Spoonbenders

10 Buddy

The World’s Most Powerful Psychic has been dead for twenty-one years. Long live the World’s Most Powerful Psychic.

Buddy doesn’t feel powerful, however. Time’s riptide is having its way with him. He’s clawing to stay in the present but keeps being dragged over and over into the past. Once, his memory of the future was as lengthy (and full of holes) as his memory of the past. But now, there’s so little future left. Everything ends in a month, on September 4, 1995, promptly at 12:06 p.m.

Zap.

Sometimes when he thinks about that day he’s terrified. Other times, he’s merely sad. He will miss out on so much, but what hurts most of all is that he will never see his true love again.

But still other times, he’s grateful. There are undoubtedly many awful things to come after that dead stop, and he doesn’t have to watch them over and over. The future will no longer be his responsibility. Someone else will become the World’s Most Powerful Psychic, and he’ll be able to rest at last.

The small supply of futurity, however, only makes the pull of the past stronger. He knows he can’t wallow in history, but sometimes—like right now, this very moment of consciousness—he longs to be somewhen else, somewhen cold, snow outside the window. Because in this now it’s ninety-five degrees and the sweat is running off his naked chest. He’s bent over the front step, setting out ceramic tiles in rows and columns, and his underwear is plastered to his ass. It’s imperative to lay out the tile, dry, before cementing it in place.

“So is this the way you want it?” a voice asks. Oh, right. Matty—the fourteen-year-old version—is helping him. He’s mixing up the thinset in one of the big plastic buckets.

Buddy nods. But then the kid moves on to new questions. Wants to know everything about the Amazing Telemachus Family. Where they performed, what people thought of them. Buddy ignores him. The less Matty knows, the better. At least, Buddy thinks that’s true.

Matty keeps talking. He really wants to know about his grandmother. What did she do onstage? Did she really work for the government? “Could Grandma Mo travel outside her body?” he asks.

This question makes Buddy look back at the boy and frown.

“You know,” Matty says. “Like, walk through walls?”

Buddy stares at him.

“Because that would be real useful, right? That would make her the perfect spy.”

Buddy nods slowly.

“How far do you think she could travel? I mean, all the way into Russia? Frankie said the Russians had psychics, too. Do you think she could go anywhere she wanted?”

Buddy shakes his head. She had no limits, he thinks. Nothing could stop her except for one thing. Time.

His mother sits across from him at the kitchen table. There’s snow outside the window, and soon his father will come home with pizza for dinner, and his brother and sister will rush in, their jeans soaked, faces red from the wind, after sledding with the big kids. But now, right now, he’s in the warm kitchen with his papers and crayons—and Mom. She is doing her own project, reading and rereading a stack of business papers with business numbers on them. She’s been crying, but now she’s stopped crying, because she sees he’s scared.

“Show me what you’re drawing,” his mother says.

He doesn’t want to. It’s sad. But she’s seen his other sad drawings, so he moves his arm and she leans forward. It’s a black rectangle surrounded by green except for a few scribbles of red and yellow. She says, “Are those flowers?”

“I’m not good at them,” he says.

“Oh, I think you are,” she says. “And I like that there will be flowers near me. It’s a really nice grave, Buddy.”

It’s been months since the TV show where everything went wrong. Mom talks about all his sad pictures like they’re no big deal. She hardly cries (at least in front of him). She looks through what he’s drawn today, and then says, “Why don’t you draw me something from when you’re, say, twelve years old?”

He tries to remember all the way to twelve. He’s sitting in a building. It’s summertime, the medal heavy and slick against his chest. He’s taken to secretly wearing it under his clothes, like Superman’s outfit. Frankie’s there in the building, looking tall and skinny and tough. One of his favorite Frankies. Buddy draws another rectangle and Mom says, “That’s not another grave, is it?”

He shakes his head. “It’s a pinball machine,” he says. “Frankie’s really good at pinball. Plays it all day.”

“Oh,” his mother says. “That’s nice.” She’s not crazy about the idea, he can tell, but she has no idea how good Frankie’s going to be. “And you’re there, too?”

“I just watch,” he says. He draws himself next to the pinball machine, and draws a circle where the medal would be.

“Does Dad know about that?” she asks. “That you two are hanging out in a pinball parlor?”

He shrugs. He sees what he sees. He can’t read minds.

She takes one of the blank sheets of paper and starts writing on it.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“I just wrote down, ‘When Frankie is sixteen, he gets really good at pinball.’ ”

“Oh.”

“I like to know what you’ll all be doing,” she says.

“After you’re dead,” he says.

“It’s like a future diary,” she says. “You draw, and I write down words, but it’s the same thing.”

“It doesn’t make you sad?”

She thinks about this. “Sometimes.” He likes that she doesn’t lie to him. “But other times, I’m just happy that you all grow up together, that you take care of one another.”

He doesn’t like to think about Mom not being there, in the future. But he’s known ever since The Mike Douglas Show that she’d be leaving them. Just like he knows that Irene is going to have a baby, and the baby’s going to be a teenager named Matthias, and someday he and Matthias will put brown tile on the front step.

Suddenly he’s dizzy. His body is little and big at the same time. His arm by the window is cold, but he can feel the sun on his back, feel the sweat running down his sides.

“Buddy?” Mom asks. “Buddy, look at me.” She comes over to his side of the table and crouches down. She turns his face in her hands. “Stay with me, kiddo.”

Yes. There she is. Mom’s here. Alive. Alive.

She runs a hand across his damp hair. “You’re sweating,” she says.

He pushes a palm against an eye. He nods.

“Tell me what this is, Buddy,” she says, and points to the drawing of himself.

“It’s a medal. I used to wear it all the time, then.”

“What medal is that?”

“The one you’re about to show me,” he says.

Her eyes go wide. Talking about her death didn’t make her cry, but this does. Then she smiles, a brilliant, uncontained smile, and says, “Oh, that medal.”

She leads him upstairs to her room, and opens a drawer. “This was given to me a while ago, but soon it will belong to you.” It’s wrapped in a scarf that she never wears because it’s too fancy, too colorful. Teddy’s taste, not hers. She peels back the cloth, and the gold is as bright as her smile.

“You have a wonderful gift,” Mom says. “I know it’s hard sometimes. I know you get worried. But I know you’ll always do the right thing, because you have a good and noble heart.” She waits until he looks her in the eye, and then she touches her forehead to his. “Listen to me,” she whispers. “It’s all going to work out.”

Irene pulls up with the windows down, and he can hear her singing along with the radio. Even after she turns off the car she keeps singing: “Ba-a-a-nd, on the run. Doot-do-do-do-doo.” Buddy loves to hear her. She sings all the time when she’s a girl of nine and ten, and hardly at all when she’s older. But in the early weeks of August 1995, right before the end, she turns into Maria von Trapp. She sings every time she takes a shower. She hums while she’s cooking dinner. And when she’s not saying anything at all, she seems to be swaying to music he can’t hear.

She sees the newly tiled front step, finished now except for the cleanup, and instead of yelling at him or asking him what the hell he’s wasting his time on, she just shakes her head. “Buddy, that’s indoor tile.”

Matty says, “So?”

“So it’s going to be slick as hell in the winter.”

“It’s not slippery,” Matty says. “Try it.”

“Wait till it rains,” she says.

“Just try it.”

Irene abandons her complaints. She steps up with mock seriousness, compliments Buddy and Matty on their handiwork, and goes inside, still humming Paul McCartney.

Matty’s looking at him. “It’s weird, right?” the boy says. “How good a mood she’s in.”

