Rocco has trouble breaking up with these women. Underneath his surface toughness is a good guy who can’t bear to hurt anyone and has that male terror of women’s tears. He refused to believe Charlotte when she suggested that Kathy was a kleptomaniac. He didn’t end the relationship until he found, in her tote bag, a framed photo of him and Charlotte, on the steps of their childhood farmhouse in the Hudson Valley. The photo must have been taken not long before their mother burned down the house and got sent away.
Rocco couldn’t look at Charlotte when he returned the photo. She didn’t need to see his face. She knew that his expression (detached or dreamy, depending on what you wanted to see) would be just like the look on twelve-year-old Rocco in the picture.
Before Klepto Kathy, he dated a woman who ripped out her hair in clumps, and before her the cutter, and before her the nudist, and before her the one who locked herself in their bathroom and swallowed a fistful of antibiotics from the medicine chest.
The stable ones never last long. Boring, Rocco says. He jokes about his love life. But he doesn’t learn from his mistakes.
Why should Charlotte feel responsible? If she wants someone to blame (and who doesn’t?), it should be their mother, who, acting on some selfish childish romantic impulse, named them after Charlotte Brontë and Mr. Rochester. Mom should have been a character in a nineteenth-century novel; that’s how she imagined her life until Dad took off and moved to the city to live with an intellectual property lawyer who consulted for his law firm.
That stress must have been too much for him. He died two years later, of a heart attack.
Mom survived, more or less. After Dad left, she evicted their tenant, who taught at a college nearby and lived in the attic rental apartment in their family home—on the farm they’d inherited from Mom’s parents and rented out to local farmers.
Mom moved into the apartment and left the house—and Rocco—to Charlotte. When that failed to bring Dad back, Mom really went off the rails. After she burned down the house, a fire that almost killed Rocco, she had a choice: either jail or a stay at a hospital, the latter of which she agreed to because its inmates included movie stars. After a while she was released, more or less cured. For a short time she lived with Rocco in an apartment in Hudson while Charlotte went to college. Neither Mom nor Rocco did well, and Rocco got into trouble, drinking and doing stuff that Charlotte doesn’t like to think about now.
Not long after Rocco left home, Mom moved to Mexico. Now she’s living in Oaxaca, still partly on the money from the family farm, which they sold to Andrew John, the Argentine billionaire hobby farmer for whom Rocco works now, trucking perfect vegetables to the Greenmarket in the city.
When Rocco first went to work for Andrew John, he had been drinking heavily. He’d been twice in and out of rehab, for which Charlotte and Eli paid. At the beginning Charlotte feared that her brother might resent working for the owner of the farm they used to own, but Rocco seems to like it.
He’s been sober ever since.
Eli has asked a question that Charlotte is supposed to have heard.
“What’s this woman’s name?”
“We shouldn’t think of her as ‘this one.’ It’s Ruby. No, wait. Ruth. Rachel. Robin—”
“Don’t worry, he’ll introduce us. Hush. Daisy’s awake.”
Their daughter stands in the doorway, clutching the battered, pouchy giraffe she hasn’t let out of her sight since Klepto Kathy returned it. Daisy took it to kindergarten and over the summer took it to day camp in her backpack. Five seems borderline old for that, but Eli and Charlotte let it go. They feel guilty for exposing her to an adult who would steal a toy.
Inch by inch, Daisy materializes in a white nightgown and a silver headband with two glittery kitty-cat ears.
“Have you guys been smoking?”
“Of course not,” says Charlotte. “You know Daddy and I don’t smoke. You know who it is.” She points down at the floor—at Ariane’s loft, beneath theirs—then puts her finger to her lips, as if Ariane and Drew could hear them talking.
“Right,” says Daisy. “It’s the bad people downstairs.”
Without looking at Eli, Charlotte can feel him looking at her. He’s asked her not to make Daisy so frightened of their downstairs neighbors, who so far haven’t actually done anything wrong—except smoke. Charlotte has told Daisy to never ever let Drew get her alone, no matter what he offers her, no matter what he says. All right, Eli’s said. It’s probably a good thing to warn Daisy about. But Charlotte doesn’t have to remind Daisy every few days.
“They’re not bad,” says Eli. “They’re just . . . unhappy.”
Daisy looks from her father to her mother and back. Whom should she believe? Charlotte notices, as she often does, that Daisy looks nothing like her. She takes after Eli’s Panamanian mother. When Charlotte and Daisy are alone, strangers assume she’s adopted, but when Eli’s there, they remark on how much she resembles her father.
As always, Charlotte wonders: Who is that beautiful child? Then comes the rush of feeling, the pressure in her chest, the shock of a love for which she has no words. She loves Daisy more than anyone. Even Eli, Charlotte secretly thinks, a secret even from herself.
“Climb on board, little. Cuddle up.”
“Pasa, amor,” says Eli.
Daisy approaches cautiously, as if she hardly knows them, as if her real parents have been replaced by actors. She lies down on Charlotte’s side of the bed, stiffly, on the far edge. Charlotte pulls her closer, and Daisy leans into her mother.
Should Charlotte tell her that Rocco is coming? Daisy adores her uncle, but when she finds out he’s bringing someone, she might worry all day. Like Charlotte, she’s a worrier. Both hate surprises. It’s possible that when Rocco and Rachel or Ruby or Ruth arrives, Daisy won’t leave her room, which will cast an awkward pall on the new-girlfriend welcome dinner.
The asthma is the most serious but only one of the things Charlotte frets about. Daisy is too formal, too polite for a little girl. And Klepto Kathy did nothing to lessen Daisy’s distrust of strangers.
This week, in therapy, Charlotte will tell Ted how anxious she was about how Daisy was going to react to Rocco’s new girlfriend.
“Your Uncle Rocco’s coming for dinner.”
Silence. “Just him?”
“No,” Eli says. “He’s got a new girlfriend.”
“What’s her name?” says Daisy.
“Something with an R. Definitely not Kathy.”
Charlotte can feel her daughter’s relief.
Even better news, for Daisy, is that she won’t have to clean up her toys. Charlotte fears that Rocco’s women will be intimidated by the tasteful perfection of their loft. But she doesn’t like feeling apologetic. So she lets Daisy make more of a mess than usual, to humanize things a little.
Still holding on to her giraffe’s hoof, Daisy half surrenders Raffi to Charlotte.
“Hide him,” Daisy says. “Please. Lock him up somewhere safe.”
“It’s not the same girlfriend,” Charlotte says.
“I know that. You just told me. But I don’t care,” Daisy says. “Lock Raffi up, or I’ll have to stay in my room and guard him.”