Breaking the Bank (18 page)

“Then what
is
it about?” To Mia, it was always about money when you didn't have enough.

“The choices you've been making. This implacable hatred of Lloyd—”

“Mom!” Mia burst out. “How can you sit there and say that to me?” She had gone from zero to eighty again, in a matter of seconds; just because her mother was clueless didn't mean she was harmless.

“Mia, I think that what Lloyd did was terrible and wrong, and I will never forgive him for it. Still, Eden needs him, and so you have to find a way to have him in your life that isn't eating you up inside.”

Mia knew Betty was right, at least about this, so she said nothing. Her feelings for Lloyd were eating her up inside, chewing and grinding her to a pulp. And she wasn't helping Eden with all her out-of-control flailing. But her feelings of isolation and loss were even stronger now than they had been when she, beggar at the banquet, had walked into this house of plenty.

The noise of Hank's car pulling up and the sounds of the girls as they tumbled out onto the gravel driveway offered a brief reprieve. Mia stood, and her heel touched her bag, which had somehow gotten shoved under the couch. So that's where it was. She reached for it. Why was it so heavy? Then she remembered.

The girls burst into the room, with Stuart trailing after them. “Mom, you should have seen that horse!” said Eden. “He was so big!” added India. “Here,” Mia said, handing
The Magic of Money
to her brother. “Happy birthday.”

N
INETY THOUSAND WAS
a tidy little sum. Not a fortune, but a beginning. Ninety thousand was roughly what her now-verified-as-authentic ten-thousand-dollar bill was worth on the market, give or take. Mia thought of it as a down payment on a place of her own, maybe in Sunset Park, Windsor Terrace, or even Bedford Stuyvesant— one of those soi-disant emerging neighborhoods, where the prices were not as high as they were in Park Slope. At least not yet. She was angling for a place where she and Eden could settle in, feel secure. Mia envisioned a dwelling—a row house, maybe—with space enough to rent out; she was determined to provide herself and her child with income that was layoff proof, alimony proof, just-about-anything proof.

To make this happen, though, she was going to have to sell the bill. But how? Could she go back to see Solly Phelps? He had verified the bill's authenticity. He had shown interest in putting it on the market. Now she just had to come up with a viable story for how she happened to have it in her possession, a story that Solly and everyone else would buy. Piece of cake.

E
VER SINCE
T
HANKSGIVING
, Mia had been in a quiet but persistent state of alarm. Her situation, seen through the damning eyes of her family, seemed even worse than she had believed it to be, and she was both furious at them for pointing it out and bewildered about how to remedy it. She had been oscillating back and forth between those two poles—rage and panic—when she discovered a blank envelope stuck
in her bag. It contained a one-line note in Betty's writing and three hundred-dollar bills.

Use it well.

Those words again! They kept cropping up. And the money . . . what was she to make of that? She couldn't figure her mother out anymore. When Mia's father died—quite suddenly, of a coronary, his eye pressed against the lens of a telescope for what had been his final and, she prayed, glorious vision of the vast, starry skies—she had assumed that Betty would remain on Ninety-ninth Street, teaching her classes, rallying around her various causes, filling the walls of the apartment with one huge, sloppy canvas after another. Her mother had seemed to belong to the Upper West Side, and the Upper West Side had belonged to her. No new luxury apartment building, no self-interested politician, no alteration in the zoning laws had escaped the ever-humming throb of her moral indignation. Mia had grown used to her mother's preoccupation and not minded it so much; she had her father, and she had Stuart. And then there were those moments when Betty could be really and truly present: witness the humbling of the gym teacher, the white bag with its red, red heart. Yet Betty's sudden departure and subsequent reinvention of herself had left Mia feeling more forlorn than she would have expected.

W
HEN
M
IA HAD
gotten home from Greenwich, she'd found a message from Stuart on her machine. “I want to talk,” he'd said. “Soon.” She listened to it a few times, but she wasn't in any hurry to return the call. “Hey, Judas, how's it going?” were about the only words that came to mind. She had promised she would consider letting Eden spend some time with Betty. Well, she was considering. No need to discuss it again, was there?

