It was not a complicated theft. Lisa wasn’t why I stole the money. It was just there. I saw the ten thousand dollars on the bookkeeper’s desk, so I placed five thousand dollars in each of my shoes. The shoes were too big, which helped. Jim had bought them for me that first day I landed, the day with Lisa and the limousine, and I had wanted big ones. I was timid to ask for the correct, smaller size with Lisa looking on. They were my black alligators. It was December 17 and I was standing in my socks in the bookkeeper’s office with ten thousand dollars in my shoes on the floor. I tried pushing my feet in just as they were and it turned out there was no need even to untie the bows. They were that loose. Plus I was wearing silk socks.
With the cash under my feet the shoes actually fit better. I hurried down the back hallway and out into the crowd of customers, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, while also trying to look like it was just ordinary me, on my way out the door to lunch. I couldn’t look back over my shoulder to see if anyone saw me leaving. Then I was outside. I walked through the icy streets of downtown Fort Worth to the bank a few blocks from the store and wired half of the money to my old bank account at Royal Bank in Calgary. It would be safe, there, in Canada. Lisa needed the money, but it was a good idea to put a little aside for myself, too. This was my first bank account and I had had it since I was seven years old. I had opened it for my paper route. For my collections money. Plus that way once I gave Lisa the other half, all the money would be gone, and I didn’t want any of it around. No evidence.
The only tricky part about the stealing was the wiring paperwork. I figured I should save it in case the wire did not go through. Then when I came back to the store I lost my nerve and tore it up and flushed it down the toilet. This was in the executive bathroom right outside the bookkeeper’s office where I had discovered the money. The same bathroom by the stairs to Popper’s office, that we weren’t supposed to use that I always used. When I went back to the bathroom to check on the toilet, perhaps twenty minutes later—thinking I better make sure, because I had been afraid to look under the lid when I flushed it the first time—when I lifted the lid I saw the torn-up paper was still in the bowl. I tore up the wet paper smaller and flushed it again with some toilet paper. The third flush it finally went down. But if someone had found that paper that would have been it.
Mr. Popper sat behind his desk and Sheila paced around the room. She nearly tripped over my legs as she walked, and then again over my feet. But she didn’t say anything to me. The bar fridges were on the floor, built into enormous Chinese lacquered cabinets on one wall, so I was on my hands and knees.
I was stocking Mr. Popper’s two bar fridges with Diet Dr Peppers, Tabs, Perrier, and gold-lidded pints of strawberry and coffee Häagen-Dazs ice cream.
Behind Mr. Popper a television was tuned to the news. It was on mute. There was a story about the ice storm that had closed much of the city. This was the big ice storm of 1987 and everyone said it was grisly news for the store because no one would come downtown in the ice, and we were only a week from Christmas. At this time of year we could see five hundred thousand dollars a day on the showroom floor. That was not counting the phones. But the ice storm could kill all of that.
Three salesmen, plus Jim, Dennis, and Popper’s wife, Sheila, were seated at Popper’s desk. Everyone faced Mr. Popper, watching him. No one noticed me. This was a good thing about being sixteen. They did not see me in the same way they saw one another. To encourage them not to think about me I kept my eyes on my stocking. If I seemed interested I would suddenly be less innocent. I endeavored to restock the contents of the refrigerator in the manner of a child who, without knowing how it had happened, found himself playing a boy’s game among the legs, faces, and mysterious conversations of a group of friendly adults. But I also needed to stay in the office for as long as possible so that I could hear this conversation.
As a teenager I was not frightened. Perhaps I was jumpy.
“It wasn’t Lisa,” Jim said. “She reported it.”
“It could have been anyone.”
“She wants to take a polygraph.”
“A polygraph won’t catch an expert fucking prevaricator like that. Don’t fucking kid yourself. They don’t have a polygraph machine strong enough to trip up her kind of prevarication.”
