And you’re one of them, Yale didn’t say. He said, “Maybe it would be best if we met Nora at the bank in the morning, to finish this up. At the safe deposit box.”
Debra appeared behind Frank. “Everything okay, Dad?”
“Gallery boy’s leaving now,” Frank said.
Yale and Roman and Bill put their coats on in the living room, and Yale took a pencil from his pocket to copy the number off the tag on Nora’s phone.
Debra would drive her to the bank at 10 a.m. Stanley promised he’d be there too.
“Me three,” Frank said, and his wife scratched his neck soothingly with her pink nails.
* * *
—
At 6:30 that evening, Herbert Snow called them at the B&B: He’d gotten as far as Waukegan and turned around. He’d start again in the morning. “Can you be here by ten?” Yale said. Why the hell had he turned around? Why hadn’t he just stayed there and saved an hour tomorrow? “You’ll need to leave around five thirty, is the thing.”
He said, “I’ll do my best.”
* * *
—
They went to dinner—“To celebrate!” Bill said, though Yale felt it was a terrible jinx to say so—and wound up ordering three bottles of wine. They were the only people in the restaurant until a wedding party came in—not for the reception but simply to eat after the reception, which had just been cake, as Roman learned and reported back after he’d stumbled over to congratulate the bride and groom—and the two parties both stayed so late that the waiters, by the end, were scrubbing the same nearby tables over and over, clearing their throats. Bill told Yale and Roman a story about Dolly’s father, a concert pianist who had once courted one of Rachmaninoff’s daughters. He kept refilling Roman’s glass the second it was halfway empty. Bill got drunk enough that soon he was doing all the talking, and all of it was directed at Roman anyway, so Yale was free to lean back and stew. He was relatively sober; he’d be the one driving.
The art, he reminded himself, might still be forged. Even if everything worked out, there was still the possibility, however remote, that their trouble getting into the house today, and all this protestation, were part of some long, crazy con behind which Frank was the mastermind. But what in the world could these people gain from it? Not money.
Yale had never been able to take good fortune on its own terms. His fear of being tricked went back to at least sixth grade, to the day the basketball roster was posted and a classmate added Yale’s name to the list in careful mimicry of the coach’s handwriting. Yale showed up for practice unaware he’d been cut, and the coach looked at him and, with no trace of meanness, said, “Mr. Tishman, what are you doing here?” Behind him, the team had laughed and coughed and pounded each other’s backs. While they ran laps for punishment, the coach asked Yale if he’d like to be the equipment manager. He didn’t look surprised when Yale said no.
This had been followed by a thousand small cruelties over the next seven years of school, a thousand baits and traps. And all the while, Yale had tried, hopelessly, to trick everyone around him about the biggest thing of all, hoping against hope that they’d fall for his professed crush on Helen Appelbaum, his ogling of the girls’ volleyball team. But they never did, and Yale understood that he would always be the tricked, never the tricker. It was why part of him had assumed, the night of Nico’s memorial, that he was the victim of some coordinated meanness. And perhaps it was for similar reasons that Charlie had assumed even worse things that night. Charlie had it worse growing up, English schools being what they were.
But Yale was a grown man, and even if the world wasn’t always a good place, he reminded himself that he could trust his perceptions now. Things were so often exactly what they seemed to be. Take Bill Lindsey here, leaning across the table to Roman, talking about the art professor who “really opened me up, if you know what I mean.” Take the snow out the window, falling so deliberately. Take the waiter, checking his watch.
2015
Fiona covered as much ground as she could that afternoon, figuring that even if Claire was no longer here, someone who’d known her when she had been here could be