Golden Age

2000

JANET WAS on the verge of deciding that the whole thing wasn’t her business after all when the last call came in, from Loretta in Antigua. Janet looked at her watch; it was ten in Palo Alto, so it might be two in Antigua, time for lunch. Loretta said, “Did they call you and tell you they found him?”

“Yes, he’s at the ranch. He sneaked in in the night, and your mom found him in one of the guest rooms after the school called her.”

“I can’t believe the school let him escape.”

“I don’t think the grounds are fenced or anything; I mean, I’ve only driven past it, but it’s not high-security.”

“Shit.”

“How long are you in Antigua?”

“We just got here two days ago, so two weeks. Magnus has a sailing yacht. This afternoon, we’re headed for Montserrat.”

Janet looked at the mirror on her closet door and made a face like a dog growling.

“—can you please go get him and take him back? I would be so grateful. I don’t dare ask my mom to do it — she shouldn’t be driving at all, she says her shoulders hurt too much. Dad only drives on the ranch.”

Janet heard herself say, “I can do that. It’s — what? — an hour and a half. Jonah has art class after school today, so I don’t have to pick him up until four. That’s six hours from now.” After all, she had never been to the ranch.

“I love you,” said Loretta. “Michael thinks—” But then the connection failed, and Janet never heard this piece of very interesting information.

When she got there, Chance was on a horse in the arena beside the barn, practicing spins and slides. Janet had never seen him on a horse. She recognized at once that this was his real self, not the neatly trimmed and well-clothed boy she saw at restaurants or when she’d picked him up at SFO a couple of times. His heels were down, his body was limber, his shoulders were loose, and his cowboy hat (Janet would have put him in a riding helmet) was dirty and well used — it fit him perfectly. What was he, sixteen or seventeen? Janet couldn’t remember. Then she looked again, and saw that there were several Angus calves milling in a pen attached to the arena, and that Chance had his riata looped over the horn of his saddle. She walked toward the calves, and one of them put his nose through the fence and mooed. That was when Chance saw her.

He cantered over, slid to an easy halt. He said, “Aunt Janet. You came to get me.”

“I did,” said Janet.

“Mom sent you.”

“She did,” said Janet. “What’s your horse’s name?” Janet reached through the fence and tickled the chestnut on the cheek.

Chance said, “Bogey. Grandma named him. He has a sister named Bacall.” When Janet grinned, he asked, “How’s Emily doing with Pattycake?”

“I don’t know who hates the New England weather more, Emily or Pattycake. They should have gone to Pomona.”

“Grandma says I can stay here. The season is about to begin. I’m going to practice for the spring, and then go on the circuit.”

“What circuit?”

“Roping.”

“What about school?”

“I hate school.”

Janet knew that if this were Jonah talking she would be hitting the roof, but that was Loretta’s job.

“Is your grandmother in on this?”

“Gran thinks I have talent and should use it while I can. Bogey is thirteen, we’ve trained him perfectly, he’s peaking, and so am I.” He sounded very reasonable. He patted the horse and said, “Reining horses take a long time to grow up. Grandpop told me that when he gave him to me, when I was in first grade.”

Janet said, “Don’t you graduate this year? Just graduate, then do it.”

“Nope.”

Janet climbed onto the lowest railing of the fence and leaned over it, grabbing Bogey’s rein. She said, “Chance. It’s four months. Graduate.”

“Mom already sent my college applications in. Georgetown, St. Louis U., Fordham. Not Notre Dame, because it’s not Jesuit.”

“What does your dad say?”

“Do you mean Michael or Father?”

Janet barked a laugh, but Chance wasn’t joking. She said, “Michael, I guess.”

“He says, fuck you.”

To whom? thought Janet. But she said, “Okay, even so, I think we can work this out. Just come with me—”

Bogey started backing up, fast, tucking his chin, flopping his ears, right out of her grasp. Then he spun, and a moment later, Chance and Bogey were galloping across the arena, then through the open gate at the far end. Janet stood up, shadowed her eyes, saw them disappear around the barn, and then reappear moments later, galloping up a trail that crossed a hillside behind the house. They were going fast.

