Page 23

“Good night, Lucas.”

“Good night, both of you. Stop talking.”

Chapter 5

The General Returns

PRESTON

The doorbell rings at 09:14 the next Saturday morning, which is already suspicious, because no one we know rings doorbells. Elena has a key. Jax walks in without knocking, eats whatever’s in the fridge, steals Luke’s beer, and leaves. Max texts before he comes because Max considers unannounced arrivals a form of assault. My father doesn’t visit – he arrives, in a car, with champagne. And Mama Ortiz doesn’t need a doorbell – she knocks twice, waits exactly three seconds, and then enters whether you’ve answered or not. We changed the locks after The Incident. She had a copy made within the week, and the Dignity Box remains flattened in her hospital locker as insurance. We stopped fighting all of it.

The doorbell means a stranger or a catastrophe. In this family, the distinction is often academic.

Luke is in the shower. Elena is on the couch in a nest of blankets and laptop cables, eating cereal directly from the box while scrolling through job listings like she’s conducting her own autopsy. She looks up.

“Are you expecting someone?”

“No.”

“Then don’t open it. It’s Saturday. Nothing good happens on Saturdays before 10:00.”

“That’s not a real rule.”

“It’s my rule. I’ve been on this couch for nine days. I’ve earned governance.”

I open the door.

My mother is standing on the threshold.

She is wearing a suit that can only be described as Cruella de Vil attending a hostile takeover – white with black checkered squares, padded shoulders that curve sharply upward like weapons, and a silhouette that suggests the suit has opinions about everyone in the room and none of them are favourable. Her sunglasses are on. Indoors. In a fourth-floor walk-up in Queens where the hallway lighting could charitably be described as “post-apocalyptic.” Her hair is set. Her lipstick is the exact shade of threat. She is carrying, in the crook of her left arm, Duchess.

Duchess is a Yorkshire Terrier. My mother acquired her after Baroness – our Persian cat, rest her judgmental soul – passed away when I was fifteen. Duchess has the temperament of a creature that has absorbed over a decade of York family tension through osmosis and now expresses it as a sustained, low-grade tremble. Her diamond-encrusted collar catches the hallway light. She looks, as always, like she’s one loud noise away from a complete neurological event.

“Preston,” my mother says. She does not say it warmly. She says it the way a general says at ease – technically a kindness, functionally a command. “I need to come in. The hallway smells like cabbage and I refuse to have this conversation adjacent to brassica.”

“Mother. What are you doing here?”

“I am visiting my son. Is that a crime? Has New York criminalised maternal affection in my absence? Given the state of this stairwell, I wouldn’t be surprised. I counted four health code violations between the lobby and your door. There is a shoe on the second-floor landing, Preston. A single shoe. Who loses a single shoe? What has happened to the other shoe? These are the questions that will haunt me to the end of my mortal coil.”

She pushes past me into the apartment. The dog vibrates in her arms. Catherine surveys the walk-up the way a property assessor surveys a condemned building – professionally, thoroughly, and with visible restraint, because expressing everything she’s feeling would take longer than the visit.

Her eyes land on Elena.

Elena does not sit up. She does not adjust the box of Froot Loops balanced on her stomach.

“Who is this?” Catherine asks, and it’s not rude – it’s inventory.

“Elena Silva,” I say. “Luke’s sister. She’s staying with us temporarily.”

“Very temporarily,” Elena repeats, from the couch, in a tone that suggests the word is doing a lot of work. “I’m between apartments. And jobs. And life stages. It’s very glamorous.”

My mother looks at Elena. Elena looks at my mother. The dog vibrates.

“You’re eating cereal from the box,” Catherine observes.

“I am.”

“There is no bowl.”