Five Fortunes (21 page)

“Shanti Amos.”

“Age?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Married?”

Shanti shook her head no.

“Living with?”

“Flora.”

Carter smiled.

“Employment?”

“I work for the power company, in billing.”

“Who looks after the baby?”

“They have a nursery. I usually bring her with me. I work at night, so she’s mostly asleep.”

“What do you have for family?”

“My parents are dead. I have a sister, but I don’t know where she is.”

Carter looked at her sharply.

“What does that mean?”

Shanti was direct, as always. “I haven’t seen her in a few years.

She was using the last time I saw her. I imagine she’s on the street, but I don’t know where.”

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Carter was taking notes. “You live in the house you grew up in?”

Shanti nodded.

“So if your sister ever wanted to come home, she’d know where to find you?”

Shanti, looking away from Carter this time, nodded again.

“How old is she?”

“Nineteen.”

“Name?”

“Delia Amos.”

“Maybe you should just hire me to find Delia. Then you could all move to a better neighborhood.”

Carter had been partly kidding, but she saw at once that she had crossed an invisible line, and wished she could take it back. Shanti just looked at her with a cool expression.

“Sorry,” she said. “Can I ask you one more question?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you choose us?”

“Terri thought you would take us seriously. Not rip us off.”

Carter nodded. “No, we won’t do that. But I’ll have to talk to the others. We’re not exactly a democracy here, but we don’t just order people to do things we know are dangerous. The ops have to agree.

If you give me your number, I’ll let you know on Monday, and we can talk about terms.”

Shanti gave her the number, then stood up and put out her hand to say good-bye. Carter shook it.

“Flora, time to go,” Shanti said. Flora scrambled to her feet and made her way back to her mother. Shanti picked her up, and Flora, now back on eye level with her, studied Carter gravely.

“You made a bracelet,” Carter said. Flora had about thirty rubber bands on her fat little arm. She looked at Carter with her big brown-marble eyes from under long black lashes. She looked worried that she would have to give the rubber bands back.

“Next time you come, will you make me one?”

Flora thought it over and then nodded gravely. Shanti, watching her daughter’s face, wore a slight smile.

158 / Beth Gutcheon

“Great kid,” Carter said to her.

“Are you a great kid?” Shanti asked Flora. Flora was at once overcome with embarrassment, and hid her face.

“I’ll call you Monday afternoon,” Carter said.

“Thank you.” Shanti picked up her bag from the chair and made her way out. Carter stood watching her. When she was about halfway down the room, Carter saw Flora lift her head slightly and peer at Carter. Carter winked at her.

A
my had given up nursing when she married Noah because he wasn’t used to having a wife who worked. But after Jill was born she had semi-accidentally developed another career as a photographer. It started with studies of baby Jill, but she had a real eye, not to mention a way with babies, and had soon found herself in demand to photograph children’s parties and make formal portraits of other peoples’ children. When one of her friends’

daughters developed mile-long legs and a neck like the stem of a peony, Amy made photographs of her wearing vintage clothing in improbable combinations. The girl acquired a modeling agent and began to have a vogue, and Amy began to get calls from other models, and then from a magazine editor or two to do fashion shoots.

That all ended the day the police called from Central Park to ask if Amy had a thirteen-year-old daughter named Jillian who carried a purple backpack.

The next two years had been agony for everyone. There were endless medical appointments, and even more endless visits to healers of broken spirits. It had been hard on the marriage, for sure.

Noah felt neglected and angry, and Amy felt helpless. She even had to stay away from the police department from fear that one of the tabloids would discover her identity and publish Jill’s name; mira-culously they had confined themselves to calling her “Girl X.”

Briefly Amy had hateful feelings about all men, including Noah, which she knew were irrational and yet were hard to suppress. She went back into therapy, and things got better in the marriage even 159

160 / Beth Gutcheon

though Noah wouldn’t go with her, but Jill seemed completely frozen and stuck. Then Jill came unstuck in an unwelcome way; she began to encase herself in layers of lard until she became a stretched-out balloon version of their daughter. This put a new strain on things.