That was Sheila. She loved the word prevaricator. I asked Jim about it once and he said the story was that she had once accused her father of telling a lie and he had told her not to use that word because it was a hateful word—“Two words a Christian won’t use,” he had supposedly said, “hate, and lie”—so Sheila always said prevaricator, prevaricate, and prevarication. Apparently Mr. Popper had tried to switch her to dissimulation because it had a less rednecky ring to it, but no luck. She was always accusing everyone around her of prevaricating. That’s the kind of person she was.
“She’s a cokehead. Everybody knows it. A cokehead will do anything.”
“It might have been a customer. Someone using the bathroom.”
“They would have been with a salesperson. Don’t be ridiculous. A customer is never back in that bathroom alone. Plus who would go into Cindy’s office?”
“If the door was open. With the cash just sitting there.”
“We can check the cameras.”
“I can’t believe Cindy would walk away from her desk with that cash on it. What was that woman thinking?” This was Mr. Popper. I glanced up and saw the way he glared at his wife. Cindy the bookkeeper was Sheila’s responsibility. She reported directly to Sheila.
I never had the courage to look at my own wife that way, later. That was a look men used to have with their wives that we men today have forsaken, relinquished, or lost.
“There are no cameras in the bathroom.”
“Not in the bathroom. To see who went in back. They have timers on them. We can check them against the time.”
“I know it wasn’t Lisa,” Jim said.
“The cameras are on the showcases. There are no cameras in back. The cameras are all on the floor.”
“It could have been Cindy. Why not Cindy? I would be tempted if I were her,” Dennis said. What an innocent thing to say, I thought. You can learn from that, Bobby, I told myself. Dennis was that smart. That street-smart, I mean.
“It wasn’t Cindy, you moron. For chrissake.”
That was Sheila again. She always frightened me. She was not the sort of person who thought children—children like I am only a child, really, I wanted to remind them all—were naïve. Plus she did not even like her own children. She would have fired me over that first Rolex deal if I hadn’t been Jim’s little brother.
“Cindy was in the bathroom. That’s why the money was on her desk.”
“These fucking salespeople. No fucking gratitude.” Sheila swore frequently. In Texas they call it cursing. “Why do you curse so much, Sheila?” Roger or Paul would ask her, and she would say, “Fuck you,” to be funny. But to a Canadian it was unnerving.
“Ten grand. It takes some balls to stick ten grand in your purse.”
“Or your pocket. Why does it have to be a purse?” Jim said. He was a defender of women. Or maybe he was still thinking of Lisa.
“A lousy ten grand,” Popper said. “Why take the risk for that? Frustrating. I don’t care about the damn money.”
“Well I sure as fuck care about the money, Ronnie. And you should damn well care yourself.”
“You’re missing the point, Sheila. The point is there is a criminal among us.”
He was Ali Baba in the house of a thousand thieves and he trusted these people. I have since noticed that both trusting and trustworthy people often have this problem of insufficient skepticism and investigation of the truth. It may be a laziness they share.
“Not even into that hallway? There must be a camera that can check that.”
“They had to put the money somewhere. That’s a good point. That much money wouldn’t fit in your pants pockets.”
“You wouldn’t walk back into the phone room. Too many people.”
“You would be too nervous.”
“We might see if someone let a customer through the gate.”
“Why take the cash off Cindy’s desk when you knew it would be noticed? Why not just hit the cash box? You could hit the cash box every day and no one would ever notice.” I glanced up because of a familiar sound in the way he said it and there was Jim giving me a close look. I arranged the cans of soda. Dr Peppers on the left, Tabs on the right. In the door were Sheila’s Frescas and Perriers.
“I mean, if you are a thief,” Jim said.
“You can’t take money from the cash box like that. We reconcile it every night before we leave.”
“Well, technically, I think you could. Come to think of it. That’s something we better change. Shit, this is depressing.”
“How many times do I have to tell you, Ronnie? You can’t believe a word they say. Little pieces of shit.”
“Plus the temptation. She should never have left it sitting there.”
“It could have been anyone. We could polygraph them. The suspects. The ones who probably might have done it.”
“What about the Polack? There’s something sinister about that girl.”
