Best Friends (52 page)

Ted grinned. “Exactly. We'll time-share her. She and her sisters get along really well. Does she talk to you about them at all?”

“Of course. She likes visiting you. She gets home and goes up to her room and sleeps for three hours. I think you guys are a bit overwhelming.”

“It's ‘you girls.' I certainly don't overwhelm her. She ignores me.”

I rolled my eyes. “Me too.”

“I read somewhere that the strongest predictor of a child's intelligence was the intelligence of the mother,” Ted said.

“But I don't do that much with her. Really, I don't.” I felt almost desperate, wanting Ted to understand. I wasn't much of a mother. At some point, I was sure, Aury would slip and let her father know how few hours she saw me each day, how much time she spent with my mother or at school or with Brittany from next door, how often I slipped away to California. “Aurelia just kind of . . . made herself. She's a self-made girl.”

“Oh, Clare,” Ted said, shaking his head, “you can never take a compliment.” He looked at me across the table with exasperation, a sliver of cream shirt peeking from his sleeve. I remembered Ted when he wore flannel shirts with frayed cuffs and underwear left over from high school. There'd been worn spots in the seats of his briefs.

“I love compliments,” I said, honestly. “I'm a glutton for compliments.”

“You're amazing.”

I made a puzzled face and glanced around us, as if he must be talking to someone else. “Moi?”

Ted grinned again. “Wait a minute, too direct. Wrong tack.” He cleared his throat and spoke in an television anchorman's voice. “Your hair's different, Clare. Are you dyeing it?” He was leaning backward now, the glass of wine trembling slightly in his hand.

“I dye it darker and I streak it. I had a makeover, years ago, from some of my patients.” I reached for my glass of wine and tried to pick it up calmly, but I was shaking myself. “Dead, all of them. But the makeover lives on.”

“Clare, how do you stand it?”

A moment or two passed, and still Ted watched me. “Your tremor's less,” I blurted.

“Inderal.” A drug you could take for a tremor.

He wanted to say, then, “I love you.” I could sense it, I knew it was on his mind. And I would have said it back if he had said it first, so it was our collusion at the end of the meal when he rested his shaking hand on the small of my back and guided me to his room.

 

 

 

“ SHE ' S STEALING,” Sally said. “It's not even very subtle. I mean, it's clever but not brilliant.”

The bank man had picked it up. “Are you shipping to Juarez now?” he'd asked Sally, because he went down there sometimes for fun, and he'd seen a bunch of Crown magazines in a shop.

“We don't ship to Juarez, do we?” Sally asked Virginia.

Oh no, Virginia said. Not for years. Maybe resale, she suggested. A garage sale for magazines. Those Mexicans can be thrifty.

But no, the bank man said, these magazines looked fresh. He was picky that way; he wouldn't buy anything used.

“Magazines in Spanish?” I asked, and Sally gave me a incredulous look.

“See, she takes the magazines that don't sell—I mean her son takes them, he's in the warehouse—and she sells them to her outlets. In the meantime, she's credited the legitimate stores for returning their unsold copies. It's like she's stealing from us twice: she's crediting stores for merchandise we never got back and she's taking that merchandise and selling it herself.”

I shook my head, trying to understand it. “It is clever,” I said.

“It's not brilliant. I figured it out myself, after the bank guy mentioned it. I've talked to about thirty stores. The son's involved, of course, and Buck may be involved too.”

“It's what my father did,” I said. “He embezzled.” Bigger shrimp. An extra fifty dollars for clothes. I had never even thought about the mechanics of it. How had he managed it? What tiny mistake had tipped the doctors off?

Sally smiled sadly. “Oh, Clare. Your father was a mini-embezzler. Not like her.”

“How much are we talking about?”

“Real money.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Why? I don't care why. She's stealing, Clare,” Sally's voice rose. “Stealing is wrong. We have to be very careful with her. We can't let her get an inkling that we know.”

 

 

OH, HE HAD CHANGED.

