Greta scrunches her mouth in concentration as she trims the peony stems and arranges them in the vase, but her brow doesn’t wrinkle—is it paralyzed by Botox? She can’t be more than thirty but it looks like she’s already on the plastic surgery train.
Not that I should be surprised after seeing her marked-up magazines. I want to tell her that she doesn’t need all that intervention, but there’s no way I can bring it up without admitting to snooping.
I hear the yapping before I see it—a fluffy white purse-dog comes charging at me. Greta barks a stern command at the dog and instead of biting my ankles, it halts, flips on its back and wriggles with all its might. I laugh and bend to scratch its belly.
“That’s Peekaboo. She thinks she’s a two hundred-pound pit bull and I don’t have the heart to tell her otherwise.”
“I watch a dog that’s not much bigger than her. Supposedly, Jasper’s ancestors were bred to hunt lions. I guess dogs don’t think size matters.”
“Oh, but women do.” Greta’s finely plucked brows arch and she giggles. “Unfortunately, it’s not the only thing that matters, or else my last boyfriend would have been perfect.”
“My last boyfriend was far from perfect,” I say, enjoying this girl-talk moment with Greta. I shake my head as if to say “men,” but wonder why she is being so nice to me.
Most of the women at the charity ball treated me like I was diseased when they found out I’m not rich. Maya the model-slash-booty-call-girl treated me like the hired help. But something’s different about Greta.
Thinking of the last charity ball reminds me of something else, and an idea blooms in my mind.
“Greta, I was wondering, do you have a favorite charity?”
She rolls her eyes. “Oh, honey, I go to plenty of events. They get so boring after a while. They need young people like us to liven them up.”
“I didn’t mean the galas, I meant the causes, the good they do. Are you on a board or a committee for any of them?”
“No. I’ve been asked, but they just want my dad’s money. They don’t care about my ideas, and that’s how I really want to help. I’ve always wanted to be an event planner, but I can’t get a business like that going without some experience.”
Greta frowns and I see that beneath her spoiled rich-girl trappings she’s dying for someone to take her seriously.
“Well, why don’t we do it together? I like organizing and it will help me meet more clients.”
Greta puts a hand on my arm. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Beryl, but they probably wouldn’t let you. It’s strictly pay to play. And, no offense, but you’re a house sitter.”
“You mean I have to make a big donation to get on the committee?”
“Yes.”
“Like, how big? Ten thousand dollars?”
“Twenty. Twenty would get their attention and probably get you on a committee, but not as committee chair.” Greta nods sagely. She knows the prices for things that don’t have a price.
“How about fifty?”
Greta laughs. “You’d be in for sure!”
I grab Peter’s check from my purse and push it across the kitchen counter to her. “Then we’re both in. We’ll make this a joint donation and then we can get on the committee together.”
Greta’s eyes go wide. “Wait. You’re independently wealthy and you make a living as a house sitter?”
I shake my head. “It’s not my money. It’s from—” I search for the right words “—a contract that required a donation. But I earned it.”
She sees the name Peter Todd on the corner of the check. “I’ll say. This guy is bad news. He seems charming, but he hurt a friend of mine.” She studies me with narrowed eyes. “Did he hurt you?”
I take a quick breath. “Not exactly. But what he did deserved more than an apology. And so I thought I could put a hundred thousand of his little apologies to good use.”
“Damn, girl. You’ve got guts.”
Greta pulls out her rhinestone-studded phone and dials a number while I scratch Peekaboo’s tummy. I hear a gushing greeting and then Greta gets down to business.
“So, I called because I’m wondering if you’re doing the Safe Haven Network ball next month. Are you still on the events committee?”
My ears perk up. Of course Greta has other socialites on speed-dial.
“Well, congratulations! That makes my question even easier, since I’m sure a chair has the authority to add committee members. What do you think about adding two members right away?”
She pauses, listening.
“I can understand you don’t want too many cooks in the kitchen. But my friend Beryl …”
“Sutton,” I whisper quickly.