“She’s not a thief,” Popper said quickly. “No, it’s not her.”
I saw Sheila Popper give her husband a quick, sour glance. Jim and Dennis wiped their faces blank. But I saw them trying not to look at each other.
“Why this now?” Popper said. “Why did she just leave it on her desk? This is all we need.” Mr. Popper hammered his desk with his brass Rolex paperweight. It was the signature Rolex crown but the size of a soup bowl. He was not angry. He was sad.
“We could call the cops. That might put a scare into someone.”
“We are not calling the fucking cops, you fuckhead.”
“Sheila! Control yourself!”
“If we polygraph anyone we have to polygraph everyone. Everyone who was here today, anyhow. That’s the new law.”
“I bet it was Roger.” Roger was the Watchman. “I don’t trust that guy. Plus he’s getting divorced.”
“How did they get the money out of the store?”
“It’s only a few steps from the bathroom.”
“Cindy couldn’t have been in the bathroom.”
“That’s another reason why it couldn’t be the Polack,” Jim said. He looked at Popper as he said it. “The Polack was in the bathroom. That’s what we said. We already established that.”
“I thought it was Cindy in the bathroom.”
“Do we know that?” Dennis said. “All we know is that somebody was in the front bathroom.”
“I still think it could be Roger. Rita says it’s a very messy divorce. Those are expensive. He isn’t making any real sales lately, either.”
Rita was an idea, I thought. The way she watched Lisa and me.
“Suppose for the sake of argument it was Cindy,” Mr. Popper said. “She would have stolen something else. Why take just ten K? She could have hit us for tens of thousands. Maybe hundreds of thousands.”
“Only a real dummy would take ten thousand dollars off the bookkeeper’s desk like that.” This was Jim. His tone was unpleasant for me to hear.
“We’re not all thieves, Sheila,” Dennis said.
“Dennis, just shut the fuck up,” Sheila said.
There was a quiet moment.
“I bet it was Rita,” I said. I said it very quietly, like I was speaking to the carpet and not the grown-ups in the room. I supposed nobody might even hear me.
Sheila said, “From the mouths of babes.”
“I wouldn’t want to think that. Golly, I hate to think that,” Ronnie said.
“She’s been disgruntled,” Jim said.
“Hell, disgruntled! That’s one word for it. Pissed off is another. Pissed off is what I’d call it,” Mr. Popper said. “Ever since last Christmas. Or maybe it was the Christmas before that.”
“She’s been demanding a raise for three years,” Sheila said. “I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“I bet you’re right, Bobby,” Dennis said. He looked back at me with the cold face of a lizard. You know something, you bastard, I thought. You know it was me. “I bet it was Rita.”
“It’s always the one you don’t suspect, isn’t it?”
“Rita. Huh. Who would have guessed?” Jim said. He was always the store’s best closer.
It was late, the highway was black, and his cheeks and nose were green in the light from the speedometer and the other gauges. Jim and I were driving home.
“I am worn out,” he said. “I hope all this is worth it.”
The windshield wipers squeaked. I opened the window a crack. Outside, more sleet was falling. I thought about how our little black car must look on the black highway in the icy rain, from high above us, with the yellow beams of the headlights stretching out in front. The highway was already freezing over. Tomorrow the roads would be closed. But tonight, after Jim and Lily were asleep, I would drive to Lisa’s.
I found the money, Bobby. I can’t take this money.”
After we had made love I crept out of the bedroom, very late, with her asleep in the bed behind me, and left the five thousand dollars where she would find it in the morning. To beat Jim to the store I would be up and at work before she was even out of bed. I wanted to be waiting for him outside when he got there. So that he didn’t think I was hiding from him.
I understood that she would not take the cash if I tried to give it to her. This way she could pretend it was from Jim, or Santa Claus. But then she woke up in the early morning to get a glass of water or smoke a cigarette and found it. She woke me up with the light on and there she was, at the end of the bed, with the five thousand dollars out in front of her on the bed.