Of course, maybe I'd changed too.

“After all these years,” Ted said, stroking my shoulder. “All these years and it's better than it ever was.”

The hair on his chest bristled against my cheek. He had a wonderful new smell, a piney smell, and it didn't matter that it was surely a cologne his wife had chosen.

 

 

 

“VIRGINIA!” I closed the door behind me. “How are you? How are the grandkids?”

Everyone was fine. She and her daughters and grandkids were planning a cruise to Alaska. She'd been saving up for years. The only one who couldn't go was her son, because he was on probation (she didn't say what for) and couldn't leave the state, but that was okay because he was the one who got seasick.

I sat down in a chair beside her. “How's business?”

“Same old, same old.”

“You don't mind driving down here every day?”

“How could I? I want to help Sally out. I know what it's like being a working mother.”

“Nice of you.” I looked at her guilty profile.

 

 

 

WHAT CAN I SAY? We loved each other. We loved each other happily and well.

We left Ted's room that evening and drove out to dinner in the Flats, an area of restaurants and nightclubs by the Cuyahoga River, and ate in a big loud seafood restaurant. We weren't loud. We sat at our table and smiled at each other—loving smiles, sheepish smiles, I-can't-believe-we-did-that smiles. When I reached for the salt, Ted reached across the table, and I left my hand on the salt shaker as his fingers explored mine. His tremor was gone.

 

 

 

“YEAH, IT ' S STILL OKAY, ” I told Sally. “We chat some. We're polite.”

Sally shook her head. “Milk? Your flavored cream?” I visited Los Angeles that summer while Aury was in Colorado, leaving Ohio a day early so my mother would take Aury to the airport to meet Ted and Mary and their daughters.

“No thanks, I'm drinking black now.”

Cheerios, crushed and intact, scattered across the floor, the refrigerator door open, the twins in shirts and diapers walking on tiptoe carrying full cups of milk, baby Linnea seated on the floor chewing a sky-blue Ferragamo pump, a message on the answering machine from a La Vonda about having the photos once they'd found the right harnesses, the sucking alarm sound from Peter's computer, a noise he'd created himself: in Ohio, I missed this familiar chaos.

“You should bring Aury next time,” Sally said, handing me my mug of black coffee. “I miss Aury.”

“Maybe I'll bring her.”

“I talked to the prosecutor's office,” she said. “Monday. You'll be here.”

 

 

 

THE PLANNING WAS ELABORATE. Virginia had been secretly indicted by a grand jury (Sally's legal connections helped her make the case), and the local police agreed to arrest her at Sally's home between nine-thirty and eleven A.M. on Monday. The police needed the early morning for speeders and the later morning for lunch; Virginia's own home was in a different jurisdiction.

Virginia arrived for work Monday through Friday by eight-thirty, so having her at Sally's was no problem. She'd be in the upstairs office with the door closed, overlooking the backyard and the glass roof of the solarium; the police would park in the driveway; the doorbell would ring, which Sally would get up and answer, and the police (who'd be polite, who understood this was an older woman and white-collar crime) would come up the stairs and arrest Virginia. Sally didn't think she'd fight; underneath it all, Virginia had morals, and Sally imagined she'd be like a child caught in some misdeed, distressed but secretly relieved.

The kids were going out with Peter and Teresa and wouldn't be back till noon. It was quite a feat to get them all dressed and out by nine A.M., but Peter and Teresa did it. Virginia arrived on time and entered, as she always did, through the back door into the kitchen, a Styrofoam cup of coffee in one hand and her sack lunch in the other. As she put her lunch in the fridge, she had to make her way through the kids: Linnea in a car seat, the twins pushing at each other and making unintelligible noises, Barbara in a dress, crown, and sparkly shoes, and Ezra barking worried commands at them all. “They clearing out?” Virginia asked, looking relieved.

“Toy train festival,” Sally explained (this was true), and Virginia nodded and headed for the front foyer and the stairs.