Janet drove to the house. Loretta’s mom was standing in the doorway, a little hunched, perhaps waiting for her. She said, “He’s a very stubborn boy,” as she stepped back to let Janet in. It was now twelve-forty-five.

Janet said, “I wonder where in the world he gets that.”

“I say nothing,” said Gail Perroni. Janet had liked her every time they met — three or four times now.

Of course there was food. Gail led her into the kitchen, where two places were set. She said, “I thought you might be hungry. Pop is out with Teo — that’s the foreman — checking the fence line at the far end of the ranch; heavens, that’s miles and hours away. And a good thing. I’m going to have to break him in easy to having Chance here.”

Janet said, “I thought he was crazy about Chance.”

“Oh, he is, but he’s going to be just like Lori about this. I’ve spent her whole life trying not to be outnumbered by the two of them.”

She ladled out what looked like tortilla soup, then offered Janet crisp tortilla strips, slices of avocado, and chopped tomatoes for garnish. She said, “I’m having iced tea, but we have some Cokes somewhere.”

“Iced tea is fine,” said Janet as she pulled out her chair. The soup looked so good that the trip became worth it.

Gail looked at her bowl with pleasure, then began eating. She seemed very relaxed. Once Janet had eaten some, and taken a few sips of her tea, Gail said, “I guess you’ll have to leave by two, in case you hit traffic.”

Janet said, “I guess Chance won’t be going with me.”

“Oh, I doubt he’ll be back by then. Bogey can be out all day. He’s as fit as they come.”

They continued to eat.

Gail touched her napkin to her lips — very gently, since she was wearing lipstick, a fuchsia-orange, and plenty of rouge, too. Janet said, “Loretta is very upset.”

“She’ll be fine. A fait accompli is about the only thing that has ever worked with that girl.”

To the best of Janet’s knowledge, Loretta was not yet forty-five. Gail looked older than her own mom, but that could be years of sun. Gail tipped her soup bowl and spooned out the last bite, then helped herself to another slice of avocado. Then she sighed, and smiled. She said, “Well, I feel a lot better now. So — I knew this was coming.”

“Did he say something over Christmas?”

“I knew this was coming sixteen years ago, when Dalla — Remember her? She was the nanny? — she would say to me, ‘Ma’am, do you think that boy can hear? I call him and I call him, and he just walks away.’ So we did a test. He was stacking blocks, and we sneaked up behind him — you know, to clap or something? Well, he heard us coming, no problem. Nope, he hears you fine, but only when you are saying what he’s interested in. It isn’t going to do him one bit of harm to take time off from that prison in Portola Valley. I don’t know why she sent him out here. I told her not to, but she would do it her way. If he goes out on the circuit for a year, he’ll learn that that’s a hard life. A friend of ours had a boy who was determined to be a rodeo clown. He did that for exactly a year and screamed to come home, and Jane, that was his mom, she said, ‘Nope, you do it till you’ve learned all about it.’ It’s dangerous. He lasted a good four years.” She stood up and picked up her bowl, then Janet’s. “Now he’s a vet. Even vet school is a breeze compared to being a rodeo clown.”

“Who tells Loretta?”

“Don’t you have caller ID?”

“On my phone?”

Gail nodded. “Then you don’t need to answer, do you?”

“Will she ever speak to me again?”

“Oh, she’ll come back from the Caribbean, and then she’ll come out here fit to be tied, and then that boy’ll show her what he can do on that horse, and it’s a sight, I’m telling you. And he’ll kiss her and hug her and pooch out his lips and say, ‘C’mom, Ma, please?’ And she’ll stomp around the house for an hour and maybe go call that priest, whatever his name is, but she’ll come around.”

Janet said, “Is she going to be mad at you?”

Gail looked relaxed in a cat-that-ate-the-canary sort of way. “I’m used to that, believe me.”

Then Janet said, “Can I call you when I need parenting advice?”

Now Gail squeezed her across the shoulders. Then she nodded and said, “Almost two now. Takes twenty minutes just to get out to the road.”

