When the knock came, I didn’t think before opening the door.
Lance Harding was wearing a pink suit with a red shirt and no tie. I wondered then if agents of the FRC had a dress code.
“Mr. Vaness,” he said.
“I’m so glad to see you,” I said, opening the door wide and ushering him in to my clean house. “Come in, come in.”
Sitting in the same chairs as before, we faced each other. Harding crossed his left leg over the right one and nodded.
“I wanted to call you, but I couldn’t find a number for the FRC in the Yellow Pages,” I said. “I planned to get on somebody’s computer and look it up soon.”
“Why were you looking for us?”
“You,” I said. “I wanted to ask you something that I didn’t think of the last time we met.”
“And what was that?”
“You mentioned my real father when we talked before. Do you know when he died?”
When Harding reached into his breast pocket, I was reminded of the fear I had of him the first time he sat at my table.
He came out with a small notepad and flipped through the pages. He stopped for a moment, reading something, and then turned a leaf.
“Nineteen seventy-four,” he said, “when you were two years old. He was found murdered in the home of a young prostitute named Pearl Watson.”
“Do you know if anybody claimed the body?”
“Have you gone to see your daughter?” the FRC agent asked.
“How do you even know to ask that?”
“I’m here with another final request.”
“Another five thousand dollars?”
“Have you visited your daughter?”
“Yes. Yes, I have.”
“Do you love her?”
“I do. But what does that have to do with you?”
Instead of answering, Harding took another ivory envelope from his pocket.
Again he handed me the letter.
Again I hesitated.
When at last I accepted the final request, I expected Harding to leap up and leave, like he did the first time. But he remained seated, staring at me.
“I am supposed to wait for a reply,” he said.
“A reply to a dead man?”
Harding hunched his shoulders, and I tore open the envelope.
Dear Roger,
By now you’ve probably met Sovie and I know because you’re reading this letter you at least say that you love her. I’ve been telling Dearby that I’ve been visiting with Althea because she has cancer and is dying. Althea does have cancer and she is dying but I’ve also been doing my old thing in her house on her phone. Seems like bookies are back in style. I couldn’t tell Dearby because she’d want the money I’m making and I needed that money for Sovie. I also needed to tell you about your daughter and to make sure that you cared for her.
The FRC agent sitting in front of you has a third letter. This one has a legal document saying that the bearer of this letter should be allowed access to my safe deposit box at Concordia Bank in downtown Cincinnati. There’s $137,941.00 in that box.
I saved that money for Sovie but I owe you something too. And so you can either accept the document and help the child with her bills or you can turn the whole thing over to her and let her decide how to handle it.
It’s up to you, Little Brother.
I folded the note and put it in my pocket.
“I got another question for you, Mr. Harding.”
“Yes?”
“Do you take in trainee agents now and then?”
“Yes.”
“Could I apply for that job?”
“I can make the proper connections. I happen to need an assistant, and your background fits our major criteria.”
“Then you give that letter you got in your pocket to Sojourner Alexander and send me the application form.”
The Letter
My wife, Corrine, and I had the same financial advisors — Walton, Barth, and Wright. The firm uses oversize light blue envelopes with its return address printed in red in the upper left-hand corner. The partners’ names are writ large in block lettering, while the address, in italic print a quarter the size, sits on a single line just below. We had separate accounts with the firm, but I took care of most of the correspondence. Corrine doesn’t have much patience with finances and had been more than happy to let me take care of our accounts, taxes, and monthly bills.
“Just show me where to sign,” she’d say when I tried to explain the forms and requests.
So on that Wednesday morning, when I saw that Corrine had laid two of the WBW blue envelopes on the dinette table in the nook, I picked them up and put them in my briefcase to read at lunchtime.
“Do you have time for breakfast?” I called down the slender hallway.
Corrine stuck her head out from the bathroom while rubbing a tan towel against her head vigorously. Her coppery skin glistened slightly from the moisture of the shower. Dark gold freckles tempered the serious cast of her face.
“I thought you said you were late.”
I could see her right breast. The nipple was a dark rose, a kind of in-between color from her mixed parentage.
“I am, but I thought we could sit together for a bit. We haven’t really talked in a week.”
“I don’t have time to cook,” she said and then ducked back into the bathroom.
“We could have cereal,” I suggested, raising my voice to be sure I was heard.
“I’m watching my carbs.”
“You’re not fat.”
“You don’t have to be fat to be careful about what you’re eating.” She came out from the bathroom with the towel wrapped around her, then went the other way down the hall toward our bedroom.
I wondered what she would do if I ran after her and pushed her down on the bed. Would she resist? Push me away? There was no desire in this idle musing. I didn’t want to have sex with her. We’d been together for nearly twenty years, since she was twenty-one and I thirty-five. We didn’t have sex much anymore, and when we did there was usually some red wine and a little blue pill involved.
I hadn’t needed chemical help the three times that I’d had affairs. When I was with a new woman in a secret place, I could do things the way I did when I was in my twenties... or at least my thirties.
My last affair had been with a Korean woman, Donella Kim, who had temped in my office for a month or so. I didn’t call her until after she’d left Korn/Wills. After that we rutted like rabbits for almost six weeks.
During that time I fell behind in my work, came home late every night, and never had sex once with Corrine. She noticed, but I blamed a muscle strain, and she seemed to accept the excuse.
In the end it was Donella who broke off the relationship.
“I don’t want to do this anymore, Frank,” she said, when I called her from my office, also on a Wednesday.
“But I love you,” I said. My tongue had gone dry, and a dying rodent was keening in my chest.
She hesitated.
I didn’t love her, but I didn’t want to lose her either. She made me feel alive, and life was, to my mind, better than love. Life was a sweet thing no matter how old you got.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Corrine. I didn’t think so on the morning Donella broke up with me — but I was wrong. As bad as I felt about the abrupt break from Donella, Corrine had the power to devastate my heart and not even know it.
“No, you don’t,” Donella said over the phone, three months past. “You just want the sex and the excitement.”
“How can you break up with me and not even talk about it?” I asked. “Don’t you care for me?”