Buddy shrugs. It’s time to sponge up the dust and excess grout. And he has more work to do before sunset: mail to deliver, people to talk to, a meal to make. What is he forgetting? Not the cold. He remembers the winter. No, now: Dad driving home, asking what’s for supper. The color of his mother’s scarf. No. Matty leaving for the gas station to buy milk. And what else? Frankie showing up, looking for Matty. The feel of the medal in his small hand.

“Uncle Buddy?” Matty says. “You okay?”

Buddy holds on to that voice. Fourteen-year-old Matty. They’ve just finished tiling the front step.

“Did I make you mad?” Matty asks.

He shakes his head. “We need milk.”

“Milk?”

“For supper.” Buddy walks toward the house. “There’s money on the kitchen counter.”

“But—”

Buddy raises a hand. He’s already said more than he’s comfortable with. Words are dangerous. He goes upstairs, and stays there even after he’s done with his shower, so that he’s safely out of the way when Frankie barrels into the house, looking for Matty. But the boy is gone, so he instead declaims to Teddy in his too-loud voice that he’s selling the hell out of UltraLife products. Going through the numbers, talking about the percentages he’s making on each sale. He wouldn’t try that bullshit with Irene. But she’s out of the way, too. As usual, she’s in the basement, in front of the computer, online again.

Which leaves only Teddy to absorb the lies. Poor Teddy. And poor Frankie, who’s embarrassed because he asked Teddy for a loan last week, and was turned down. Of course he was. Frankie wouldn’t say why he needed the money. Now he has to make sure everyone in earshot knows he didn’t need the money anyway—he’s got big plans, a surefire way to come out on top. Buddy thinks of the day in the casino, the chips stacked in front of his brother, just like he promised, and the roulette ball listening to him the way the pinball used to. Wasn’t it enough that he gave Frankie that hour of bliss? True, only an hour, but that’s more than most people get. Buddy only got forty-five minutes.

He’s twenty-three years old when he leaves his brother alone on the Alton Belle, walks the half mile to the Days Inn, and sees her, the girl of his dreams. In fact, he’s dreamed of her for years.

She’s sitting on a bar stool, turned slightly away from the bar, her tanned bare legs crossed at the knee. One hand lazily twirls the swizzle stick in her drink. And oh, those hot pink nails, the same color as her lipstick. The long blonde hair (a wig, but it doesn’t matter, not to him) cast into another shade of pink by the neon light of the Budweiser sign. His heart beats a tattoo, sending him to her. Pushing him across the room.

The bar is almost empty. The hotel, though only a few blocks from the Alton Belle dock, can offer none of the attractions of a casino, and this early in the night no one’s ready to drown their sorrows. Yet she’s there, waiting. Almost as if she had a vision of this meeting.

He’s ready. One pocket is stuffed with cash, a fraction of Frankie’s winnings at the roulette table. (Frankie is still on the riverboat, enjoying himself—for now. Buddy already regrets what’s going to happen, even though he’s powerless to stop it from happening.) The other pocket contains a hotel key card. His mouth radiates cinnamon freshness thanks to the three Altoids he chewed on his walk over from the riverboat.

He sits down, one stool away from her. The bartender is nowhere in sight, and he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He reaches blindly into his pocket and puts a bill on the bar. Sees with surprise that it’s a hundred.

The woman says, “Good day at the Belle? Or haven’t got there yet?”

He smiles. She’s thin and tanned and maybe thirty years old. Her eyes are rimmed by black eyeliner.

“I got lucky,” he said.

“Or maybe it was your turn to get something nice,” she says.

This is what he’s been telling himself: Wasn’t it his turn? Yet his own words rang hollow. Everything he knows about the whirlpool of past and future tells him that the universe does not owe you anything, and even if it did, it would never pay up. He never convinced himself he was owed this moment, but hearing the words come from someone this beautiful makes him want to believe. It was his turn, tonight, and not Frankie’s. Oh God. Poor Frankie doesn’t know what’s about to happen to him.

“Don’t look so worried,” she says. “Come sit a little closer.”

How can he not obey? He shifts onto the next stool.

“Tell me your name,” she says. He likes the huskiness in her voice.

“Buddy.”

“Cerise,” she says. She puts a hand over his—and leaves it there. He can feel his heart in his throat. She smiles. “You don’t have to be nervous, honey. You’re over twenty-one, right?”

He nods, unsure where to look. She’s wearing a tight, spangly tank top with spaghetti straps and a black pleather miniskirt that barely reaches the tops of her thighs. He has a future memory of her underwear—a lime-green thong. He really needs to stop thinking of that lime-green thong.

She glances down at his lap. “Oh, you poor man,” she says. “I think you need the full treatment.”

He reaches into his pocket again and she says, “Not here. You have five hundred dollars?”

“And I have a room here,” he says. “Upstairs.” A clarification that’s probably unnecessary. He doubts they have guest rooms in the basement.

“Then what are we waiting for?” She downs the rest of her drink, then nods at the bill resting on the bar. “A twenty will cover my tab, hon.”

He takes out the wad of cash, thumbs through it. Finally he finds a twenty-dollar bill.

Cerise chuckles, leans in close. “You probably don’t want to flash your whole roll like that. This ain’t East St. Louis, but still.”

“You’re right,” he says. She doesn’t know that he’s going to give it all to her, in forty-five minutes.

They take the elevator up. She asks for the room number, and he tells her: “Three twenty-one.” She leads him there without glancing at the navigation signs, and as they get closer, he’s thinking of the room number like a countdown: three…two…

He lets her inside. She glances at the open closet, peeks into the open bathroom, and says, “You travel light.”

He doesn’t understand this comment at first, then thinks, Right. No luggage.

She puts her string purse on the dresser next to the TV. When she turns to him, she’s surprised. “Honey, you’re shaking.” Then she understands. He can see it in her face. She steps to him, and touches his cheek. “You have nothing to worry about,” she says softly.

But it’s what she says next that makes him fall in love with her. The words ring like chimes backward and forward through all the Buddys, across the years: sitting beside a cold window on a winter afternoon; arguing with his brother in high summer; lying on the grass on the last day of the world.

She smiles and says, “It’s all going to work out.”

Buddy crouches beside his bed. From underneath he pulls out a metal lockbox closed with a padlock. He dials the combination and slips off the lock. Inside are several white envelopes bound with a red rubber band looped two times around. Once, there were so many envelopes the rubber band could barely go around them. (Though he’d started out with a different rubber band. Then it got old and snapped, and he had to find one that was exactly the same color and thickness.)

All of the envelopes are addressed to Teddy, except one blue one that has Matty’s name on it. That one Buddy isn’t supposed to deliver until later. He takes the topmost Teddy envelope, and makes sure it has today’s date. Only one more letter to his father is left. His mission for Mom is almost over. He carefully puts the lock back in place and hides the box again.

With the envelope hidden in his shirt, he sneaks downstairs, trying to stay out of sight of the kitchen door, where Frankie is still yammering away at Teddy. Buddy slips out the front door.

As he remembers, a van is parked just down the street. A silver one, that will return here on September 4.

He puts the envelope in the mailbox and closes it with a silent sigh. One more secret duty nearing its completion.

Speaking of duty, he thinks, and turns toward the van. The man behind the wheel, a gray-haired black man, watches him approach from behind sunglasses. He probably thinks the glasses are sufficient disguise. After all, they have only met once before, at Maureen’s funeral, when Buddy was six years old. Buddy raises a friendly hand, as if greeting a stranger, and then walks up to the driver’s-side window. He makes a twirling motion, and the driver rolls down the window. There’s a passenger in a rear seat of the van, but Buddy doesn’t see his face. He won’t, until September 4.

