would have been an easy lift, only I couldn’t get my head free to take the weight on my shoulders. I crawled back out.
“What?” she said.
“It’s probably not all that heavy, but I can’t lift it like you do a squat. And I don’t think I can hand-press it from my knees.”
Rena went over to the desk. She looked at it a long time. Then she said, “It has to go up, but it doesn’t have to go up level. Just lift one end, okay? When you get that up, slide your left shoulder underneath. Put your left palm up, like you were getting ready to press. Then just slide your palm more to the left. Slow, just a little at a time. When you get it far enough over, you push with the one hand and I’ll haul up on it, too. Then you’ll be able to get your right hand inside.”
She showed me with her hands what she was telling me to do. I could see it.
“Okay? Now, when you get both palms under it, just push. Like it was a … I don’t know what you call it, but I saw you do it. In the gym, I mean.”
She was right, too. Once I got one end up, the rest was easy. I got my palms under it, bent my knees, drove it up, just like doing a squat-thrust. One with serious weight to it—the damn desk felt like it was made of lead.
Only one rep! I kept saying to myself. I can hold this up all night. For a minute, I thought I might have to. I couldn’t look around, but I could feel Rena wasn’t in the room anymore.
But then I felt her against me. Smelled her. Her, not her perfume. I couldn’t see what she was doing, but I could see a flashlight, so I knew where she’d run off to.
I heard a couple of little taps against the wood, and something dropped on my head. It didn’t knock me out or anything, but the surprise almost made me drop the desk.
“I’ve got it,” I heard her say. “Let it down easy, okay? I’ll help.”
In the living room, I watched her unwrap something in white tissue paper. She did it like she was disconnecting an alarm. Inside all that paper, there was a little bag. It looked real old, like it was once red but faded to a brownish color now.
Like the thumbprint in Solly’s book, I thought to myself. I knew that little bag had to be Jewish. There was a gold star embroidered on the front with Jewish writing inside it. Underneath, there was like a whirly thing, also in gold, and two green-leaf things coming out of each side. The bottom was all gold fringe.
“It’s his tallit,” she said, real soft.
“His what?”
“His prayer shawl. That’s what’s inside that bag. You get one of these when you’re bar-mitzvahed. On your thirteenth birthday. For Jews, that makes you a man. In the temple, you wear it over your shoulders.”
“How come you know all this?”
“Albie told me, what do you think?”
“You went with him? To the—?”
“No! And Albie didn’t go, either.”
“Well, Solly said this was something Albie left to you. In his will, I mean. Doesn’t that prove Solly has it?”
She didn’t say anything. For a long time.
She was still sitting there, with that little bag in her lap, when I got up and walked back to that suite.
It took me a while. By the time I got there, a whole set of books was on my bed. Big, thick ones.
Albie’s ledgers, I guess. Because that little blue book Solly wanted, it wasn’t there.
It was still nighttime when she came back to where I was—3:51, with a blinking sun. There was enough light from the hall for me to see she only had her underwear on.
She lay down next to me. Before I had a chance to even think about what was going on, she put her lips against my ear.
“We have to get out of here, Sugar.”
“Now?”
“Right now. Pack up your stuff. Everything, understand?”
“What about your—?”
“The keys are in the Lincoln,” she said, stepping over what I wanted to ask her. “Put all your stuff in the trunk. Then come back to the living room. I’ll have stuff, too. A lot more than yours. If it doesn’t fit in the trunk, we’ll just throw it into the back seat.”
“What hap—?”
She put her finger over my mouth. Then she jumped up and ran out