Unbecoming (34 page)

She paid with the blank check Jacqueline had sent with her, made out to Fassi, and he handed her the taped paper parcel, no bigger than a saltine cracker.

Grace hadn’t known that moissanite had inclusions. Of course it did; moissanite was natural, flawed like any precious stone.

She fished out her crumpled note again, making a sour face.

“Wait,” she said. “I was supposed to get
two
pairs. Four of them.” She frowned in annoyance. “I’ll have to take the one with the inclusion. And I already gave you that check.” She rummaged in her purse for her wallet. “How much for the bad stone?”

“Eh, you can take it for two twenty-five.”

He was ripping her off. “And two fifty for the other. Here’s four seventy-five.” She made a neat stack of notes on the counter. Her rent money. He raised his eyebrows.

“She better reimburse me quickly,” Grace said.

 • • • 

It was possible Jacqueline had noticed the small inclusion in the diamond trillion, but Grace was certain she would not have inspected it closely enough to register its exact size and shape. Still, her palms grew damp. The only thing she was sure of was the flaw’s placement. Even if Jacqueline hadn’t thoroughly examined the inclusion, the ring’s owner might have. It would be a month’s rent and nowhere to go if she were caught.

No. This ring wasn’t owned by a gemologist. Someone had been sloppy enough to trust Jacqueline, whose fingers were too stiff to repair fine work but plenty sticky enough to steal it. Even to a jeweler, an inclusion didn’t warrant truly investigative attention, only enough to dock the stone’s value accordingly.

When Grace returned to the workshop, she showed the pair of perfect trillions to Jacqueline, who looked them over next to the ring and nodded. “I’ll bring the ring out to you in a moment.”

Grace went back to her desk. Hanna was there, biting her lip as she clipped the loose ends from wire loops. Grace took the imperfect trillions out of her purse and began to work them over with a damp cloth.

Jacqueline came out with the ring and pulled up a chair. She was going to sit there and watch as Grace removed the diamonds.

“I’m going to put them right back in the safe,” Jacqueline said. “We can’t have diamonds floating around the piles of sawdust and glue guns.”

There was no sawdust. There were no glue guns. Their workshop was spotless.

“Of course,” Grace said, carefully setting the wad of cloth, trillions deep inside, on the table. Damp, the cloth stayed together. “I don’t think they’ll be hard to remove.”

The ring was old, the gold soft, and Grace’s prong lifter easily pulled apart the weak jaws of the jewels’ settings. She lifted out one trillion, and then the other. There was a rim of grayish gunk around the perimeter, decades of dirt, hand lotion, and flaking skin cells.

“Let me clean them up,” she said.

Jacqueline stared at the diamonds in Grace’s left palm as though they might jump up on their own. Grace took the balled cleaning cloth in her right hand and let the stones fall into a fold. She massaged one through the cloth, and then the other, feeling for the other stones, deeper in the fabric. When she found them, she reached into that fold and plucked them out. She dropped the two moissanite trillions into Jacqueline’s waiting hand, one of them featuring a small inclusion.

“Perfect, thanks,” Jacqueline said, standing up. She hurried back to her office, leaving Grace alone with diamonds and disbelief.

“She’s got you on the leash now,” Hanna said.

She had not seen.

“Stop pretending you wouldn’t do it, if you had nowhere else to go,” Grace said. “I can’t say no. You’re almost finished with the centerpiece and there’s nothing else.”

Satisfied surprise flickered across Hanna’s eyes.

“I’m only worth what someone will pay me,” Grace said.

Hanna had nearly finished the centerpiece, earlier than she had expected, but she had been interrupted by no other jobs. Grace felt a peculiar envy as she looked at the centerpiece. She wanted something beautiful to work on, something with some substance and worth and history. It was impossible to hang on to any ideals in the current atmosphere. What beauty was there to aspire to?

 • • • 

Grace cleanly set the pair of perfect moissanite trillions in the ring, next to the solitaire. She looked at the prongs through her loupe. They were gently closed and clinging tightly to the stones. Perfect.