The driver says, “Yes?”

Buddy does have an exact, clear memory of this moment, so it’s a relief to not have to worry about what to say. “Have you seen a teenage boy walk by here?”

The driver does not quite glance behind him, at the man in the backseat. Then he shakes his head.

Buddy says, “I sent my nephew, Matty, to the gas station for milk, and he should be home by now. It’s only four blocks from here, and I was getting nervous.”

The driver says, “We haven’t seen him.”

“Okay,” Buddy says. “Thanks anyway.” He turns and walks back toward the house. He’s feeling proud of himself, because not only did he deliver the letter, but he got through the conversation with the van driver perfectly, with all the words in the right order.

Behind him, the van starts up. It makes a three-point turn, and drives away.

“It’s all going to work out,” the World’s Most Powerful Psychic says to himself. He just has to keep doing his job—until it’s no longer his job.

11 Matty

It took Matty one day to become a criminal, three weeks to become a psionic superspy, and a short walk to the gas station to make him give up astral travel forever.

His life as a criminal began the day he borrowed the fifty dollars from Frankie. Matty carried the money in his fist as he slowly made his way down the basement stairs to Malice’s room, softly calling her name. Each step revealed a bit more of the basement. Malice lived in a pigsty. Clothes were not just scattered over the floor, they covered it, a foot-high mulch of flannel, denim, and T-shirt. There wasn’t much furniture—a bed, a bookcase, a green armchair, a milk crate that functioned as a bedside table, an old TV—but every flat surface was a Jenga of dirty Tupperware, food boxes, CDs, and cups. So, so many cups.

Finally he reached the bottom of the stairs. She sat on the rollaway bed, facing away from him, headphones on, a notebook balanced on her knees.

“Malice?” he called.

She pulled the headphones down and twisted to face him. “What the fuck?” Her arm knocked into a pile of books, atop which rested a plate with a half-eaten sandwich. The plate tipped and fell facedown into a pile of clothes. Malice made no move to pick it up. “What are you doing here?”

“Sorry! I didn’t mean to sneak up on you. I just—wow.” He lifted the sandwich by two fingers, instantly regretting it. This was no recent meal. “I just never knew girls could be such slobs.”

She climbed out of the bed. “You can leave now.” She was wearing a pair of running shorts and a T-shirt that said NO EMPATHY.

“I will.” He set the sandwich and plate back atop the stack of books. “I wanted to ask you a favor.”

“You can’t come out with me again.”

“Oh, I don’t want to—that’s not—” He shook his head. “That wasn’t my fault.”

“You have zero tolerance, dude. It was like you were on acid. You were totally zoned, and then you started yelling.”

“It wasn’t my fault!” he said. But of course he hadn’t been able to explain what had happened to him while he was high. And up until he came to with everyone looking at him, it had been one of the best nights of his life.

“So,” Malice said. “You get scared straight?”

“Not exactly. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

He looked around for a place to sit, but even the armchair was covered in crap.

“You’re not staying,” Malice said. “What’s the favor?”

“I want to buy more pot.”

She laughed. A bit harshly, he thought.

“From you,” he said.

“No,” she said. “No way.”

“I really need it,” he said.

“You need it? Okay, now I’m really not giving you any. You’re thirteen.”

“Fourteen.”

“I’m not getting my stepcousin addicted to pot. Plus, I don’t think you’re cut out for it, man. I mean—” She stuck out her arms and shimmied, bug-eyed. “Gaddiga-gaddiga-gaddiga.”

“I did not look like that.”

“Dude, it was much worse.”

He opened his fist, revealed the wad of cash. “Here.”

She eyed the bills, but didn’t touch them. “Where’d you get forty bucks?”

“Fifty.” He wasn’t about to tell her he’d borrowed it from her father. “You do this for me, and I can get you a lot more money. Later.”

Her eyes went wide. “You shit! You think you’re going to be a dealer?”

“What? No!”

“Don’t fucking lie to me, Matty.”

“I would not lie to you. I’m just going to get more money later. And I could pay you.”

“How much?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“No,” she said. Then: “How much are you getting later?”

That was a good question. How much money was in Mitzi’s safe? How much was his share? Grandpa Teddy would have been ashamed that he hadn’t made that clear in advance, family or no family. “I don’t know, exactly.”

“I want two hundred,” she said.

“Two hundred dollars?”

“Connection fee. Like paying a toll. Take it or leave it.”

He didn’t really have any choice. “Okay,” he said. “Two hundred—”

“Three,” she said.

“Oh come on!”

“It doesn’t matter,” Malice said. “I don’t believe you anyway.”

“Oh, I’m going to get the money.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Is this part of the secret project?”

“Secret what now?”

She plucked the bills from his hand. “I’m so tired of this Amazing Telemachus shit,” she said. “You’re so fucking special, but whenever something goes wrong, you just blame it on some ‘psychokinetic accident.’ ” She tucked the money into the waistband of her shorts, a gesture with no sexual overtones—for her. “It’s hard enough with Cassie and Polly in the house, but now Frankie’s bringing you into it.”

“Pardon?” Matty really wasn’t following. What was up with the twins?

Malice lifted the head of a ceramic monkey and pulled out a plastic bag. “This is all I have on me, but I can get more. Do you know how to roll a joint?”

He shook his head.

“Consider this lesson part of my fee.”

The journey to psionic superspy began that night, in Frankie’s garage. It was a lot like Luke Skywalker’s training on Dagobah, except that Frankie was no Yoda, and had no idea what his apprentice was up to. The Jedi was going to have to train himself.

“It just has to be out here,” Matty told him. They were making a bed on the garage floor out of a pair of crib mattresses—leftovers from the twins—and a couple of blankets. “And I can’t be watched.”

“So I’m going to tell Loretta that you’re sleeping out in our garage?” Frankie asked.

“I know it’s weird,” Matty said. “But I’m sure she’s seen weirder things, right?”

“You have no idea,” Frankie said. “What else do you need?” Matty hesitated, and Frankie said, “Out with it.”

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Matty said.

“Shoot.”

“How much is in there?”

“The safe?” Frankie shrugged. “Well, you’ll be able to tell me, won’t you? You’ll just—” He waggled his fingers. “—take a look.”

“Oh, right,” Matty said. “But, you know, ballpark?”

“Ballpark?” Frankie said. “It’s a big fucking park, Matty. A hundred K, easy.”

“A hundred—?” His voice squeaked.

Frankie laughed. “We’re not doing this for chicken feed. We’re going to hit them on payday, Matty. As soon as their customers fork it over, then bam.”

Matty suddenly thought: Did that mean they were stealing the victims’ money? Maybe the right thing to do was to give it back to them. But then how to figure out who was owed how much? You couldn’t do that without a ledger, something with all the names and addresses. And if they gave it all back, then maybe Frankie would get what was owed to him, but Matty would get nothing. Or rather, Mom would get nothing. And he was doing this for Mom, right?

This was all a matter of moral timing. When did the property of innocents transform into the corrupt holdings of criminals—as soon as it entered the safe? Maybe it was like the miracle of transubstantiation, but in reverse. An anti-Communion.

“Hello, Matty?” Frankie said. “You need anything else?”

“Oh. Let me think.” He examined his inventory: a Chicago-area map, spread on the floor, with big red arrows marking the way from Frankie’s house to Mitzi’s Tavern; two cans of Coke in a Styrofoam cooler; a spare pillow in a My Little Pony pillowcase.

“I’m good,” he said.

But was he?