“Sutton and I just have our hearts set on helping with Safe Haven Network, and we’re both prepared to chip in a hundred to join you.”
I see Greta grinning widely. Money talks.
“We look forward to it as well. See you next Monday!”
Greta clicks off her phone, grabs two sparkling waters from her refrigerator and plops on a kitchen barstool next to me, her eyes dancing. “We’re in. I think I heard her head explode when I told her our donations.”
“Thank you for making that call, Greta. But I can’t help but feel a bit out of my league.”
“What league? The thing my dad always says is, ‘You get to choose where you stand.’”
“I don’t buy it. It seems like the pecking order around here is based on your tax bracket.” I wince, realizing that I’ve just made this inane comment to the wrong audience. Open mouth. Insert foot.
But Greta surprises me. “It takes more than a bank balance with lots of zeroes, sugar. They like that, don’t get me wrong, but they prefer money with a bit of dust on it. Like, if you inherit money, it’s better than if you actually work for it.”
“It all spends the same.” I shrug. I’ve thought more about money since I’ve been in New York than I ever did in Eugene.
“Wrong. There’s some stuff money can’t buy, meaning, they won’t even take your money if you’re not the right kind of wealthy. I’m not the right kind of wealthy. Too new. I’ll bet my high school job sucked worse than yours.”
I raise my brow. Greta had a job? “I’ll take that bet. I was a dishwasher at a retirement home. I came home every night smelling like creamed corn. Top that.”
Greta gives me a Cheshire smile. “I worked in one of my dad’s canneries. On the line. I came home every night smelling like fish guts.”
“Winner, winner, chicken dinner!” Her job is so craptastic I cackle at the thought of it. From the tabloids, you’d think the hardest work she ever did was buffing her manicure.
“Beryl, if you want to stand up to Peter Todd and take his old, dirty money to Safe Haven Network, let’s go for it. Plus, with your organizational skills, I think we’d throw a killer party.”
“Greta, you’re awesome.” I genuinely like this woman.
“This will be fun. So, next Monday night we’ve got our first committee meeting. The dress code is anything you want, so long as it’s expensive. Can you do that?”
I think of Lulu’s wardrobe and nod. She gives me the address and I type it into my phone.
“If you can help me get the committee to take my ideas seriously, I’ll be more than happy to make sure we spend Peter’s money wisely.”
“What about his mother? She’s on the board of directors.”
“If she gives us an ounce of trouble, we’ll make sure everyone knows exactly what inspired the donation.”
I shudder. “But I’m not supposed to say a word to anyone. It was in the contract.”
“I didn’t sign a contract,” Greta says, a wicked gleam in her eye. “And with this crowd, it’s what isn’t said that matters.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
I get back to Gavin’s apartment later than usual and Jasper is anxious to get out. The dog’s led a life of crime while I’ve been gone—my clothes are spilled out of a laundry basket and he’s chewed t
hrough the crotch of my underwear.
Disgusting. I give Jasper a dirty look but he shakes his head—a marvelous wiggle that rattles his ears and echoes all the way down to his curly tail.
I got my apology from Peter, but there will be none from Jasper.
I shut my laundry firmly behind a closet door and change into my walking clothes. We go out into the heat of the city but as soon as we enter the park it’s cooler. I think about what to write to Gavin—he asked me to send him a story.
When we get back to the apartment, I look through the notebook I’ve kept since I arrived in New York—the one you’re reading now—but I don’t want to send him this.
I do a lot of stupid shit. It’s embarrassing.
I prop my laptop on my knees and write a childhood story instead.
On summer weekends, my dad used to take me to fly-ins at tiny airports within a couple of hours of our house. We flew a 1942 Piper J-3 Cub, a bright yellow airplane with a black lightning bolt down its side. It flies slightly faster than a freeway speed limit and it has just a handful of instruments to tell the altitude, speed and engine RPM.
