by Ruthie Knox
Allie stood up. This hadn’t gone how she expected it to. Her sister was yelling at her, her stomach too full, the heat from the ovens making her queasy, and nothing she tried was working.
She’d just thought she could drop by. Visit her sister. Talk, and see the apartment. Casually ask if May thought it might be a good idea to move their parents’ anniversary party to September, right before they all went up to the cabin for Labor Day, to give her more time to fix their family.
She hadn’t planned on getting caught in her lies, or on angry Ben, or on her sister yelling at her and telling her about stuff she’d had no idea was going on because she hadn’t been willing to listen.
She was botching it like she always did, without the first clue how to un-botch.
May dropped the metal pan onto the countertop with a bang. “Why are you here?”
“I can’t do this.” Allie crossed to the door. She’d left her shoes there. Now she sat on the stool by the door and started buckling them back on. “I’m sorry, I can’t.”
“You’re not leaving.”
“I’m in New York for the next few days. You can call me, just right now I can’t.” She buckled her second shoe, glanced up at her sister, and wished she hadn’t. “Please, May.”
May crossed her arms. She was as angry as she ever got, and it cut into Allie like it always did, being the one who let her sister down and made her look like that.
She’d torn off May’s Barbies’ heads, ruined her first homecoming gown, totaled the car she bought by saving up her Taco Bell paychecks for a year.
Always, it was Allie who did this to May.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to.”
May flapped one hand. “Oh, do what you have to. Definitely.”
“Listen, I want to move Mom and Dad’s party back to September. If it’s this coming Sunday like we planned, you can only come for the weekend, but if we move it, you guys will be able to visit longer right after, up at the cabin, and I just think it’s better.”
“Ben already planned on taking off this Friday to Monday.”
“But he could change it, right?”
“If you can’t get the party ready in time, even after I checked and you told me it was all under control, sure. Move the party to September, months after our parents’ actual anniversary. Don’t worry about how they might feel about it, or how inconvenient it might be for Ben, who’s never left the restaurant unmanned before. Don’t worry about anyone but yourself, Al. You never do.”
Allie scanned the floor and furniture for her purse. Her chest hurt too much. “Where’s my—”
“It’s by the fishbowl.”
She looked to her left. To her right.
“On the left. On the table. For fuck’s sake.” May stalked to her, past her, and plucked her bag off a table right in front of her.
“I’ll be in the city,” Allie said. “I’m not going.”
But May pushed her bag at her, and she went.
The apartment was on the second floor, the second building on the second block from the street where the subway had disgorged her, and everything looked the same here, and there was nowhere to sit down in Queens. There was nowhere to be alone with yourself in New York, nowhere you could get a grip, and anyway she didn’t have a car, or darkness, or Wisconsin where you could loop for miles around farms, drive in a patchwork quilt of interlocking squares on dairy roads until your throat felt like it might start bleeding and your voice sounded like nobody you’d ever known.
It was good that she didn’t plan on crying.
She walked until her shoes were giving her blisters, and then she found a park with a bench where she sat down beside an anemic tree in the full sunlight.
Angry. Furiously angry. With herself, and May, but mostly herself.
She should have asked. She should have tried to talk, and to listen, because if she had, May might have told her she was scared and short on money, and those were problems Allie could actually solve. Money she had. If all she had to do in her family was write checks, this would be a fucking relief.
But that wasn’t all she had to do. She had to do this—this project she couldn’t seem to get a good hold on, this mission to fix things, make her family whole again, before May and their parents figured out exactly how far they’d traveled down the road to broken.
She didn’t want to be the one who broke them anymore. She wanted to be a fixer. She just kept fucking it up, and it made her want to go home.
Instead, she called her dad. She couldn’t think of anyone else to call, and she needed to feel tethered to a real human being who loved her and who she hadn’t disappointed lately.
He picked up on the first ring. “How’s my girl?”
“Good, thanks. How’re you?”
She could see him, just what he’d look like, what he’d be doing on a Monday—puttering in his garage with his shop clothes on, his hair wispy and flyaway, a rag in his pocket. Lately he’d been clearing out one of the bays to take donations for Syrian refugees for the church.
“About as well as I could ask for.” His standard answer. “What’re you up to today?”
“I’m actually in New York for a few days. Spur-of-the-moment thing.”
“No kidding.”
“Yeah, I thought I’d better tell you, since Matt’s been asking people where I am.”
There was a pause. A long pause by other people’s standards, but not a long one for her dad. They breathed into the phone at each other.
“How’s the donations drive going?” she asked.
“Good. They announced it again at church. I got a few people coming over later.”
“That’s awesome.”
“I’m going to need a bigger space, though. You know if Sal’s warehouse is still empty?”
