Page 95 of Que Será, Syrah

I’m surprised into laughing. “Yeah, maybe. That’s an idea, isn’t it?”

“Legs.” Rosa has dragged one of the wicker chairs over, so that she’s seated on my left, catty-corner to me, on the opposite side from Bee. “Talk to me. What’s going on?” And she reaches for my hands and holds them captive, giving serious mother hen.

Once upon a time, back when we were kids, we experienced one of those rare to seriously-kids-this-never-happens-here summer thunderstorms. Some people find that sort of thing exciting. It scared the living shit out of me. Rosa found me in my room, cowering under the bed and coaxed me out. We passed the time until the storm blew itself out, seated cross-legged on the braided rug, facing each other, holding hands just like this, while Rosa told silly stories to distract me.

I’m not sure where Bee was at the time, but given her love of science, she was probably busy somewhere setting up gadgets to measure rainfall and windspeed, and calculating how far away the storm was by counting the seconds between each flash and boom.

I loved my big sisters, and I admired their bravery. So, so much. But sometimes, they were impossible to live up to. I’m not sure that’s ever changed.

“Nothing’s going on,” I tell Rosa now, pasting a brittle smile on my face, slipping one hand free of her grasp to accept my new glass of wine when Jake hands it to me. “We had a problem, now it’s fixed.”

“But…”

“But nothing.” I give the hand I’m still holding a squeeze. “Listen to me. I was the one who made the mistake, so it was my responsibility to solve it. And I did. But I don’t particularly want to talk about it right now. Capisce?”

I take a sip of wine. It tastes heavy and overly jammy after the bright, crisp taste of Goldfinch. And maybe that’s all that’s wrong with it. It’s basic and old fashioned, and stuck in the past, and our palates have outgrown it. Losing interest, I set my glass down. “You know, it’s pretty depressing when you realize that this stuff was made with Caparelli grapes.” I turn to Bee and say, “I can’t wait to see what you’ll do with them.”

But my sister isn’t listening. Eyes wide, mouth agape, she’s leafing frantically through a sheaf of papers and murmuring, “No, no, no, no, no.”

“Where’d you get those?” I wonder, then it hits me. The envelope I brought back from Jimmy’s office. “Hey! Those are mine. Give that back!”

“Rosa! You need to see this,” Bee says, holding the papers aloft with her far hand, using her left to block my attempts to snatch them back.

“Stop that,” I growl. “Give ’em back!” I leap to my feet just as Jake leans forward, both of us reaching for the papers in Bee’s hand, and my face collides with the wine bottle dangling from his fingers.

“Ow!” I collapse back onto the swing, clutching my face while Jake hands the papers off to Rosa, and then runs for some ice.

“Oh, Legs,” Bee groans. “What have you done?”

And then Rosa, gasps, “Allegra—no! You didn’t?”

“Ow!” I say again, ignoring them both. “Ow, ow, ow.” And then, when Jake hands me some ice wrapped in a tea-towel, I scowl and mutter, “Thanks, traitor.”

“You’re welcome,” he says, then he goes to read over Rosa’s shoulder. And a moment later, I hear him mutter, “Well, fuck.”

Which sums it up nicely, I think.

“We will fix this,” Rosa insists, just a few moments later, having shifted from Mother Hen to Mama Bear in an impressively short amount of time. “I don’t know how yet, or how long it might take us, but…”

“That’s right.” Bee nods in agreement. “We will.”

“Guys,” I sigh and shake my head. “Just stop, okay? You can’t.”

“You have my sword,” Jake says teasingly. “For what it’s worth.” Then he nods towards Rosa and adds, “And her bow.”

“Oh, I know this one,” Bee says excitedly. “And my axe. Right?”

“Look,” I say, ignoring the absurd LOTR by-play. “It’s not like this was my first choice. I tried to find another way. And Jimmy tried. But in the end, we both agreed that this was the only way we could ensure that Caparelli stayed in the family. Which is what Nonna would have wanted.”

“What Nonna wanted was for the three of us to run it,” Bee corrects. “All of us. Together.”

“Well, two out of three…that’s not so bad, is it?”

“This isn’t funny, Legs.”

Don’t I know it.

“Go and talk to Jimmy if you don’t believe me, if you still think there was something else we could have done. But, as he explained it, it’s actually pretty simple. The will had been read. The bequest had been made. So, at that point, me signing the papers was mostly a formality. But it was an important one. I’d been holding up the final disposition of the estate, which meant everything was still in limbo. Geno could potentially have swooped in and tried to be reinstated. And Nico could have claimed....anything. He could have said I was attempting to hide my assets. Or that I was committing fraud—and that you were both conspiring with me to do so.

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