I remember the drill my dad did before every takeoff: CIGARS. Controls. Instruments. Gas. Attitude. Run-up. Safety.
My dad sat in the backseat with me in front and he’d let me push the tall joystick to turn and bank us as we flew to the airfield where dozens of classic planes, biplanes, and warbirds parked on the grass flanking the runway.
At fly-ins, people walked up and down the aisles of aircraft talking with pilots and admiring restorations. I was proud to be part of the show. On chilly days, Dad would let me borrow his brown leather pilot’s jacket that reached my knees. It smelled like him—like trees and hay and sunshine.
We played games with the other pilots to show off for the crowd and my favorite was flour bombing. Each pilot took a turn dropping a small sack of flour at a target painted on a tarp by the runway. My dad usually flew his plane with the door open—it split horizontally, the top half secured by a catch beneath the wing, the bottom half dropped down to give me easy access to see our target.
“Go, Beryl!” my dad would shout, and I’d let the sack fly. The J-3 Cub’s wide wingspan helped my dad’s plane fly slower than most, so we were pretty accurate. In the fall, the flour-bombing game became the pumpkin drop, and I had a blast pitching a soccer ball-sized gourd out the door and watching it splatter on the field below.
We stayed overnight, pitching our tent beneath the wing of the airplane. A donut truck followed the fly-ins from city to city and I got a couple dollars from my dad each morning to fetch the crispy little donuts that came covered with powdered sugar in a brown paper bag.
The best part of the trips was just following my dad around, helping him wipe bug splatters off the airplane after our flights and hearing him trade stories with other pilots. The old guys were the most fun—some of them were World War II pilots who remembered training on Piper Cubs when they first learned to fly.
As I wrap up my story, I tell Gavin how it feels to be in the airplane when a gust of wind suddenly bumps you and your stomach flip-flops. I tell him how we’d cut the engine when circling over our house and yell, “Hello down there!” My mom would wave feverishly at us from the backyard.
I tell him how we’d spy on everyone with swimming pools in the summer, land on a friend’s bumpy grass strip to pick blackberries, and buy glass bottles of Coke from an antique vending machine at one airfield.
I tell Gavin all of this and feel closer to him. Finally, I push “send” and let my story go, traveling at light speed to somewhere in Bali where he’ll read it.
I make myself dinner and sit out on the terrace with Jasper as the sun sets, sipping my favorite concoction of iced tea and lemonade that’s not too sweet and not too bitter.
I page through Gavin’s notebooks as I eat. He’s given me permission to look and I’m fascinated, seeing his scribbled notes on the gridded pages of a soft brown Moleskine notebook.
I see how his songs take shape and grow, with certain phrases underlined or circled and many others crossed out. I trace my fingertip across his handwriting and imagine myself tracing his body. I can feel the blackened skin of his tattoo and the constellations of freckles scattered across his shoulders.
My face flushes as I turn more pages, reading love songs I pretend he’s written for me. I hear his voice in my head, a memory from watching him on video, reading me the words on the page.
I feel him with me.
I’m killing time. Waiting for the ping from my laptop. Waiting for Gavin to wake up on the other side of the world, find an Internet connection and reach out to me.
Finally, I hear it.
Gavin: Beryl, I’m here.
Me: Me, too. Good morning!
Gavin: Good evening to you. How was your day?
Me: Pretty freaking great.
I tell him that my mom’s coming to visit for my birthday. I tell him about my victory against Peter, the wicked contract and the forced donation, and getting on the charity committee with Greta.
Gavin: You’re one brave woman, you know that?
Me: Sometimes I don’t feel very brave. But today I felt awesome.
Gavin: I read your story. I felt like I was there with you, spotting the pumpkin target, feeling it go splat.
Me: I miss that. I miss my dad.
Gavin: I know how you feel. I miss Lulu. I miss the way she could light up a room and get everyone excited. We’d be struggling with a song, writing it and it just didn’t work, and then she’d say, ‘This!’ and show us the best part. And then we’d take it forward.
