Unbecoming: A Novel

  Whether she had meant to steal from the Grahams was an impossible question. Of course she hadn’t meant to steal from them—or rather, she hadn’t meant for stealing to be the right word for keeping the money. It had been something else, the answer to a split-second series of emotional calculations, not quite conscious and immediately suppressed. She had wanted to be the beloved daughter but had tunneled in as a wife. Community property applied to wives, even secret wives. What was Riley’s was hers; the money was a gift to her. But she knew that she had kept the money to feel like a daughter, not like a wife.

  Riley was on one of his rare picking-up sprees, shaking the dust bunnies out of their clothes and stuffing them back into drawers. Grace’s pile grew up from her suitcase, which she still had not put away, and now it seemed too symbolic, as if her time were up and now she would have to go.

  She didn’t know how she could find out what they had told him without dragging everything up to the surface.

  She tried hard to imagine the scene: Mrs. Graham would have asked Riley about the money, to remind him to thank his father. Riley wouldn’t know what she was talking about. But he gave it to Gracie, she might have started. Riley would have asked if she was sure, and Mrs. Graham would have had to think then. Maybe not, she would have had to say. I’ll ask him. It’s probably buried in his desk or something.

  “Sorry, what?” she asked Riley. He was holding up a pair of black tights.

  “Shouldn’t you wash these?”

  Mrs. Graham must have thought quickly, to say those things, to protect her. Grace had always known that Riley’s mother loved her; she had never doubted it. That was why she and Riley couldn’t tell anyone they’d married, because Mrs. Graham would be crushed to have been left out of the wedding. Her daughter’s wedding. But no, Grace was not her daughter. Mrs. Graham had made that clear. Why had she and Riley gotten married? Why hadn’t they gotten engaged? That, they could have told everyone. Marriage had seemed bigger, more romantic and risky, she guessed.

  No, she realized. They’d married because marriage had seemed final, as though it would protect her, protect them.

  Dr. Graham knew about the money too, of course. Oh, it was worse than if Riley knew, so much worse.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked her, his hand on her calf. “They’re not usually this bad, are they?”

  She shook her head. “No, not like this. I feel horrible.” She began to cry, her throat burning, and Riley went downstairs for her bag, where there was ibuprofen. He came back upstairs clutching her purse from the side, and he looked so young—his face pale and pink and childish, his green eyes big and worried. He’d poured her a glass of Coke.

  When you’d known someone this long, she had often thought before, you could rarely see what they looked like at any present moment. Riley’s face was a composite of every face it had been since she had met him. Only every now and then did his face become singular. Now it shocked her, how young he looked. Like a little boy. She felt desperate to fall back in time with him, to go back, back, back, and sickened that she couldn’t.

  20

  A week later, Grace was eating a mealy apple, dumbly clicking through auction records, and staring at her phone, both desperate for and dreading a call from Mrs. Graham asking them to come to dinner, when Riley burst in the kitchen, flushed with panic.

  “My dad says I have to pay taxes on my painting money.”

  “Oh,” Grace said, looking up from a listing on Mdina pottery. “I hadn’t thought about that. All the jobs I’ve had, they were just taken out.”

  “Obviously, I hadn’t thought about it either,” he said, blowing up at his hair. “This is fucked up.”

  It wasn’t that she had thought about his taxes, but more his look of indignation, as though someone else were at fault. She wanted to smack him.

  “Well,” she said, looking back at her reading, “maybe you should rob the Wynne House.”

  She was surprised when he laughed. He sank down the wall and sat on the floor, his hands over his face, his laughter muffled.

  “Just put on some nice ski masks,” he said. “Just get some flashlights and clean the place out.”

  “Strip it,” Grace said, biting a side out of her apple. The cold hurt her teeth. “Lock old Dorothea in the powder room, throw it all in the back of a pickup, and drive to New York City.”

  “What do we tell the people who buy the stuff?”

  “That your grandfather died. Great-aunt. Great-something.”

