"I'm not making this up!"

"Or Alison. Or anybody, you would have had to call somebody, and they would have had to call me. Which to my knowledge did not happen."

"I'm going to go take a shower."

"Hi!" she chirped. "I'm over here at the apartment, and Tina has just told me an interesting story."

Right across the hall was a bathroom-the one with the silver-spotted wallpaper-but it needed a good cleaning, and several tiles had come up around one of the corners, so it was frankly too depressing to take a shower in. There was also a pretty capable blue bathroom right behind the kitchen off the great room, but Len had all sorts of apparatus set up in there. And just to the right of the TV room and the bedroom, there was a quite tidy peach-colored bathroom, but it had one of those shower chairs in it for people who are too old and decrepit to stand up, which was simply too depressing to contemplate. But if you walked down the hall off the TV room, past the laundry room, and around a corner, there was a fourth bathroom, which was painted periwinkle, and had a lot of sixties-looking groovy flower stickers stuck to the ceiling and all over the cheap plastic door of the shower stall. So although it was a little inconvenient to walk a quarter mile to take a shower, it was a nice bathroom and worth the effort. I left my nightmare of a sister to her devilish shenanigans and hiked off to take a shower to clear my head.

By the time I got back, Lucy was done with her phone calls and having a cup of tea. She glanced up at me, set the cup down, and stood. Then she smiled, like we were good friends who had had some sort of minor misunderstanding. "I talked to Ira," she informed me.

"Good for you."

"He told me that they do in fact have a record of you being taken down to the Forty-ninth Precinct."

"Did you think I was lying?"

"Well, Tina-it didn't make sense. And by the way, you weren't actually arrested. They just had you in for questioning, at least that's what they have on record."

"They have anything on record about an injunction?"

"Well, that's the interesting part," she said, still smiling. "There was in fact an injunction. Ira accepted service, and he did tell me about it, but he a.s.sured me that he didn't think it would stick."

"And then you just forgot to tell me."

"I didn't forget, for heaven's sake, no one thought they would arrest you."

"So you deliberately didn't tell me?"

"This is not my fault, Tina. I am not the one who had you arrested," Lucy claimed, staying right on point. "And if you would just calm down long enough to listen, it might interest you to know that the injunction is gone. Obviously it would never have held up to a court challenge, which Ira was going to file this week."

"They just dropped it? When?"

"Just this afternoon apparently. So no worries about that, okay, Tina? Although honestly, if the police come by, you will call me, right? Even though they just took you in for questioning, that is completely unacceptable, and you should never ever talk to the police without a lawyer present. Ira got really upset when he heard that you let them take you down there and no one called him."

"I don't even know him," I said.

"But you should have called me, and I would have called him. Listen, tell me you understand this. If you're being hara.s.sed, it's important that you let us know."

"Why, because you're so worried about my safety? Is that why you didn't even warn me?"

"I'm not going to get into some long argument about this, Tina, especially when everything came out all right. I already said I'm glad it was nothing worse. I don't know what more you want out of me, but then I never do." She sighed, looked at her CrackBerry, and started doing that little thing with her thumbs.

"Why are you here?" I asked.

"What?"

"You never just show up. You always have a reason," I said. "So what's your reason today?"

"A friend of mine is coming over."

"What friend?"

"His name is Dave, he works on the city page of the Times, he's going to come take a look at the apartment. He might be interested in writing about it."

"No. Come on," I said, suddenly overwhelmed. "No."

"What do you mean, no?" she said, looking up at me sharply.

"I mean no. No reporters in here. No." I thought about Len talking about privacy, and Pete Drinan not even setting foot in his home for years and years, and that tenderhearted paint job in the kid's bedroom, and I just couldn't bear the thought of some f.u.c.king reporter wandering around my apartment. "No," I repeated.

"You know, I don't actually need your permission, Tina," Lucy observed, with that nasty edge she could not keep out of her voice. "You can stop acting like you own the place, when you're just staying here for all of us."

"I can't believe you," I said, trying seriously not to lose it. "I spent the night in jail because you-you-"

"I'm only taking care of my interests and yours. And as to spending a night in jail, it's not the first time, so I don't know what you're making such a big deal about." She stood up, turned away, and went to the little kitchenette, where she started wiping down the counters deliberately, like I had not done a good enough job.

