Breaking the Bank (24 page)

“Why do you ask?”

“I wanted to know if he was your boyfriend.”

“Well,” stalled Mia. “He is a friend. A good friend.” God, but she needed some Pepto Bismol. “Would you like it if he were my boyfriend?”

“Yes!” Eden answered without hesitation. “Daddy has a girlfriend, so it seems only fair.”

Mia pondered the wisdom of that for a few seconds, and then Eden, apparently done with this topic, asked if she could run up and see if Luisa was home.

A
S SOON AS
she was gone, Mia heard the sound of a door opening, and there, facing her, was Mr. Ortiz with his dog.

“Hi,” she said weakly, not wanting to stop and talk. “Señora Saul,” he said. “May I speak to you, please?”

“Of course,” she said, trying to seem as friendly as she could, given the acid that was corroding her ileum. “What's up?”

“It's about the police.” He stepped closer and lowered his voice to a whisper. The dog trembled.

“The police?” How did he know? Mia felt both exposed and shamed.

“I know that they came. Two nights ago.” When Mia didn't say anything,
he added, “I don't sleep well, and when I heard the noise in the hall . . .”

“Yes, they were here,” Mia said tiredly. He already knew. What was the point of trying to pretend? “But everything's all right, Mr. Ortiz. You don't have to worry.”

“Because if there is anything, anything at all I could do for you, Señora Saul”—he said, as if she had not spoken—”you have only to ask.”

“Thank you, Mr. Ortiz,” said Mia, his kindness momentarily overriding the pain in her stomach. “Thank you very much.”

“If at any time you need a witness for your character, you call me, yes?”

He stroked the dog, which rested its dark snout against his chest. “I really appreciate it, Mr. Ortiz. I hope it won't come to that.”

“There's one more thing . . .”

“Yes?” She still needed that antacid, though the pain was definitely more manageable now.

“The money.”

Jesus. Did he know about the bill, too? Did everyone know everything about her these days? She felt as if she were living in a glass house and had been too self-absorbed and preoccupied to notice.

“The night you slipped the bills under the door . . . I was awake then, too, so I heard the noise. When I went to look, I saw your door closing.”

“You caught me,” Mia said. “I want to thank you for that, Señora Saul. You are a very special person. So special that I had to tell someone.”

“You did?” she asked. “Yes, I mentioned it to Señora Ovalle when I saw her the next day. She sometimes brings me food from the restaurant. So I now know that you gave her money, too.”

Señora Ovalle? Restaurant? Then she understood: Luisa's mother.

The leftovers were from McDonald's, though Mia thought that calling the place a restaurant was a major stretch.

“It's okay,” she told him. “I wanted to do it. My pleasure, in fact.” Which was, Mia reflected, the truth.
Use it well.
She was trying. Mia went inside and headed straight for the medicine chest. Hadn't she seen Pepto Bismol when the police were here? Right behind the RID and the lice comb? She found it and guzzled the thick, pink liquid right from the bottle.

M
ONDAY MORNING
M
IA
made sure she got to the office early. She had to hustle, what with her wasted day on Friday and all the work she now had piled up on her desk. But it turned out to be a day punctured by a half-dozen small and irritating distractions. A baby-shower breakfast for the very pregnant art director, some major screwup with the computer system, a meeting she had totally forgotten about.

The call came while she was at the meeting; Mia could see the editorial director glare at her when the phone beeped and Mia fumbled quickly to turn it off. But not before she saw the name and number on the tiny screen: Feinberg, Schrank, Liebowitz, and Saul. Stuart. Well, he was going to have to wait. She turned off the phone and stuffed it down, way down, into her bag. The meeting was mercifully brief, and Mia, sufficiently glutted by the bagel and sticky buns she had consumed at the shower, decided to spend lunch at her desk. She turned the phone back on to vibrate, and as soon as she did, she could feel it humming, like some -thing set to explode. It was Stuart again, and this time she took his call.

“Are you stalking me?” she asked. “Are you avoiding me?” he shot back. “I'm not avoiding you.”