She did, however, call her mother, to thank her for the money, which, though generous, nonetheless left a gritty residue of annoyance. Why the secrecy? Why hadn't she stood up for Mia when Stuart and Gail were on the warpath?

“You're overreacting,” Betty said. “They were not on the warpath.”

“Oh, really? So why was I maimed and bleeding by the end of the conversation?”

“Really, Mia, you are so dramatic. You always were,” said Betty. “Maybe I had good reason to be,” Mia shot back. “Maybe that was my bid for attention.”

“I'm sorry if you don't think I gave you enough attention,” Betty said in a humbled tone. “I always tried to be a good mother to you.”

“And you were,” Mia hastened to assure her. The image of Betty's face—darkened by the sun, wizened, frail—suddenly swam into Mia's mind. It was the old mother-daughter push-pull: say something mean, then scurry to retract it.

She backed off, and the conversation chugged along peaceably enough for a few more minutes, until Betty mentioned bringing Eden out west during the winter school break.

“We've been over this a dozen times,” said Mia, bristling again. “It's a suggestion. Only a suggestion.”

“Which I have said I would consider. So please stop mentioning it, okay?”

“There's no need to be sarcastic,” Betty said testily. “You're so quick to shoot down all of Stuart's and Gail's ideas—”

“Gail is a she-devil who has bewitched my poor brother.”

“Mia, honey, your attitude toward Gail is not going to improve the situation, can't you see that?”

Actually, I can't,
Mia wanted to say, but she was sick of this topic, sick and tired and more than a little scared. She had no energy to argue with her mother, particularly not in the same way they had been arguing since Mia was a teenager. So she swallowed her anger
in one large and dyspeptic gulp, and said nothing. Her heart felt scuffed, and it hardened against Betty, as if it were growing a protective shell. Then, succumbing to the undertow of panic that had been threatening to engulf her ever since Stuart and Gail's little
intervention,
she said, “Okay, okay. I will bring Eden to visit after Christmas and see how she likes it. Now will you and Stuart
please
get off my case?”

T
EN-PLUS YEARS
ago, Mia hadn't planned on getting pregnant. She and Lloyd had wanted to wait until they were a little further along in their respective careers before starting a family. He was deep into his indie-film thing, scrambling and scheming to get the funding for the documentaries that he believed ought to be made, the stories he believed needed telling. She had just been promoted to associate editor in the children's division of the small but tony publishing firm of Williams, Hatch, and Rabinisky. WHR, as it was known in the biz, had a reputation for publishing only the best, the most engaging and original of books. Working there, Mia had felt she'd found an oasis of quality in a rapidly degrading marketplace. As far as their children's list went, they had more Newbery and Caldecott winners than any three other houses combined. It was a great job, and Mia loved every single thing about it, including but not limited to her diminutive though light-flooded office in the Flatiron Building; her bosses, the revered Mr. Williams and Mr. Rabinisky (Hatch had died some years earlier); her smart and funny coworkers; the framed book jackets of WHR's classic titles that lined the halls; the bars of French lavender soap with which Nettie, the office manager, always stocked the ladies' room. And when

The Secret Journey of the Great Gray Owl,
the first book Mia had championed since her promotion, was picked as a Newbery silver medalist, Mia's star seemed to shine very brightly indeed. Oh, it was a grand situation, all right, and when she found out that the stick had turned blue, she did spend a stunned evening on the couch, feeling utterly unprepared
for the maelstrom that she sensed was whirling around inside her hapless uterus.

But then she snapped out of it. Lloyd was happy; why shouldn't she be happy, too? They had wanted kids; this had been part of their game plan all along. So what if it happened a little sooner than expected? And then, right after she had found out but before she had told her boss, WHR was sold to a Dutch conglomerate, and everyone was fired on a single, soul-draining day.