  “Grandpa Dwight promised me his guns,” he said. “At the home, right before he died, when my mom was out of the room. He also said, ‘The ass is the lass.’ Didn’t elaborate.”

  “He died when you were, what, thirteen? Did you get the guns?”

  “Nope, he gave them to Nate and Colin. He mixed us up a lot.” He stared at the ceiling. “Maybe we should just move into the Wynne House. Then we wouldn’t have to pay rent.”

  Grace got up from the table and joined him on the dirty floor. “We could sleep in the tiny bed together,” she said. “All snuggled up.”

  “I will be the statesman and you can be the . . . the—”

  “They didn’t have stateswomen,” Grace said. “I get something crappy. The charwoman.”

  “No, you just don’t have a job. You’re the lady of the house, just like now.”

  She swatted him and he laughed into her hair.

  “No,” she said. “We should sell it and move to Canada or someplace, never to be seen again.” She imagined never seeing Alls again, never seeing the Grahams again, and felt momentarily peaceful, as though someone had turned on a white-noise machine.

  “Canada? You want to rob the Wynne House so we can move to Canada?”

  “Anywhere,” she said. “Belize. Peru. Rome. Anywhere with you.”

  • • •

  Alls got a second job as a cashier at the drugstore, so he bought the groceries. Grace had applied for the drugstore too, but they had not called her, and of course she couldn’t take a job there now. Riley had called the wedding photographer he worked for in the summers, but it wasn’t wedding season yet. So far, he had refused to take less than he owed on the car, but no such offer was forthcoming. Somehow, it had not yet occurred to Greg that he would have to find a job. He ate the pizza Alls brought home as if it had long been his due. If they’d lived in Memphis or Nashville, getting jobs would have been less of a problem, but Garland was too small to employ them, and now Riley and Grace were without a car.

  Grace’s heist fantasy became her and Riley’s private joke, increasingly elaborate. At night, eating saltines, they “debated” the pros and cons of single-item theft versus all-out looting. Grace drew “maps” of the site, including floor plans of the interior. They walked by the house sometimes, wondering about the locks on the doors and the windows, noting the curtains and shades, which ones were drawn and when. But these conversations all fell disappointingly within the bounds of their standard what-ifs, no different, really, from folding a four-pointed fortune-teller. Grace wished the robbery were not a joke to him. Each time he made a crack about shoplifting from the Wynne House, he was laughing on the edge of the idea, and Grace waited for him to step over. The real idea would have to be his, she knew.

  Even if their Wynne joke stayed a joke, she was grateful for the shared diversion, which gave them something that had been missing: a game, a secret that, unlike their secret marriage, let her imagine them somewhere other than where they were. They read together about the unsolved 1990 robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in Boston, where two men dressed as police entered the museum late at night, tied up the guards in the basement, and stole five hundred million dollars in Rembrandt, Degas, and Vermeer. They read about the thieves who rented a storefront across the street from the National Fine Arts Museum, in Paraguay, dug a tunnel ten feet underground into the museum, and stole five paintings. Never caught.

  Riley had been utterly charmed by the San Juan Surfer, later rechri
stened the Surfer Bandit, who robbed ten banks in Southern California before he was caught, always wearing “casual surfer attire” and escaping on a maroon 1983 Honda motorcycle. Riley had shaken his head in wonder at the published security camera photos; the man bore an uncanny resemblance to Greg. Grace preferred Blane Nordahl, a cat burglar who’d stolen only hallmarked antique silver from wealthy Americans along the East Coast for decades. He chose his marks from Architectural Digest and Town & Country, where people eagerly displayed their most portable capital in situ. To get in, Nordahl would painstakingly cut through a single pane of window glass, so as not to provoke the security system by raising the window. He was at large again. Grace thought of her Dianakopf spoons and felt the glow of camaraderie. She knew which silver to take.

