“We won’t bother you. We just want to talk, okay?” The voice was male, unbright, and on my left.
“Then let me go!”
And he did. So did the other pair of hands. I adjusted my hat and looked up at the oversize, alleged spawn of the late Wynn Teller. “Don’t touch me again, you understand?” I said.
Adam looked cowed, but Eve put her hands on her solid hips. “I ask your help in the name of sisterhood,” she said.
“Where are you from?”
“Buffalo, why?”
“Because in the other forty-nine, people don’t talk that way anymore, okay? Enough that you’re saying you’re Teller’s daughter. Don’t get it all confused by saying you’re my sister, too.”
“It’s not meant the same—”
“Listen, I’m a teacher. I get a forty-five minute lunch break and nearly half of that is gone. Talk fast and follow me.”
“You were there. You could testify.”
We passed a sadistic nanny forcing a little boy in a snowsuit to play despite the wind-chill factor. The game he chose was called kick the nanny.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Our father,” Adam said. I thought he was praying. “He’s dead,” he continued.
“My condolences, of course.”
“No, you don’t get it. How are we going to prove he’s our father now? But you were there, in the office, a witness. Remember?”
I did, but so what, and how the devil did they remember me? I asked all of that while we hustled along.
“We went back this morning, asked Glenda, the receptionist, and she had your name in the appointment book, and then there was the record from when you interviewed of where you worked and everything.”
“They’re open? Today? Business as usual?”
“Maybe not as usual,” Eve said. “But yes, open. What does that have to do with anything?”
I didn’t think she’d be interested in my need to deliver my résumé and references, which I’d now do right after school. “Look here,” I said, “the truth is, I don’t remember much about what was or wasn’t said. Certainly nothing that would stand up in court.” We entered the aroma zone of a deli. They followed me in and stood sniffing, Eve with less obvious pleasure than Adam. I suspected she only ate third world foods, like yak butter, but her political correctness seemed peripheral when she thought she was in line for Daddy’s bucks. Scummies, I’d heard the genus called. Socially Conscious Unless Money Is Involved.
While I was ordering, she poked me in the shoulder. “You teach literature, right? I’ll bet you only read the standard dead white men.”
I shook my head and ordered a container of vegetable soup and a pastrami sandwich. “Hardly,” I told her with my sparklingest, sisterhoodiest smile. “You’ll be glad to know that I’ve dropped Hawthorne and Twain so we’d have time to do the entire Barbara Cartland canon. Every book she wrote.”
When we left, Adam and I had matching takeout bags. Eve already had heartburn from her own raging anger.
“Come on.” She grabbed my arm again.
“I warned you!” I looked around for a patrolman. I didn’t see one, but Eve let go anyway. I still wished I’d seen a patrolman.
“I never had your advantages,” she said in a shrill voice that made me less than upset about her sufferings, real or imagined. “I never went to college to become an English teacher.”
“I had a scholarship.” I stupidly defended myself when I didn’t have to.
“My mother had to scrub floors,” Eve shouted, “and—”
“She never scrubbed floors,” Adam said. “Our floors were always a mess.”
“It’s a metaphor! Give me a break, you pig! Bad enough I had to share a womb with you!”
Maybe it wasn’t the heating system at Philly Prep. Maybe everybody’s brains were being sucked out the holes in the ozone layer, even up in Buffalo. I vowed never to use an aerosol again.
“Look, Miss—” Adam began.
“Miss! How many times do I have to tell you not to identify women by their married condition!” Eve sighed histrionically.
I always think of myself as a nonviolent person, so I’m shocked by how often I have the urge to slug somebody. Like now. In the name of sisterhood. Even though I do prefer
Ms.
Nonviolently.
“The thing is, there were letters,” Adam said.
“You don’t have to tell her everything!”
“But we couldn’t find them. I mean, we have the ones he wrote our mother, but they’re vague, you know? Like they say
idea
instead of spelling it out. Like:
Your idea sounds very interesting.
But the ones she wrote him, they said it, like let’s have tutoring centers. We need those letters. For proof, you know?”
What I knew was that Adam Teller couldn’t walk and talk at the same time. Every time he had to do so much as think, he stopped in his tracks and placed himself so that he blocked me. I considered an end run, but then looked at his formidable sister and held off. “It was her idea, you know,” he said. “He said it had gone belly-up. He lied.”