“It wasn’t like that. I didn’t steal it for you. I didn’t mean to steal it at all, really. It was totally innocent. I’m serious. It was practically an accident. What happened was I was taking a shortcut from the steamer room past the Rolex desk so I could ask the Watchman a price for a ladies’ all-stainless”—because we were so close to Christmas the price and availability on all-steel models changed daily, like bullion—“and I wanted to stop by the back bathroom on the way to do a bump. So the quick way was through Cindy’s office.”
“We are not supposed to walk that way.”
“I know. That’s what I am saying. It was just bad luck. So I’m hurrying through and I almost walked right past it. There were two stacks of bills, side by side, like bricks, you know, on the desk. I smiled toward where I expected Cindy to be sitting, to say, Gosh isn’t that nice, a big stack of cash like that, and her chair was empty. So, you know, they don’t have cameras in there,” I said.
“I bet they will now,” Lisa said.
I wanted to say, Look, I know you need the money, and maybe you could even tell me why. But I did not want to interfere with her love for me in any way at all. I tried to recover control of the conversation.
“One thing about me, Lisa, is I was raised by bankrupts. That teaches you not to take property very seriously. Plus, being Canadian. You know. Socialism.”
“Other people’s property, you mean.”
She had an odd look on her face that I couldn’t decipher.
“Right. That’s my problem. That’s exactly what I’m saying. I don’t treat other people’s property with the proper seriousness. It’s just a weakness I have. It’s not like I had malicious intentions. It’s my nature. My upbringing.”
“Well, now they are polygraphing the whole store, Bobby,” Lisa said. “The whole damn store. And you have brought me into it by giving me this money.”
“You don’t have anything to worry about,” I said.
“What if I do? Bobby. This only makes things worse. Bobby, you don’t know what they are going to ask about. Did you even think about why I need the money? That could come out too, Bobby. Anything could come out.”
She reached over and grabbed one of the pillows. She wrapped her arms around it like it was a stuffed animal.
“It’s not your fault. It’s like your brother said . . . well, I mean, it’s my own damn mess, not yours.”
I watched her carefully. I knew that if I spoke she would stop talking. I strove to look like I was only there to listen.
“The thing is, Bobby, well, you know I have other people, other friends outside the store. They are not guys like you and Jim. They are a different kind of people. Not nice people. I mean, they aren’t bad people exactly. But they are wild, you know?”
I could be wild, too, I thought. But I knew I couldn’t say it.
“Anyway, I’m not going into it. But there was this party, and—”
“When were you at a party?” How did she have time to go to a party? “What people are you talking about?” Don’t talk, Bobby, I told myself. She is trying to confess.
“Bobby, honey, listen to me. I am trying to tell you. You know, baby, this is really—well, it’s not that it’s none of your business, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m just worrying about both of us, you know?”
She didn’t understand that I could help her, if she would let me. That I wasn’t concerned about anything except her.
“This is so ridiculous. I can’t believe how stupid we are. Now that I’m talking about it, it was just like you. I’m sitting here judging you and it was just like you and this fucking money.” She picked up the stack of bills and then put it back down again.
“I know you’re not judging me,” I said. “You can tell me anything, Lisa. I don’t care.” I wanted to say, I love you.
“You know, the funny thing is I wasn’t even going to go to the stupid party. I was driving home.”
“After work, you mean.”
Was this Saturday she was talking about? But when I saw them in the parking garage it was Friday—so then it must have been Thursday. But on Thursday hadn’t she stayed late and closed with Jim and me?
“You know how sometimes you just drive somewhere without even thinking, like knowing where you’re going but not ever deciding to go there? And they were all fucked up, some of them had been partying for days. I kept trying to leave. Then the next thing you know it’s me and this other guy and we are practically the only ones who aren’t passed out. And there’s a stash of drugs and money in this guy’s place and nobody knows where he keeps it, but my friend said he wanted to show me.”
“Your friend, you mean, the guy? Which guy?”
