by Sonya Cobb
“But have you hired a lawyer?” Carly asked.
“With what money?”
“I don’t know. Legal Aid? You need one.”
“Why? It’s all my fault. I signed up for the stupid option ARM. I failed as a freelancer. A lawyer can’t change all that.”
“That’s not how it works. A lawyer can help you fight. They can help you get the upper hand. At the very least, they can force the bank to talk to you and work things out.”
Sophie fiddled with her jacket zipper. Hiring a lawyer meant talking to Brian. Talking to Brian meant admitting that she hadn’t been working. Admitting she hadn’t been working meant having to explain all those trips to New York. “I think I can handle it. They’re supposedly sending me loan modification forms. So…”
“What if I have my friend Joshua call you. I think he does real estate. He could give you some advice.”
“That’s okay.”
“Sophie.” Carly pointed her finger again. Sophie batted it away.
“Just get me working again. That’s what I really need. Work.”
“Done.”
“Thanks.” Sophie smiled wanly. “Still jealous of me?”
“In some ways,” Carly said. “I’m sorry it’s so hard to believe.”
“I didn’t know you wanted a family.”
Carly shrugged. “Obviously I don’t need two point five kids to be happy. But sometimes, yeah. The condo gets a little quiet.”
“You can have my kids.”
“Ha.” Carly picked at her sweater. “I’m sure you don’t take them for granted.”
“No. I mean, I don’t think I do. Sometimes it’s hard to see past the day-to-day. It’s not all continuous delight and amazement, you know?”
“I know.” Carly smiled wanly. “Nothing ever is.”
***
She’d almost forgotten about the prepaid phone, until it started ringing from the pocket of her winter coat, which had been put away for the season. Sophie dug through the closet of parkas, scarves, and sweaters, finally pulling the phone from the woolen depths; by the time she had it in her hand it had stopped ringing. She stared at it apprehensively, wanting to talk to her friend Harry, not wanting to think about why he was calling on this small, grimy phone. Then it rang again, making her jump.
“Hello?”
“Darling! How are you?”
“Wonderful, now that I’m hearing your voice.” She hurried back downstairs to the living room, where Elliot was stacking Tupperware containers into towers and driving toy cars through the streets of the plastic city. “How about you?”
“Can’t complain. No, I take that back. I can complain; I’m quite good at it, but I choose not to.”
“Oh, Harry. What’s wrong?”
“You know. The usual. I hate my customers and there aren’t enough of them. Also, Jeffrey’s been in a beastly mood ever since I quote-unquote abandoned him over the holidays. He thinks I’m having an affair, which is utter bullshit. I mean, I’ve barely got the energy to deal with his tantrums, why would I want to double my workload?”
“Oh, dear.”
“But that’s enough of me not complaining. How are you? How are those delightful children of yours?”
“Fine. We’re all fine. Sorry I didn’t call you after talking to the FBI…I just wanted to put the whole thing behind me.”
“I was a bit worried. But I’ve been keeping an eye on the Inquirer. There’s a reward, you know.”
“I heard that.”
“That means they haven’t got any leads. Won’t be long before everyone forgets all about it.”
“I hope so.”
“Don’t worry, love, everything will be fine.” His words felt like a warm bath; when was the last time anyone had told her everything would be fine? “So the interview went all right?”
“Piece of cake. There was a little bit of missing time they couldn’t account for, between my leaving Brian’s office and exiting the building, but they don’t have anything solid. And anyway, nobody really knows when the thing disappeared. They only noticed it missing the day before Christmas.”
“All right, good. So…in the meantime.”
“Yes?” Sophie tried to shield the phone as Elliot knocked over his towers with a roar.
“Have you got any more goodies for Uncle Harry?”
Sophie snorted. “You sound like a pedophile.”
“Sorry. You know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean, and unfortunately the answer is no.” She cleared her throat. “Uncle Harry.”
