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bookkeeping—were his department. I had my own checking account and paid my own credit cards, but Howard paid all the big stuff: electric, gas, phones, condo, cable, grocery, laundry, school, kennel, department stores, housekeeper, live-in babysitter. I ripped open the envelopes, threw away the promotions, placed the bills in a neat pile, and began to sort through them. The amounts of money staggered me. Moreover, there were two bills from a mortgage company, each for about $1,200. Curious, I called the 800 number on the mortgage invoice. I patiently worked my way through the automated prompts until I reached a human being.
    “Mortgages?” I asked. “What mortgages?”
    “You took out two mortgages about eighteen months ago,” he replied brusquely.
    What?
Why did Howard boast about owning all our property “free and clear” when we had two mortgages? And why didn’t I know about them? I turned on Howard’s adding machine—practically an appendage to him—and added up the bills. I ripped off the tally and looked at the number: $15,000. My God, I thought, that’s a boatload of money! And that was only for a month. How do I get that kind of money? What am I going to do
next
month? My heart sank.
    I had no idea what income came from the restaurant or whether Howard even got a paycheck. He never told me his income, but I assumed that we lived off Nathans, the Joynt family trust, and his stock portfolio. We certainly didn’t want for anything. The money for the occasional Cartier bauble had to have come from somewhere. Certainly we didn’t live on my $50,000 a year from CNN. That might have gotten Howard through a month. He always tamped down my occasional money questions with “You don’t need to worry.” So I didn’t. Big mistake.
    Looking at the bills made my head hurt. I stacked them back in a pile, clicked off the light, pushed back from the desk, put the chair neatly back in place, and walked out of the den. On the sofa in the living room I lay down and stared at the ceiling, tears welling.
    “If anything ever happens to me,” Howard had said, “sell Nathans immediately. Don’t take a partner because they’ll rob you. Don’t try to run it yourself, because it will kill you. Just sell it. Get a good broker, put it on the market, and sell it.” What would I get, I asked. “On a good day you’d clear $2 million.”
    Although publicly I insisted that I would keep Nathans—it was, after all, a family business—privately I planned to heed Howard’s advice and sell it as fast as possible. I was no more qualified to run a restaurant and bar than to wield a scalpel if Howard had been a heart surgeon and left me his medical practice. In my mind I was a widow and a mother, and I wanted to get back to my work as a producer for
Larry King Live
. I wanted to run our household, not a twenty-eight-year-old bar with fifty-five employees. My only interest in Nathans was the financial security it could provide for my son and me.
    In the first few weeks I tried to get us back to some kind of routine. In the morning, I got up, woke Spencer, and welcomed the babysitter, who lived down the hall in a small apartment we owned. I’d get in a good run, make breakfast, drop Spencer at nursery school, make a quick stop at Nathans, drive across town to the CNN building, and work at
Larry King Live
until mid-afternoon when I drove back to Georgetown to pick up Spencer from school. Rather than work from home in the afternoons, as I did before, I left Spencer with the babysitter and returned to Nathans until Spencer’s dinnertime. I found comfort in order and routine. If I could get through one day I could maybe get through the next.
    I dreamed about Howard. In one dream I was in the car, speeding haphazardly from one end of town to the other, all the while trying to reach him on the phone. I was lost and I needed directions. Do I turn left? Do I turn right? Howard would know what to do. I had to reach Howard. But Howard was