No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [51]
When they were done, I suggested grabbing some dinner on the way home.
“Are you sure?” Cynthia asked. “What with…our other expense of the moment?”
“I don’t care,” I said.
Cynthia gave me a devilish smile. “What is it with you? Ever since yesterday, you’re the most cheerful little boy in town.”
How could I tell her? How could I let her know how thrilled I was by Tess’s good news when she’d never been privy to the bad? She’d be happy that Tess was okay, but hurt that she’d been kept out of the loop.
“I just feel…optimistic,” I said.
“That Mr. Abagnall is going to find out something?”
“Not necessarily. I just feel as though we’ve turned a corner, that you—that we—have gone through some stressful times of late, and that we’re coming out of them.”
“Then I think I’ll have a glass of wine with dinner,” she said.
I returned her playful smile. “I think you should.”
“I’m going to have a milkshake,” Grace said. “With a cherry.”
When we got home from dinner, Grace vanished to watch something on the Discovery Channel about what Saturn’s rings are really made of, and Cynthia and I plunked ourselves down at the kitchen table. I was writing down numbers on a scratch pad, adding them up, doing them another way. This was where we always sat when faced with weighty financial decisions. Could we afford that second car? Would a trip to Disney World break the bank?
“I’m thinking,” I said, looking at the numbers, “that we could probably afford Mr. Abagnall for two weeks instead of just one. I don’t think it would put us in the poorhouse, you know?”
Cynthia put her hand over the one I was writing with. “I love you, you know.”
In the other room, someone on the TV said “Uranus” and Grace giggled.
“Did I ever tell you the time,” Cynthia asked, “when I ruined my mother’s James Taylor cassette?”
“No.”
“I must have been eleven or twelve, and Mom had lots of music—she loved James Taylor, Simon and Garfunkel and Neil Young and lots of others, but most of all she liked James Taylor. She said he could make her happy, and he could make her sad. One day, Mom made me mad about something, there was something I wanted to wear to school that was in the dirty clothes pile and I mouthed off because she hadn’t done her job.”
“That must have gone over well.”
“No kidding. She said if she wasn’t cleaning my clothes to my satisfaction, I knew where the washing machine was. So I popped open the cassette player she had in the kitchen, grabbed whatever tape was in there, and threw it on the floor. It busted open and the tape spilled out and the thing was ruined.”
I listened.
“I froze, I couldn’t even believe I’d done it, and I thought she’d kill me. But instead, she stopped what she was doing, went over, picked up the tape, calm as could be, had a look at which one it was, and said, ‘James Taylor. This is the one with “Your Smiling Face” on it. That’s my favorite. You know why I like that one?’ she asks me. ‘Because it starts off how every time I see your face, I have to smile myself, because I love you.’ Anyway, something like that. And she said, ‘That’s my favorite because every time I hear it, it makes me think of you, and how much I love you. And right about now, you need me to hear that song more than ever.’”
Cynthia’s eyes were wet.
“So after school, I took the bus over to the Post Mall and I found the cassette. JT, it was called. I bought it and brought it home, and I gave it to her. And she got all the cellophane wrapping off it and put the cassette into her player and asked me if I wanted to hear her favorite song.”
A single tear ran down her cheek and dropped onto the kitchen table. “I love that song,” Cynthia said. “And I miss her so much.”
Later, she phoned Tess. No special reason, just to talk. Afterward, she came up to the extra bedroom with the sewing machine and the computer, where I was typing a couple of notes to students on my old Royal, and her red eyes suggested that she had been crying again.
Tess, she told me, had thought she was very ill, terminal even, but it had turned out to be okay. “She said she didn’t want