“Men!” Eve snarled. It was amazing how much subtext that teensy word could contain, and how often I’d heard that subtext lately.
“Whatever the letters might say, why on earth would he have kept them all these years?” I asked, moving us along.
Adam stopped again. “Because she said he did that.”
“Be quiet, would you?” Eve said.
“Stop bossing me! She thinks she can do that because she’s seven minutes older than me,” he said. That thought stopped our progression again. “Mom says he keeps everything, that’s why, and a leopard doesn’t change its spots, Mom says.”
“Did you…” I wasn’t sure how to phrase the question. “How do you know the letters are missing?”
Eve slitted her eyes and clamped her mouth shut.
Adam, open-eyed, didn’t even have to stop walking for this one. “Because they weren’t there!”
“At the house, you mean?” I asked softly.
Adam nodded. Of course. The looted family room. I wondered if they’d done a number at the center, too.
“So the only avenue left is to have witnesses testify that he identified us as his children,” Eve said.
“What does that have to do with your mother’s having originated the centers?”
This was a long pause, an enormous pause during which I considered the size of the two of them. A quarterback must feel this way now and then, I decided.
I was not without fear. We were at the far corner of the square, out of sight of the school, and anything was possible. They wanted something, anything—recompense for whatever ails life had dumped on them up in Buffalo. Somehow I’d become the magic provider of it.
They had not found what they wanted last night, and Wynn Teller was dead now. It was possible that was cause and effect.
If I couldn’t save them, or if they thought I wouldn’t, they could toss me in a dumpster and nobody would ever know what had happened.
“Mom’s not so sure she can find the marriage certificate,” Adam said. “She’s not so sure that their wedding was, like…completely official. By the court’s standards, that is. And you can write any name on a birth certificate, so…”
“Why? Why are you telling her all this?” Eve screeched.
“Because she could tell them!”
“Who?”
“Her! She could tell the judge she heard him say we were his children! She could get us to inherit. Don’t you understand?”
They were squaring off, readying themselves to do battle, expressions as dense as their muscles. I decided I preferred the milder craziness inside the schoolhouse walls, and I bolted.
But not fast enough. His legs were longer, his arms like Plastic Man’s, and he grabbed and held me.
“Let me go!” I screamed.
“You have to!” he shouted. “You have to tell them!”
“You’re hurting me!” As if he cared. He clamped both my arms behind me. My soup and sandwich dropped. It was not a pretty sight, carrot cubes and cooked peas splatted on the sidewalk. “Let me go!” I screamed again.
And then, out of the sagebrush, or really, from behind the triangle of dormant hedge, a favorite spot for smoking, came
the thundering troops to the rescue. Truly.
“Yo!” a voice shouted. “Lay off!”
I turned, using Adam’s moment of stupefaction—he couldn’t be stupefied and grasp at the same time, either—to pull free.
“Don’t you be abusin’ my teacher!” Rita screamed, full force. “Don’t you be abusin’ anybody, you hear, scumbag?”
And behind her, Colleen, her less thundering echo. “Yeah,” Colleen said. “Yeah.”
And behind Colleen, a body-builder type, so proud of his pecs he barely covered them even now, in arctic weather. The infamous Ronny Spingle, I was sure—
bad news
stamped on him like U.S. Prime Beef on a steak. But not now. Right now, suitably intimidated by Rita and Colleen, he, too, strutted forward, fists clenched. “Yeah,” he said. “Lay off, pea-brain.”
I loved Rita, loved Colleen, felt kindly to Ronny Spingle and his pecs, loved fly tattoos and weird hairdos and running with them away from the scary duo, laughing, then stopping at the doorway, out of breath and kissing them all.
“I learned good, huh, Teach?” Rita said.
I didn’t dream of correcting her grammar. She was right. She had learned good.
Sixteen
THIS TIME, THE THIRD AFTERNOON IN A ROW I’D STOOD OUTSIDE HER CUTOUT window, Glenda Carter squinted at me as if just maybe she had seen me somewhere before. The outer office was empty except for me and the potted plant. Someone had removed the framed magazine story with the glowing photograph of Wynn Teller. That was probably tactful and correct, but I nonetheless shivered at the speed with which people disappear, trace by trace.
