“Christ, no, I’m not a bloody idiot. I hid in the bathroom, didn’t answer their knock, yeah? But they were looking for you. I could hear them asking your neighbor if this was where you lived.”
“Lisa? What did she say?”
“She said she didn’t know your name. Right cheeky, that one.”
Thank you, Lisa, I think. “Did they tell her what they wanted to talk to me about?” Lachlan shakes his head. “Well, if it was something serious, they wouldn’t have come politely knocking on my door.” There’s a falter in my voice. “Right?”
I turn to see my mother standing there, a plate of crackers in her hand. Her eyes swing from me to Lachlan and back again, and I realize that I’ve been talking much too loudly.
“What did you do?” she asks.
And at that, I am momentarily silenced, because how am I supposed to answer that?
For three years, while my mother has been too ill to work, I’ve supported us. As far as we’re both concerned, I am a private antiques dealer, filling the homes of east side hipsters with mid-century Scandinavian design and Brazilian modernism. To that end, I keep a ten-by-twenty storefront in Highland Park, with a handful of dusty Torbj?rn Afdal pieces in the window, and a sign that says BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. A few times a week, I drive to the shop and sit there in the quiet, reading novels and studying Instagram on my laptop. (It’s also a useful way to launder the money I make in other, less legal ways.)
And so I pretend that I have somehow parlayed twenty percent commissions on the occasional cabinet into a six-figure income that covers both of our living expenses, plus a fortune in medical bills and my outstanding college loans. Improbable, perhaps, but not impossible. Yet my mother surely suspects the truth. After all, she’s a con (more specifically, a former con), too; she’s the one who introduced me to Lachlan in the first place.
My mother and Lachlan met at a high-stakes poker game she was working four years back, when she still could work. “Cons recognize cons when we see one,” as Lachlan explained it to me. Professional respect evolved into friendship, although Lily fell ill before they ever had a chance to do a job together. By the time I was summoned to Los Angeles to take care of her, Lily could barely get out of bed, and Lachlan had stepped in to give her a hand.
This, at least, is what Lachlan tells me. My mother and I don’t discuss Lachlan’s profession at all, having buried it alongside other untouchable topics like family, and failure, and death.
So, surely she’s wondered if Lachlan turned me into a con, too—if we aren’t just “clubbing” when we disappear at night—but we tiptoe around the subject, walking a careful line between pretense and willful blindness. Even if she does suspect the truth, I could never admit it out loud to her. I couldn’t bear to witness my mother’s disappointment in me.
But now I wonder if I was an idiot to think that I had ever fooled her. Because judging by the expression on her face, she knows exactly why the police were at our door.
“I did nothing,” I say quickly. “Don’t worry about it. I’m sure it’s a mistake.”
But I can tell by the way my mom’s eyes dart back and forth across mine that she is worrying. She looks over my shoulder at Lachlan and her face changes as she reads something there.
“You should leave,” she says flatly. “Right now. Get out of town. Before they come back.”
I laugh. Leave. Of course.
If there’s one thing my mother was a real expert at when I was growing up, it was leaving. The first time we left was the night that my mother chased my father out of our apartment with a shotgun, when I was seven, but by my count we left again nearly two dozen times before I graduated from high school. We left when we couldn’t cover the rent; we left when a jealous wife showed up on our doorstep; we left when the police did