She took the ring to Jacqueline, who uncrossed her legs to lean forward and admire it in the light of her desk lamp. “You really can’t tell,” Jacqueline said. “Moissanite. It’s a shame the name is so ugly.”

It was right to steal the diamonds because Jacqueline was a thief herself, and because she had used Grace to help her steal. She hadn’t given Grace any choice
but
to steal. And the high, the
high
that raced up and down her, was electric, filling her head with champagne fizz, causing curls to spring up in her hair at her temples, making her forget, for moment, everything else.

26

Parolees Still Missing

August 21

Cy Helmers

The Tennessee Department of Corrections continues to search for two missing parolees. While it was initially believed that the men may have absconded together, law enforcement officials now believe the men may be acting or traveling independently.

Riley Sullivan Graham, 23, was last seen Saturday at Swiftway Dry Cleaning in Garland, where he had been employed since his release from the Federal Correctional Complex in Lacombe.

Allston Javier Hughes, 23, is believed to have disappeared as early as Thursday night from his place of residence, 441 Jewett Road in Garland. After Hughes missed a scheduled meeting, his parole officer contacted Hughes’s father, employer, and known associates, including Graham and his family.

Graham and Hughes were paroled on August 10 after serving 36 months for robbing the Josephus Wynne Historic Estate in June 2009.

The Department of Corrections has issued warrants for both men’s arrests.

She didn’t know what to make of it.

Freindametz had gone out but left the TV on. A French game show cackled and screamed from her bedroom and Grace went in to switch it off. She wished she weren’t alone in the house. She poured herself a glass of the Scotch she kept far back on a high shelf above the stove and sat down on the stairs.

If they’d headed for different places, they were after different things. Alls would start over, finally. Better to be a nobody headed nowhere than to be a convict in Garland, surrounded by Kimbroughs and people like them.

But Grace was not going to sit and wait for Riley to find her. Whatever he wanted from her, he would have to find somewhere else. She trudged up the stairs and set her sweating glass down on her nightstand. She fumbled in her bag for the brown paper envelope and unwrapped the trillions, adding them to the scattering of diamonds that was already sparkling there on the desk. God, how they gleamed, even in the dark. She turned on her bedside lamp and sat there on the edge of her single mattress, staring at the big stones, like two bright eyes, looking at her and everything else.

“Your problem,” Riley had shouted during one of their fights, “is that you want everyone to think you’re so goddamn special, but
you
don’t even think you’re that special. No one is!”

“I’m not special,” she’d protested. “Please, I don’t think that at
all
.”

“EXACTLY!” he’d roared.

Grace sipped her drink.

She had just been looking for the most love, that was all. Like anything you believed to be scarce, you had to take it for yourself wherever you found it.

Lachaille would buy the trillions. Maxine Lachaille knew her well enough now; she might even take them for cash, though not for nearly as much as if Grace had had enough time to set them in something. Selling a naked diamond was nearly impossible, but Grace would have to try tomorrow and leave Paris straight after. It didn’t matter that Jacqueline knew Mme Lachaille, as long as Grace left right away. That was a guarantee, Grace decided, that she would really go.

She pulled down her suitcase and began to fill it. Her books would have to stay. Just clothes. She pulled her skirts and dresses off their hangers and dropped them in. She’d buy a train pass and start moving; that was the main thing. She listened to a woman outside chattering at her baby as she pushed a stroller along the bumpy sidewalk. It was dark. In the apartment across the street, the teenage boys were smoking pot and listening to drum solos.

Because of the drumming, she didn’t hear the knocking right away. But when the drums quieted, the knocking kept on.

Someone was knocking at the front door.

She looked out the window to the street below but saw no car. She tried to see around the awning over the front door, but she could see nothing.

No one ever knocked on the door. Freindametz’s daughter just barged in.

Riley. She had known it would happen just this way.

Grace sat on her bed and waited—for what, she didn’t know. If she went downstairs and opened the door, there he would be, her cheated husband who never broke a promise.

The knocking stopped.

