Chapter 4 - The Dinner
I shaved my head that morning in the bathroom of the motel where I'd moved Renata two days before.
I did it with a cheap set of clippers from the drugstore. She sat on the edge of the tub and watched, and about halfway through she started laughing, and the laughing tipped over into the other thing, and then came back to laughing.
"You look like a peeled potato," she said.
"I look like my wife."
We got to the house at six. My mother had set the dining room up right — the good tablecloth, candles lit, the china down. Shayla had bought a dress for the occasion.
Renata walked in beside me with no cap on.
My mother's face when the two of us came through the door was worth some fraction of what all of it cost.
"Cole," she said carefully, "you look absurd."
"Sit down, Mom."
Then Gerald Prewitt came in the front door behind us in a gray suit with a briefcase, and behind him a woman named Agent Holloway from the Defense investigative service, and behind her, in a cardigan, Maureen Callahan from two doors down.
Shayla stood up. "Who are all these people?"
"Sit down," I said. "All of you. Sit down."
I stood at the end of the table I'd eaten every childhood dinner at and set five folders on the cloth.
"One. There is no four hundred thousand dollars. I made it up in the backyard eleven days ago, about ninety seconds after you told twenty people my wife shaved her head because she'd lost her mind. Everything you've bought since then is on credit, and it is not my problem."
Shayla's mouth fell open. "You lied to us?"
I let that hang in the air a second, because coming out of her, it was almost beautiful.
"Two." I opened the next folder. "Renata has been covered under my family health plan for four years and one month. Not one day of a gap. She was told she wasn't covered. She was told there was a county waiting list. There is no county waiting list. Here are the enrollment packets, the yearly statements, and two replacement ID cards — every one of them mailed to this address, every one of them found in a tote in the garage under a string of Christmas lights."
"That mail comes in by the fistful, Cole. I can't be held responsible for—"
"They were rubber-banded together, Mom."
"Three." Third folder. "Twenty-two months ago, somebody filed a routing change on my housing allowance with my wife's signature on the spouse line. Renata has never laid eyes on this form. Agent Holloway has a handwriting comparison. That's a federal crime, and it's the reason there is a federal agent standing in your dining room right now."
My mother didn't look at the folder. She looked at Prewitt, then at Holloway, and I watched her run the same arithmetic she'd run on the lawn — what does this cost me, what can I still keep.
"Four." I set my phone on the tablecloth and played the seven-minute clip. All of it. The basket. The step. Four minutes with her hand on her chest. My mother stepping over her. And then, at 6:46, my mother's own voice, saying what she said about the lump and the laundry.
Shayla started crying around the ninety-second mark, and in two years I have never been able to decide whether it was for Renata or for the cruise.
"Five." Last folder. "This house is mine. The deed's mine. The loan's mine. The gate, the truck, the furniture, the cameras that just filmed you — all of it came out of the allotment, and the allotment came out of my paycheck. You don't own a nail in this building. You have thirty days. Mr. Prewitt has the notice."
My mother stood up.
And here is what she said. I've turned it over more than anything else from that night.
She said, "After everything I gave up for you."
Not a denial. Not one question about my wife, who was standing four feet away from her with no hair and a port in her chest. With a federal agent in the room, her first move was to hand me the bill.
"You want to know the worst part?" I said. "It isn't the money. You could have had the money. If you'd called me and said your mother wants the house redone, I'd have said yes and you know it. All you had to do was let her use the card that was already in the mail."
"She was faking."
"She had a mass the size of a plum in her chest and you told her to go finish the towels."
Renata spoke for the first time since we'd walked in. Very quietly. To my mother, not to me.
May you like
"All I asked you for was three hundred dollars."
My mother looked at her, and for one second — exactly one — something moved behind her face. I saw it. I still don't know what it was. Whatever it was, she folded it up and put it away, and then she turned to Prewitt and asked whether she could stay through the holidays.
