I wanted to shake her, push her back onto a chair, stand over her, one finger poking at her chest, demand that she tell me the rest of it, now—this exasperating woman, building me up for each piece of her autobiography so I wouldn’t think ill of her. What did that have to do with anything anyway?
What did she think—that if she told me everything at once, I wouldn’t understand?
Or was it that I would?
She was going to see Harry’s lawyer. Shouldn’t I be in the locker room, too, cleaning up, telling her, like it or not, I was going with her, that she wasn’t letting me do my job, that, no two ways about it, I had to find out what the lawyer had to say, I had to know once and for all what the rest of the story was, whatever was keeping her up nights, scaring the hell out of her?
But if I did go with her, would the lawyer talk? Who the hell was I that Harry’s lawyer should talk to me? And what made me think Venus would let me rush this, find out what I needed to know faster than she was willing to eke it out?
There had to be another way, I thought, going over everything she’d said, starting with her first phone call.
She had whispered the night she’d called me, then she’d talked too loud, purposely feeding information to whoever was there. But when I was outside her office door with Charlotte, I could hear her on the phone, talking about something personal, saying she was scared. Why wasn’t she worrying about anyone overhearing her then?
She’d called me around midnight, said she was staying over.
Was it the night man she suspected? He’d been there when the dog disappeared, hadn’t he?
And he wasn’t there, at least not inside the facility, when Harry was killed by a bicycle.
I turned and looked at the big round clock on the wall. He’d be there in a few hours. Lonely work, staying up all night taking care of disabled people, people who get spooked easily, can’t tell you what’s wrong. Maybe he could use a little company to make the time go by. Before he knew it it would be morning, time to go home, and what? Feed his puli?
And where were all the other players? Where were the sister-in-law and her son and daughter, people who stood to inherit a bundle when the old man died? It wasn’t at all like relatives to lie back and wait, act casual when there was a fortune at stake. It was more like a feeding frenzy, the sharks smelling blood and moving in close to make sure they had a shot at the biggest portion.
After my father died, some second cousins we used to see once or twice a year, if that often, came to the house, one saying that since my mother only had girls, my father’s watch should go to him, that Abe, he was sure, would have wanted it that way—as if my father, who hadn’t known the clock was running down when he was still so young, had nothing better to concern himself with than wondering to whom he should leave his few worldly possessions. And the books, his mother said, a dumpy woman with a doughy face, my cousin Abe would have wanted us to have his books.
My mother, sitting on the couch, a Kleenex crushed in one hand, lifted her face and looked at the cousins, then stood and quietly walked to the door, opening it for them.
“Abe’s things are staying right here where they belong, with his family,” she said, showing them out. “We’re not dead yet,” she called after them. “Not by a long shot.”
A watch. Some books. What would it have been had there been money, the kind of millions Harry Dietrich had to have had to pour millions into Harbor View over the years?
And what of that? Was money set aside to keep the home going? Eli Kagan must have thought so. He’d told the Times that Harbor View would operate as always. With Harry gone, would he be managing those millions? And if not, who would?
Beyond the uptown traffic they were building a median to be filled with plants, trying to make the new road more palatable, prettying it up so the quiet community to the east of the roadway would be less offended by the constant rush of traffic—a neighborhood of townhouses built one hundred and fifty years before, wrought iron boot scrapers still in place at the foot of the stoop that took you up to the grand parlor floors, so that you wouldn’t track in mud from the unpaved roads. There were still cobblestone streets in the Village, and carriage houses, now converted into homes, like my own, cottages entered through passageways just wide enough for a horse and wagon to pass.
Venus was leaving the gym, wearing a white linen suit, a peach-colored shell underneath. As she passed the windows where the treadmills were, I could see that the heart was tucked away again, which made me think of something else; the way she’d put her hand on her chest at the gallery, squeezed her eyes closed, and taken a minute to collect her feelings before continuing. It was the necklace she was touching, feeling it through her shirt, getting comfort from it, the necklace Harry had given her, which she didn’t want anyone at work to see.
I looked across at the Jersey skyline. Two towers were going up, the window openings still without glass, like dark open mouths. I thought about how quickly the world was changing now, how slowly things seemed to move when I was a kid, the time between my seventh and eighth birthday taking ten times as long as the time between my thirty-seventh and thirty-eighth.
How had time moved for Venus and Harry that first moment, when they understood who it was they’d each been writing to, someone they each had known for years, but in a very different way?
He was easily old enough to be her father, and as Venus had said, he wasn’t an attractive man. He had one of those faces, if it were sculpted out of clay, that looked as if someone had placed a hand on top of the head and leaned a little too hard, scrunching everything into a permanent scowl.
Harry, the money man, watching figures all his life.
But kind to his dying wife.
He’d been kind to Venus, too, paying attention to her concerns, listening to her dreams. He’d shared his thoughts and feelings with her, month after month. He’d been truthful with her, telling her he had a wife.
Maybe not at first, but soon enough.
You could hardly fault the man, wanting someone to talk to when his wife had been so sick.
Could you?
Besides all that, he was rich, richer than anyone else Venus had ever known.
How long after that first glimpse did Venus think about the money?
Looking at the river, the light sparkling on the water the way it did on Venus’s diamond necklace, I wondered about that, about their first meeting and what each of them was thinking when they saw the other for the first time, Harry sitting there waiting for her, Venus carrying a single red rose.
I slowed down the belt and stretched out my legs. There was work to do, and for the moment, I was glad that Venus was going elsewhere and that I wasn’t going with her. I had the feeling I’d find out much more on my own. I touched the outside of my pocket to check for the keys she’d given me, then headed home with Dashiell to shower and change.