“Almost ten o’clock,” Frankie said. “Better get crackin’. I’ll leave you to…whatever it is you do.”

Frankie closed the garage’s side door behind him. Matty reached into his back pocket for the baggie.

The door popped open. “Good luck,” Frankie said.

Matty stood very still.

Frankie started to say something else, seemed to think better of it, and closed the door again.

“Oh my God,” Matty said to himself. He waited five minutes before taking another look at the baggie. Finally he slipped out one of the three tidy joints that Malice had rolled for him (he never succeeded in rolling one himself) and flicked the Bic lighter she’d loaned him (“All part of the service,” she said).

Ready for liftoff, he thought. Ignition.

Liftoff did not occur. He sat on his baby-mattress launchpad for several minutes, inhaling and coughing, coughing and inhaling, and told himself everything would be fine if he stopped worrying. And he was right. At the same moment he noticed that he’d stopped worrying, he noticed that he was sitting beside himself.

“Hey, good-lookin’,” he said. His body giggled. The joint dangled between his fingers.

“Maybe you should put that down,” he said.

His body took one last toke, then placed the joint on the cement.

“I’ll be back in a bit,” he said. He drifted through the wall of the garage and hovered a few inches over the grass. He thought about looking in on Malice, but decided against it. That was one habit he needed to break. He couldn’t be a drug addict, a burglar, and a perv.

Flying, though, that was a pure good. He coasted over Uncle Frankie’s rooftop, and moved slowly up into the trees, then over the streets, gradually gaining altitude, until he could again make out the towers of the city, glittering in the distance. Acres of air hung below his feet, and he was only mildly disturbed by this.

He thought, Probably a good thing I’m high. (High. Heh.)

Moving took no effort at all; he was pulled along by the string of his own attention, reeled in by whatever caught his fancy. That brightly lit water tower next to I-294, painted like a rose. The jets, roaring toward O’Hare. Quick as a flash he was flying alongside the windows of a plane, inches from the face of a bored red-haired woman staring out.

Matty made wings of his arms. “I’m an astral plane,” he said. Far away, his body laughed; he could feel the echo of it.

“Focus, Matt,” he said. Where was Mitzi’s Tavern? He had no idea. And he couldn’t see the map of Chicago without zooming back to the garage, or reentering his body.

Speaking of which, where was his body?

Holy shit!

He spun in the air, panicked, lost in the night sky. Below, dots of light fenced dark rectangles of rooftops and yards. Which of those was Frankie’s house? The only time he’d gone this far from his body, he’d been sucked back into it by Malice slapping him around.

He began to fly at random, zooming close to street signs, trying to remember the map of Chicago. Why hadn’t he studied it more? Why hadn’t he arranged for Frankie to come wake him up?

His body was the anchor. He’d gotten this far from it by following whatever drew his attention. Maybe, then, he only had to pay attention to his body.

He tried to think about his arms, his chest. His throat. The tickle of smoke at the top of his lungs. He coughed—and felt his body move. The sound of the cough seemed to come from far away.

“Okay, Matty,” he said aloud. His voice came through more clearly, and he began to follow it back across the network of roads and houses. “Here we go.”

A minute later, he slipped through the roof of the garage. His body said, “Next time, maybe you should be less high.”

He didn’t make it all the way to Mitzi’s Tavern until ten days later. The biggest obstacle was finding a place and time to smoke. He couldn’t keep staying at Uncle Frankie’s house. Grandpa Teddy’s place, though, was crowded and chaotic. The basement was out of the question; Mom had made that her second home, camping out there when she wasn’t at work to talk to the Joshinator. Buddy could barge into any room at any time. And the garage was too risky; Grandpa Teddy had a door remote, and the thought of the door sliding up while he was passed out on the floor terrified him.

He eventually settled on a spot behind the garage, between two overgrown bushes. If he sat cross-legged, with his back to the garage wall, he was invisible unless someone walked up right in front of him. He thought of it as his nest. But the only time to slip into it was between the end of work with Frankie and the return of his mother from work.

At least it was easier to travel in the daytime. He memorized the route from Grandpa Teddy’s to Mitzi’s, and after a few trips he was able to get there in seconds, as long as he didn’t let his mind wander—literally. Anything could distract him: sirens and church bells; old ladies and young girls; animals, especially birds, which were amazing, and seemed to be everywhere he turned his attention, a nation of tiny, officious observers who could not only see Matty’s astral form, but hungrily track it.

That last bit of paranoid insight, he realized later, came courtesy of the marijuana. He was having trouble fine-tuning his cannabis intake. Too much and he never arrived at the tavern, too little and he barely had time to look around before his body snapped out of it.

And time was a problem. Barney the Bartender never went to the door alarms during the day. Finally Matty was able to get there early enough one morning to see him open up the bar and type the disarm code into the alarm console: 4-4-4-2.

Frankie was overjoyed. Then almost immediately he forgot the joy and started worrying about the safe. Days went by without Matty being able to give him the combination. “What’s the problem?” he asked one afternoon in the Bumblebee van. “It’s just three numbers.”

“Most of the time I’m there, she never gets up from the desk,” Matty said. “I’ve only seen her open the safe twice—and the first time she hunched over it, so close I couldn’t see the numbers. Practically on top of it. And the next time she went for the safe, I tried to zoom in, but I overdid it. I went straight through the wall, and then—whoosh.”

“Whoosh? What’s whoosh?”

Matty felt his face grow hot. “I ended up…away. Like, really far away.”

“Like what, Glenbard?”

“Over the water. Lake Michigan.”

“What the fuck!” Frankie had said that too loud, and lowered his voice. “What the fuck?”

“I know! It kinda freaked me out. I panicked. Luckily, the—” He was about to say that the pot wore off, and squelched that. “I came to, and I was back at home.”

“Okay, okay, this is good news,” Frankie said. “You’re getting stronger. You just need control. It’s a classic Telemachus problem. Too much power.”

Matty liked the sound of that.

“Tell me what you need,” Frankie said. “Talk to your coach.”

Coach? Matty thought. Aloud he said, “I think I need to spend the night again at your house.”

“Why’s that?”

Why, indeed. Because (a) he’d smoked half the pot and needed to stock up if he was going to stay on his game; and (b) he wanted an excuse to hang out with Malice. The only reason he could give Frankie, though, was (c): “Mom’s getting suspicious of all the time I’m spending alone.”

“Right, of course she is,” Frankie said. “I’m coming over for dinner in a couple days. I’ll ask her then.”

“Thanks, Uncle Frankie.”

“It’s nothing.” He clapped Matty on the shoulder. “It’s just another obstacle. Like the twelve labors. You know what I’m talking about?”

“Sure. Hercules.”

“Heracles, Matty. Learn your Greek. That’s your heritage. We’re sons of gods—demigods at least. We come from heroes. Heracles, Bellerophon. Theseus—”

“Okay…”

“And what can stop a hero if he sets his mind to it?”

“Nothing?” Matty said.

“Damn straight.”

Then Uncle Buddy asked him to walk to the gas station to buy milk for dinner.

That simple request turned into an attempted kidnapping by a pedophile—at least, that’s what it looked like at first. Starting sometime when he was four years old, and repeating at frequent intervals, his mother had described exactly how it would go down: a windowless van would pull up alongside him, and a strange man would lean out and offer to show him something really neat. Maybe it would be a puppy. Or a Game Boy. And what was Matty supposed to do? Run, of course. Run away and find Mom.

Now that it was finally happening, though, Matty found himself rooted to the hot sidewalk, the cold milk jug sweating in his hand. The predator, an old black man with white hair, had leaned out of his driver’s-side window of a silver van and said, “Hey, Matty. Got a second?”

