by Peter Craig
The final stop was the infamous jewelry store, where Colette described a staff that had “only one kindred spirit.” Kevin entered first, past the ringing bell, chased by a few tumbling maple leaves that settled on the floor. From Colette’s notes, he knew that Barbara was the day manager, and Carl was the most officious salesperson; and he knew it would please Colette if he could divert them both, open a perfect lane to the sympathetic and highly suggestible Sheila, who was rearranging a display of velvet boxes. Kevin yelled to Carl that he wanted to buy a present for “his sophisticated lady friend.” When Kevin began pawing at mobiles of bracelets and pendants, Carl rushed over and asked what he had in mind.
“She’s a jewel, dude—top-notch. The smartest, most beautiful, heartbreaking ass-kicking babe you ever met in your life. She’d go through you like a slice of cheesecake. There’d be nothing left but the sweater vest.”
“Well, she sounds like she may be out of your budget. May I suggest the university bookstore. They sell geodes.”
“Hilarious. I want to talk to the manager. I’m coming in here ready to throw down some serious coin, and you’re talking fucking geology. I don’t have time for that. My dad’s top brass in Silicon Valley and I’m coming in here with serious plastic, my man. I got a credit line that goes deeper than hell and I’ll fucking use it just to shut your ass up.”
Barbara emerged from the back to try to calm the strange aggressive customer, while Sheila watched fearfully from across the store. Just then a bell on the door rang and Colette stepped up to Sheila. She said a quiet greeting. Carl noticed her, so Kevin twirled a display of hoop earrings, dropping a few. Carl was blushing with anger and complained to Barbara that he had said nothing whatsoever to provoke the young man, who had without warning become violently rude.
Meanwhile, Colette had begun her routine. She put the stolen receipt on the counter, and then placed her wedding ring on top of it. She said, “I was wondering if you might help me. You see, I found out that my husband has purchased some merchandise here.”
Kevin had to fight to keep his eyes away from Colette, for there was a magnificent thread of suppressed hysteria in her behavior, reined in by a pathetic attempt at dignity. Jerry’s standard rule was to do everything with brash confidence, to muscle the mark into position; but here Colette played such a sad figure, straining to be noble, that she immediately bypassed any suspicion. Sheila was a younger woman than Kevin had expected, perhaps in her early thirties, with an expressive face that seemed like a canvas for dread. She had a perfunctory manner that was quickly befuddled, and she appeared to empathize with any show of suffering. “It’s not my birthday, and it’s not our anniversary,” said Colette, with an ironic lightness in her voice, “so I can only assume it’s a gift to help get me through my pregnancy.”
Kevin couldn’t hear Colette’s next move because he had broken into his own monologue: “I walk in here and this dude assumes I’m broke, like some thug off the street—that’s, like, a form of discrimination right there. I could be a fucking prince for all you know.”
“You don’t need to use that kind of language.”
The phone rang and Carl answered. Colette and Sheila moved to the farthest corner, where Sheila was now studying the receipt to keep her eyes averted. Colette said, “The problem is, I haven’t been seeing any jewelry. If you catch my drift—I think our only hope would be a set of rings. For the sake of—” And she glanced down at her belly. “And of course, look at my ring. It’s nothing. It’s from the days when we were kids. I haven’t seen a piece of jewelry in ten years.”
Onto the glass display case, Colette unfolded a photocopy of the mark’s driver’s license, as well as his credit card information.
“Because I don’t particularly agree with my husband’s taste, among other things, I think we should go ahead and open up an account. Here’s all of his information. Believe me, he’ll prefer we do it this way, rather than get into a serious debate about all of the secretive little things he’s been purchasing over the past few weeks.”
“Okay, ma’am—are you authorized to—let’s see here—”
Collette looked down at her bulging stomach and said, “Believe me—I’m authorized. If he can afford a two-thousand-dollar necklace, he can afford to save his marriage.” She pressed her finger onto the glass and continued, “I want those two rings. We can have them sized later. Don’t be alarmed, Sheila. I’m having the man’s child. The least I can do is go out with a fight.”
