Page 167 of Dial F for Finance

Dominic

“Nicky! Your house is a factory!” my brother bellows from the front hall, arms wide, bow tie crooked. “A FACTORY, HANNAH. He LIVES here!”

A month after my wife tore up our annulment papers, the Bucktown house is holding more people than it has at any point in the years I’ve owned it, and the noise level has already violated three municipal codes before the pork is even out of the oven.

It was Jenna’s idea. That’s the part I keep turning over like a coin. One day she was reinstalling her toothbrush in my bathroom—our bathroom, I’m told the deed language is being amended—and the next day she looked up from her laptop and said, “We should have everyone here. All of them. Both sides. Rip the Band-Aid off in one controlled detonation. They didn’t get an engagement party or a wedding. So let’s host them for a weekend to make up for it.”

I had stared at her, mesmerized by the way she color-coded the guest list in real time, and agreed to turn our sanctuary into ground zero without a second thought.

Now, I’m managing the fallout.

I step out of the kitchen, adjusting the cuffs of my maroon suit jacket. “It’s a converted textile factory, you philistine!” I bellow back, projecting my voice to cut through the sheer volume of the room.

Dustin laughs as he signs my response back to Hannah. She throws her head back, joining him.

Then she looks at me and signs, I like your jacket.

I understand her without looking at Dustin.

After the months of daily lessons, it feels like acing a surprise quiz.

Thank you. I like your dress, I sign back.

Hannah’s expression softens for half a second. Then she bursts out laughing again.

Dustin points at my hand. “No, Nicky. Your ring finger and pinkie have to stay out when you sign like. You keep folding them in.”

He demonstrates, then reproduces my cramped version with offensive accuracy.

“It wasn’t that bad.”

Hannah nods emphatically.

“Your fingers are too impatient,” Dustin tells me.

I try it again—thumb and middle finger drawing away from my chest, the other fingers extended this time.

Hannah lifts both hands in exaggerated applause, grinning.

Weeks of daily videos, after-dinner practice with Jenna, and being corrected by half my family, and I’m still a work in progress.

But Hannah signed to me, and I answered her without making Dustin carry the conversation between us.

Imperfectly, apparently.

Still counts.

I scan the room, mentally cataloging the moving pieces. It’s a beautiful, high-decibel disaster.

Even though we made it clear this would be fully catered, my parents drove in from Greenwich with enough food to survive an occupation—my father currently holds the kitchen, narrating pork to anyone who wanders too close. Dustin and Hannah came with them, fresh off his second driving lesson, about which everyone within a nautical mile will be hearing shortly. Ma Pemberton took the train from Queens with a Tupperware tower on her lap and a sixty-day chip in her pocket, and when I opened my front door to her for the first time as her official son-in-law, she looked me over, handed me the tower, and said, “Don’t drop the baked ziti, Cruz. And tell your expensive caterers that if they mess with my manicotti, they’re losing a finger.”

I had accepted the tower like it was a live nuclear core. “Yes, ma’am. Ziti secured.”

Hailey flew in for her final weekend as an East Coast resident. She moves to San Francisco on Thursday and starts at Canfield the following Monday. All three of her interviews were with Xavier Field, so she’s spent the afternoon peppering me with questions about Thomas Canning.

“Have you googled the guy?” I ask eventually, and she shakes her head.

“I don’t google people. It’s creepy. Plus, Google is just going to give me the PR pitch. I want the inside scoop from people who actually know the guy. Give me the dirty deets, brother-in-law of mine.”