As she got into her car, Janet decided that this was, indeed, a Perroni matter, not a Langdon matter. Of course, a part of her thought Loretta was getting what she deserved, but another part of her applied this lesson to Jonah — when and if Jonah were to put his foot down, would Janet then be getting what was coming to her for encouraging, or not discouraging, Chance? Janet had never told any of her Palo Alto friends about her period with the Peoples Temple; they thought she and Jared were fresh out of the East, Minnesota, Iowa, vaguely New Jersey. Nor did she often go into the city, as different as it was now from the chaos it had been in those days. No one she knew now could imagine what San Francisco was like in the 1970s, and she didn’t know anyone now that she had been close to in the Temple. She hadn’t heard from Marla, who was teaching theater at Wellesley and doing occasional plays in Boston and the Berkshires, in seven years. She doubted she would recognize anyone else besides Lucas — ah, Lucas (was he the love of her life?) — who was putting on weight and had safely moved on from youthful good-looking nice young African American man roles to more substantive and weathered father roles, mostly on the TV, though she had seen him twice in movies. And that was a good thing.

When she arrived at the school twelve minutes past her usual time, Jonah wasn’t the last child waiting — only the second to last. She apologized to the teacher. Jonah was sitting quietly on the wall that ran along the drive, kicking his heels against the bricks. When he saw her, he sighed and jumped to the ground. He dragged his backpack to the car, picking it up only when the teacher said, “Come on, Jonah, you can carry that.”

Janet opened his door, and Jonah got into his car seat. He was small, and she still had nightmares about him slithering under the belts of his very expensive Britax and rolling up like a millipede beneath the passenger’s seat. He was, she had to admit, much like Emily had been at his age, reserved and suspicious. She suspected that those who discussed this behind her back agreed that he got it from her.

Two days later, she was brave enough to answer the phone even though she could tell the number was international. It was Loretta. But she wasn’t angry. She thanked Janet for “doing her best” and said her parents’ “united front” with Chance against her and Michael was like the Great Wall of China. Loretta knew better than to argue at her age.

—

AFTER BILL BRADLEY dropped out of the presidential race in March, Riley stopped speaking to Richie. Riley’s support for Bradley had rather surprised Richie, since Gore said a lot more about global warming. But Riley’s mother had mentioned to Riley that when she was working in a factory of some sort in 1968, the minimum wage had been $1.60, and her mother had, in fact, been paid $1.75. Now the minimum wage was $5.15, but Riley calculated that, according to inflation, it should be $8.00. That $2.85 per hour times however many minimum-wage workers there were in the United States was the exact price of the Clinton administration’s failures of character and policy, and Riley thought Gore was a fraud, though with a small “f,” not with a capital “F,” like those sleazy Clintons (nor did she believe a thing the Republicans said about their activities in Arkansas). Nadie (whom Richie still saw once in a while, although she said that her relationship with him had convinced her that she was a lesbian, and he should take that as a compliment) said that they were living in a fool’s paradise if they thought that (a) Bradley had a chance and (b) Bradley was a real liberal, but Riley was nothing if not stubborn. Her attitude had hardened toward everyone except, Richie thought, Charlie. Charlie had had a revelation in the fall, on the Appalachian Trail, and was now getting ready to apply to nursing school after taking a few courses that he’d missed in college. He wanted to be a nurse and an EMT trauma specialist — one of those guys who fly to people who find themselves on narrow cliffs overlooking precipitous valleys and must be rescued by someone swinging from a rope underneath a helicopter. Riley was very enthusiastic — she said school would keep him occupied for at least three years. The nursing school wasn’t far from their apartment.