  In 2008, four men in drag stormed into a Paris Harry Winston with guns and grenades. They bashed in display cases and swept the diamonds within into suitcases while the employees and shoppers trembled in a corner. All told, they got away with $108 million, never recovered. Grace loved the audacity of it—broad daylight, broken glass, one of the most famous jewelers in the world. She caught her knee bobbing as she read.

  The Wynne House had no security guards, no security system beyond locks on the doors. All they would have to do was show up.

  • • •

  Grace, Riley, and Greg were sitting at the kitchen table eating cereal one night when Riley read the local police blotter out loud from the Record. The complaints of Garland’s citizens were always ripe for mockery.

  “‘A resident of the three hundred block of Lowery Avenue called police Friday afternoon at four to complain of two youths, estimated twelve to fourteen, cutting through her yard and disrupting her garden. The youths’ parents have been notified.’”

  “When I’m an old lady, I will collect dead birds to throw at the youths,” Grace said.

  “‘A Garland citizen,’” Riley continued, “‘found a lewd drawing on a napkin near the Lions Club picnic.’”

  Greg snorted.

  “Here’s one: ‘The Josephus Wynne Historic Estate reported the theft of an antique desk accessory from its premises.’”

  Grace stared at him. What was he playing at?

  “They don’t even know when,” Riley said, avoiding Grace’s eyes. “Because who would notice a missing desk accessory?”

  “I’m surprised people don’t steal shit from them constantly,” Greg said. “All that old shit no one cares about.”

  “I bet it’s all crap,” Riley said. “What do they call it?” He looked at Grace. “When they make new stuff that looks like antiques?”

  “Shabby chic,” Greg said with authority.

  “Reproduction,” Grace said, seething at Riley’s indiscretion.

  “No, they probably don’t allow that,” Riley said. “Against the rules or something.”

  “Some people go in for the dumbest shit,” Greg said. His family’s house was full of crystal decanters and silver napkin rings, but maybe he had never noticed them amid the rubble. The Kimbroughs were more into biannual kitchen renovations than they were into heirlooms.

  Riley shrugged. “I’d rather have George Washington’s spittoon than a home theater.”

  “No you wouldn’t,” Greg said. “You’d be like, how many Xboxes can I get for this? You’re just saying that because of her.” He got up and dropped his bowl in the sink. “They should just liquidate the Wynne House and build a water park.”

  “We’re doing it. Raiding the Wynne House,” Riley said, clasping his hands behind his head. “Me and her.”

  “Hot damn, I want in.” Greg laughed and leaned against the counter. “Then what? Yard sale?”

  “Then we drive the loot to Atlanta or whatever and sell it off. All our grandpas died.”

  “Come on,” Grace said, getting up. “We need to get to Walgreens before they close.” Grace needed to pick up her birth control, but Riley didn’t need to walk with her, and he knew that.

  “Why do you hate me?” Greg asked her. He’d said it as if he was kidding, but he wasn’t. He smirked at her, daring her to answer. She rolled her eyes.

  “No, you really do,” he said. “Like, it’s painful for you that I’m laughing at one of your jokes.”

  “Christ, man,” Riley said. “Will you chill?”

  Grace was getting tired of Riley’s Christ, which seemed to stand in for his brain so he wouldn’t have to think of anything to say.

  “You don’t have any money anymore,” she said to Greg. “What are you going to do?”

  Greg shrugged. “They’ll give in. They’re not going to let me starve.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you, though, that it’s up to them?”

  Riley was clearly nervous. In the six years they had known each other, Grace and Greg had never had any real discussion, and she certainly had never flaunted her contempt for him.

  “It bothers you more than it does me,” he said, surprising her.

  “We need to hurry,” Riley said. “They close at nine.”

  They closed at ten, but Grace followed him out.

  “What the hell was that?” he demanded on the sidewalk.

  “What the hell was that? You tell him everything we talk about?”

  “It’s a joke,” he said. “I didn’t realize that was such sensitive information.”

  “I feel like we have no privacy here,” she said. She could not tell him what she had meant to say without looking like a fool. “I feel like we have less privacy now than we ever used to.”