I was about to hand Glenda my packet and be on my way when Mr. Schmidt emerged from his office. “Miss Pepper, isn’t it?” he said, coming close. “Neil Quigley’s friend and associate. You’ve been a regular visitor lately, haven’t you?”
“I forgot to leave my résumé when I interviewed.” I felt shy, as if he were the principal and I had committed some offense.
He smiled and took my credentials packet and waved toward his office.
“I was already interviewed,” I said.
“I know, but in the light of what’s happened…perhaps we could talk a moment? It’ll be a pleasant break for me. Things are somewhat confused here today.”
“Understandably,” I said. “In fact, I didn’t think you’d be open at all.” We were in his office, a Spartan, utilitarian box without a personalizing touch. The office of the former foundling looked institutional and overwhelmed—there was an enormous stack of papers and files on his desk. Everything but the gray-green file folders continued the monotonous beige color scheme, including Schmidt himself, whose fair skin and sandy hair nearly disappeared into his surroundings, like a hidden picture.
He settled on one of the two pale chairs in front of his desk, seeming ill-at-ease, awkward. I could understand why Wynn, so much more the showman, so much more expansive, had done all their publicity and promotion, and why I tended to forget the second name in Teller-Schmidt Learning Centers. “We’ll certainly close for the funeral,” he said, “but there are so many loose ends. The franchise owners, for example, need to know this doesn’t mean we’re out of business.”
He was going to have to stop using
we.
His partner was dead and he was not royalty.
He returned to the business at hand: me. “In all honesty,” Clifford Schmidt said, “I was pleased—and surprised—to see another Philly Prep teacher apply. I don’t mean to speak harshly of your good friend, but Quigley is not the best spokesman for TLC.”
“Well, I…he…” Schmidt’s awkwardness was catching.
He drummed his fingers on my manila envelope. “I trust you do not share his…impractical approach to life.” He stopped drumming and looked embarrassed. “Showing my bias, aren’t I? I admit I’m a practical man. I care about the bottom line, the big picture. It’s not romantic-sounding, but it keeps a business afloat.” He studied me for a too-long moment. “Neil, on the other hand…But it appears that, despite his reservations, he encouraged you to join us.” He waited for confirmation.
For Neil’s sake, I couldn’t admit that he’d very explicitly warned everybody off. “He made it sound intriguing.” I hoped that covered all vague bases and pleasantries.
“Intriguing, eh?”
“And potentially profitable,” I added with a smile.
“Ah.” He tented his fingers and looked meditative.
We might have continued indefinitely except that my stomach growled. Audibly. I looked at my watch and spoke loudly, hoping he hadn’t heard. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’m running late.” For sustenance. “Was there something specific you wanted to ask?”
“Oh, no. I didn’t mean to detain you.” He smiled, fleetingly, but with some charm. “Only wanted to get to know you a bit now that Wynn…” He sighed. “I’ll have to—all the things he took care of and knew…” He stood up. “Oh,” he said, “everything is so…”
So changed, so lost, so final, so confusing, I thought as I left the practical man trying to make sense of his mountain of papers and files.
* * *
Macavity can smell cat food straight through the tin, and he is particularly gallant and attentive whenever I come home bearing groceries. He purred. He preened. He groomed my ankle. If he ever learns to work a can opener, he’ll have no further use for me, but until then, I appreciate the attention. I gave him an extra-long and serious under-ear scratching plus the promised gourmet treat.
I watched him eat with envy. I was suffering post-traumatic pastrami and soup loss and had never intended to diet quite this stringently. It was time to compensate. However, I can handle either a complicated life or a complicated cuisine, not both at the same time. Given recent history, dinner had to be a plate-size sedative. In fact, dinner, which was lunch, too, had to be breakfast. I scrambled eggs, toasted a muffin, and ate standing up while I listened to my messages.
Mackenzie’s syllables were smudged. He was agitated, which served him right. He assured me that it was for the best for everybody that Lydia had stopped being a fugitive. He was more worried about me and my mood of late. “So why don’t you join”—I perked up—“us”—I perked down—“at Nuevo. The place on South Street? Say seven-thirty?”