“I think his kids leased it out.”
“Yeah, I wondered. I’m looking at those storage units out by the highway.”
“You think you’ll get that much stuff?”
“You never know.” There was another pause. “Your mom’s just taking some time for herself.”
Her lower back hurt. She’d curled over the phone, hunched in a ball on the bench. “Yeah, I wondered when she didn’t call me back.”
“Yeah. I’m sure she will, when she gets to it.”
“Yeah…Okay, well, I’d better let you go. I just wanted to say hi and, you know. Let you know what I was up to.”
“Sure thing. Talk to you soon, then.”
“Talk to you soon. ’Bye, Dad.” She took a breath. “I love you.”
But by the time she got the words out, he’d already hung up.
The sun punished her for everything she’d done wrong. It made her stomach overlarge, made her head pound with the hangover she deserved for all the whiskey she’d had last night but thought she’d avoided when she woke up thinking of Winston.
Winston.
Winston and his beautiful shirts and better smile and old-fashioned manners.
Winston and the way he held her hand, like it wasn’t a childish thing to do, but a thing, in and of itself.
Winston and the way he made her feel like someone new and fresh, rather than the kind of person whose family needed to get away from them, to take time for themselves.
Without letting herself think of what May had said, or what her mom had done, or any of it, she pulled the card he’d given her out of her purse and called the number.
Feel free to use his services toward your cause, he’d said.
So she did. She felt free to ask Jean to drive all the way to Queens to pick her up, and she felt free to slip into the cool, air-conditioned backseat of the Town Car when it arrived.
She didn’t know where Winston was, exactly.
But she felt free to ride around in the back of this car until it found him.
Chapter 8
“Ms. Lewis.”
Winston cleared his throat. His executive assistant didn’t move or look up from her computer. He shifted
his weight from one foot to the other and considered whether it would be more foolish to continue standing here or to go back into his office and emerge a second time, trying her name again.
At his worst, in London, in those last few dark years, he would have pounded the call button on his phone and barked at his assistant, not caring who in the open office heard the chastisement. Thinking of it, he felt the shame burn the tips of his ears.
“Excuse me? Ms. Lewis.” Nothing. He raised his voice and used her given name. “Chasity.”
“What?”
She’d asked without turning to face him. He’d never had an assistant so affectless, so artless and insubordinate. He’d never had one so good at her job, either.
Perhaps this wasn’t a good idea. She would see through his questions to the purpose behind them.
But he’d been playing and replaying his dreadful breakfast with Beatrice on a loop, and Bea was right: Allie needed help. He needed to help her. Somehow.
“Could you come in here for a moment?”
“Yeah, I’ve just got to finish this first.”
Winston waited on the threshold of her space, unclear whether she’d intended him to. After a few moments she finished typing. “What is it?”
“If you could come into my office.”
“Do you have an idea how long this will take?” She finally backed up her athletic-looking, all-black wheelchair and spun it partway around with her muscled arm, but not to look at him: to grab her bale of red curls into her fist and whip-snag them on top of her head with a pencil.
“Not terribly long, I shouldn’t think.”
“I’m in the middle of a chat with legal.” Today her T-shirt was black and full of holes and said IRON MAIDEN. When he’d chosen her from a group of internal candidates cleared by HR, she’d told him her position was not in the public, and so she would not dress or perform for the public. He could barely remember agreeing with her, but obviously he must have.
To Winston’s relief, she grabbed her iPad and began gliding into his office.
“I’d like to do a review of our current client list.”
“No.” Chasity pivoted and wheeled out of the room.
“Wait.” Winston rose, stumble-slaloming his hips around the corner of his desk. “It’s not a waste of time.”
“It’s an utter waste of time. It’s not something we do unless there’s some kind of massive problem, like last year when accounting misapplied that percentage to every client. I know for a fact there isn’t any massive problem. I take smoke breaks and don’t smoke so I can be on the ground floor of what problems to anticipate. Smoking is boring but those fuckers gossip. You didn’t put this little exercise into your Outlook calendar, so it’s officially not on my calendar, and not a part of any life I’m living today.” She turned to her computer with her back to him. “Namaste. Talk to you later.”
It took him a while to release his hands from the fists they’d balled themselves into. Another passage of seconds to unclench his jaw, and a full minute to talk himself out of a lecture that would have included the phrases bloody Americans, no sense of proper hierarchy, and if you worked at the London office, you’d have been canned by now.
This wasn’t London. This was an American corporation that the bank had purchased just a few years ago, and which continued to operate largely independently. On paper, yes, Winston’s family owned a controlling share of the whole show, and this had translated into him being given a work visa, an office, and a portfolio of the most important clients. But his arrival hadn’t changed the way these people did their jobs.