Grace stood next to the window, looking out from where she couldn’t be seen. No one.

Then she heard the door open. The hinge squeaked and the sound hung there. Shoes. Slow, pausing, stopping, looking around.

On the stairs now.

It could be Hanna, or some disgruntled boyfriend of Freindametz’s daughter, looking for her. Was she sure Freindametz didn’t have a son? A husband. A handyman. Any man she did not know. The footsteps, though soft, were a man’s.

On her little writing desk was a cup of pens, some scissors, a sterling letter opener. She reached for the letter opener and shut it in her fist. She should have turned around but she was scared to.

In the hall.

He cleared his throat behind her and she knew, she knew, she knew.

“Grace,” he said. “Long time no see.”

27

A
lls was taller than Grace remembered, and broader. His chest was deep and upright, not crouched and hollow like it used to be. She couldn’t yet stand to look at his face.

“It’s you,” he said. “I knew I would find you, but I still can’t believe I did.”

Grace stepped backward, but there was only wall behind her. Alls shut the door.

He took her hand in his and looked over her nails, her hot palms. She stared at his fingers, his knuckles, his wrist, the cuff of his sleeve. She couldn’t stand him touching her. She held tight to the letter opener in her other hand. She knew he’d seen it.

He dropped her hand and sat down on her bed. “You look exactly the same,” he said.

He flicked his eyes up at her impatiently. She sat down next to him, nearer her pillow, enough space for another person between them.

He took out a cigarette and offered it to her first. Grace shook her head and smoothed her skirt over her thighs. His were already splayed out carelessly. He rooted for a lighter in his jacket pocket. The weight on her narrow, lumpy mattress shifted and her body pitched toward him. She reached out to steady herself, trying not to touch him. She crossed her legs and pulled at the hem of her dress, like some schoolgirl at a babysitting interview, and he laughed, though exactly how he was laughing she couldn’t tell. He was a stranger.

“You didn’t think I would come,” he said.

“No,” she said. “Or, not alone.”

She saw the twitch of surprise in his neck.

“This isn’t what I thought Paris would look like,” he said.

“It’s only Paris in the municipal sense.”

“This room is very similar to the last bedroom we sat in together.” He patted the blanket on either side of him. “Little bed against the wall. One window to the street. Little desk, little chair.”

Grace felt like Alice, already little herself and shrinking to a crumb.

“A dorm room,” he said. “You came all the way over here to live in the same goddamn dorm room?” He nodded toward the window. “Cobblestones, I guess.”

He had lines around his eyes already, as if he had been squinting into the sun for years. But the sadness she used to see there was gone. She didn’t know what she saw instead. She had imagined this moment, a hundred variations on the wrong theme, for years, and now Alls had broken into her house and she didn’t think it was her place to ask why.

“How did you find me?” she asked him.

“It’s always
how
with you. Never why.”

“I can’t ask you that,” she said. “I don’t think I want to know.”

He stood up and went to her bookshelf, stooping to look over the titles. He went to her desk and picked up one of the trillions, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger. “Still a magpie,” he said quietly. He turned toward her and she flinched.

“You think I came all this way to
hurt
you?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

“You don’t know me anymore. I get that.” He shrugged and nodded toward her desk, toward the loose diamonds and piles of books under the poster of Petit Trianon that hung over her desk. “Is it possible you haven’t changed? That as different as I am, you’ve just been sitting up here in your little room, changing your hair but staying the same?”

She shook her head. “I’m not the same.”

“What,” he said, looking toward the diamonds again. “You steal those yourself?”

But stealing alone was a real difference, wasn’t it? She had grown up, if sideways. She raised her eyes to meet his. “I did.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“I know what you must think of me,” she started.

“You can’t imagine,” he said.

“Where’s Riley?”

“No,” he said. “I’m not taking questions just yet.”

“Please tell me,” she begged him. “You don’t know what I—”

“I don’t?” he shook his head. He reached for her drink and when he saw that it was empty, he asked for his own. “Scotch?” he said in disbelief. “Benedict Arnold.”