No longer did he need to keep moving from hotel to hotel. Then again, he had no home anyway. A hotel was the best he was going to do for a while. Maybe someday he’d get back together with Andrea, this time as two equals who’d each been through some hard times and emerged in the light. Maybe they’d buy a big-boned, rambling house together on Francis Ave in Cambridge.
Maybe not.
The point was, he had money now. No doubt three-million-plus dollars was pocket change to a rich person, to some hedge fund titan, but by Rick’s lights it was a lot. If he shared it with his sister, which seemed only fair, that was still 1.7 million dollars. Maybe not a fortune, but it was enough to buy a future. And it took some of the sting out of that handshake with Pappas.
Anyway, it was all in how you looked at it, right? Maybe Pappas was right and Rick had won. The money was his to hold on to now, whosever it originally was, whether it was clean or dirty or clean and dirty. The war was over. Lenny was dead, and there was no more reason to fight on.
Rick was feeling better, physically. It still hurt when he moved, or when he coughed, but not as acutely. His bruises were purpling. He did some errands. His replacement credit cards arrived. He went to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get a replacement driver’s license. He thought briefly about checking out of the DoubleTree and into the Mandarin, or the Four Seasons, in the Back Bay. After all, he had more than three million bucks in storage. Why not live it up?
But that felt wasteful. The DoubleTree was perfectly fine.
He drove over to the storage unit. He was sure he was no longer being followed, but he couldn’t give up the ingrained habit of scoping out the parking garage, looking in the rearview. No one, as far as he could tell, was following him. He unlocked the unit and took a few wads of cash, then he drove over to the old house. He had some debts to pay.
No one grabbed him, no one followed him. No one was there.
He was safe.
He took Marlon and Santiago aside, one by one, and handed each of them a thousand dollars in DoubleTree envelopes. “Thank you,” he said. Was a thousand dollars too little? They’d saved his life after all. He owed them a lot more than that. True, they’d saved his life by accident; they were really intending to grab his money. But no matter how they came to it, they’d saved his life. That was the important thing.
Staring him up and down, Marlon said, “Somebody beat the shit out you. They finally catch up with you?”
“It had to happen eventually,” Rick said.
“Yeah? Tell us who did it.”
Rick shook his head. “It’s over,” he said.
They were hanging drywall. Marlon was measuring eight-by-four-foot sheets of drywall with a T-square, scoring them with a utility knife. Jeff was fastening the large cut squares of Sheetrock to the bare studs using a screw gun.
Rick waited for Jeff to finish screw-gunning a cut of Sheetrock. “You guys are really making progress.”
“We should be wrapped up within the week,” Jeff said. “There’s this and some skim coating and painting and then the floors, and that’s all she wrote.”
“That’s excellent,” Rick said. He had no plans to ever move back in. As soon as it was finished, it would go on the market.
Before it sold, though, he’d have to go through it and remove any personal objects, anything of value. By now there couldn’t be much left. Wendy had come with a moving van some years ago. He’d taken whatever was important to him, mostly some books from childhood and school. But Lenny’s stuff remained. That was the most of it. There was clothing to give away, a couple of file cabinets to go through and mostly discard. He had a lot of old LPs, mostly sixties folk singers like Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Judy Collins. Hipsters collected LPs these days. He could probably unload some boxes at the Back Bay office in a matter of minutes. Though he’d probably hold on to the Judy Collins. Then there were his father’s books, from his study, all of which had been moved down to the basement in boxes.
“Hey, Jeff, got a second?” Rick said.
“What’s up?” Jeff said. “You okay?”
“Not as bad as it looks.”
“You know who did it, don’t you?”
Rick nodded. “Yeah, and that’s why I wanted to tell you-forget what I told you about asking questions.”
Jeff looked puzzled.
“About the Big Dig. I asked you to see if you might know someone… I’m just saying, don’t.”
“Okay, whatever you say,” Jeff said. “Let me ask you something. How much you have this place insured for?”
Rick shook his head. “I don’t know, maybe three hundred thousand?”
“It’s already worth a lot more. You should boost the insurance to a million five.”
“That much, huh? Wow.”
“Do it right away, man.”
“Okay, Jeff, thanks-I will.”
He went downstairs to do a quick survey of possessions. On the way he passed through the kitchen. All the old pots and pans were still hanging on their hooks on the pegboard, coated with plaster dust like snow. He ran a finger over the cast-iron skillet. The plaster dust was stuck to the oil residue. That was the pan Lenny used to make salami and eggs for Rick’s breakfast, several times a week, after Mom had died. Rick didn’t particularly like salami and eggs, but he’d once made the mistake of praising it and Lenny kept making it for him.
The basement was filled with crap, with old toys Rick had once begged Lenny to buy for him, he just had to have. Things that were once of paramount importance, used once or twice, then discarded. Castaways of abandoned passions. Snowshoes. A mountain bike. The electric guitar, the drum set, the oil paints, the chemistry set. Rick didn’t remember whether he ever thanked him.
He found the boxes labeled STUDY. Most of them contained law books. He had no idea whether they were dross or might have value. In one of the boxes he found a familiar-looking book: Walden and Other Writings by Henry David Thoreau, with a very sixties dust jacket, a curvy, groovy Peter Max-like font. Rick had often seen that book on his father’s desk, open to one of Thoreau’s little essays. Sometimes Lenny would read from it at night. He had loved Thoreau. He liked to quote one of Thoreau’s maxims: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Rick wondered whether his father had lived a life of quiet desperation. Probably so. At least he heard the beat of a different drummer, that was for sure.
Rick had once said something snotty, some kind of hurtful thing to Lenny, he didn’t remember what he’d said, and he waited to see how his father would respond. Instead, Lenny seemed to will himself into silence. There was the intake of breath, then the pursed lips. The small shake of the head. Dad disliked conflict.
The weight of things unsaid: At first, it was light, like a dusting of snowflakes. In time, it grew heavy, like six feet of hard pack.
That Thoreau book Rick would hold on to, even though he never shared his father’s enthusiasm for Thoreau. It was important to Lenny, so it was important to Rick.
He noticed his father’s old computer and removed its cover. This he’d have to throw away. He plugged it in and started it up. It crunched and grunted and eventually the green letters appeared on the screen. He took one of the 5 1/4-inch floppies from a box and inserted it into the disk drive and waited for the directory to load up.
CORRESPONDENCE/BUSINESS one folder was labeled.
CORRESPONDENCE/PERSONAL was another.
He opened Correspondence/Personal. He felt strange doing this. He was rifling through his father’s private letters. Did his death make that okay? Did you lose the right to privacy when you died?