Noah was a very physical and competitive man and he cared very much about the beauty of his wife and children. Jill sensed her father’s withdrawal from her, and she withdrew from him in retali-ation. That left both of them relating to Amy as if Amy were the fulcrum in a badly designed machine.

Jill’s therapist suggested she move to a new school. It would be easier for her in a place where no one had known her before to get used to accepting the person she had become after the attack. It helped in some ways, although at first she was very lonely. Neither of her parents had any idea how much time she spent on the Internet pretending to be a cast of invented characters.

Meanwhile Amy, restless and lonely herself, and wanting a challenge that wouldn’t defeat her, volunteered to work on Jill’s school’s charity auction and ended up running it. When the dust cleared and she had raised $24,000 more than the evening had ever netted before, a couple of the other moms on the committee suggested that they go into business together.

Amy discussed it with Noah.

“Who’s going to pay you to organize parties when New York is full of full-time volunteers?”

“We don’t think that’s a problem.”

“What was the matter with photography, if you want a hobby?”

“I don’t want a hobby, I want useful work. Getting the bookings depends on contacts. And word of mouth. One job leads to another.

I’ve been out of the loop for three years, everything’s changed.”

“Well, go back to doing portraits, then.”

“Noah—how many people do you know who want a big, formal portrait of their sixteen-year-old? With the braces and the pimples and the ring through the lip? Five-year-olds, yes. Young brides, yes.

But the home-baked portrait and birthday party business is going to be a little slow with our kids at this age.”

Five Fortunes / 161

“But it’s not as if you need the money. Why not just do it for fun?”

“I don’t know. Would you take out peoples’ ovaries for fun if nobody wanted to pay you?”

The rest of the conversation had gone badly. Two weeks later she came to Noah with a very professional business plan and asked him to lend her her share of the start-up money. He wrote a check.

Within six months she had paid him back with interest, which annoyed him because the business was a succès fou and he would just as soon have had equity in it.

Amy was the client wrangler and food expert. Paige calculated costs, bid the jobs, and wrote the contracts. Elizabeth designed everything from invitations to decor. Noah had been just about dead wrong about all the full-time volunteers they would have to compete with. It seemed that all the former volunteers were working now themselves, and were too busy to plan their own children’s weddings or their companies’ picnics.

Amy was immersed and happy, although a wise friend had remarked that “you’re only as happy as your unhappiest child.” She was always fitting her work hours around Jill’s schedule, always alert to the tone in Jill’s voice on the phone, and her partners were aware that she had to limit the jobs she could supervise on school nights or weekends.

Thanksgiving morning, Jill went out jogging and ran into her friend Clara on Twentieth Street, walking the family’s incontinent dachshund. The streets were almost deserted, as if the holiday had had the same effect on city life as a neutron bomb. Clara was a friend from Jill’s building. This morning her attire and grooming suggested a certain inner emotional disarray.

Clara was younger than Jill, attending a school that required you to show four semesters of community service on your transcript in order to graduate. You could intern at a museum after school or cook hamburgers in a hospital coffee shop or tutor dyslexic kids, or any number of other things, but Clara had, one way or another, failed to follow through on any of the commitments she had made and here it was almost second term of junior year.

162 / Beth Gutcheon

“My dad is all, like, ‘I work my butt off to send you to that fancy school and you’re not going to graduate, yadda yadda yadda.’ Happy Thanksgiving.” Clara had persuaded him that if she served dinner at the Tompkins Square Soup Kitchen on Thanksgiving Day she was going to get extra credit. Then she’d applied a bottle of blue food coloring to her platinum hair and drawn black lines an inch wide around her eyes, hoping to look so weird that the soup kitchen would beg her not to come back.

“You’ve got to come with me,” Clara said, pleading. “I’m afraid of Big Lee.” Big Lee, the soup kitchen’s director, was a man who had spent enough nights outside in bad weather to have very little patience with these conscripts his board forced him to put on his work roster. He had actually called the school to complain when Clara signed up to work Thursday dinners in September and then never showed up.