And what did Matty do? Smile uncertainly and say, “Uh…”

“Destin Smalls would like to talk to you.”

Smalls? The guy who’d been on the phone with Grandpa Teddy?

“He’s a friend of your grandfather’s. And your grandmother, Maureen.”

No puppy. Just a phenomenally intriguing teaser. Still, a cue to run. Instead, Matty waited as the man stepped out and walked around the front of the silver van. He moved stiffly, as if he had a bad hip. Then he waved for Matty to follow.

Matty obeyed. It seemed rude not to. “I considered her a friend, too,” the driver said and held out a hand. “Clifford Turner. It was an honor to serve with her.”

Serve with her? Holy cow, Matty thought. The government stuff. It was all real.

Cliff pulled back the van’s side door, which had the effect of a magician pulling back a curtain to reveal…a huge white man in a blue suit, crammed into the far captain’s seat.

“Matt. Pleased to meet you in person. I’m Agent Destin Smalls.” His voice was low and confident. And he’d called him Matt. He gestured to the empty seat next to him. “Come on in. It’s air-conditioned.”

Okay, that was straight out of the pedophile playbook. “I have milk,” Matty said.

“I see that.”

“I mean, my family’s waiting for me,” Matty said. “They’ll come looking for me.”

“This won’t take a minute. I just wanted to introduce myself.”

Matty looked at Cliff. “It’ll be fine,” the man said. “I promise.”

Matty climbed in and set the milk jug on the carpeted floor. Cliff shut the door from the outside, sealing them in.

The back of the van, behind the seats, was mostly dark, but blinked and hummed with electrical equipment. The air-conditioning (which did feel nice) was probably necessary to keep all those machines running.

Smalls saw him looking. “That’s high-tech stuff. Advanced telemetry.”

“What’s it do?”

“It helps us find gifted individuals, Matt. People like…”

Matty tried to keep his face from spasming.

“…your grandmother.”

“Oh really?” Matty said. The words came out an octave higher than he intended.

“Indeed. How much has your grandfather told you? Did you know that Maureen Telemachus was the most important operative we had during the Cold War?”

Classic Cold War, Frankie had said. High-stakes ops.

“Cuba? Maureen was there,” Smalls said. “The Straits of Gibraltar? She told us what happened when the USS Scorpion exploded and died. These were tense times. Both sides so terrified of each other, we were in very real danger of the world ending. Our job—your grandmother’s job—was to find out where the Russians were keeping their missiles and keep our eyes on them. The worst-case scenario was if the enemy believed they could launch with impunity.”

Matty didn’t know what to say, so he said, “Wow.” He was pretty sure this was the most important conversation of his life and didn’t want it to grind to a halt just because he didn’t understand most of what Agent Smalls was telling him. He knew about the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the rest of it was a mystery.

“Indeed. And the Communists had their own psi-war program as well. We were constantly on guard against psychic incursion.”

“So, Grandma Mo and the Russians, did they, like, fight it out?” Matty asked.

“Fight?”

“Psychically,” Matty said. “Like, on the astral plane.”

“Where did you get that from? Comic books?”

“No,” Matty said defensively. If his mom were here, she’d know he was lying. Psychic duels were straight out of the X-Men.

“You’re not far wrong. The gifted can sense each other. In fact, Cliff out there? He’s detected spikes of activity in this area.”

Matty felt his heart thump in his chest. Cliff detected him? Matty lost track of the conversation; his panic deafened him. Did they know what he’d been up to with Uncle Frankie? Would they turn him in to the cops?

Smalls, though, had continued to talk. “You must know your family is special,” he said in a confiding tone. “Not just your grandmother. Your uncles, Buddy and Frankie, used to have abilities. Your mother, too.”

Matty played dumb. “That was just an act. A stage show. They got debunked.”

“Did they?” Smalls asked. “Perhaps. But perhaps they merely stopped performing. The question I have, naturally, is if you’ve seen any new activity. Perhaps among your cousins?”

“Like what?”

“It could be anything,” Smalls said. “The ability to move objects. Sense water moving underground. See things from far away.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Matty said. Thank God Smalls didn’t have his mother’s ability.

Agent Smalls smiled. “All I’m asking is that you keep your eyes open. Can you do that for me?”

Matty thought, Does he want me to spy on my own family?

“The threat to America didn’t end with the Cold War, Matt. Not by a long shot. The Soviet Union is dead, but the Russians still have their own psychics, don’t doubt it. How many other governments have their own operatives? How many fringe groups and terrorist organizations? Worse, how many of these bad actors are trying to recruit gifted Americans?”

Smalls delivered this line with Old Testament gravity. Or at least Old-Hollywood-Bible-Movie gravity. Matty sat back in his seat, milk forgotten.

“That would be bad,” Matty said.

“Not only that, these foreign powers might decide that they can’t afford to have us hire these people, either. They might decide to neutralize the psychic.”

“You mean, like, kill—?”

He shook his head. “I’m sure that won’t happen,” he said, in a way that suggested that was exactly what could happen. “But there are other ways to neutralize the psychic. There are devices that can simply remove those abilities.” He snapped his fingers. “Like turning off a light switch.”

Oh God, Matty thought. He’d neutralize me.

Smalls reached inside his jacket, and Matty gripped the arms of the chair. The agent’s hand came out holding a business card. “I’m on your side, Matt. I want to protect your family. I want to help them. Your grandfather doesn’t want me talking to any of you, because he thinks you’re too young to understand how important this is. Another Telemachus could step into your grandmother’s shoes. The nation would breathe a sigh of relief.”

Matty looked at the card, then put it in his jeans pocket.

“If there’s anything I can do, reach out to me,” Smalls said.

Matty emerged from the van with the feeling that much time had passed, though it had only been minutes. The sun shone at a more oblique angle. The trees whispered together conspiratorially. Even the milk jug seemed heavier, weighted now with hidden significance.

Cliff shook his hand again. “Great to meet you, Matty.”

“I…yeah.”

“Someday I want to tell you about something your grandmother did for me once. She took me along on one of her long-distance journeys, way beyond what I could do on my own. It was one of the most profound experiences of my life.”

“That would be great,” Matty said. Unless Destin Smalls turns me off like a light switch.

He walked home and into the house. He was sure his family would see all this new knowledge cooking his insides like radiation, but no: Grandpa Teddy barely looked up from the newspaper, while across the table from him, behind a fence of empty beer bottles, Uncle Frankie explained something about the Van Allen belt. “Sure, robots could get past the belt to the moon, but human beings?” Mom was busy at the stove. Only Uncle Buddy, chopping onions and green peppers at the counter, looked him in the eye. Matty, suddenly embarrassed, tucked the milk into the fridge. But before he could escape to his room, Mom told him to set the big table.

He was forced to ferry plates and glasses from the cupboards to the dining room, walking back and forth like a duck in a shooting gallery.

Matty went to his mother and said in a low voice, “Is Uncle Frankie staying for dinner?”

“I don’t know. Ask him.”

“Can you do it?”

Mom frowned at Matty as if to ask, What’s your problem? Then she said over her shoulder, “Frankie, you eating or not?”

“You don’t have to make more on my account,” Frankie said.

“Jesus, there’s enough pasta to go around. Yes or no?”

He sighed elaborately. “Wish I could. But Loretta and the girls are waiting.” He stood up, drained the last of his current bottle, and set it on the table.

“You’re welcome,” Grandpa Teddy said.

Frankie raised a hand in salute. “Hey, Matty, help me get something out of the van.”

Matty froze.