"f.u.c.k you," I said, sounding like a peevish teenager. "f.u.c.k you. Call me when he's gone."

"He might want to talk to you," she said, all deliberate and chilly and mean, like some nasty old high school nun. "About being hauled into the police station. We're in the middle of a real estate war! And they had you arrested? You should tell him about it, it might help sell the story."

"Go to h.e.l.l, Lucy." As I left I slammed the door behind me, good and loud. I am sure Mrs. Westmoreland heard it and took notes.

Wandering the Upper West Side of Manhattan can be entertaining when your life is less screwed up, but when you're in a bad mood, both about having been arrested and having a sister who consistently behaves like a jerk, it is not all that much fun. I walked up and down Amsterdam for a while, then cut over to the park and wandered around, hoping that a little urban nature would make me feel better. It was a lonely and pathetic endeavor, but after an hour it started to have a little bit of a positive effect. That section of Central Park was in fact particularly utopian; old ladies and their dogs wandered along charming, curling pathways where young boys and girls on Rollerblades flew by, calling to each other with hopeful, nonsensical glee. College kids lay on the gra.s.s and laughed at each other while inching ever closer to having s.e.x. I pa.s.sed a mossy lake and a giant statue of an angel coming down to earth. An Arab guy at a little Plexiglas stand under a green-and-white umbrella was selling falafel sandwiches and cans of soda. Life was coming back into focus, and the exhausting, endless night finally seemed over.

Which is when I tried to buy a can of lemonade. It seemed like a sane enough idea, as I had been walking and thinking for quite a while and was feeling rather thirsty. Unfortunately, I was so thoroughly peeved with Lucy when I left the apartment that I had been more concerned with making an exit than with grabbing my backpack. All I had on me were my house keys and a dollar twenty-five in my back pocket, and the Arab guy in the falafel cart wouldn't spot me the quarter.

In fact he was dismissive. "One fifty. You need one dollar and fifty, young lady," he explained, which I was perfectly willing to accept, if he hadn't so quickly and needlessly worked himself into a lather over it. "What is the matter with you?" he asked before I had a chance to scrounge the three quarters, four dimes, and two nickels out of my pocket. "Can you step aside, please? If you are not going to purchase something, step aside!"

"Cool your jets," I muttered. This sent him even further over the edge.

"You have no money! Step aside! Step aside, please! You have no money!"

"Could you just relax for a second," I said. "I have it. For f.u.c.k's sake."

"Why are you using obscenity?" the guy howled suddenly. "STEP ASIDE," he raged. I couldn't move. I was in trouble, serious psychological trouble. After my awful night and day, I had nothing left. I was actually contemplating leaping onto his little cart and hurling cans of soda at him when some girl came up behind me.

"I'll buy her a lemonade," she said.

"It's fine," I said, trying not to sound as insane as I felt. "I didn't want his stupid f.u.c.king lemonade."

"This crazy woman is cursing me! I do not have to serve people who speak to me with this language!"

"Yeah, I'm sure you've never heard that word before," said the girl. "Relax." She reached past my shoulder and handed the guy a five. "Make it two," she said. I turned to snap at her and stopped. It was Jennifer White, my sullen teenage neighbor from 9A.

"Oh," I said.

"Yeah," she said. "You're welcome." She handed me my can of lemonade and turned back to reach for her change.

"Here, here is your change, now please go!" growled the way-too-uptight Arab. "There are customers who are waiting!" Jennifer ignored him, holding her lemonade under her arm while she slowly took the two dollars off the Plexiglas stand and carefully folded them into a tiny pink change purse. "Please!" he howled, but he sounded now like he was begging. Still ignoring him, she dropped the change purse into the side pocket of an enormous backpack and finally stepped aside.

"I AM SO SORRY, HOW CAN I HELP YOU!" the guy shouted at the next man in line, with a kind of friendly fury.

Jennifer looked at me, unruffled. "Are you heading home?" she asked.