“Mia, this is
me,
Stuart. I
know
you, remember? And I know when you're avoiding me.”

“All right then. So I'm avoiding you. Can you blame me?”

“Look, I'm sorry about Thanksgiving. But I've been trying to call ever since; I can never get you.”

Mia said nothing, but picked up a red editing pencil and began stabbing the point into a pad of Post-it notes.

“Mia? You there?”

“I'm here,” she said. “I just felt really attacked. By everyone: you, Mom, Gail. But most of all by you.”

“I'm sorry it seemed that way. We were worried. We're
still
worried. Lloyd told me he had another phone call from Frobisher. Did you know that Eden's refusing to do her math? She says math is useless so she's
boycotting
—her word—the subject. She's encouraging other kids in the class to do the same thing.”

“No one told me!”

“That's my whole point. The teacher doesn't feel like she's getting the support from you that she needs; she's turning to Lloyd.”

Mia silently continued her stabbing motions until the pencil snapped and she stared at it stupidly, like she couldn't figure out how

that
had happened.

“Listen, the welfare of your daughter is at stake, and you're in major denial.”

“Denial? Me?”

“Yeah. You. Didn't you promise Mom that you'd bring her out there after Christmas?”

“Yes,” she said, tossing the ruined pencil into a wastebasket under the desk.

“So? Have you made the reservation?”

“I will, Stu. I really will.”

“So you say. But then you don't follow through.” He made a loud, exasperated noise. “I know you can't see it, Mia, but I just want to help you.”

“Really?”

“What do you mean ‘really'? Of course I do.”

“I need some legal advice then.” There, she said it. If she was going to endure this conversation, she might as well get some useful information out of it.

“Advice? Maybe you should talk to Charlie Ellis.”

“This isn't about the divorce,” said Mia. Charlie Ellis, an old law-school buddy of Stuart's, had represented Mia when she and Lloyd split up.

“Oh? Is it a landlord-tenant kind of thing then? I could find you someone to talk to if that's what you need—”

“No, it's not the landlord,” interrupted Mia. “So then what is it?”

“Uh . . . it's . . . a criminal issue. Drug-related. But not for me. It's for a friend.”

“Jesus, Mia, what have you gotten yourself into now?”

“I told you: it's not me. It's a friend.”

“And I'm supposed to believe that? Don't kid a kidder, okay?” He sounded so superior that Mia wished he was standing in front of her so she could dig her hands into his hair and pull, hard, the way she used to when they were kids. “I'll find you someone, and it'll be someone good. But we're going to do a little exchange of goods and services here: I'm going to get you the phone number and not ask too many questions—
yet
—and you are going to book that flight. And I'm not asking you. I'm telling you.”

“All right,” she said, sullenly. “Stop sounding so persecuted. I told you: I want to help. We all do. Even Gail, though God knows why, after the way you've treated her.”

The way
she
treated
Gail
? There were no words, no words at all. “I'll make that reservation,” she said, suddenly desperate to end the conversation. “But I'm at work now. I've got to go.”

When she got off the phone, she felt rattled, like she had taken a ride in a cement mixer. She checked her watch; it was not even one
o'clock yet. She could still go for a quick walk outside, clear her mind, before tackling that stack on the desk. Grabbing her coat and bag, she was out of the building in minutes, glad she hadn't run into anyone on the elevator.

The street was crowded; Manhattan at lunchtime was always crowded. But the packed sidewalks felt good. That was one of the things she loved about New York, how you could lose yourself so easily, just slip into the stream and shove off. She began to walk, long strides, downtown, toward Union Square.

It was a cold, bright day, with a hard blue sky and no clouds. She stopped at a vendor's stall and bought a brown knitted hat flecked with tiny bits of red, burnt orange, and teal blue. Not her typical sort of purchase, but she was suddenly fed up with her overwhelmingly black wardrobe. The hat was warm and soft besides, and she felt better having it on. She wasn't hungry, but when she passed the greenmarket, in full swing, she stopped for a cup of hot cider.

