I know that he’s speaking the truth. In two or three meals, Mrs. Berner, Aurelia Berner, will do whatever I tell her because she trusts me and because she’s lonely and wants to keep me as her friend or maybe as a fill-in for the kids who left for California. And I think that if it weren’t me, it would certainly be someone else taking her money. And it isn’t her money anyhow. It would be her money if she knew what her home was worth and she doesn’t, so why should she make a fortune off a house and property she can’t even use anymore?
Each time I visit the Berners I take something else, two of the snow globes, an old copy of Robinson Crusoe, a porcelain doll. I take three more perfume bottles. As we walk in the house I sometimes run my hand over the place where I took an object or two. I wonder where she keeps her cash, the money she probably pays a neighbor kid to do her grocery shopping.
I ask her once if she needs someone to do her grocery shopping.
I pick up a load of groceries for her and when I return with them I tell her they cost twice as much as they did. I want her to question me, to ask for a receipt. Instead she hands me fifty bucks for some cold cuts and fruit, bread, vegetables for a salad, and a few boxes of rice.
Old man Berner marks me some trails he hiked when he could walk and tells me what I’ll see: “Thick red spruce and those nice fir trees in the highlands and lower down the sugar maples we get our syrup from, and beech and yellow birch, and animals, Randall, that you can’t see anywhere else: Indian bats, grouses and loons, worm snakes and bog turtles, and turkey vultures.” He reminds me a little of a turkey vulture, though I don’t tell him that.
After a month or so, Eddie calls me in my room. “Did you get the check I sent?” he asks. My room looks like an antique shop. My place is filled with beautiful items taken from the Berners’ house. I’ve dusted them all. I collected enough money from two things I sold to buy a secondhand TV and an electric razor. Soon I will have a great deal more than that. Eddie will pay me 3 percent of the profits, which could bring me about eight thousand dollars.
“They want out of there, Eddie. They’re ready to sign whatever I bring over.”
“Get her to sign and then give her the check. Make it fair. Ninety thousand just like we talked about. We’re not in the business of ripping people off. We can’t get that reputation.”
It is clear he’s convincing himself here and that he’d want to pay less. If he could get away with it, Eddie would buy their land for twenty-four dollars like the deal Peter Stuyvesant worked out for Manhattan.
The next weeks are freezing cold, the roads iced solid and scary to drive on. The winds whip harshly through whatever I put on. The snows come strong out of nowhere and I am forever scraping ice from my windows, knocking it out from under my boots. On my way home from the Berners’ one night I am stuck in a whiteout, white all around me, and I cannot tell which direction is forward. There aren’t any sounds. My tires are high off the road in a snow cloud. I slow to about five miles an hour and then I cut the engine. I step out of the car and let the snow fall on me and for just a moment I feel like a six-year-old.
When I get back in and start driving again, it takes me two hours to go a distance that should take twenty minutes.
At night I watch TV just to hear the voices. I take long walks and then I turn on the news. There’s a small mention of the man who killed the old couple in Utica. He claims he never meant to kill them. He meant to rob them but the old guy pulled out a knife. The reporter said the knife was the old man’s Swiss Army knife and the blade was smaller than four inches.
On the night of a particularly loud and icy storm, I barricade myself in blankets against the sounds outside. I wear layers of sweaters and shirts. Before I go to sleep my phone rings.
“Randall?”
It’s Mrs. Berner.
“There are two windows I can’t get closed. They’re wide open and the heat’s going right through them. I’m afraid he’ll… I’m afraid Mr. Berner will freeze if we don’t get the windows closed.”
They are hard to close even for me. I pull and pull and then I begin banging on them. I pour steaming water in the openings and then smear butter in the hinges. The cold air washes in against my face. Finally one budges and in another few minutes I’ve got the other closed.
Mrs. Berner gasps. And then she gives me a beautiful smile. We sit in her kitchen and drink hot chocolate, and the sound of old Roury Berner snoring, loud and steady, comforts us both, like the sound of the logs crackling in the wood-burning stove.
Sunday the sun comes out strong. The ground begins to thaw. I eat turkey at the Berners’. Mr. Berner eats a few bites of dinner with us and then heads back to bed.
“I guess we’ve been pressing our good luck,” Mrs. Berner says. “He’s getting worse living here. He’s going downhill.”
After dinner I bring out the papers. Mrs. Berner looks them over closely. She shuts me out for a while and I think for a moment she might lose her nerve and decide to stay. But then she looks up at me and smiles.
“You might want to think about this awhile.”
“I have,” she says. “Where do I sign?”
I show her.
“Now I give you this check for ninety thousand. You fill out a check for two thousand and make it out to me. That’s a transaction fee.”
“Transaction fee. Okay.”
“That leaves you with eighty-eight thousand.”
“That’s plenty.”
And then we have nothing to say to each other. I drink my hot chocolate and she drinks hers.
Half an hour later I pull my coat on to leave.
“Randall,” she says before I’m out the door.
“Yes,” I say.
“We want you to have those things. I wanted you to know that.”
“What?”
“The things you’ve been taking. We want you to enjoy them.”
I feel dizzy suddenly. I can hear Mr. Berner coughing.
“You’re welcome to have anything of ours you want. We don’t have anyone to give things to anymore. You know what that’s like?”
“Thank you,” I say.
“I picture our things in your little apartment over the general store. I picture you taking them into your home when you buy one. You’ll have a nice home, one day. Maybe you’ll choose to stay around here. We’d like you to. We’d like you to think of us as your family.”
“Thank you,” I say. I tell her I’ll help her move.
“You’re not who you think you are,” she says before I can get away. “Give it time. I know. You’ll find your peace.”
The door is open, but I stand still and seen before her, unable to move, overcome with a feeling I cannot name — the sense of being followed.
“You think you’re stealing, but it’s yours, don’t you see? Always was. You’re forgiven, Randall. Money shouldn’t divide. The past is over and done.”
It’s clear from her eyes she’s talking about someone else, someone she blames herself for losing years ago, but I pretend she’s talking to me.
“We love you very much,” she says.
“I know that,” I say.
How to Fall
I rode up to the snow-blessed hills of Vermont on a ski trip for singles. I did. Two overheated buses full of women and men between the ages of twenty-two and thirty drinking flavored vodka from plastic martini glasses, and trying to mask their awkwardness. My college roommate, Amanda, dragged me along, in part for company, but mostly to extract me from the ditch I’d dropped into since things ended with Mitchell. I was permitted to mention Mitchell once — for under ten minutes — Amanda said. The subject was otherwise off-limits.