The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt Page 0,96

and she took out her checkbook. She said to me, ‘Goldie, I know your son needs this computer for his schoolwork. Please let me do this thing for you, my friend, and you pay me when you can.’ ”

“You see?” said Jose, unexpectedly fierce, glancing back from the television, where the woman was standing in a graveyard now, arguing with a tycoon-looking guy in sunglasses. “That’s your mother that did that.” He nodded at the money, almost angrily. “Sí, es verdad, she was Class A. She cared about people you know? Most women? They spend that money on gold earrings or perfume or some things for themselves like that.”

I felt strange taking the money, for all sorts of reasons. Even in my shock, something about the story felt dodgy (what kind of store would deliver a computer that wasn’t paid for?). Later, I wondered: did I look that destitute, that the doormen had taken up a collection for me? I still don’t know where the money came from; and I wish I had asked more questions, but I was so stunned by everything that had happened that day (and more than anything by the sudden appearance of my dad, and Xandra) that if Goldie had confronted me and tried to give me a piece of old chewing gum he’d scraped off the floor I would have held out my hand and taken it just as obediently.

“None of my business, you know,” Jose said, looking over my head as he said it, “but if I was you, I wouldn’t tell anybody about that money. You know what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, put it in your pocket,” said Goldie. “Don’t walk around waving it out in your hand like that. Plenty of people on the street would kill you for that much cash.”

“Plenty of people in this building!” said Jose, overcome with sudden laughter.

“Ha!” said Goldie, cracking up himself, and then said something in Spanish I didn’t understand.

“Cuidado,” said Jose—wagging his head in the way he did, mock-serious, but unable to keep from smiling. “That’s why they don’t let Goldie and me work on the same floor,” he said to me. “They got to keep us separated. We have too good a time.”

xix.

ONCE DAD AND XANDRA showed up, things started moving fast. At dinner that night (at a touristy restaurant I was surprised my dad had chosen), he took a call at the table from somebody at my mother’s insurance company—which, even all these years later, I wish I’d been able to hear better. But the restaurant was loud and Xandra (between gulps of white wine—maybe he’d quit drinking, but she sure hadn’t) was alternately complaining because she couldn’t smoke and telling me in a sort of unfocused way how she’d learned to practice witchcraft out of a library book when she was in high school, somewhere in Fort Lauderdale. (“Actually, Wicca it’s called. It’s an earth religion.”) With anyone else, I would have asked exactly what it involved, being a witch (spells and sacrifices? deal with the devil?) but before I had a chance she’d moved on, how she’d had the opportunity to go to college and was sorry she hadn’t done it (“I’ll tell you what I was interested in. English history and like that. Henry the Eighth, Mary Queen of Scots”). But she’d ended up not going to college at all because she’d been too obsessed with this guy. “Obsessed,” she hissed, fixing me with her sharp, no-color eyes.

Why being obsessed with the guy kept Xandra from going to college, I never found out, because my dad got off the phone. He ordered (and it gave me a funny feeling) a bottle of champagne.

“I can’t drink this whole damn thing,” said Xandra, who was into her second glass of wine. “It’ll give me a headache.”

“Well, if I can’t have champagne, you might as well have some,” my father said, leaning back in his chair.

Xandra nodded at me. “Let him have some,” she said. “Waiter, bring another glass.”

“Sorry,” said the waiter, a hard-edged Italian guy who looked like he was used to dealing with out-of-control tourists. “No alcohol if he’s under eighteen.”

Xandra started scrabbling in her purse. She was wearing a brown halter dress, and she had blusher, or bronzer, or some brownish powder brushed under her cheekbones in such a strong line that I had an urge to smudge it in with my fingertip.

“Let’s go outside and have a smoke,” she said to my father. There was a long moment where