Chapter 11
Celeste closed her eyes, tears leaking through her tightly shut lids. “May we... may they still have them?”
“They’re at my house,” I said. “Under the tree. If you want to bring the girls over on New Year's Day to open them, my door is unlocked. But Andrew doesn't come inside until he learns how to wipe his feet.”
I turned the handle, opened the heavy door, and walked out into the corridor.
Behind me, the conference room remained dead silent, save for the muffled, shuddering sound of my brother finally breaking down into tears.
January in Minnesota has a way of stripping away every unnecessary thing. The leaves are long gone, the lakes freeze into thick sheets of slate-blue ice, and the air becomes so sharp and clean that every breath burns slightly in your chest.
The transition was not painless, but it was swift.
By mid-January, Andrew had surrendered the lease on his downtown commercial suite. He moved his advisory files, two desks, and three filing cabinets into a rented space above a dry cleaner’s in St. Louis Park—a modest, drafty office with linoleum floors and twenty-five-dollar venetian blinds. He laid off his three junior associates, kept one part-time bookkeeper, and began doing his own client prospecting for the first time in five years.
In February, the Range Rover was turned back into the dealership. Celeste retrieved her ten-year-old Honda Civic from her sister’s garage, took it to a local mechanic for new brakes and an oil change, and began driving the girls to school herself.
At the end of March, the moving vans arrived at the 4th Street tower.
They did not move to another luxury high-rise. They rented a three-bedroom clapboard house in Richfield with a fenced-in backyard, a detached one-car garage, and slightly squeaky floorboards. It cost twenty-two hundred dollars a month—an amount Andrew’s shrunken firm could actually cover if he worked sixty hours a week and skipped the steak dinners.
Celeste called me the first week of April.
She didn't ask for money. She asked if I knew a good plumber, because the downstairs sink was leaking and Andrew’s attempts to fix it had only resulted in a wet kitchen floor and a bruised thumb.
I gave her the name of Frank Kowalski, an old friend of Dad’s who still ran a truck out of Bloomington. Then I asked how the girls were adjusting.