"I guess so," I said. "Thanks." She popped the lid of her lemonade and took a long slow sip, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. The leaves were glowing above us. We sipped our lemonades silently, as if that were a solution to something, then turned toward the path. Jennifer walked so slowly we were barely moving at all.

In the golden light of late afternoon, Jennifer White looked like a young G.o.ddess. A slight breeze moved carelessly through her hair, and her cheeks had the slightest lift of color in them. She was wearing that dopey school uniform, but the boring white blouse was open a bit too wide at the neck, and the plaid skirt looked witty, somehow, like an outfit in a hip-hop video. Heroic-looking young men in shorts and running shoes kept glancing back at us in fleet, happy admiration.

"This lemonade is pretty good," I said.

"It's all right," she agreed.

"I don't want to go home either," I told her.

She didn't respond, as that would have amounted to admitting something. I decided to just keep talking. "My sister is a f.u.c.king nightmare," I said. "Sooner or later, she'll leave, but I can't go home until she does."

"What's so bad about her?" asked Jennifer.

"All she thinks about is money."

"That's all anybody thinks about."

"Yeah, I know, but trust me, Lucy is off the deep end. I think inheriting this apartment has driven her insane."

"I heard you didn't inherit it," Jennifer volunteered. She didn't exactly sound like she was fis.h.i.+ng, but I knew she was.

"My mom was married to Bill and he left it to her, so they say we inherited it. It sounds legal to me, but what do I know." This came out sounding snottier than I meant it to, since I realized that Jennifer might be able to shed some light on a few things. "Anyway, that's what they're going to figure out, if we did inherit it. n.o.body knows yet."

"They think they do."

"They who?"

"Everyone."

"Everyone who?"

"They're having meetings about it, you know. You are so totally not supposed to be there. It's driving them nuts."

"Them who?"

"The building," she said.

I knew what she meant, but it was unnerving to hear it stated so definitively by a teenage girl.

"The building doesn't get to decide, does it?"

Jennifer shot me a bored look, like she didn't believe that a person as old as me could be so stupid.

"What?" I said, trying to laugh. "It's not up to them."

"They think it's up to them," she said. "They didn't like your mom."

This last bit, offered up with no prodding or prying on my part, landed like an atom bomb on my heart. For a second I hated that bored kid in her snotty pleated skirt and her s.h.i.+tty little white blouse and her perfect blond hair, but before I could come up with a cutting remark to avenge this completely obscure and meaningless slight on the mother I had barely spoken to in the last years of her life, Jennifer flushed, ashamed of herself. "Not me," she apologized. "I liked her. I mean, she was always nice to me. But she was like a cleaning lady. That's what they're hung up on. And Mr. Drinan was kind of weird. And they're all obsessed with that apartment, everybody knows it's the best one in the building, and they're all so hung up, it's so, whatever. I'm just telling you. That's what the problem is."

She felt so bad about telling me the truth that I didn't know what to say.

"It's okay," I said. "I appreciate the information."

"Yeah, okay," she said. Neither of us said anything for a little while, and then, as slowly as we were walking, we were there. We looked up at the Edgewood looming above us, elegant, enormous, the building.

"I love those lions," I said.

"They look like guard dogs to me," she replied, tossing her empty can of lemonade into the cast-iron trash can on the street corner. She looked over at me and made one of those half smiles, like you expect people to know how unhappy you really are. It was the most human expression I'd seen cross her face.

"Look," I said. "Do you have to go in?"

"They're probably flipping out already," she said, and the half smile evaporated. She just looked sad.

So that's how I got into that apartment again. I took Jennifer up to the Whites' apartment and rang the doorbell and started talking. "Hey, Mrs. White," I said, all friendly and helpful. She was, as usual, wearing an absolutely glorious suit. "I hope you haven't been too worried about Jennifer. She's been with me."

"We have been worried!" Mrs. White said. Her entire ensemble was the most extraordinary shade of sea green. She must have had the shoes dyed to match the suit; there could be no other way to get the color so exact. "I was just about to send for the police!" she announced, checking herself out in the mirror.

"Oh, I am so sorry, we should have called, but she was really upset," I said humbly.