Sheila was so confused by this dialectic that she read the information again. Colette looked away long enough for her eyes to dampen; then she leaned forward to rivet them on Sheila’s face.
Meanwhile, Kevin chose a pair of drop earrings with gold-plated ankhs and the eyes of Re, and he littered the display case with crumpled bills, which Carl helped smooth and count while still on the phone.
Sheila said she needed to talk to her supervisor first, and Colette grabbed her by the forearm, entreated, “This isn’t about policy—this is about two women who understand each other. Do you honestly think a man cheating on his pregnant wife is going to have the audacity to complain to your supervisor? This is one of those moments, Sheila, when policy and humanity don’t see eye to eye.” She quickly cleared the water from her eyes, sniffled hard, and stood up straight again.
Sheila’s nostrils flared and she looked at Colette with bulging eyes, altering from sympathy to a startled admiration. Colette waited, then smiled. “I want these two rings engraved with this message. I realize it’s a rush, but I’d like to pick them up this evening, before six o’clock.” She slid a piece of paper across the counter.
Sheila’s pale face had boiled into ruddy cheeks. She whispered that she hated her job anyway, and Colette responded, “You might be changing your life someday too.” With the tone of speaking to a genuine confidante, she confessed, “I really do love him. He taught me everything I know. I used to think I couldn’t live without him. But—if the respect isn’t there, you have to demand it any way you can. Don’t you?”
Sheila began punching numbers into the credit verification machine, looking up finally to say, “You’ve sure got guts.”
Colette reached across and affectionately touched her shoulder. “It’s just about my only redeeming quality.”
All day, before the rings were ready, she shopped for her two boys, buying Kevin a ratchet set, a police scanner, a new suit, and a Farrington machine, used to emboss credit cards; and for Jerry, a monochromatic outfit of blazer and slacks, which he seemed to regard as the skinned hide of a dream lover.
“At least I have something to wear at my funeral.”
They packed everything into the car except Colette’s favorite leopard-skin valise, which she ordered Kevin to lug along to the store, claiming that she might need something for the endgame. Kevin gave her a suspicious look under his drooped eyelids and disheveled hair. She asked if he objected to being her porter.
“Am I going to carry it to the border?”
“I haven’t measured the distance exactly. Do you charge by the mile or the foot?”
It was a frigid evening. The windows frosted and obscured the orange-and-black Halloween decorations, cardboard witches and handkerchief ghosts. Kevin trundled the valise along behind her, tempted to pour everything out into the street. He had a pathological distaste for being a bagman. He imagined her chasing down spilled underwear and blouses as they scatted like blown leaves; but when the image faded, he was alarmed to have felt a sudden and almost prophetic bitterness toward her clothes.
He waited outside while Colette moved in the portraiture of lit windows, past an arrangement of severed mannequin hands, fingers beset with the gaudiest cuts of stone, and two clasping black hands with matching oval-cut diamonds, like a wedding of shadows. A new salesperson checked the receipt, then retrieved a bag, which she handed to Colette with an unknowing smile. The cold wind had paused; the air hovered and thickened, until distantly spaced snowflakes drifted down. When Colett
e left the store, the flurries strengthened enough to speckle her sleeves and net in her hair.
She ran across the street on a faint tissue of snow, leaving footprints from her ballerina shoes. Kevin followed her into a parking garage, where they stood under the cement canopy and watched, through steaming breath, as the landscape disappeared under silver and gray. “I’m in my element again,” she said, and there was a nervous tremor in her voice. A fluorescent light flickered over puddles, and, a level above, someone tried to start a flooded car. She reached into the bag, opened the cardboard package, and parted the velvet box like a clamshell. “I wonder if you already know what I’m going to say.”
“Don’t do this to me,” whispered Kevin. “Not after all this.”
“Repeat after me: ‘I, Kevin—’”
“I said don’t. Don’t mess with my head. Don’t make me into some kind of a joke.”