“Just listen for a minute, okay? I’m trying to tell you. Then, you know, whatever, and next thing he’s passed out, too. It was just that easy. So I grabbed this stuff and I left and that was that. Just like you did at the store. I walked out. I mean, it could have been anybody, right? But they know it was me. They already went to my dealer and fucked him up, just because. They held him down and burned him, Bobby. With the lit end of a cigar. Now I can’t even be here. I shouldn’t have even let you come over here. Oh, Bobby,” she said, and for a second I hoped she was going to start crying. But when I reached toward her she stiffened.
“And even this five grand, even if I could take it. It would get me out of town. Maybe I could like leave half of it in my mailbox for them or something. You know, like, to calm them down. That might help a little, if they don’t know where I am. But you stole this money, Bobby, and Popper’s rent-a-cops are going to catch you. Now you’ve brought the store into this . . . I don’t know, Bobby. And what about you? I can’t have you going to jail because you were trying to help me. Oh Christ, Bobby. This is a real mess, you know? This is a real fucking mess we made together.”
She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking across the room at nothing. Her neck was as lovely as a person’s wrist.
“Neither one of us can go back. That’s the thing, that’s the truth of it. This jewelry business is not the right thing for you anyway. It is just like how some people should not be married because they make each other worse. That’s jewelry for you, Bobby. It’s like Miracle-Gro on your failings. Mine, too. I’ve been wanting to tell you that anyway, and now—” She waved her hand at the money. “I’m staying up all night and packing and getting out of here.”
“Good, okay,” I said. “Let’s go. Good idea. I’ll come. I’ll come with you.” Then I laid my head down on her legs. I didn’t want to see her face when I said it.
“Oh, baby. Come on. I’m sorry, but that is not something we can do. But you have to leave, that’s for sure. Don’t go to work. Make up some lie. You need to get on a plane back to Canada, as quick as you can get a ticket. That’s what you should do. Go back to Wendy. Go home, Bobby. If you don’t they could put you in prison. You have got to start growing up, now. Both of us do, I guess.”
“I don’t want you to go,” I said into her folded legs. She scratched at my head very lightly with her fingertips. “I want to stay with you.”
In the morning, when I woke up in her bed, with her blue comforter twisted around me, she was gone. I looked at her alarm clock. It was almost nine-thirty. Now Jim would want to know why I was late.
The lie detector tests began two days later, on December 23, so I stayed home sick with a stomachache.
“I think I need to go to the hospital,” I said. “I think it’s my appendix.”
“You can’t really take today off, Bobby,” Jim said. “I mean, unless you’re dying. It’s the biggest day of the year. Christmas Eve is nothing like the day before Christmas Eve. This is it. This is the money day. Plus the polygraphs. That would look funny. They are doing them all day long. Don’t you have an appointment? Did you sign the sign-up sheet? Everybody has to sign the sign-up sheet.”
Dennis had given me the sign-up sheet with a look like he was passing a collection plate at church. I scribbled two mostly unrecognizable words that resembled the Watchman’s name, perhaps, a bit, and passed it on.
“I’m on there,” I said. “I’m interviewing tomorrow. You could sign up for today or tomorrow. I am really sick, here, Jim. I feel like my appendix is going to burst or something. I am nauseated and I have this sharp pain in my side.”
“Uh-huh. Okay,” he said. “I am not making any excuses for you. This is the one day. This is the big day and you’re blowing it. It’s your call.”
He looked at me with that look your mother gives you when she knows you are pretending to be sick.
“Better call an ambulance if it gets any worse,” he said, and plugged in the phone by my bed. “Go ahead. Pull a James Clark. Pull a Dad on me. Don’t blame me.”
I had to stay in bed because Lily was in and out of the house all day but I didn’t want to get out of bed anyway. I was trying not to think about Lisa. I smoked pot and reread Autobiography of a Yogi. I called Wendy but no one answered the phone. I counted my other, separate stash of hundreds and twenties in the closet, and looked over the Christmas gifts I had stolen for people I loved. I looked at the tourmaline-and-ivory ring I had put aside for Lisa. I couldn’t give her any of her gifts now. It would be okay for Wendy, I thought. But you couldn’t size it. And Wendy’s fingers were fatter than Lisa’s.