Ivy, too, found herself single again. The first thing that happened, around New Year’s, was that Ivy uncovered the fact that the billionaire was sleeping with a twenty-three-year-old M.B.A. student at NYU. When she confronted him, he asked her to marry him, and for about a week she considered this option, but then, at a party at the manse in New Rochelle, a woman she had met through him said, “Oh, heavens, Ivy, don’t you know Bob’s philosophy of the bedroom? ‘A wife, a mistress, and a bit on the side.’ ” According to Ivy, who came to Washington with Leo and spent the weekend on Richie’s couch, Bob had confessed that wifely duties were rather more arduous, and possibly less rewarding, than mistress duties, but he still considered marrying him to be a promotion, and so she let things go along, apparently congenially, until Valentine’s Day, when she sent him a breakup valentine. For Richie, as for many divorced men with no talent for being single, the fantasy of reuniting with Ivy persisted, but in fact that would mean weekends together with Leo. Leo was much easier one to one. Ivy said that it was her experience that the marriages that lasted forever were in fact the worst ones. Richie knew she meant Michael and Loretta, and he wasn’t about to disagree with her — the screaming matches about Chance (with the monsignor refereeing from the sidelines) were as loud as he’d ever heard. They did not argue about whether or not Chance was going to spend the next year or so trailering Bogey and Bacall from rodeo to rodeo all over the West (and maybe up to Calgary) — he was. Rather, they argued about who was to blame, either because of a failure of parenting styles or because of dysfunctional genes. Tia and Binky seemed to get the message, though: they got all A’s and did what they were told.

As for Richie’s reelection campaign, his seat was safe — his opponent this time was a thirty-year-old possibly being trained to do such basic operations as read, add, subtract, and sign checks. The boy’s main qualifications as a candidate were an aggressive posture and a readiness to say, “I would like to see what Congressman Langdon has actually done for the businessmen of the ninth district!” The national Democratic Party was on track to raise more money than the Republicans, and more money than they had ever raised before since the fall of Rome. It seemed to Richie that all he had to do to get funds was smile and say thank you; his coffers were at $560,000, including what he hadn’t spent the last time. Nadie found this worrisome, as did her girlfriend who ran a fitness gym in Arlington that was full of Republican women in leotards (“She has claw marks all over her body,” said Nadie). But Richie felt good — he felt that he, too, had survived, just like Clinton and Gore. What he said about Clinton on the campaign trail was that he admired the man. Watching him get through his presidency was like watching someone strolling along on the other side of a nice green hedge. He was smiling, he was chatting on his mobile phone, he was enjoying the landscape, and he seemed to know where he was going and what he was doing. And then there was a break in the hedge, and you saw that vicious dogs were attached to both of his ankles by their teeth, growling, biting, being dragged across the grass, refusing to let go. Riley was right in her way, but Richie thought he was also right, and the donations pouring into Democratic coffers seemed to demonstrate that the voters thought that anyone would be better than the Republicans.

—

JESSE HAD DECIDED, with some input from Jen and her brothers, that it was better to raise GMO crops than not to do so, and the logic was simple: There was only so much land, and the world population was rising faster and faster. A farmer’s primary moral obligation was to avoid famine and soil loss, and, at least for now, GMO corn and beans were doing that. You had to be careful, you had to be precise, but Jesse was. His dad might have been a saint (every time he’d said this, his dad shook his head), but when he started farming in the 1930s (and grew his own hybrid seed, according to an old story), things were much different. The GMO corn Jesse planted was Roundup-resistant, like his beans. He could and did make the ecological case.

It must have been mid-August, and hot, when Jesse was driving on the other side of Denby, past the Gorman place on Quarry Road, and saw three heads in the cornfield, just visible above the very green and very tall rows. He didn’t think anything of it; no one else mentioned it at the café. But after Labor Day, it came out that Bill Gorman had gotten some legal papers in the mail accusing him of stealing Monsanto property, and Jesse thought of those heads, in feed caps, looking down, pausing once or twice. He realized that those men had been taking samples of Bill’s plants — maybe leaves, maybe kernels — and then they must have tested the genetic material. At first, according to Russ Pinckard, Bill treated this as a joke — he really did think some prankster had forged some papers in order to tease him for not using Roundup Ready seed, which was expensive and picky. Then he had put off addressing it; there was too much else to do around the farm, around any farm, especially at harvest, to waste your time looking for a lawyer and dealing with something that was obviously crap.