“Come on,” Frankie said, already in motion. “The rest of you, enjoy your fine repast. It’ll probably be mac and cheese at my house.”

Matty hesitated, then finally followed his uncle out to the driveway.

“So anything happen today?” Frankie asked.

“Nothing happened,” Matty said.

“No trips? No visits to the tavern?” He was so eager. So desperate. “We really need that combination.”

“I can’t do it,” Matty said.

“What? What’s the matter? Is your mom getting in the way?”

“No, it’s not that, I just don’t think—”

“Self-confidence. I knew it.” He put his hand on Matty’s shoulder and leaned close. “I’ve been there. I know what it’s like to doubt yourself. You just have to push through.”

“I mean I can’t do it, ever.” He struggled to make eye contact with Frankie, and couldn’t pull it off. His uncle’s right ear became his focus. “I’m out. I quit.”

“Quit?” His voice was so loud. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Matty didn’t know what more to say. The government is on to me? They can track me? They can erase me? Frankie would argue him out of every point.

“You can’t quit,” Frankie said. “You’re a Telemachus. We don’t quit!”

“I know, I know.” But wasn’t quitting what they were most known for? The Amazing Telemachus Family had walked offstage and into mediocrity. Frankie gave the benediction years ago at the Thanksgiving table: We could have been kings.

“I’m sorry,” Matty said. He was tearing up. He didn’t want to cry in front of his uncle. “I’m sorry.”

Frankie kept talking, cajoling and shaming and pleading in fast-paced combinations, like a bantamweight working the heavy bag. Matty weathered the blows, unable to speak, unable to move. He wanted to disappear. He wanted to fly out of the top of his head and let his body flop onto the driveway like a bag of wet grass. But that was exactly what he could never do again.

12 Teddy

Love was waiting for him in the mailbox, coiled like a rattlesnake. A plain white envelope. He knew what it was even before he saw his name in Maureen’s razor-sharp cursive, and in a trice the old, sweet poison raced to his heart.

Oh, my love, he thought. You knock me out, even from the grave.

The letters were coming more frequently now, and he had no idea why. There’d been a flurry after she died, then a tapering off, so that for years at a time he’d thought they’d finally stopped. But this was the second one this summer. Was it a sign of the end-times? He was getting old. The obituaries were full of hardier men, younger men, struck down by strokes and prostate cancer and heart attacks. The stress of these letters was enough to do him in. Mo was going to kill him at the mailbox.

“Are you all right?” Irene asked. She was twenty feet away, standing by the car. Too far away to see the handwriting on the envelope.

“Paper bullets,” he said. He tucked the envelope into his jacket pocket. There’d be time to look at it later. “Straight to the brain.”

“How are you getting mail on a Sunday?”

With anyone else he would claim that it was misdelivered and a neighbor must have put it there—but this was Irene. His only choice was to dodge the question entirely. “Let’s go,” he said. “Graciella’s waiting.”

Irene made no move to get in the car. “We have a deal, right? If I go with you, no matter what happens, you’re watching Matty for me.”

“Yes, yes.”

“Four days, next Thursday through Sunday.” He’d made the mistake of giving her the keys so she could get the air-conditioning going, and now she was holding them ransom. She stood by the driver’s-side door, one hand drumming the roof. He winced to think of her rings scratching the paint. She said, “And you will watch him this time.”

She would not let him forget about the time he babysat Matty when he was two. “He’s a teenager now, not a toddler,” he said. “This time if he drinks a glass of gin it will be on purpose.”

Irene groaned, but surrendered the keys.

She managed to sit in silence until the third stoplight. It was more than he could have hoped for.

“Do you trust this woman?” she asked. Meaning Graciella.

“Do you? You’re a better judge of character than I am.” In fact, that’s why he kept bringing Irene along.

“She’s using you,” she said.

“I want her to use me. That’s the point of friendship, Irene.”

“She’s not a friend if she’s after your money.”

“Money? What money? I’m on social security, for Christ’s sake.”

“This car’s a year old. You get a new one every eighteen months.”

“That’s just good sense. New cars are dependable. You break down on the skyway, you’re likely to get killed.”

“And the suits? And the watches?”

He took a breath. How to phrase this, for a woman who can smell a lie? “Just because I don’t dress like a hobo doesn’t mean I’m rich.”

“I know about ATI, Dad.”

He pretended to concentrate on the traffic in the side-view mirror. “What’s that now?”

“Checks were coming to the house all through high school, and they’re still showing up.”

“You’re going through my mail?”

“Don’t have to. I can see the envelopes. Advanced Telemetry Inc.’s a privately held electronics company, but there’s suspiciously little on file.”

“You investigated me?”

“Them, Dad. Turns out they’re some kind of consulting business.”

“You’re a snoop. It’s your greatest failing.”

“I’m sure you’ve got a list. So what is this, Dad? Are you a consultant? Is this a holdover of what you and Mom did?” Her eyebrows rose. “ATI is the front that Destin Smalls uses to pay you, isn’t it?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m just worried, Dad. I don’t care about the money, but I don’t like that this woman is taking advantage of an—of you.”

“Of an old man. Say it.”

“Don’t have to. It’s obvious you’ve gone senile.”

“She doesn’t need my money. She’s mob royalty.”

“So what’s her angle, then? You said she wasn’t interested in you romantically, so she must want something. Why are you smiling?”

It warmed his heart to hear his eldest child musing about angles. Irene was always the sharpest of his children. She had all of Maureen’s intelligence and a good dose of his craftiness. Maureen used to think that Buddy was the genius of the family, but it was little Irene who had a mind like a Ginsu knife. The Human Lie Detector. And that was why, if he was going to help Graciella, he needed Irene at his side.

“I thought you liked her,” Teddy said, trying to sound hurt, and failing even to his own ears.

“Liking has nothing to do with it,” she said. “This is business.”

He laughed until the next stoplight.

“How much is ATI paying you?” Irene asked. Hanging on like a God damn terrier. “In round numbers.”

“They are not paying me any numbers,” Teddy said. “Round, square, or rhomboid. I am paying myself.”

She made a skeptical noise, even though she had to know he wasn’t lying.

“I’m half owner,” he said. “Stop making that face. It was my idea to start the company. Once I got a glimpse of how government worked, how could I not? It’s the craziest damn business. Skinny bakers, top to bottom.”

“You’re saying that like it’s a saying.”

“Skinny bakers! ‘Never trust a skinny baker.’ That’s absolutely a saying.”

“And what does that have to do with the government?”

“Allow me to expound,” he said. “The people inside don’t get to eat any of the cake, but they compensate by throwing cakes out the window. Barrels of cake. The military industrial complex is made entirely of barrel throwers and cake eaters. In this metaphor, cake equals money.”

“Let’s just call a moratorium on metaphors.”

“A metatorium.”

“And coinage.”

“The point is, Destin Smalls is the most gullible man on the planet, and yet he could funnel millions into dubious projects. He’d pay G. Randall Archibald outrageous sums for the most transparent flimflammery. Torsion field detectors. Micro-lepton guns that never quite worked, oh, just need another half mil in development—”

“Oh my God,” Irene said. “This is about competing with Archibald. Still. Again.”

“This is about making money, plain and simple,” Teddy said.

“Did Mom know about this?”

He started to answer, then thought better of it.

“Then no,” Irene said.

“She knew,” he said. “Eventually.” Before Irene could ask he said, “Your mother, she was very conservative about money, very conservative. Didn’t like anything speculative. The start-up costs were significant, and took a long time to recoup. I was very sad that the company didn’t start earning back on our investment until well after her death.”

