One Fifth Avenue

“Three months ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Lola said accusingly.

“We didn’t want to upset you,” Beetelle said. “We didn’t want to distract you from your work.”

Lola said nothing, allowing the irony of the situation to sink in. “Daddy can get another job,” she muttered.

“He might,” Beetelle said. “But it won’t solve our problems. Not for a long time.”

Lola was too frightened to ask her mother what that meant. Beetelle started up the car, and they rode the rest of the way in silence.

Windsor Pines was an idea more than an actual town—a continuation of the strip malls and fast-food restaurants that spoked out from Atlanta like the legs of a spider. But in Windsor Pines, the shops were upscale, and the downtown strip sported Mercedes, Porsche, and Rolls-Royce dealerships. There was a Four Seasons hotel and a new town hall built of white brick and set back from the road and fronted by a wide green lawn with a bandshell. The “town” of Windsor Pines, incorporated in 1983, had fifty thousand residents and twelve golf courses, the most golf courses per capita in Georgia.

The Fabrikant manse sat on the edge of one of these golf courses in a gated community. The house was an amalgamation of styles—mostly Tudor, because Beetelle loved all things “English countryside,” with a nod to the great plantation architecture in the form of tall white columns flanking the entrance. There was a three-car garage and, above it, an entertainment center that had a pool table, a giant flat-screen TV, a bar, and sectional leather couches. The large kitchen had marble countertops and opened into the great room; in addition, the house had formal living and dining rooms (hardly ever used), four bedrooms, and six bathrooms. A white gravel driveway, replenished and resurfaced each spring, made a sweeping turn to the columned entrance. As they came up the road to the house, Lola gasped. A FOR SALE sign was poked into the lawn on either side of the driveway.

“You’re selling the house?” she asked, aghast.

“The bank’s selling it.”

“What does that mean?” Lola asked. It began to dawn on her that her mother was serious after all. Dread rose to her throat; she could barely speak.

“They take all the money,” Beetelle said.

“But why?” Lola wailed.

“We’ll talk about it later,” Beetelle said. She popped open the trunk and wearily lifted out Lola’s suitcases. She began carrying them into the house, pausing on the landing, where she appeared dwarfed by the columns, by the house, and by the enormity of her situation.

“Lola,” she asked. “Are you coming?”

Sam Gooch never looked forward to Christmas. Everyone he knew went away, while he was stuck in the city with his parents. Mindy said it was the best time in New York, with everyone gone and just the tourists, who rarely ventured into their neighborhood. Sam would return to school after New Year’s to find a classroom full of kids chattering about their exotic vacations. “Where’d you go, Sam?” one of them would joke. Someone else would answer, “Sam took a tour of the Empire State Building.”

One year, the Gooches had gone away to Jamaica. But Sam was only three then, and he barely remembered it, although Mindy sometimes brought it up with James, making a negative reference to an afternoon he spent with a Rastafarian.

Walking back to One Fifth from Washington Square Park, where Sam had taken Skippy to the dog run (Skippy had attacked a Rottweiler, which gave Sam a perverse sort of pride), he wondered why they couldn’t go away this year. After all, his father was supposedly getting money from his book—but it hadn’t changed their Christmas plans. As usual, they would drive to Pennsylvania early on Christmas morning to visit his mother’s parents; after a traditional Christmas dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, they would drive to Long Island to see James’s father. James’s family was Jewish and didn’t celebrate Christmas, so they would have dinner at a Chinese restaurant.

Skippy was attached to a retractable leash; when walked, he liked to be as far away from his owner as possible. He ran into One Fifth several feet ahead of Sam; by the time Sam got into the building, Skippy had tangled his leash around Roberto’s legs. “You’ve got to train that dog, man,” Roberto said.

“He’s my mother’s dog,” Sam reminded him.

“She thinks that dog is a child,” Roberto said. “By the way, Mrs. Rice was looking for you. Something’s wrong with her computer.”

Annalisa Rice was on the phone when Sam knocked on her door. “I’m so sorry, Mom,” she was saying. “But Paul wants to go away with these people…” She motioned for Sam to come in.

Every time Sam stepped into the Rices’ apartment, he’d try to summon up a nonchalance at his surroundings, but he was always awed. The floor in the foyer was a sparkly white marble; the plaster walls were yellow cream and looked like frosting. The foyer was deliberately spare, though an astounding photograph hung on one wall: an image of a large dark hairy woman nursing an angelic blond baby boy. The woman’s expression was both maternal and challenging, as if she were daring the viewer to deny that this was her child. Sam was mesmerized by the woman’s enormous breasts, with areolas the size of tennis balls. Women were strange creatures, and out of respect for his mother and Annalisa, he pulled his eyes away. Beyond this foyer was another entry with a grand staircase, the likes of which one saw only in black-and-white movies. There were a few duplexes in the building, but they had narrow, sharply turning staircases, so anyone over the age of seventy-five always moved out. This staircase, Sam guessed, was at least six feet wide. You could have an entire party on the staircase.

“Sam?” Annalisa asked. She had a sharp, intelligent face, like that of a fox, and she was a fox, too. When she’d first moved into the building, she’d worn jeans and T-shirts, like a regular person, but now she was always dressed. Today, she was wearing a white blouse and a gray pencil skirt and velvet kitten-heeled shoes and a soft, thick cashmere cardigan that Sam, from his experience with private-school girls, surmised cost thousands of dollars. Usually, when he came up to help her with the website, she spent time talking to him, telling him about when she was a lawyer and had advocated for runaway girls, who were usually running away from abuse, and how they often ended up in jail. She’d traveled to every state to help these girls, she’d said, and sometimes it made her question human nature. There were people out there who were capable of terrible things, of abandoning their children or beating them to death. To Sam, the people she talked about must have lived in a different era, but Annalisa said it was happening every minute—somewhere in America, a girl was abused ev

ery nineteen seconds. And then sometimes she’d tell the story of meeting the president. She’d met him twice—once when she was invited to a reception at the White House, and another time when she’d spoken before a Senate committee. It sounded much more interesting to Sam than Annalisa’s life now. Just last week, she told him, she’d gone to a lunch for a new handbag. She found the concept funny and said she was surprised the handbag hadn’t been given its own chair and a glass of champagne.

Annalisa always made jokes about it, but Sam suspected she wasn’t thrilled with this new life. “Oh, I am,” she said, when he asked her about it. “I’m happy to organize a luncheon to raise money to send computers to disadvantaged children in Africa. But all the women attend in their fur coats, and after the luncheon, they all leave in their chauffeured SUVs.”

“New York’s always been that way,” Sam volunteered helpfully. “There’s no use fighting it. And there’s always some other lady who’d be happy to take your place.”

Today, however, Annalisa was in a rush. “Thank God you’re here, Sam,” she said, starting up the stairs. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. We’re leaving tonight,” she said over her shoulder.

“Where’re you going?” Sam asked politely.

“So many places it’s insane. London. China. Then Aspen. The Aspen part is supposed to be the vacation, I think. Paul has a lot of business in China, and the Chinese don’t celebrate Christmas, obviously. We’ll be gone for three weeks.”