Chapter 10
DOLL
Iask Angel to give me his knife.
He hands it over grip first, no lecture about the blade, and then he does the hardest thing a man built like him can do. He sits down on the floor across from me and waits.
The tape is ten years old, amber and brittle.
It parts under the edge with a sound like a held breath let go.
I fold the flaps back on the first box. With Angel by my side, I find the strength to open it and my mother’s kitchen comes up at me.
Not the smell. The smell is long gone. The order of it.
Cookbook on top, the fat one with the cracked spine, because she used it most and I packed how she taught me.
Heavy and loved goes on top where you can reach it.
The cover still has a ghost of flour in the grain.
I open it at random, roast chicken, and there she is in the margin in blue ballpoint, arguing.
Serves 6, the book claims. LIES, my mother answers.
Serves 4 Hales, one of them Danny. Two pages on, next to a cake, no notes at all, only a grease spot shaped like a thumb, and I put my thumb on it until I can breathe around it.
“My mother fought with this book for years,” I tell Angel. “She never once lost.”
“Sounds like the winning kind.”
“She was.”
He doesn’t reach into the box or for me.
He sits with his forearms on his knees and lets me hand him what I hand him.
It comes to me slowly, somewhere between the cake page and the bundle of wooden spoons she’d have never let anyone throw out that this is more naked than last night.
Last night I gave him a kiss. This morning he’s watching me take my childhood out of a box.
The records are my father’s, stacked on their edges, never flat, house rule.
I walk my fingers down the spines and stop where I knew I’d stop.
The singer with the name one letter off from the man who owns my uncle.
Dad and I used to shout the chorus “Hit me with your rhythm stick” and make Mom laugh.
I pull the record out and lay it on top of the cookbook.
“This one needs a player,” I say.
“Then I’ll find you a player.”
He says it with no ceremony, and I already know there’ll be a turntable in this clubhouse by the weekend.
There’s a shoebox of loose photos too, my mother’s single failure of order.
I deal them out on the floorboards like solitaire.
Me at seven, gap-toothed and filthy, riding my father’s shoulders with both fists in his hair.
My mother mid-laugh at a picnic table, waving the camera off and ruining her own objection by laughing.
The three of us at Ocean Shores squinting into the wind, written on the back in her hand. Danny, June, Sloaney. ’11.
I was loud, in these pictures. Muddy. Somebody’s whole entire kid.
I pick the shoulders one and hold it out. Angel takes it in both hands like it might go off, and looks at it as long as it deserves.
“There she is,” he says.
Three words, and I have to look at the wall for a while.
The envelope waits until last. My name in my own fat marker, twelve years old and already learning.
The week I moved into Victor’s house my winter coat disappeared for a month, and by that weekend I understood what kind of place I was in.
Anything that mattered had to live where he wouldn’t think to look.
The envelope moved a lot. Under a mattress, inside a boot, under a bed slat.
Inside, a photo strip from the booth at the fair, four frames of us making the same face in three sizes. And a shoelace, knotted, threaded through my mother’s wedding ring. Thin gold.
I don’t cry the whole time. Only now, not much, and Angel does the exact right thing, which is nothing. His hand lands on my ankle and stays. An anchor, not a fence.
“Twelve-year-old me thought Victor might sell it,” I say, when I can. “Twelve-year-old me was probably right.”
The second box is books. A bank statement falls out of the third book I lift.
My father’s favorite, the fat one about the patient man who comes back rich and ruins everybody who buried him. The paper is folded in threes, soft at the creases, doing bookmark duty. Habit makes me open it flat and smooth it. Ten years as somebody’s assistant. I read documents before I decide to.
Then I read it twice more and the number doesn’t change.
It’s a joint account. Daniel and June Hale. The statement is dated four months before the accident, and the balance is three hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars.
“Doll?”
My voice comes out level, the office voice, the one I use for delivering other people’s bad news.
“He told me there was nothing.” I turn the paper so Angel can see it.
“Victor. He stood in the kitchen with the funeral flowers still on the table and told me my parents left debts, a mortgage, and nothing else. My brother’s charity case, he called me on the phone two nights ago.
I earned my keep for ten years against a debt that never existed. ”
Angel reads the number. Nothing on him moves except the paper, one corner trembling, and it takes me a moment to work out that the tremble is his hand.
Yesterday my hands shook on a banister and he walked me home without a word about it.
I reach over and hold the far edge of the statement steady, and we sit like that for a breath, my parents’ money flat between us.
“Cash,” he says finally. He gets up, helps me stand, opens the door. “We need to talk to Cash.”
Cash settles at the large table in the common room with his laptop, and Angel gives him the statement.
“Victor told me my parents died broke,” I say.
Cash reads the statement and frowns.
“This is a probate question,” he says slowly. “Ten years old, but Glitch is going to enjoy this.” He takes his phone out and takes a picture of the statement. “Anything else in these boxes I should know about?”
“No,” I say. “Everything else in these boxes is mine.”
“Fine,” he says. “It’s time for church anyway.”
“Church?”
“That’s what we call our meetings,” Angel explains.
“And I’ll give you a preview of what we’ll talk about,” Cash says.
“Glitch cracked the shells last night. Looks like Ian Durey brought the Quinlans in as investors. The pitch language is all over the setup. Passive money, Pacific Northwest development, clean returns, scrutiny-proof. The family’s money enters through vehicles so legitimate you could show a banker.
That’s the product Ian sold his cousins.
An investment machine for clean money that never breaks. ”
“But Brightmoor …” I say.
“Brightmoor is the opposite of the pitch. Forced guardianships, elder abuse and all that jazz …”
“He hid it from them?” I ask.
“That’s my read.”
“They never came to Halcyon,” I say. “The Quinlans. All the meetings, it was only ever Ian. He introduced himself as the family’s man in Seattle.”
“And he was, according to what Glitch found,” Cash says. “But he fucked up when he decided to strong-arm the reluctant sellers. This is not the clean investment he had promised his cousins.”
“So Victor isn’t the only one afraid. Ian is one phone call from his cousins finding out what they actually invested in,” Angel says.
Cash looks at me for a long second, and then at Angel. “The club will need all you know. You’re an asset.”
“She’s not an asset,” Angel says.
“I disagree. I’m an excellent asset.” It comes out with a laugh in it. “Now go do your thing.”
They go to Bishop with their new theory, and I return to my room where I loop the shoelace over my head. My mother’s ring settles under my shirt, flat against my breastbone, warm in a second.
For ten years Victor made me carry his whole life.
From now on, I’ll only carry mine.