“You can’t say ‘our’ if she didn’t agree to it.”

Yet she paid all the same, Teddy thought.

“Help me find the address,” he said. “One-thirty-one. Look for a real estate sign.”

They found it soon enough. NG Group Realty. The parking lot was empty except for Graciella’s Mercedes wagon. He eased his car next to hers and Irene put a hand on his arm.

“Answer this: Has Graciella asked you for money?”

“No,” he said. The honest truth.

Irene shook her head. “I don’t get it, then.”

“You’re asking the wrong question,” he said. “It’s not what she’s getting from me, it’s what I’m getting from her.”

“Which is?”

He couldn’t lie, not to Irene, but he could choose what true thing to say. He thought of saying, “Revenge,” but that sounded melodramatic. He considered “Justice,” but that was both melodramatic and out of character.

“I get to be back in the game,” he said.

One of the great regrets of his life was that he never told Maureen about ATI. Another one of his great regrets was that she found out on her own.

He remembered the night. He’d driven home through a snowstorm and entered the house like the Great Hunter, bearing the finest pizza in the Chicagoland area. Maureen cleared the papers and crayons from the kitchen table, and the whole family sat together under the warm lights, Frankie excitedly describing fantastic sled crashes, getting them all to laugh, even Buddy. It was when they all huddled together like this that he was most happy. They were coconspirators, happy thieves dividing up the take, laughing it up while the mundane world went on with their dreary lives. It was the next best thing to being onstage together.

After dinner, Teddy lit a cigarette and watched Maureen wash the dishes. He was not by nature a content man, but this came pretty damn close. Then he noticed, on the counter next to his elbow, the stack of pages that Maureen had moved from the table to the counter. They weren’t Buddy’s coloring pages, as he’d assumed after seeing all the crayons. They were bills and bank documents. He lifted a few pages, and saw the red logo of their mortgage company. It was Teddy’s job to handle the money and the house payments. He’d insisted on it.

He replayed the past hour in his mind, knowing that Mo had been looking at those pages before he arrived. Now her laughter seemed a bit forced. Her attention had been elsewhere.

“You want to talk about anything?” he asked.

Maureen didn’t turn around. “Is there anything to talk about?”

He knew that arid tone.

In retrospect, he was a fool to think she wouldn’t find out sooner or later. How could any mortal hide anything from Maureen Telemachus? He’d dipped into the family savings, if you could use the word “dip” for such a thorough excavation, and he’d also taken out a second mortgage.

“Tell me what you did with it,” she said. “Are you gambling again?”

She thought he’d gone back to his wicked ways. Ironically, he had returned to his wicked ways, but only to make up the money sunk into ATI.

“What I used to do wasn’t gambling,” Teddy said, unable to keep the indignation from his voice. In those days, he was even more of a peacock than now.

Maureen, without even looking at him, made it clear she was taking none of his bull. Why should she? She’d taken so much of it for years. “Oh, Teddy,” Maureen said. “Everything we worked for, you’re throwing it away.”

“I certainly am not,” he said. “I’m investing it. There’s a big difference.”

“Investing in what?”

“I’ll tell you,” he said. “Just sit down. Please.”

She dried her hands and took a seat opposite him at the table, quiet as a hanging judge.

“A business opportunity presented itself,” he said. “I had an idea for a company, and a coinvestor to create it with me. This company would create an ongoing revenue stream, but it required some initial capital, just to get things rolling. Short-term start-up costs, long-term returns.”

“Ongoing revenue stream,” she said.

“That’s right!”

“Are you listening to yourself?” she said softly.

“I want you to listen to me,” he said in a reasonable tone. “I’m trying to put food on the table. What choice do I have? Everything else I’ve tried—”

“The act,” she said. She shook her head in a way that years later would be echoed by their daughter. “You’re still angry. You can’t let it go.”

“We had a plan, Mo. Everything depended on you coming out, and you didn’t do it.” Teddy knew Archibald was scheduled to interrupt their act. He deliberately gave the skeptic something easy to expose, the old séance trick with his foot, something the cameras could pick up. The family wasn’t debunked; their defeat was bunk itself, the setup for the big reversal. Mo would do the telephone gag, flummoxing Archibald. The famous skeptic would admit on national television that they were the real thing, and their fortunes would be made.

“What did you want me to do?” Teddy said, exasperated.

“Get a job,” she said. “A real job.”

“This is better than a job,” he said. “This is a legitimate business venture.”

“You come in here with Nick Pusateri’s pizza, and you’re going to talk to me about legitimate?”

“This has nothing to do with him.” Which was the truth. “All I did was buy a pizza.” Which was a lie. He’d stopped by Pusateri’s to talk about their next job. But he couldn’t tell her that, because he’d promised that he’d never work for that man, or the Outfit, again.

“Then tell me what this investment is,” she said. “No hemming and hawing. None of your flimflam. Tell me exactly who you’re in business with, and what you’re doing.”

“I can’t, Mo. I just can’t. You just have to trust that what I’m doing, I’m doing for the family.”

“Trust,” she said bitterly.

He nodded. “That’s all I need. A little trust.”

“Yet you can’t trust me,” she said. Her lips were trembling. “Your wife.”

“Not until it pays off. Then, I swear, you’ll understand why I—”

Frankie burst into the kitchen, followed by Buddy. “Can you make cookies?”

“I’m not one of your marks,” Maureen said. She gathered up the bank statements, ignoring the boys, who were clamoring for her attention. He watched her in silence, thinking they were done with the argument, and then she handed him the pile. “That’s not true,” she said. “I was your first mark.”

The next morning, Maureen informed him that she’d accepted Destin Smalls’s offer to work for the government in a new program called Project Star Gate. And not long after that, Nick Pusateri ended Teddy’s career as a cardshark.

Graciella unlocked the door to the offices from the inside and let them in. There were no hugs—she was not that kinda gal—but she shook hands with Irene. “Welcome to NG Group.”

“You’re the G?” Irene asked.

“The N liked to keep me in the dark, even though I was the owner on paper.”

“And now you want to be the owner in fact,” Teddy said.

“Now I have to be. I don’t know how much of this business is real, and how much of it is a front for the other Pusateri business. I don’t even know if I’m the only owner. I wouldn’t be surprised to uncover a few silent partners.” She led them through an empty cubicle farm—none of the agents had yet come in—to a big glassed-in office. She gestured toward the computer and the large beige monitor. “Nick Junior gave me the password for the accounting software, but I don’t know what I’m doing. Your dad said you were good at this.”

Irene gave him a look, then said to Graciella, “What are you looking for, exactly?”

“The money,” Graciella said, and Teddy laughed.

Irene went to work like some kind of…computer person. She got the machine running, and for the next five minutes did nothing but grunt and talk to herself, eyes scanning the screen, while Graciella hovered behind her. He’d have never expected his telepathic daughter to learn accounting, but he had to admit it was a pleasure to have a child with such arcane skills.

Teddy, ensconced in an overstuffed womb chair designed, evidently, to lure clients into childlike trust, watched the women as long as he could before boredom overcame him. He checked the Rolex. They’d been here five minutes. “Tell her about the teeth,” Teddy said to Graciella.

“I think she’s busy,” Graciella said.

Irene looked up. “Did you say teeth?”

“You’re distracting her,” Graciella said.

“It’s pertinent to the situation,” Teddy said. “It’s why we’re here.”

“Teeth?” Irene repeated.

“I want her to hear it from you,” Teddy said to Graciella. Then to Irene: “They’re proof that Nick Junior is an innocent man.”

“He’s not completely innocent,” Graciella said. “But he is the father of my children. I have to think of them.”