“I’m not, honey. There’s no easy way to do this. ‘I, Kevin, do hereby proclaim, that I will never forget you, or any alias you may choose, as long as we both shall live.’ ”
“I’m not going to say some little speech you wrote.”
“I want to give this to you. Okay? It’s to say thank you and that I—”
“If you think I’m putting that fucking thing on my finger—after all this—”
“Don’t be so pigheaded, for God’s sake.” Snowflakes were thawing in her eyelashes, and when she grabbed his hand, her skin felt like a cold rag. “I’m trying to do this in a civilized way, and you’re not helping.”
“If you leave now, Colette, right when things are rolling again, then you’re fucked in the head.”
“Oh, don’t sound so much like your father. Can’t somebody ever have feelings for me without using foul language? Now, come on. I’m going to miss you too, so we should end on a decent, classy note for once in our lives. We don’t get to do this again, so let’s not drag it through a puddle.”
“Just wear one on each hand then. Collect them for every finger.”
“Okay, so you’re angry at me. Fine. But try to see beyond that, please. Haven’t I at least been a good friend to you?”
He was so stung that he moved away from her to the edge of the lot and faced the streetlights around the naked trees. “I can’t believe you made me carry your bag all night.”
“You know I have to go; you’ve known it longer than I have. We had a great run, didn’t we? Come on, Kevin. Am I just supposed to be miserable because you want me to stay? Look, I’ll always appreciate your father for what he taught me, but there’s a lot more in the world than digging through a minister’s garbage and plundering a Kmart. All I want is for you to put this ring on and tell me you’ll remember me.”
“I’ll remember you, Colette! I don’t need a four-thousand-dollar string around my finger.”
“God, you are so impossible.” She grabbed his fist and tried to pry his fingers apart, clenching her jaw. “Open your hand.” As he let her pull open the fingers, he lost track of everything else but the look of her face, eyes downturned under damp lashes, the smooth curve of her forehead. She was sliding the ring onto his index finger and it was freezing cold. “It’s too loose. I didn’t realize your fingers were this slender.”
“What if I just found you again someday—”
“God, you have incredible hands, Kevin. I might have noticed if they weren’t all over me.”
“What if I found you again in a few years? Would you want to know me again?”
“A few years is another lifetime. Wear it on your thumb then. Like a married hitchhiker.”
“You should at least say good-bye to him. He isn’t a monster, you know.”
She lifted his fingers, kissed him on the knuckles. “Of course he is. So am I. And so are you. We’re three little trolls, and it’s better we find our own bridges. Watch after him, okay? He isn’t taking very good care of himself.”
She hoisted up her valise with a groan and walked, listing against the weight of it, down the path of streetlamps and under the churning wind, where she moved in shambling steps under each heave, dropping the valise for a rest, and raising it again from a gouge in the shallow snow. He watched the halting journey all the way down the block. She looked back from the corner, waved to him, turned east, and disappeared behind a store. In the tinny light between a van and a pickup, Kevin tilted the ring to read the inscription:
A SECRET BETWEEN US: ELIZABETH
For a second he thought it was a mistake, that she had used the name of the professor’s real wife. Then it occurred to him that Colette had been an alias all along; and with a sudden pulse down his bones he understood that she had just introduced herself, at the very same moment she’d said good-bye.
SIXTEEN
Walking downhill, Kevin could see the lake wrapped with ribbons of clouds, thick trees emerging through mist. He watched his feet. The snow was just deep enough to make a chewing sound under each step. He found the meeting place, and waited under an awning while the yellow siren of a snowplow approached. Once it had passed, with its scrape and two-tone heartbeat, headlights came on from a parked car across the street, shining through a silk web of ice. Kevin opened the door with his sleeve, brushed off the bucket seat, and sat beside his father, who lit a cigarette and stared up at the parchment of snow on the windshield. His window was cracked and he blew a slim thread of smoke past a ridge of clinging ice. He didn’t speak for a long time, handling the cigarette like it might convince him of something, until finally he asked, “Did she pull off the job at least?”