“Taking a little time off until the dust settles?”
“Yes, well, partly. I’ve actually decided to stop altogether.”
“Stop? But you’ve barely begun. We have such a perfect little setup.”
“I know, I know, and it’s been very rewarding, Harry. But I can’t take these kinds of risks anymore. It’s crazy! I have a family.”
“I would think the money has been very nice for your family.”
“Of course. And I appreciate everything you’ve done. You’ve been so great. I just…I just can’t anymore. I’m done.”
“Sophie, why don’t you just let me help you. You don’t have to do everything on your own. If we work as a team we can start doing things properly. Make some real money. Then you can quit.”
“Sorry. Sorry, Harry.” Elliot had climbed into her lap; she closed her eyes and rested her cheek on his warm, silky hair. “I want to keep seeing you, though. Can we still have lunch sometimes?”
“Maybe.” The charm had slid off Harry’s voice. “I’ll call you.”
Fifteen
Carly got her the two projects—at the same time—which meant Sophie soon found herself working both of her free mornings, as well as during Elliot’s naps and in the evenings. It took a few days to update all her software and review the changes in browsers and JavaScript protocols, a process that reminded her of her grandfather cleaning and oiling his gun at the beginning of hunting season. She eased herself into the methodical processes of the work, readying her mind, quieting her nervous imagination.
The law firm’s site was straightforward; the wireframes and design flats were already finished and approved. Still, Sophie lavished it with the kind of care and attention she normally would have reserved for a much larger, better-paying client. She optimized it for search, without even being asked, stocking the meta tags with well-researched keywords. She finessed the linking strategy, refined the secondary navigation, and added some subtle but crucial Flash effects to the menus. She tested and retested. She optimized load times. She created a user-friendly back-end tracking system.
The e-commerce work for the beverage company was a little further outside of her comfort zone, but Carly recommended some decent new shopping cart software options and helped her with Ajax. Sophie built the pages slowly, learning as she went, adding in the customer feedback mechanisms and relationship management tools that had apparently become de rigueur. She trolled blogs and forums, giving herself a crash course on the latest trends in order streams and registration protocols. The hours unspooled like toilet paper in the hands of a bored toddler. She had to set an alarm on her computer to remind her to stop working and go get the kids at day care.
At night, lying in bed, she brainstormed ideas for the museum database. She created sections for cataloging each object’s provenance, valuation, location, and condition notes. She added a media center for tracking photography, and a cross-referenced index of donors, artists, conservators, and curators. She filled a notebook with ideas, then started a new one.
Her newly busy schedule meant skipping a few Music for Me classes, and eventually dropping out altogether. Lucy was in preschool full-time now, so the classes were only for Elliot, and it was pretty clear he was more interested in organizing the stack of lyric sheets in neat pile
s than singing or dancing. Once she’d made the decision not to register for the next session, Sophie felt a sense of liberation so profound, she wondered why it had taken her so long. Where had she gotten the idea that being a good mother meant sacrificing her own sanity? Why had it never occurred to her that her own happiness might be the germ from which her children’s contentment might sprout?
Brian came back from France to find her more cheerful, well rested, and interested in his successes than she had been before he left. He was brimming with his news, and they stayed up late the night he came back, in spite of his jet lag, talking and making each other laugh in a way that felt freewheeling and full of hope. The Saint-Porchaire was real. Its condition was excellent. The woman in Strasbourg was ready—eager!—to sell it to the museum. Brian had asked her to name a price, and she had shyly requested ten thousand euros.
“No,” said Sophie, her eyes wide.
“Yes.” Brian laughed tentatively.
“But you can’t do that to her.”
“Why not? She thinks she’s asking a lot. I’ll even get her a little more. She’ll be ecstatic!”
Sophie said nothing.
“What? Imagine the uproar it would create in her ex-husband’s family if she got, like, a million for it. It would tear them apart.”