Nor should it have. He was the one who had to adapt to new realities. Like his terrifyingly intelligent workaholic assistant who scared the cheese out of him.
He approached Chasity’s desk and selected a clear space along the edge to sit.
“Get off my desk.”
He stood, but very, very slowly so that she would look up. He felt like the cat in a YouTube video Bea had showed him who deliberately swatted at the nose of a crocodile.
“What is it already, Tea and Biscuits?”
“I met a woman.” If he was going to swat at the crocodile, he might as well die.
“A rich white man meets a woman and it’s an emergency. Big fucking surprise.”
“She’s from the state of Wisconsin.”
Chasity just stared at him, unmoved. She had meticulously painted eyebrows that he ordinarily found quite fascinating, privately, but drawn down like that, she did rather resemble a man-eating prehistoric beast.
“She’s looking for her mother, who ran away to New York, and is in some trouble.”
“Her mother? Her ma have Alzheimer’s or something? Shouldn’t you be calling the cops?”
“No, it’s nothing like that, but Allie—this woman—she does very much need to find her. The rest of her family is expecting her home, and no one knows precisely where she is.”
For the first time in a year, Winston observed Chasity’s eyes soften and actually become somewhat doelike, and her posture rounded in a way that was nearly humanoid.
“How does reviewing your clients help this woman’s ma?”
Winston took one step back, like he was luring an animal back into its cage. “Why don’t you come into my office and I’ll tell you?”
“You swear it’s for this lady’s ma, and not so you can get your wick dipped?”
Winston felt his entire body wince. Possibly his soul. “Jesus, Chasity.”
“All right. I’ll give you five minutes to start, so tell it to me straight.”
—
“No, look, it’s right there.” Chasity hard-poked the screen of his computer. “There—” Poke. “There—” Poke. “And there.”
“That’s a pattern?”
“Yes, fuck, I swear to God I don’t know how any of you keep your jobs. It’s a fucking pattern, it goes back years, look at the withdrawals and tell me what you see.”
Winston flipped between pages, scrutinizing the column Chasity had pointed to. He didn’t see anything that stood out.
“Justice’s daily income is generated from investment interest. We funnel all that to this checking account. That happens twice quarterly, you can see that, here.”
“Sure.”
“This dude never, ever makes withdrawals, shuffles anything around, except sometimes, and that’s always after he meets with you—or the account manager before you, Christian, who was a fucking moron and deserved to be transferred to insurance. Look, you switched up his portfolios here, here, and here, and those all match the last three times you took a meeting with him.”
“Right.”
“Like, this guy, he’s pretty conservative. Privacy’s more important than bling, I guess. Most of your other clients are always liquidating for some reason or another—to pay the new decorator, rent some Vineyard place, whatever. There’s never a pattern, just their own rich fuck’s whims.”
Winston just nodded this time, as he was in this category of rich fuck.
“But three months ago, that changed. And you said he never talked to you about real estate, investing in some private thing like a gallery or charity or whatever.”
“No, he didn’t. He always just wants everything to stay the same, and to make any lucrative adjustments I might feel prudent to keep his assets growing.”
“Except, there’s been weekly withdrawals. And he’s not calling you, he’s just calling the number we print on all our shit that goes to the floor with the junior managers. He needs money, weekly, for the last twelve weeks, but wants to do it so he doesn’t have to really talk to anyone about it. Make it like he’s a regular client. I mean, the floor handles hundreds of withdrawals like this a day.”
“He doesn’t trust me.”
“Nah, he doesn’t trust what it would look like if he starts coming in and out of here, or if you have a lot of meetings with him.”
“Why wouldn’t he just come in and make one big withdrawal three months ago?”
>
“Add it up, dude.”
Winston ran over the numbers Chasity had been pointing to. Added them up. Added them up again.
“Jesus. There’s probably close to three million in withdrawals over this period.”
“Right. You’d probably ask, if only to make sure you were managing well for someone who had started spending. A lot of these withdrawals are for five or ten K at a time, he probably talks to someone different on the floor every call. He’s keeping a low profile.”
“What the hell is he up to?”
Chasity pushed away from his desk, her drawn-on eyebrows lifted high. “He’s doing what he does. He’s Justice.”
“That’s a lot of art supplies.”
Chasity shook her head, very slowly, like he was a child on notice for annoying a dinner party. “He’s Justice. You’re aware of the art that he does, right?”
“Big things? Sort of in the streets and what-have-you?”
“I can’t even with you. Yeah. Big stuff. Like, he wrapped the goddamned Statue of Liberty in black nylon. One day, there she is all inspiring and green, the next day, creepy fucking bullshit out in that harbor. Don’t you get the paper in England?”