The three of us trooped up to the room with the closed door. I read some magazines, Virginia logged on to her computer and keyed things in, and Sally kept herself busy reviewing a ridiculous cartoon strip in which women's waists were barely bigger than their necks and men's penises hung down past their knees. I was glad not to be looking over Virginia's shoulder: since Ted was back, the sight of naked people did not leave me unmoved.

At nine Sally went to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee, bringing me and Virginia two big mugs. “I wonder how Monica Seles is doing,” Virginia said. “I miss her. Can you imagine? Stabbed in the back. Sheesh.”

At ten Sally asked Virginia if there was something else she could review. “I'm done with this strip,” she said. “It's just juvenile.”

“People like it,” Virginia said. “I mean, men people.”

“That's interesting you say that,” I said. “Isn't your market pretty exclusively male?”

“Not anymore,” Virginia said, and she launched into an explanation of the lesbian market, the lusty hetero market, and the women who wanted magazines like romance novels with pictures.

At eleven Sally cracked the door open—“to get some air”—but really, I knew, to be sure she heard the doorbell.

By eleven-thirty Sally was sweating. There were streaks on the fabric under her arms. “I'm getting hungry,” Virginia said. “I don't know about you, but I'm getting through these
Balls Almighty
numbers, and then I'm going to eat.”

“Me too,” Sally said quickly. “Let me run down and start heating some soup.”

“Soup in the summer?” Virginia said.

“In an air-conditioned house, it doesn't matter.” Sally disappeared downstairs.

At about noon Virginia yawned and stood up. “That's a wrap, kid,” she said, and headed downstairs. She always ate her lunch at the house, either in the kitchen or outside at the patio table. It was staggering to think that a woman who functioned on such intimate terms with her employer was capable of stealing her money.

Virginia's lunch was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (one of the pieces of bread was the heel), carrot sticks, an apple, and a soda from Sally's fridge. She laid out her lunch on the big kitchen table and ate it with deliberation. I began to feel sorry for her. It seemed cruel that a person eating such a modest lunch was about to be arrested. Sally wasn't sure that Buck—whom she would certainly call—would be able to make bail. “Nice and quiet here today,” Virginia said. “Bet the munchkins like those trains.”

“Any word?” I whispered to Sally.

“The dispatcher says they're coming.”

Sally had heated up the soup but wasn't eating, and when I asked for some, she plunked the pot in front of me and waved at the bowls and ladle.

A car door slammed, then another, then—after an excruciating pause—a third, which meant that Peter and Teresa were in the garage unloading the van. Sally went out the door to the garage, waving desperately at Peter, but it was too late: the kids were at the door.

“What the—” Peter said, noticing Virginia.

“We're eating lunch!” Sally said, her voice pitched high. “Just a normal Monday.”

Virginia was picking up her things. “I'll move outside, leave you guys room.”

“No!” Sally said, and I wondered how she'd try to make this command sound normal. “It's too hot out. How were the trains, Ezra?”

“Barbara got to ride three times,” Ezra complained.

The doorbell rang. Peter and Sally exchanged a quick glance, and Peter went to the front door.

The policemen did not look like those in Ohio: the female was Hispanic and the male was Asian. “You're Virginia Luby?” the Hispanic policewoman said. “We have a warrant for your arrest for grand larceny. We're here to take you to the station.”

“What is this?” Virginia said, twisting in her chair to look at all the adult faces. To me she seemed to say: “You knew?” She ended up fixing her eyes on Teresa, and seemed to be sending a warning.

“I'm not going,” she finally said.

“You can finish your lunch,” the policeman said in a reasonable way. He pulled out a chair and sat across from her. “We'll just wait.”

“Mommy, is that a policeman? Why are there policemen here? Is that woman a policeman too?”

“Let's go upstairs,” Peter said. “Come on, Ezra. This is boring stuff. Let's go read
Peter Rabbit.
”

“You telling me this is my last meal?” Virginia said, setting down her sandwich. “You planning to execute me or something?”