  He looked at her then as if she were crazy. “What is this about?”

  “Riley, how are we going to pay the rent, huh? And buy food? By selling your stupid car?”

  “Look, I know you’re worried, but something will change. Worse comes to worst, we move back home for a while. We’re not adults.”

  “I can’t go back home,” she spat. “Don’t you get that?”

  “Calm down. My mom made you a room, for chrissakes.”

  They walked the rest of the way in silence. It was only a matter of time until Riley found out something, she knew. If the Grahams told him about the money, she knew that Riley would want to believe that his father had made a mistake, that he had not given her the envelope. Or that he had, but she had not opened the envelope, that she had simply lost it. She didn’t know which was better to say.

  She wished she could take something else from the Wynne House, just so she could sell it and pay the Grahams back. They could all pretend she had simply misplaced the envelope. Everything could be the way it was before, or at least the Grahams would think it was.

  The horrible shame of knowing Dr. and Mrs. Graham thought—knew—she had stolen the money seemed like it couldn’t possibly get any worse until she imagined the further conversations: Riley telling them they were wrong, that of course he believed her. Mrs. Graham knowing that Grace had lied to her son, and so effectively. Grace wouldn’t be a girl with a little problem of borrowing and not giving back, their girl who just needed some sessions with a counselor. They would never really trust her, or even look at her like her again, their Gracie.

  But that had already happened, she knew. Mrs. Graham had been clear. Grace was not their daughter, not all the time.

  Grace and Riley had not been to his parents’ since Mrs. Graham had confronted Grace. She had dreaded Riley’s questions about why she didn’t want to go, but he barely noticed. Grace had been the one pushing for those weekly dinner visits, and she and Mrs. Graham had always arranged them. Two weeks had passed since Mrs. Graham had taken her up to the bedroom, and she had not called Grace about dinner. About anything.

  This was what happened when your heart wanted two things it could not have together: You lost them both. Everyone knew that.

  But she still had Riley, the only person who still thought she was a good girl, and she could not let him change his mind. She knew this even as she fought to ignore the inexplicable, grotesque rage she felt hissing deep within—at Dr. and Mrs. Graham
, for treating her as their daughter and then humiliating her like a stray who’d forgotten her place; at Donald and at Bethany; at Lana and Kendall; at Craig Furst, wanting to know if she enjoyed Miami; at her parents and at the twins for revealing them to her; at Greg, who coasted through the days in an Xbox fugue state, blank-eyed and gassy. At Alls, who had picked her like a lock. At Riley, for being so loved and so smug, even now, and in love with her. At herself, more than anyone, for not smacking her own hand back when it wanted, so often, what was not hers. She looked at her husband and saw a ticking clock. She had to take him away, and she had to take him before she ran out of time.

  • • •

  The next morning, Grace and Riley were lying in bed when Grace heard a door slam in the driveway. She turned over and covered her head with her pillow, trying to stay asleep.

  “RILEY!” Greg bellowed from downstairs. “YOUR CAR’S GETTING TOWED!”

  She heard the front door swing open and shut, Greg shouting at someone. She elbowed Riley, her eyes squeezed shut.

  “Wake up,” she said, her throat dry. “Greg is yelling.”

  What had Greg said? The car?

  She pulled a T-shirt over her head as she stumbled to the window. “Riley,” she said sharply. “There’s a tow truck in the driveway.”

  He rubbed his eyes. “It’s our driveway,” he said. “I can park in my own driveway.”

  “I think you better wake up,” she hissed, raking through the pile of clothes for a pair of jeans.

  All at once he sprang up and sprinted downstairs. Grace followed him. Alls was already outside, demanding to see the man’s papers, and Riley ran out into the March frost in only his shorts, shouting at the man to stop.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Repossessing your car,” the man said. “You want to give me the keys?”

  “What? Why?”

  “Are you sure you have the right car?” Alls asked the man. “You check the VIN?”