Mia took the loss of her job as a sign that she was on the right path, and decided not to look for work. Instead, she grudgingly allowed herself to become the star in Lloyd's latest not-for-TV movie, which was about her pregnancy. He documented the whole thing using a handheld camcorder, shadowing Mia relentlessly during her ensuing stages of largeness. The vomiting, the swollen ankles, the tedious visits to the ob-gyn—he got it all. The culmination was the birth, at the end of which he was able to sweet-talk one of the nurses into holding the camcorder briefly so that his snipping of the umbilical cord could be preserved, like the rest of the messy, bloody business, for the ages.

Once Eden actually arrived, Mia felt as if she and Lloyd had acquired an extremely time-consuming but endlessly interesting new pet. Lloyd was great about all the day-to-day stuff with her; he handled the soiled diapers, the barfed-on clothes, the nights pierced by her hiccuppy wailing, with unusual aplomb. And gradually, Eden ceased being this unpredictable little creature, totally dominated by the intake and expulsion of various bodily fluids, and settled into being, well, herself. Despite the fatigue, the exasperation, the at times punishing twenty-four/seven-ness of being Eden's mother, Mia had never wanted to be anything else.

And now here was Lloyd—and her brother, too—saying that she was inadequate to the task, and that Eden, child not only of Mia's heart but of her soul, too, would be better off with someone else. The unfairness of this, the casual disregard for Mia's decade-long involvement
with Eden, was as galling as it was hurtful. Well, she wasn't going to roll over and play dead on this one. She was going to fight back with every weapon in her limited arsenal, and that bill, fairly smoldering beneath her bedroom floorboard, was first in her line of attack.

I
N EARLY
D
ECEMBER
, Mia returned to Solly's office on West Thirtieth Street. Her own office—at least until the cookbooks were finished—was on West Twentieth, so it was easy enough to take a brisk walk uptown during lunch. The temperature had dipped; Mia retied her scarf around her neck and briefly considered buying a knit cap from one of the vendors who stood on Broadway, rubbing their hands in the cold. But in the end, she decided not to stop, just to keep going until she reached the wind-blown street, even colder and more desolate-looking than the first time she visited. She was about to hit the buzzer when two parka-wearing guys emerged from the building, and she slipped into the open door as they went out. She had deliberately decided not to call Solly and tell him she was coming; maybe the element of surprise would work in her favor.

Her knock on the door was sharp and confident, at least to her own ears. And that was how she wanted to appear: Sharp. Confident. There was a momentary silence during which Mia considered the idea that perhaps Solly was not there. But then she heard his deep, smooth-as-melted-chocolate voice.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Phelps? Remember me? I came to see you a few weeks ago.” Mia heard some shuffling sounds and then footsteps. And then there was Solly, larger than life, ushering her once more into the room which was, if possible, even more crowded than before. He wore a navy blue jacket over gray flannel pants, and his shirt was the crisp white she remembered from last time. His bow tie—it seemed to be a thing with him—was scarlet.

“You again?” he said, maneuvering his bulk past a metal filing cabinet
that was parked almost directly in front of the door. Mia was sure it had not been there before.

“Me again,” she said. Her scarf caught on the corner of the file cabinet and she carefully tried to free it without snagging the wool.

“I've been thinking about you,” said Solly, settling in at his desk. The same battered-looking chair was facing it, though the fish was gone; the glass bowl was empty and dry. “I wondered how you were progressing with that sale. I haven't seen it posted anywhere; I've checked.”

“No progress,” Mia said. “That's why I came back. I thought maybe you would still be interested.”

“I am interested,” Solly said. “Very interested. But I told you before: my interest is contingent upon information. I have to know where you got that bill before I can try to sell it.” He looked at her with those cold blue eyes. Mia looked back, refusing to let herself be intimidated.

“I inherited it. From my father.”

“Reasonable enough. Why couldn't you tell me that before?”

“Because there's been some contention about it in my family. My brother feels it should have gone to him. I didn't want to bring all that up before; I wanted the sale of the bill to be a private matter.”

“So you wanted to sell it behind your brother's back?” Solly said. “It's mine; I can do what I want with it.”