Jim was home after midnight. He was drunk and excited. He woke me up.
“Hey, I’m sorry,” he said. “The way you were acting I half thought it was you. I owe you an apology. How’s your stomach? Is it any better? Sorry I woke you up. I just thought you would want to know. You were right. It was Rita. I can’t believe it. They did a few polygraphs and Rita was up early on the list and they caught her. They postponed the rest of the polygraphs until after Christmas so we can focus this last twenty-four hours.”
“Man, what a day I had. Fadeen called and bought that seventeen-carat. Six hundred grand. I already had it mounted and shipped. That’s a thirty-thousand-dollar commission. One day. Ronnie and I have been out drinking Dom. He gave me that nephrite hippopotamus lighter, too. Just as a bonus. We rented a limousine and hit some Dallas bars.” I hadn’t seen him drunk very often. Maybe never before. “The Polack went, too. I should have asked Lisa, I guess. But she didn’t show up for work. Two days in a row, now. Everybody was real suspicious about that until they caught Rita. I don’t know where the hell she is. I guess I better call her.”
I started to say something. I half sat up in the bed.
“Shhh,” he said, looking back over his shoulder into the dark bedroom and the open hallway beyond.
“Lily’s sleeping. We sure don’t want to wake that up. Okay, go on back to sleep, buddy. I love you. Sorry again. Take the day off again tomorrow if you want. Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve, it’s not such a big day. Today was the day. But you needed the rest. Hell, it’s Christmas, you’ve earned it. I love you, Bobby.”
We didn’t normally say that, because we were brothers. I knew he was only drunk but I didn’t care.
“No, wake me up,” I said. The relief of being innocent was hitting me like two lungfuls of crank. “I want to be there. I want to end the season with you and Mr. Popper and everybody. Don’t let me sleep in.”
All the highways were closed. There were semis and cars spilled around the city, on the edges of roads at odd angles, like someone had sprayed a deck of cards over I-30 and I-35. The big ice storm had broken very early that morning, Christmas Eve, but before we opened the doors the customers were stretched for more than half a mile down Houston Street.
Because of taking the back roads Jim and I were in late, at almost eight o’clock, and as we drove into the parking garage and witnessed it he said, “What the hell is going on, it’s like a hockey game,” before we understood that the line out front was for us, for the store. We made the news that day. But really as part of another, bigger headline, which I will now explain.
It was the biggest Christmas Eve the store had ever seen, and it was the biggest Christmas Eve I would ever see. The customers were packed in like kids at a concert. You could not walk through the showroom. If there had been a fire, hundreds of people would have died. The rent-a-cops didn’t like it but Mr. Popper was back there getting them drunk. He was getting everyone drunk, putting champagne, Baileys Irish Cream, and Sheila’s Texas Hill Country secret recipe of ninety-proof eggnog into the hands of anyone who would take a glass. “I don’t understand how it doesn’t curdle,” people would say after taking a sip. But they drank it down. There was a line of salespeople waiting to get into the diamond room with their best crows waiting on the other side. Jim said afterward that Mr. Popper took in two million in seven hours. It was possible. These people were like women on the seventy-percent-off blue-tag day at Neiman’s Last Call. But they were buying fine jewelry.
Around the middle of the afternoon Mr. Popper disappeared. That was unusual on Christmas Eve. Normally that was the one day of the year he would spend the whole day out on the floor with us, Jim said. About an hour later the crowd began to water down. There were drunks among the customers and the Watchman was passed out in his chair at his desk. Sheila was nowhere to be found, probably doing a last-minute shopping run herself. The rent-a-cops were blinking their eyes. One of them was twirling his leather-billed hat like a top on the banks of video monitors. They were waiting for their Christmas bonuses. Soon Popper would be down with the envelopes.