Except that he then got a bill, or something of the sort, saying that he owed Monsanto money for stealing their property. Rumors abounded concerning the amount of money—$1,500, $15,000, $34,500. No one, least of all Bill, could take this seriously, and then he went to a lawyer in Usherton with the papers, and the lawyer had never heard of such a thing. However, a lawyer in Des Moines had heard of such a thing. When Bill pointed out (in a rather loud voice) that he did not use Monsanto seed and never had, it was suggested that pollen from the neighboring farm, which belonged to a big operation based in Omaha, must have drifted into his field — a kind of wave of Monsanto-related corn pushing into a larger population of unrelated corn indicated that possibly wind drift “accounted” for the “theft”; however, Monsanto asked permission to test the rest of the field, and to test the crop already harvested, before it was taken to the grain elevator.

But, of course, much of the harvest had already been taken to the grain elevator.

If that was the case, said the Monsanto lawyer, then they would present an estimate of what was owed according to how large the field was, how close the neighboring field was, and the weather patterns over the summer, and they would expect that estimate to be paid out of Bill Gorman’s sales to the grain elevator.

Jesse was not the only one who considered this eye-blinkingly crazy.

Bill’s lawyer presented the Monsanto lawyer with five years of seed-purchasing paperwork — genetically modified corn had only been on the market since ’97, so five years seemed like plenty. No Monsanto seed had ever been purchased at any point. The lawyer made the case that Bill was not responsible for wind-borne pollen. The Monsanto lawyer made the case that Bill had benefited from property that Monsanto owned, and that he was, in effect, selling stolen goods. The law stated that even if someone sold stolen goods unknowingly, once they found out, they had to compensate the rightful owner of the goods. The very fact that Bill had gotten quite a good harvest—165 bushels an acre — indicated that he had, knowingly or unknowingly, benefited. His yield was closer to that of farmers who had planted Monsanto seed than it was to that of farmers who had not.

Jesse had gotten an average of 169 bushels per acre.

Of course, then everyone remembered hearing of this before — somewhere in Ohio, somewhere in Illinois. Finally, one day, at the café, Jesse himself piped up and said, “Well, I did use Monsanto seed, and I did choose to pay more for it, so maybe they have a point,” and without Jesse’s meaning for it to happen, lots of farmers stopped speaking to one another, and all their disagreements were entirely about the principle of the thing.

Garst was in trouble, too, because some of its feed corn that included a pesticide against corn borers turned up in taco shells at a Taco Bell somewhere. Minnie said that her dad had always liked Garst — the company had started over in Coon Rapids, though it was now based down in Slater, and had been the first one anybody knew of that really pushed hybrid seed. Jesse had paused over the Garst seed, called StarLink, in the spring. It was different from the Monsanto, not resistant to herbicides but resistant to corn borers and caterpillars, really, which could destroy your field, eating not only the ears but the stalks. He had studied corn borers, which originated in Europe, in ag school. They were indeed a pest. But he had decided in the spring that they weren’t enough of a problem around Usherton — more down around Burlington and over into Illinois and Indiana. In addition to that, you had to plant a field of nonresistant corn the next field over, as a refuge for the corn borers. Whether you could do this or not depended on how the fields were configured and where your neighbors were. Jen wouldn’t have liked him to plant the Garst — she was nervous the way his mom had been about contaminants in the kids’ food — but Jesse saw it as a dilemma that was possibly not soluble. Every time the chemical companies said that they had conquered a problem, the moths, or the weeds, regrouped and attacked from another angle. Jen’s dad said that maybe everyone should give a thought to rabies, or trichinosis, or cow pox, or bovine tuberculosis. Those were the diseases his parents and grandparents talked about, not some allergy to some pesticide that was hardly there in the first place.

But old man Guthrie didn’t say anything in the Denby Café, and Jesse stayed away. He figured that the ruckus would die down once the lawyers worked things out for Bill Gorman — chances were, he was only being made an example of, and people would be more careful in the future. By February, everyone would be looking at their bank accounts, not their fields, to decide what to plant and which seed company to stay friends with. Every farmer Jesse knew had principles, but you couldn’t tell what they were by looking at their fields.