"Jennifer is not allowed to go off and have activities after school, certainly not with people she barely knows! Your father will be beside himself, Jennifer. You know the rules!"

"Would you relax, Mom?" Jennifer started. I reached over and squeezed her hand, her new best friend.

"No no, don't get angry, of course your mom was worried, she didn't know what we were doing!" I explained. I looked at Mrs. White and smiled. "I was helping her with her math!" This was completely improvised on my part, and Jennifer looked at me with real surprise. "We b.u.mped into each other in the lobby-I mean, literally, it was ridiculous and completely my fault, because I was just not looking where I was going-and her homework went everywhere, and when I was helping her get it back together she told me she didn't have a clue how to make it through today's problem sets. And there were so many! Let me rea.s.sure you, those nuns are doing their job up there at Saint Peter in Chains, she's getting a workout in the math department. It is almost laughable how much homework she's got. Anyway, she was a little upset, so I told her-well, I'm actually, you know, I'm pretty good at math." Improbably, this part was true. "And I felt bad that she seemed so overwhelmed, so we went to my place just to look at a couple of the most difficult problems, and we seriously lost track of time. And when I realized how long we had been working, I was appalled, and I thought about calling, but obviously it made more sense to bring her home. I'm really, really sorry." Jennifer was staring at me now. It is possible that I was laying it all on a bit thick, but I could tell that Mrs. White was not particularly interested in facts, so the more I gave her, the less likely she would be to examine them too closely. And as usual, seven things were going on at once in that apartment. Kids were screaming off in the distance, a was.h.i.+ng machine was chugging along, and then something in the kitchen fell with a crash. Under the circ.u.mstances, Mrs. White couldn't waste a ton of time worrying about me.

"Oh, well, thank you," she finally said, picking up a small child and kicking a pile of coats and scarves into the closet off the foyer. "That really was kind of you, I just wish-Anna, where are you going? I have to meet Bob any minute, is dinner ready for the girls?"

"Is Wednesday," Anna, the Polish cleaning lady, announced, as if that were an answer. She was putting on her coat.

"Wednesday?" said Mrs. White. "No no, it's not Wednesday. Or, I mean, it is Wednesday, but we talked about this, this is the Wednesday you're staying. Barbie, please!"

"I'll take her," I said, and as I untangled the wriggling child from her arms, Mrs. White tried to explain to Anna that she had agreed to stay until midnight, because she and Mr. White had made arrangements months before to attend an auction this evening benefiting the Museum of Modern Art. His firm had bought a whole table at great expense, and there would be some extremely important Korean clients at that table, and they would not understand if his wife failed to make an appearance. Anna the cleaning lady seemed to feel bad, but it wasn't clear that she even understood Mrs. White's explanation. She kept saying, "Sorry, so sorry," while Mrs. White kept telling her why she couldn't leave. After a little while, Anna just walked out the door, leaving me and Barbie and Jennifer as witnesses to Mrs. White's problem and her beautiful suit.

Mrs. White looked over at me. She really had no options, so I knew better than to push it. I kissed Barbie on the cheek and started to hand her back. "Here's your mommy," I said. "Don't mess up her pretty suit."

"You couldn't-I'm sorry, but you did say you might be interested in babysitting sometime. You wouldn't be available right now, would you?"

"Right now?" I said. "Gee."

Once we got rid of Mrs. White, things really started to cook. The first hour or so was a bit of a mess, because six sets of coats and shoes had to be hung up and put away, the baby needed a new diaper, and dinner had not even been started. Katherine decided that because she had seen me first, no one else had any claim on my attention whatsoever. She followed me around, silently wors.h.i.+pful but with big confused tears in her eyes, while I dealt with all sorts of nonsense instead of going back to her room to play stuffed animals with her. The other two girls, whom I had not met before, didn't want to eat anything, and they argued incessantly over total bulls.h.i.+t. There were three cooked ca.s.seroles from a fancy gourmet store in the refrigerator, but n.o.body was interested in them. Louise, the oldest daughter, made herself a shake with flaxseed and wheatgra.s.s and ignored me. Jennifer sat in a corner of the kitchen and picked at a salad.

"Is that all you're going to eat?" I asked.