By shortly after five we had chased out our last panicky I-can’t-believe-it’s-Christmas-Eve-already husband, and locked the big double plate-glass-and-brass doors, and yet there was no Mr. Popper. People needed to get to their own families. But not without those December commission checks and the Christmas bonuses. We knew Cindy had been calculating and printing them all day yesterday and today. Mr. Popper signed them and then sealed them in an envelope, each with its bonus, which was secret and in cash. We were not allowed to discuss our bonuses. But I knew Jim was expecting fifteen grand or better.
With all of us gathered idly around the showcases and wandering in and out of the back-of-the-house, at last Jim said, “I’ll go see what’s up,” assuming Popper was up in his office, but then Mr. Popper appeared at the front door. Outside the front door, I mean. We saw him through the glass. He had his keys in his hands and he opened the door. Then he stopped and opened the lock on the other door, the one we often did not bother to open, so that both doors could swing wide. He came into the middle of the showroom floor among the showcases. He was ringed with policemen and more serious-looking strangers, and then I knew with clarity what would happen next. They had lied to Jim about Rita to lure me back into the store. Or it might be, even, that Jim had lied. But no, that couldn’t be. They had tricked him because we were brothers and now I was caught. Lisa was right. She knew not to come back. Why hadn’t I listened to her? I thought I was so fucking clever. I outsmarted everybody. Now they would arrest me in front of everyone and take me to prison in cuffs. The doors were locked and there was no place to escape to. The salespeople and the rent-a-cops and the phone sales women and the Watchman and the other back-of-the-house guys and the Wizard and the gift-wrappers and the black-fingered jewelers in their aprons and the beautiful teenage hostesses and Jim all surged softly toward Popper, expecting. They didn’t understand what was about to happen. They could never feel sorry for me, not on Christmas Eve. It was like a pack. I tried to drift to the back. But they were thick around me. I did not know where to run. My eyes were starting to fill with tears. And Popper spoke.
“Well, Merry Christmas, everyone,” he said.
I thought perhaps I could feign fainting. Or faint for real, even.
“I have some bad news. Don’t want to keep you good folks waiting around on Christmas Eve any longer than necessary. I really hate to do what I’ve been given no choice but to do.” Run, Bobby. The doors are unlocked. Run! “Seems these fellas here”—and he waved his arm generally at the men around him, who moved in closer—“think we’ve—that is, I’ve—been up to some kind of wrongdoing. They aren’t too specific on the particulars, and you all don’t need to worry none. Don’t worry about any single little thing. Our lawyers will have this solved in no time, you can rest assured of that.” And he gave one of the men in particular a hard look. The man looked away at his shoes. “But they’re closing us down.” A wind went through the room. “And I’m afraid they won’t let me write you your Christmas checks. These boys won’t let me put a single damn dollar in your pockets for your families’ Christmases. And I know better than anyone how hard you’ve worked and how much you deserve it. I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry. And, for what it’s worth, Merry Christmas.”
He was tearing up. He smiled this strong smile.
“All right, fellas, let’s get this done.”
There was silence. Someone started to cry. Then a couple more joined in. Someone said, “Goodbye, Mr. Popper.” I expected a round of applause. They bundled him up and took him away. Three or four of the serious men in badly cut blue suits stayed behind to collect the store keys. They even collected case keys. The people who had safe combinations wrote them down. The men answered every question with a business card that had a lawyer’s phone number on it. They would not even respond to the questions of the rent-a-cops, who were important regular off-duty Fort Worth policemen.
Jim handed in his keys and we drove home.
“I wonder how long I’ll get to keep the Porsche,” he said as we stepped cautiously up the icy steps to his door.
The day after Christmas I went back to Wendy and Calgary. Lisa had taken the money, that morning, but I had my stash in the closet, and the other five grand was waiting for me at the Royal Bank of Canada. I used it to buy Wendy a car, a preowned Fiat Spider convertible. I gave it to her for Valentine’s Day. That was my first car. Then, a year or so later, Jim called and asked me to join him in his new business. We called it Clark’s Precious Jewels.