—

AFTER LOIS LEFT, Minnie got restless. Goodness, she was eighty-one now, but she still felt fine, so she went to a travel agent in Usherton and booked herself a trip to Paris. The woman kept saying in a loud voice, “And is this a gift, Mrs. Frederick?” until, finally, Minnie had to stand up, lean over the desk, and use her most principally manner, “No, Vivien Carroll, it is not a gift. I am going to Paris.” The only hotel she could afford was south of the Eiffel Tower, near the Bir-Hakeim Métro stop. The trip was to last for ten days; she would walk off her restlessness, she would explore parts of Paris she had never visited and parts that she had enjoyed before, she would learn to negotiate the Paris Métro at last. For two weeks before her trip, she walked around the farm (the weather was beautiful), repeating French phrases—“Je vous en prie,” “De rien,” “Où est la toilette, s’il vous plaît?” Would it be better if she had some old man to go with? Some complainer with a cane? Some aged man-about-town who would always be talking about better times? She didn’t think so.

But Paris turned out to be too much for her. The Métro was well meaning but complex, taxis were expensive, she couldn’t figure out the bus system. She ended up walking around that neighborhood — Boulevard de Grenelle at the Quai Branly — for seven days, a few hours a day. The most cultural thing she did was to walk down the Quai de Grenelle and back up the Avenue Émile Zola, and it exhausted her. It was no help that women her age, small, wrinkled, dressed mostly in black, seemed to putter along on the sidewalks, never looking in shopwindows or at passersby. When she looked in shopwindows, she looked like those women, so she stopped looking in shopwindows.

She told Jesse and Jen that she had had a wonderful time, couldn’t wait to go back, but she knew that this was her last trip, that somehow it had served as a punishment, though exactly for what she couldn’t say, maybe for being so sure of herself all these years.

And yet she was restless. A week after she got back, she drove her old Mazda into Usherton and parked in the lot of the Peaceful Acres Nursing Home. She was wearing her best dress and carrying the handbag, yellow leather, that Claire had sent her at Easter, maybe as a joke. She made herself straight, strong, and determined, and went inside. The young woman at the desk gave her a kindly smile and also spoke rather loudly, forming her words carefully. Minnie said, “May I speak to the manager, please?” Then, “It’s about employment. I would like to apply for a job.” Why not? she thought. All hands on deck. She had just read in the Register that young people were deserting Iowa in droves.

The difficult part, it turned out, was telling Jen and Jesse that night at supper. She didn’t tell them that she had told her new boss, Marian Crest, that she would do anything — cook, mop floors, push old people around in their wheelchairs, wash dishes — but since she had a résumé that Marian (maybe about forty) was vaguely familiar with, Marian had hired her to maintain records; in an old folks’ home, records had to be maintained about every single thing. Her first week or two would be spent filing. The unspoken plan, both she and Marian knew, was that at some point in the future she would live there, perhaps still performing her job.

Jen said, “What are they paying you?”

“Five fifteen an hour, eight hours a day, three days a week. It might go up if I do a good job.”

Felicity said, “Aunt Minnie, you aren’t going to be here when I get home from school!”

“Well,” said Minnie, “three days a week, no. But if you get on the junior high basketball team, I can pick you up on my way home.”

“I’ll never get on the basketball team,” said Felicity.

Jen said, “If you worked on your layups the way I showed you…” But Felicity stared her down. Felicity was almost twelve, ready to consign all of her relatives to the outer darkness. Jen was the first to go, but Minnie thought it wouldn’t be long until she, too, was beneath contempt.

