The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [101]
A few hundred miles later, he was back in Sharon’s driveway, the very spot where the whole trip to Alaska had begun. He walked through her front door like a ghost.
“Where’s Natalie?” was the first thing Sharon asked him. He found himself stammering to explain that she was still in Anchorage with their newborn baby. “Why aren’t you with them? What are you doing here?” Sharon asked.
Breaking into tears, he confessed to her everything that had gone on with his father—the counterfeit plan, the road trip, his feeling that everyone was headed for disaster. The only thing Sharon could do was to throw out her hand to his and hope that he could hold on.
“We need to get Natalie back from there,” Sharon told him. “Get her back here, then you two can break away. You can leave the counterfeiting behind. You have three wonderful children.” She handed Art the telephone and told him to call Natalie and tell her to get on the next plane back to Texas. He dialed Chrissy’s, but he had been largely incommunicado for the last two weeks. When he got Natalie on the line and told her she needed to fly back, she was pissed.
“I’m not coming back unless you come get me,” she told him. “I’ve got two kids here and there’s equipment to destroy. You think you can just leave me to clean up the whole fucking mess you started up here? You’re wrong.”
Art and Sharon pleaded with her to come back on her own, but Natalie didn’t budge. She had compromised her needs for Art’s all summer, and unless he came and helped, she was planted. Reluctantly, he agreed to return to Anchorage the following day.
ART’S SENSE THAT HE WAS LOSING CONTROL OF EVENTS was not misplaced. Anice was not enthused that her husband had spent three weeks visiting with his first family, spending time among both the offspring and the turf of her old rival, Malinda. When Senior and Wensdae arrived at the airport in Anchorage, the reception she gave her stepdaughter was almost inhumanly cold. “Anice didn’t even say hello to me at the airport,” Wensdae recalls. “She ignored me, like she was looking through me. I haven’t seen this woman in twenty years and she’s still pretending I’m not there. It was disgusting. She was mad at my dad, probably for bringing me up there. Then they dumped me off at Chrissy’s. I knew it wasn’t my dad, but her.”
Senior knew of only one surefire way to disarm the situation with Anice, who after twenty years of having him to herself was now far less interesting to him than his children. He showed her some of Art’s bills, telling her excitedly about how they’d crossed the country, twice, dropping notes the entire way without receiving so much as an eye bat from a single cashier. He also told her that they had obtained equipment, and that he would soon learn Art’s secret of making the money himself. Thanks to Junior, they were about to become rich beyond their wildest dreams.
Art’s bills, combined with Senior’s story about the road trip, had an immediate and positive effect on Anice’s disposition. To bolster it even more, Senior gave his wife eleven hundred dollars as a taste, along with some basic instruction on how to pass. A few days later, she passed her first fake C-note at a local store, using it to buy two cartons of cigarettes. Senior and Anice had now broken one of da Vinci’s most important rules—they had spent money in their hometown.
It only took them a few more days to break another one. Having experienced the thrill of passing, Anice was thoroughly