Fin & Lady: A Novel by Cathleen Schine Page A

would forget he was around. Uncle Ty would give his odd little laugh, say, “Shit,” shake his head, and say, “Everyone has to settle down sometime, Lady.” Lady would move away from him and say, “Oh, absolutely.”
    Once, when Uncle Ty had downed several glasses of Scotch, he grabbed Lady’s wrists and yelled at her. He said she needed him. “You need me,” he said again, and then again. Fin had looked up from Superman as Lady gently pulled her arms away. Fin waited for Lady to yell back. Lady didn’t need Tyler Morrison, the thought was ludicrous, how could Uncle Ty not know that? Fin waited for Lady to storm out of the room. How dare you? she would say. But she did not storm anywhere. She sat quite still and looked thoughtful. Then: “I can’t think what for.” It was Tyler who stormed out of the room.
    He turned up again, soon enough, as if nothing had happened, nothing at all. Like a bad penny, he said, chucking Fin beneath the chin and popping his hat on Fin’s head.
    “I come before you as a suppliant,” he said to Lady.
    “Don’t be an ass,” Lady said. She smiled and shook her head like a filly, flicking her hair back from her face, but she did not really look like a filly, like a horse frolicking in a pasture. She had that desperate, wild look, like a horse straining at the end of a rope, rearing in the air. Maybe Tyler didn’t notice, but Fin did.
    “Let’s get out of here,” she said, and she grabbed her pocketbook and rushed out the door, Tyler behind her, scrambling to keep up.
    Lady went out on other dates, it wasn’t just Tyler Morrison, but Tyler was the one who turned up the most, and he was the one Fin knew he had to watch out for. He could feel it every time Tyler walked in the door.
    “Tough growing up with just that beautiful girl to raise you, isn’t it?” Tyler once said.
    “No.”
    “Sometimes a guy needs another guy around to talk to.”
    “I don’t.”
    “They’ve done studies, you know. Better to have a mother and a father. Even, say, foster parents. It’s healthier. Emotionally.”
    “I’m very healthy,” Fin said.
    Then Lady came in the room, and Uncle Ty changed the subject and did a magic trick, pulling a quarter out of his ear. Fin had to pretend to laugh. He didn’t want Lady thinking he was emotionally unhealthy.
    “Uncle Ty went to boarding school,” Lady said once. “He really liked it. He said he felt independent. He said boys like boarding school. They play lots of sports and they play tricks on each other.”
    “Yeah, but look how he turned out.”
    “Mmm.”
    Fin was on the couch reading the obituary section of The New York Times . Lady sat beside him. “Here’s a lady named Faustina,” he said. “That’s a funny name.”
    “I hope I’m doing the right thing with you.”
    “And a lady named Kat.”
    “After all, I went to boarding school.” Silence. Then: “Of course I hated it. But maybe boys are different.”
    “Faustina and Kat went to school together.”
    “Boarding school?” Lady asked absently.
    “They hated it. They ran away to sea disguised as pirates. They were shipwrecked on an island and had to marry cannibals, but they escaped in a rocket ship…” He went on until Lady noticed and kicked him and laughed and said, “Okay, okay, no boarding school.”
    *   *   *
    “Why does Lady like Tyler Morrison?” Fin asked Mabel one morning. They sat at the kitchen table while Fin picked at his breakfast and Mabel had a cup of coffee. “He acts like he lives here.”
    “Well, he almost did, didn’t he?”
    Fin slapped his hands on his face like one of the Three Stooges to portray frustration. “What?”
    “She jilted him. Left him standing at the altar.”
    Fin stared at her. “You mean like a wedding?”
    “That’s what I mean.”
    “I went to a wedding that was Lady’s wedding, but Lady never came.”
    “That’s the wedding, then. Even Miss Lady didn’t skip out on two of her own weddings. Went off to