“That’s hardly your problem. And anyway, the real value…”
“Value,” said Brian, kissing Sophie’s hand, “is a slippery concept.”
Sophie shook her head, letting him kiss her arm, her neck. She felt like calling the woman to say, “Show it to everyone! Start a bidding war! You have nothing to hide…everything to gain…” Maybe a million euros would create tensions in her family, but at least she wouldn’t have to deal with inconvenient piles of cash. She wouldn’t have to live weighed down with secrets and fear. And for a long, long time, she wouldn’t have to worry about the money running out.
As for Sophie, she wasn’t going to be paid for the website work for another month, so she was back to the shell game: making the minimum payment on her credit card, delaying the last payment to the oil company, paying the day care out of her thinning pile of twenties. She’d called several times to check on the status of her loan modification application, but each time she was told it was “being processed.” They also asked her, every time, to fax them another copy of her settlement papers, deed, mortgage note, tax return, and utility bill. For all she knew, the documents were sitting in the tray of a fax machine in some abandoned building in a ghostly office park, where mortgage notes blew like tumbleweeds through the empty streets.
She decided to pay a visit to some of her old clients, with muffins. She remembered, from her agency days, how art directors would swarm photography reps who brought in food. If this was what it took to lure her old colleagues out of their cubicles, she was not above it.
She picked a warm Friday morning in April, when the air was thick with the buttery smell of pear blossoms, when she knew agency creatives would be in the mood to linger in the kitchen. She stopped in to three Broad Street agencies, calling her old friends from the lobby, then handing out business cards as word spread throughout the office and people flocked to the oil-stained bakery boxes. Sophie was amazed by the number of cherubic new faces: the girls carefully draped in blazers and statement jewelry, the boys assiduously unshaven. She knew they’d be cracking open beers at their desks at five o’clock, then meeting up at McGillan’s or the Standard Tap…drinking pitcher after pitcher, then wobbling home, some in pairs, others alone, for a weekend of throwing Frisbees in a ball field, changing the color of their bedroom walls, shopping. Part of her ached for those youthful, meandering days, but part of her was glad to be rid of the anxiety that accompanied such a gravity-free existence.
Walking home afterward, her mind buzzed with self-congratulatory energy. Her old friends had remembered her; had asked to see pictures of her kids; had accepted her business card without hesitation. Muffins! Why hadn’t she thought of it before? Next week she’d hit the agencies around Rittenhouse Square.
She walked briskly up the hill from the Parkway, twirling her key ring around one finger as she turned down Hickory, marveling at her neighbor’s cherry tree, which had exploded into thick clots of pink petals almost overnight. She pushed open her front door and dropped her bag on the floor, then inhaled with a loud, sharp noise that caught up short in the back of her throat.
“Darling!” exclaimed Harry, his greeting tinged with a razor-thin glint of irony.
“Harry? How—is Brian home?”
“No, no. It’s just me. Relax.” He was sunk into an armchair, his legs languidly crossed. “I love your home. It’s so…working-class Victorian.”
“How did you get in?”
“Back alley. Kitchen window. You really should consider an alarm system.” He was holding a dingy canvas bag in his lap; the head of a claw hammer protruded from the top.
“This is a safe neighborhood. At least, it was.” Sophie took off her jacket and slowly hung it up. She felt a twinge of happiness, as always, at the sight of Harry’s freckled face. But she couldn’t understand why he had chosen to make such an unsavory entrance.
“Look, you weren’t around, and I didn’t want to hang about on the front stoop.”
“So you broke into my house? What the hell, Harry? You shouldn’t be here in the first place!”
Harry shrugged, then folded one hand in half, using the other hand to mash the fingers against his palm. He was wearing his leather driving gloves. “Have a seat, love.”
Sophie felt herself flush as she perched on the edge of the sofa opposite Harry. There were toys all over the floor, a stack of unused diapers, and a half-eaten bowl of Cheerios on the coffee table. “You could’ve called,” she said, combing her fingers through her hair.