It was nothing like the cider Fred had made, but it was warm in her hand, and for now that was enough.

She walked more slowly now because she didn't want to slosh the cider, so she had the time to notice a skinny black man with a luminous white Afro who stood on the corner of Eighteenth Street, singing. He had a clear, haunting falsetto, and Mia paused to listen.

So take a good look at my face

You'll see my smile looks out of place

His voice scaled up, up, and up again, hitting the highest notes with an astonishing sweetness. The small knot of people standing around him burst into applause when he had finished, and several put money in the pink plastic pail set up on the sidewalk.

Mia was too overcome to move for a second. Then she remembered that she had one of the bills, the special, not-to-be-mixed-with-the-other-bills
one from the machine, squirreled away in the recesses of her bag. It was a hundred, too. Perfect.
Use it well,
she said to herself before depositing it in the pail. Most of the crowd had moved on now, so the man picked up the pail and began sifting through his haul. His fingers reached the hundred, and, after looking down, he looked up at Mia with a dazed, wonder-filled smile.

“Thanks, sister,” he said, putting the bill in his pocket. “Thanks a lot.” He grasped the pail under one arm and used his other hand to give her a thumbs-up. “
Much
appreciated.”

Sister. He called her sister. The appellation suddenly seemed to take on great meaning, as if of all the things he had said today, this one word was unique, meant for her alone. She flashed to Stuart, whose sister she, in fact, was, and she suddenly wanted to call him back, to talk to him again, but really talk. She wanted to explain about why she hadn't made that plane reservation and why she couldn't possibly make it right now—

The phone began to vibrate, and she was sure it was Stuart, on her wavelength somehow, feeling a reciprocal urge to connect. She immediately clicked the Talk button without even glancing at the incoming number.

“Stuart, I was just thinking about you—” Mia began. “It's not Stuart. It's Lloyd. I want to know why the police had to search your apartment, Mia.” He sounded angry.

“Who told you that?” How did he even know about it? She almost dropped the phone.

“Eden called me. She was very upset. And I don't blame her. I want to know what's going on.”

Eden! Called Lloyd to tell him about the police! Betrayal knifed through her, heedlessly slashing organs and arteries along the way. Her husband, her mother, her brother, her sister-in-law . . . betrayers all. Her so-called best friend, Julie, too, vanishing without a trace, not even calling to say where she was but letting Mia find out secondhand.

What kind of a friend
did
that? And now Eden. Eden, whom she loved more than all of them put together.

“I'm in the street,” she said. “I cannot talk about this now.”

“Well, we're going to have to talk about it soon.” There was a momentary blankness, like the call had been dropped, but then Mia heard his cold, clipped voice again. “I'll be in New York on the twenty-first. That's the Friday before Christmas.”

“Eden will be thrilled,” Mia said. The sea of pedestrians eddied and flowed around her; no one was aware of her distress. Paradoxically, their very indifference gave her comfort, and even strength.

“I want her to spend Christmas with us.” By “us” he meant his parents.

“But you had her for all the extra time over the summer; you said I could have Thanksgiving and Christmas this year.”

“That was before.”

“Before
what
?”

“Before the police came storming through your apartment and terrorizing my daughter.”

“They hardly stormed!”

“Talk to Eden,” Lloyd said. “I take my cues from her.” There was a blank sound again, as if the call had been dropped, but then she heard Lloyd say, “Just make sure she's packed and ready when I get there.”

When the call ended, Mia stared at the phone as if she expected it to offer some form of restitution. When nothing of the kind happened, she impulsively punched in Julie's number, and, to her amazement, her friend actually picked up.

“Where are you? Where have you been?” Mia blurted out. She hadn't expected Julie to answer, and her self-censoring mechanism wasn't fully in place.

“Didn't Fred tell you? I told him to tell you everything,” said Julie. Then she added—to someone else, obviously—”No, not now; would you
stop
?” She giggled like a thirteen-year-old.

“Is this a bad time?” But Mia didn't care if it was; she thought Julie ought to contain her adolescent merriment and focus solely on her. They hadn't talked in so long.