Me: I can’t help but feeling jealous when you say that.
Gavin: Don’t be. You’re two totally different people. And that’s a good thing. Tell me something else about you.
Me: Like what?
Gavin: I don’t know. Stuff you like. Stuff that makes you, you.
Me: How about a game? Two truths and a lie?
Gavin: You want me to guess the lie? OK—shoot.
Me: One. I love all kinds of seafood and I grew up clamming, crabbing and fishing. But I can’t stand sushi.
Gavin: That one passes the sniff test. Although I’m going to try like hell to change your mind.
Me: Don’t hold your breath. Two: I got into a couple of excellent East Coast colleges on scholarship, but I decided to go to the U of O because I wasn’t sure if I could leave my mom. And now I resent her for that choice even though she wasn’t the one who made it.
Gavin: Hit me with number three.
Me: Three. I became a writer because my ninth grade teacher told me I was good, and I wasn’t good at any sports, and I wanted to be good at something.
Gavin: I smell a rat with number three. It lacks conviction.
Me: Is that your final answer?
Gavin: Quit stalling. Yes. Tell me which is the lie.
Me: Three.
Gavin: I knew it! You’ve got too much passion for writing to be doing it by default.
Me: I didn’t start writing because someone told me I could or should.
Gavin: Then how did you really start? The truth this time.
Me: There was a boy. I was 12, I had a huge crush on him but he moved to a different school. So I wrote him letters—more than a hundred over about a year. He only answered me once, just one letter. I saved it and folded it so many times I could barely read his handwriting.
Gavin: So you’re saying I’m not the first crush you’ve written to?
Me: Who says I have a crush on you, Mr. Big Time?
Gavin: You do. Everything you write tells me you care, and not just casually.
Me: Busted.
Gavin: Indeed. I love that you just admitted it.
Me: Looks like you can quit this rock star thing and become a spy after all. But that intel better be worth more to you than just a stroke to your ego.
Gavin: Oh, Beryl. It is. You’re worth more—you don’t know what you’ve done for me. How much I nee
d this. I need you.
Me: Gavin, I care about you. But I can’t help but worry that you *do* need me. Don’t you have anyone else in your life?
Gavin: Yes. I have my band, and they’re like brothers. But I see email from them and even though I know I should answer, I’m just paralyzed. Everything they say feels like a conviction, and everything I could say feels like an excuse. And I can’t keep making excuses—for myself, or the way I treated Lulu.
Me: What about the way you’re treating them right now?
Gavin: God, Beryl.
Me: Gavin, man up. There’s nothing so awful you can’t face it. Even death. I know this better than I know my own name. Do you know what Queen Elizabeth wrote after 9/11? “Grief is the price we pay for love.”
Gavin: That feels … true.
Me: It is. And you’d better pay attention to the fact that *grief* is the price we pay—not self-loathing or whatever kind of torture or self-imposed exile you want to put yourself through on this trip. When someone dies, you grieve, but you go on living.
Gavin: You sound like you’ve had a lot of time to think this through.
Me: I watched my mom put herself in her own kind of exile after my dad died. And I’ve written about it a lot. It helps.
Gavin: Maybe I’ll write about it too. In a song. But first, I have another song in my mind that’s growing.
Me: Really? That’s great!
Gavin: I’m going to go work on it. I just got an idea. Beryl, thank you for your story.
Me: You’re important to me, Gav.
Gavin: And you’re precious to me. Sleep tight.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
It’s too damn hot but the terrace doors are wide open to let out the fumes as a handful of painters prepare Gavin’s apartment for its transformation. I shut Jasper in my room and he whines but eventually settles down. I do not want to deal with basenji-prints tracked in paint across Gavin’s hardwood floors.
I approve all the test-swatches and one of the painters leaves to pick up mixed paint while several other guys stay behind to do the prep, lay drop cloths, tape off corners and remove fixtures and switch plates.
Tattoo Thief (BOOK 1) Page 17