“I didn’t want to waste any time. Listen, darling, I need your help, all right?”
“What is it?”
“It’s my client. The collector who’s been enjoying all of your…finds.” He waved his hand in the air. “He’s eager to make some more acquisitions, and he’s wondering what the holdup is.”
“I told you, Harry. I’m not doing it anymore.”
“Right.” He folded his hands over the tool bag. “Let me put this another way. My client has prevailed upon me to prevail upon you to come up with some more museum-quality merchandise. Tout de suite.” He pronounced this through cheerfully pursed lips.
“I’m sorry—” She was still struggling to absorb the sight of Harry—who had been walled off in a more tastefully decorated room of her life—here, among the diapers and Cheerios.
“All right, let me put this yet another way.” Harry was turning red. “Get me some more bloody stuff, and this time make sure it’s fucking good.”
Sophie blinked at him.
“I’m sorry, but you didn’t seem to be listening.”
“Get out of my house,” Sophie said shakily. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, but…but you need to leave.”
“You got him all worked into a lather over that Jamnitzer. That’s the problem—the fucking Jamnitzer. He thinks you’ve got more.”
“Yam? Nitzer?”
Harry sighed noisily. “Come on, love. Really? That mirror you brought me. The Jamnitzer.”
Sophie shook her head.
“Famous Nuremberg goldsmith? Sixteenth century? Worked for the Habsburgs?”
“Okay…” Sophie tried to recall the contours of the mirror. She’d known it was old, of course, but sixteenth century? Habsburgs? What was it doing sitting on a cart in Brian’s office? “I guess I don’t understand.”
“Debt,” Harry said, placing the tool bag on the floor. “Sometimes it forces us to take desperate measures.” He picked up one of Elliot’s fire trucks. “Let’s say I’m indebted to a certain collector who is starting to throw increasingly frequent tantrums. I try t
o distract him with a shiny new toy.” Harry turned the fire truck over in his hands. “It’s called a Jamnitzer. He loves it, but he wants more. I owe him more.” He picked up a small Matchbox car. “So you bring him a French Rococo snuffbox.” He hurled the car at the wall; it bounced onto the floor, leaving a small dent in the plaster. “Not good enough!”
“Hey!” cried Sophie.
“Then you bring him some more mediocre crap.” Harry hurled a plastic car at the wall; its wheels broke off with a clatter. “Not good enough!” He picked up a dump truck. “Not good enough!” His voice became a childish shriek as he flung the scissoring dump truck across the room. It crashed against the marble fireplace surround, narrowly missing a floor lamp. “I want fire trucks! I want fire trucks!”
Harry smoothed back his hair and carefully set the fire truck back on the floor. “We are dealing with someone who is accustomed to getting his way.”
“I thought you liked the Dutch bowl.” Sophie had backed into a corner of the sofa.
“That was definitely a step in the right direction, and I applaud your good taste. Now the question is, how can we continue to make our little boy feel loved and cared for?”
“Harry, I—”
“And just so you know—his fire trucks don’t have to be silver. Just as long as they’re sixteenth century. He’s open-minded! A nice Dutch painting would be perfectly fine.”
“It’s out of the question. The mirror was a fluke—I don’t know why it was there in the first place. And all the other stuff in storage is gone. They finished moving it.”
“And yet you are clearly a woman of great ingenuity and resourcefulness.”
“Please.”
“I would even say you have a gift. It also appears you could use a little more money.” He gestured toward the unrenovated powder room. “I had a peek in your loo. You realize that toilet doesn’t work?”
“I don’t care. I don’t want your money. I’ve told you, I’m done. Find someone else.” Sophie had never been one of those parents who laced their reprimands with a hint of uncertainty, or ended their orders with a rising question mark. One thing Lucy and Elliot had always been able to depend upon was the clarity of Sophie’s intentions.