“Yeah, she got them. But she’s not coming.”
“She had a lot to prove.”
“Let’s just go. I’m sick to my stomach.”
Jerry tilted the cigarette up and tapped ash into the snow. “She say anything?”
“Bunch of stuff I was supposed to tell you. I don’t remember any of it. You’re sure smoking a lot more, Dad.”
“She took her share, man. And then some.”
“A ring, a little spending cash. Big deal.”
“She left me a nice letter, thanking me for how much she’d learned, and a whole load of shit. Touching, huh? Except, guess what? The whole note was in my handwriting.”
“What are you talking about, Dad?”
“She’s been practicing for six months—‘oh, just using it to get better.’ Meanwhile, she can do any signature like a fucking rubber stamp. So, most of the traveler’s checks are gone, no big surprise there. Most of the cards—okay, I can deal with that. But she bled about three-quarters of the bank accounts into some hole I can’t find. I don’t even know where the money went. Sure, she nailed her professor, but she got us too.”
“You’re kidding me?”
“I’ll be surprised if we got a nickel left by dawn. She tore us up, dingo. She burned the fucking house down.”
“Naw, she’ll leave us something.”
He started the car and let it rumble for a while. The defroster began to heat two grease-paper stains on the windshield. “If I ever see that little whore again I’m going to snap her fucking neck.”
“She’ll leave us something, Dad. She was just showing off. I know her.”
“I know her too! So she distracts us with some drawn-out con, and generously leaves us with ten percent of the accounts. What is that? A commission? I’m supposed to be happy with that? I worked like a goddamn ditchdigger for that money.”
“She did all the work.”
“Oh, fucking hell. I don’t even believe you’re going to sit here and say that. She just did what I told her.”
“Obviously not.”
“Kevin—cut this shit out.” He held up his palms at the steering wheel, making a halting motion. After he took a slow breath and nodded with his lips tucked, running the windshield wipers under a froth of washer fluid, he pulled onto the street, his only visibility through slush and calving ice. “We’re just going to drive.”
On the salted highway they moved in a spindrift from under truck
s and buses. Jerry scrambled through radio stations until he landed on a high school football game, apparently leaving it there because the road thickened with snow and he needed to clutch both hands to the wheel. The car was filled with whistles, cheering, a rickety war drum, the announcer calling off yard lines. When Kevin flicked off the radio, his father said, “Fucking pretty girls, man. Pretty girls. Cheerleaders!”
“She took what she thought she deserved.”
“Uh-huh. That I know.”
“I don’t hate her for it.”
“Well, you’re growing up and you’re entitled to your own pussy-whipped opinions.”
“I think if you ever gave her any credit for anything—”
“Check and make sure she didn’t run off with one of your balls too.”
“You just shit on her all the time—it’s your fault as much as anybody’s. So don’t go calling her a whore all the time. You’re the whore. You’re the one who just sat around and made her do everything.”
“First of all, you obviously don’t understand the term very well. Of course a whore does all the work, that’s what a whore is. But—whatever—I don’t want to have a fucking semantic argument. Second of all, you should’ve read some economics when you were roaming around pretending to be a student. The people with the big ideas are the people who make the money. Not the cocksuckers who do the legwork.”
“Right. Big ideas, like going through the garbage.”
“Let me clue you in on something, because I got a little more insight into this than you. She was a piece of work, she had a lot of brains and spirit, but believe me, she wasn’t worth half of what she took.”
“You can’t even admit you got played.”
“I admit she’s a backstabbing cunt. The only way I’m keeping my eyes on the road right now is by picturing her dragging from the bumper.”
“I really wish you would just shut up for once, Dad.”
“Oh, I get it. All of a sudden you’re a tough guy and I’m some punk that everybody can dump on. You don’t know me if you think you can talk to me like that. I tell you what, tough guy, I’m going to pull this car over. We’re going to find ourselves a nice, quiet spot to have this conversation like men.”