“I thought Rosella was doing this with you,” Jill said.

“No, she got some teaching job. Speed-reading for the blind or something. Can you believe I’m going to miss my own Thanksgiving dinner, and my dad goes, ‘Serves you right’? What time are you eating? Is your mom cooking?”

“No, she’s working today.”

“She
is
?”

“Someone’s silver wedding, I think she said. It
had
to fall on Thanksgiving. She says her partners always do the evenings and weekends and she could do this for them. We don’t leave for the country until five o’clock.”

“Where are you going?”

“Greenwich. My brother’s house.” Jill made a face.

“What’s that like?”

“Perfect,” said Jill, looking as if she were sucking lemons. “The babies are perfect, their noses don’t even run. My sister-in-law is a marathon racer; she’s as hard as a rock and weighs seventeen pounds. She’s always making these Cuisine Minceur recipes just for me. We all get along so well they even invite my dad’s first wife.”

“Gross,” said Clara.

“Yes. Betty chats away with my mother while she dandles her perFive Fortunes / 163

fect little grandchildren and I sit there like the Elephant’s Child. I’m sure it makes my mom feel like dog doo on a stick.”

The soup kitchen turned out to be a trip. They were drastically understaffed for the day, and Big Lee was so amazed that Clara had finally shown up, he didn’t seem to care what she looked like. “Can my friend work too?” Clara asked, unnecessarily. They were both hustled into the kitchen of the Lady of Mercy church, still offering Masses in English and Lithuanian. They were put to work cutting mountains of carrots and onions and celery. There were four huge turkeys roasting, two in each oven, and a woman named Martha Missirlian was boiling a hundred pounds of potatoes.

At one point there was a great pounding on the door of the parish hall.

“Somebody get that, that’s the bread!” Big Lee shouted. Nobody moved and the pounding continued. Jill put down her knife and ran to the door.

The sidewalk was filled now for three blocks with discouraged-looking people waiting in the cold. There were men and women but no children—the homeless families were fed somewhere else. At the curb stood a van with the engine running, and the woman who had been hammering on the door shouted at Jill, “Come on, honey, hustle—I’ve got two more stops to make.”

She unloaded four plastic laundry baskets filled with dozens of long loaves of breads of every description. She dove back into the van and reappeared with shopping bags filled with unmatched dinner rolls. She dropped these onto the sidewalk and shouted,

“Happy Thanksgiving,” then jumped into the cab of the van and roared away. Jill half-expected the line of hungry people to descend on her and tear the bread apart, but they stood quietly watching.

“You never met Cassandra before?” asked a young black man.

He was tall, wearing oversized blue jeans and a dirty gray sweater.

“You want some help with that?”

Jill said, “Definitely. Thank you.”

The young man took up two of the baskets while Jill picked up the

164 / Beth Gutcheon

bags of rolls. “Lead on, MacDuff,” he said. A homeless guy quoting Shakespeare? Jill thought. What a trip.

The last baskets of bread were waiting for her on the sidewalk when she rushed out for them. The turkeys were being carved, and Clara, who hadn’t a clue what she was doing, was trying to make gravy. Martha Missirlian was now heroically mashing her potatoes.

When everyone from the sidewalk was sitting inside with a plate of hot food, Clara and Jill were sent in among them with a huge coffee urn on a serving trolley. They passed up and down the rows handing out steaming cups, and offering milk and sugar. Jill came to her helper, whom she thought of now as MacDuff. He was sitting with a rheumy-looking white guy who looked like a defrocked priest or school principal. MacDuff had a paperback book sticking out of the pocket of his sweater. Both had filthy nylon bags at their feet.

MacDuff’s looked like a bowling bag.

“What are you reading?” Jill asked MacDuff, and he pulled out the book to show her.
The Sound and the Fury
, by William Faulkner.

“Have you read it?” the older guy asked Jill.

“Yes, I have.”

“So has he—he’s half-memorized it. He’s our reader. He’s even got a dictionary in his bag.” MacDuff now leaned over to open his bag and produce a paperback Merriam-Webster.