The drive to work was harder than she thought it would be, more full of unpleasant surprises. Like the car she hadn’t seen when she started the left turn, which suddenly appeared in her passenger-side window, honking. Like the bike she did see, but came so close to anyway that the cyclist gave her the finger. Twice, when it was storming at the end of her shift, Marian let her stay in one of the empty “suites” for the night, and the suite had a distinct air of being her future home. As for her job, well, there was nothing an old woman liked better than setting things straight. She even, thanks to Felicity, managed to upload all the records onto a couple of disks and bring them in after a weekend. Marian gave her a harried raise, ten cents an hour; the Peaceful Acres Nursing Home didn’t have a lot of money to spare. It was working out, Minnie thought, but it was working out the way transitions did — organizing itself, smoothing itself, breaking you in to a new, less desirable life, helping you forget what you cherished about the old life. She told Jesse and Jen that everything was fine and kept her other feelings to herself, as she always had.

—

ANDY THOUGHT that she understood her computer pretty well. Jared had brought it to her — it was an Apple — and he had overseen the installation of her dial-up connection. She enjoyed it. It worked most of the time. She found that she could look at pictures of lots of places that were quite beautiful, and she would never have to visit any of them. She rummaged around in magazines, printed out recipes, communicated with Janet and Richie and Loretta by e-mail, read newspapers and other “Web sites.” But, most of all, every few days, she checked her brokerage account. There were certain mysteries, such as why the connection worked sometimes but not all the time, why pictures came up instantly or not at all, why she was sure she had typed in the proper password but it still didn’t work. She had never encountered the mystery she encountered on November 6, the day before Election Day (Richie had told her to vote for Gore). According to her account information, the previous Friday, she had had $10,765,986.23. On Monday, she had nothing. The first thing she did was reboot the computer, and the second thing she did was call her broker. His line rang and rang, and no one, not even the secretary, picked it up. With some alarm, she then signed into her bank account. She remembered her password, though it took a moment. In her two savings accounts, she had $68,900.23. In her checking account, she had $14,465.87. So her financial obliteration wasn’t global, as they might say on the Internet.

When she called Michael, he said, “Not you, too.” Her broker, who was someone that Michael knew, though he didn’t have any funds with that firm, was a man almost her own age. She and Frank had put the Uncle Jens fund (twenty-five hundred very impressive dollars) first with that real-estate criminal Rubino (he had been charming, in his way, but when she saw The Godfather she had wondered about his origins). After real-estate investments had rolled it over several times, Frank put it into the stock market with a fellow Jim Upjohn recommended, and then that firm was taken over by this man, who stayed on the job when it folded into a larger firm. What was it, 110 years since the death of Uncle Jens? Andy’s mom had remembered vaguely that he’d left maybe seventy-five hundred dollars altogether. It was a very Norwegian thing to do to hold a grudge for sixty years after you died.

The youngish man who had been overseeing the funds for the last four years had come highly recommended, and she had paid not much attention to him at all, since she had a pretty good track record on her own. But now, according to Michael, and then according to the head of the firm, who called all of his bigger clients, the forty-five-year-old had transferred almost a hundred million dollars to a mysterious account somewhere, and had himself left the country. His whereabouts remained mysterious for another four days, until he turned up in Venezuela.

At first, as Andy sat quietly at her kitchen table, stirring her mint tea and looking out the window at a group of crows arguing in the tree beside her little garage, the most shocking thing was the amount of money he had taken. Andy had thought she was rich — ten million dollars! Maybe because of that old TV show The Millionaire, which she watched when Janet was little, when they’d bought their first television and were living in that tiny place in Floral Park, she’d continued to think that a million bucks defined great wealth. A hundred million dollars! How could you spend that in Venezuela these days? When Andy had visited there with Frank, they had remarked upon how cheap even the most luxurious houses or views or gardens seemed to be.

Only gradually did she realize that she now had about eighty-three thousand dollars to her name, which had to last for some number of years. She was healthy and active, so the number of years might be considerable. She stirred her tea again, drank some more, watched two of the crows, who looked young, square off against one another, then fly away.

No mortgage payment. Not a lot for food — maybe fifty dollars a week? Heat could pose a problem, but her biggest fuel bill had been about three hundred dollars last year. She went down the list. Maybe she could go for three years or four? No new clothes, probably. She sat there. The tree was leafless, still; fog was vaporizing upward in small plumes. Andy took a deep breath and realized that she was happy now, happy that the disaster had finally arrived and had turned out to be nothing but money.