Hit Me

Forty-Six

The boeuf bourguignon was tender and savory, the little potatoes crisp on the outside and soft in the center. The wine was a Burgundy, appropriately enough, full-bodied and hearty, but neither of them managed more than a glass of it.

They talked through the meal, but mostly about the philatelic transaction. Of the two bids they’d opened, E. J. Griffey’s was the higher by a substantial margin, and that had surprised them both.

Over coffee, she said she wanted to pay him a bonus. The stamps he’d selected, he told her, were ample compensation for his time. He’d enjoyed the visit, and he’d learned a great deal from the three men, from listening to what they said and from paying attention to the way they operated.

“You made me an offer,” she said. “A quarter of a million dollars. And in the next breath you advised me not to take it.”

“Aren’t you glad you didn’t?”

“I wound up with almost five times as much.”

“I thought you might.”

“You’re an honest man,” she said, “and an ethical one, but I don’t see why that should stop you from accepting a bonus. You have a daughter. You told me her name but I don’t remember it.”

“Jenny.”

“I bet she’s smart.”

“Like her mother,” he said.

“Oh, I think you probably deserve some of the credit. But she’s college material, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not for a few years now.”

“That’s just as well,” she said, “because what I’m going to do is put a hundred thousand dollars into a trust fund to mature on her eighteenth birthday. It should appreciate considerably by then, and might even increase as much as the cost of a college education. You really can’t object to this, Nicholas. It doesn’t even concern you. It’s between me and Jennifer.”

“Jenny.”

“Jenny, but isn’t it Jennifer on her birth certificate?”

“No, just Jenny.”

“And my husband’s given name was Jeb, not short for Jebediah, as some people tended to assume. His full name was Jeb Stuart Soderling, though I’ve no idea why his father, a North Dakota Swede, would name his son after a Civil War general. And Jeb was an acronym to begin with, you know.”

“It was J. E. B. Stuart, wasn’t it? I don’t remember what the initials stood for.”

“James Ewell Brown Stuart. I would know, wouldn’t I, having been married to his namesake. Well, that’s a handful, isn’t it? You can see why they went with Jeb. But won’t it be awkward for your daughter? She’ll spend half her life correcting people who assume her full name is Jennifer.”

He’d had this conversation with Julia. “She can always change it,” he said. “But for now it’s Jenny. See, she was a breech birth.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“A breech presentation. She was upside down in the birth canal, and—”

“I understand the term, Nicholas. What I don’t begin to understand is why that would make her a Jenny instead of a Jennifer.”

He reached for his cup, took a sip of coffee. “I’m not sure this will make any sense,” he said, “but that’s when we realized she wasn’t going to be, you know, ordinary. And there were so many little girls named Jennifer, and we knew we weren’t going to call her Jennifer anyway, so—well, that’s why it says Jenny on her birth certificate.”

“And it doesn’t have to be short for Jennifer,” Denia said. “Think of Pirate Jenny, in The Threepenny Opera. But your little pirate’s name is Jenny Edwards. And does she have a middle name, Nicholas? Because I’m serious about putting that money in trust for her.”

“It’s Roussard,” he said, and spelled it. “My wife’s maiden name.”