The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [20]
She had recently read an article that applied gaming theory to the eternal topic of why there were so many great single women. Again, as all such articles did, it concluded that women should just settle. Yet she couldn’t recall anything that advised men to settle. They were the ones encouraged to hold out for everything, and to trade up to a new, flashier model.
“I know our age difference doesn’t matter to you now,” she said to Crow that evening, “but don’t you think you’ll find it a drag to be married to a, say, fifty-year-old when you’re forty-four?”
“I am going to take the television away,” Crow said. “Between Oprah and Judge Judy, you are just loaded for bear by the time I come home.”
“I wonder if they’re still checking Carole Epstein’s credit cards.”
“I’m sure they are.” It was becoming Crow’s weary refrain.
“And her debit card, too. What other marks do we leave in this world? How else can we be traced?”
“Try to settle down, Tess.”
But “settle down” reminded her of settling, period, and she was furious again. Dissatisfied by conversation with Crow, she decided to talk to her daughter, who seemed to be kicking her feet rhythmically, as antsy about confinement as Dempsey.
Don’t ever settle, Fifi. Don’t get married just because it’s still marketed as the ultimate achievement for women.
On the other hand, learn to value men for something other than their paychecks. Your father was a bookstore clerk and an underemployed musician when we started dating. Now he’s a partner in a restaurant/bar with good music every weekend. He still doesn’t make much money, though. I support us. Or did, before you put the kibosh on everything. Do you realize how much your college fund will miss these extra weeks of work I’ve had to sacrifice? Do you know about compound interest yet? Look, in today’s economy, you need to start putting stuff away in the womb.
Yet the economy was good for private detectives. More small businesses suspected theft among their employees. Insurance fraud was rampant. Even with Mrs. Blossom as a partner, she was doing fine.
Don Epstein—Don Epstein, on the other hand, owned check-cashing stores. Check-cashing stores that had belonged to his first wife’s father, but became his exclusively when she died. She wondered if these stores thrived in the current economy, or if they had a lot of defaults. She wondered if Carole Epstein had life insurance. She wondered how long someone had to go missing before you could collect on life insurance. She wondered—
But perhaps she had worn herself out, or her future daughter had decided enough was enough and Mom needed to go down for a nap. She fell asleep at the disgracefully early hour of 9:00 p.m. Snapshot of your future, as Whitney might have said. Except for the ten hours of sleep that followed.
Chapter 7
Tess Monaghan did not always appreciate her parents as much as she should. Who ever has? In her childhood, her mother was . . . well, a mother, an obstacle to be surmounted. Judith Monaghan also had an unfortunate predilection for overmatching. Shoes matched purse matched dress matched earrings matched bracelets. A secretary at the National Security Agency, she insisted she could never speak of her job at home, hinting that she was privy to too many secrets.
But as Tess moved into her thirties, she began to discern that her mother’s wardrobe was the result of a fiercely misdirected energy. Born a mere decade later, Judith Weinstein Monaghan might have been given a chance to apply her impeccable sense of organization to . . . well, whatever NSA did. (Despite reading The Puzzle Palace, Tess was still fuzzy on the details.) Meanwhile, growing up with a maybe-spy for a mother had the happy bonus of sharpening Tess’s wits, teaching her to be a much more sophisticated sneak.
As for her father, Patrick Monaghan, the world’s most taciturn Irishman, Tess had once yearned for him to be everything he was not—voluble, dashing, a literary bon vivant who held forth on the work of James Joyce. If she wasn’t such a snob then,