“Teeth,” Irene prompted.

Graciella leaned back against the window ledge, crossed her long legs, and frowned as if deciding where to start. She looked terrific in a tight green skirt and a Creamsicle-orange blouse, a combination that he wouldn’t have thought would work but most certainly did. More evidence that women were braver than men.

“This can’t leave this room,” Graciella said. Irene nodded, waiting for her to continue. Graciella said, “You know Nick Junior is on trial for the murder of Rick Mazzione. And you may have read that Nick Senior owned a piece of Rick Mazzione’s business. Took it, really, when Rick fell behind on his loan payments. Rick tried to pay up, but the debt was never settled, and Rick began to complain openly about this. He was perhaps getting angry enough to go to the police. Maybe he already had. So Nick Senior decided to find out.”

Irene took in this information like a pro. No girly gasps, no derailing questions. But she was definitely evaluating each sentence. That was why Teddy wanted Graciella to tell the story. If Teddy had done it, Irene would know only that Teddy believed what the woman had told him. With Irene, you always had to be thinking of the secondhand-story problem.

“This is where my husband gets involved,” Graciella said. “Nick Senior told him to invite Mazzione to a meeting, and then drive him out to a construction site. They began to…ask him questions. Nick Senior didn’t like the answers, and got angry. He punched Mazzione in the mouth.”

Irene nodded. “Teeth.”

“He knocked a few of them loose. Nick’s hand started bleeding, which only made him angrier.”

“He gets angry easily,” Teddy explained to Irene.

“I’m getting that impression,” Irene said.

“My husband told me that Nick Senior went a little crazy then. He started pulling Mazzione’s teeth out with a pair of pliers. All of his teeth. Except for the molars. He couldn’t get the molars.”

Irene looked at Teddy. “You were friends with this guy?”

“Work friends,” he said. “Not the same thing.”

“Then Nick shot him. Not my husband. Nick Senior.”

“Your husband told you this?”

“You don’t believe me?”

“I believe you believe your husband.”

Teddy almost laughed. The secondhand-story problem, in action.

“Nick Senior made my husband bury the body on his own,” Graciella said. “When they found it, months later, it was missing those teeth, and they weren’t at the crime scene. My husband had saved them. He kept them in a cigar box in his sock drawer.”

“Because keeping souvenirs of human body parts is a normal thing to do,” Irene said.

“Monks keep bones of saints,” Teddy said reasonably.

“You don’t have to defend him,” Graciella said. “My husband’s not perfect. And he doesn’t always think through his actions. But in this case, it’s a good thing.”

Irene raised an eyebrow. “Because…”

“Nick Senior’s blood is on Mazzione’s teeth. They put him at the scene of the crime.”

“They wouldn’t take Junior’s word for it?” Irene asked.

“My husband won’t testify against his father. He’d never do that. But I will absolutely turn the teeth over to the district attorney. I’ve already hinted to the police that I have proof. That may have been a mistake, though. Nick Senior seems to know I have something.”

“You can’t get cops to shut up,” Teddy said. “Plus, Nick Senior may have bought a few of them.”

“Or a lot of them,” Graciella said.

“So why haven’t you done it?” Irene asked. “Turned them over. Gotten Nick Senior charged.”

“Because the charges may not stick, and I want something more than his arrest,” Graciella said. “I want independence.”

Somehow, when Graciella was melodramatic, it worked, like orange on green. Who knew?

“I want my own life after my husband goes to jail,” Graciella said. “I want a clean business with no Outfit connections. And I want my boys to grow up without seeing their grandfather’s face ever again. I’ll trade the teeth to him for that.”

Teddy watched his daughter’s face. Her eyes had gone squinty. It was the look Maureen used to give him when he came home with liquor on his breath. Damn it, had Graciella lied to her—lied to them both?

“How many photocopiers are in this building?” Irene asked.

“Three,” Graciella said. “One is color.”

“I’m going to need copies of all the tax returns, and all the paper ledgers you can find,” Irene said. “Oh, and blank floppy disks. A lot of floppy disks.”

He used to love the feel of cards in his hands. There was no finer pleasure than to sit around a table drinking and smoking and telling lies with a group of well-heeled men, dealing them exactly the cards he wanted them to hold. Of course, those men weren’t friends, could never be friends. The next best pleasure was to sit around a table drinking and smoking and telling lies with men who knew him well enough never to let him deal a deck of cards, or even cut them.

“Tell ’em about Cleveland,” Nick Senior said.

“That’s okay,” Teddy demurred. He’d only returned from Ohio a couple of nights before.

“No, really. Guys, you will not fucking believe this story.” The Guys being Charlie, Teppo, and Bert the German. The regulars. Their usual Tuesday-night routine was to camp out in the back of Nick’s restaurant and eat pizza and drink Canadian Mist until dawn. They played, Teddy watched.

“What happened in Cleveland?” Charlie asked. Not the sharpest knife, Charlie. It was a miracle that he could talk and deal at the same time.

“Nothing,” Teddy said. He glanced at Nick, who was rolling out pizza dough at a big table. The best part of playing in the kitchen was that Nick kept them fed. The worst part was that every game was on Nick’s home turf. “A little trouble with a card game.”

“Come on, what’d you do?” Charlie asked. Already laughing. He was the group’s official fuckup, a kind of mascot who’d lost Nick almost as much money as he’d made him. He sensed that Nick was mad. They all moved carefully when he was in a mood, for the same reason that you played gently with nitroglycerin.

“Tell ’em,” Nick said. His stevedore arms were white to the elbow with flour. He was a big man, and determined to stay as big as he’d been in the fifties. He kept his hair in an oil-black D.A., wore the same shirts and tight pants he’d worn as a teenager, and listened to the oldies channel on the AM. The fixation on his youth was beginning to look ridiculous, but of course nobody was going to point this out to his face. “It was a hell of a setup,” Nick said. “I put Teddy in a tough spot.”

Teddy shrugged. He was not going to complain to Nick in front of these guys. “Why don’t we just play cards?” he asked.

“See, I sent Teddy down to help my cousin Angelo,” Nick continued. “He’d gotten himself into a game with a couple New Yorkers, Castellano guys.”

“Castellano,” Charlie said. “Shit, why?”

“Angelo was forced into being polite,” Nick said. “I said, hell, if you’re stuck playing with these fuckers, the least we can do is take their money. I said, I’m sending you a guy. I’ll bankroll him myself, twenty grand of my own money. I said, this guy’s the best fucking mechanic in the business.”

The guys looked at Teddy, who offered a self-deprecating smile.

Charlie laughed. “They let you be dealer?”

Teddy shook his head. “I was playing the whale.”

Nick said, “I told him to wear that fucking Newman Rolie. Flash it around.”

Teddy was wearing it now. A 1966 “Paul Newman” Rolex Daytona with a diamond dial. Worth twenty-five grand, and the thing would only gain in value. It was like walking around with a Lakefront condo on his arm. Teddy dropped his hand below the table. “My job was to lose, but mostly to Angelo,” Teddy said. “Angelo, though, was struggling to keep up with the New Yorkers.”

Nick snorted. “For good reason, it turns out. But to make it worse, the New Yorkers have two backup guys in the next room, hanging out with Angelo’s guys. Everybody’s armed to the teeth.”

“Holy shit!” Charlie exclaimed.

“But tell ’em the real problem,” Nick said.

Teddy kept his face still, projecting calm. Good humor.

“Go on,” Nick said. A commandment.

“The real problem,” Teddy said finally, “was that the New Yorkers were tag-teaming us. They were signaling to each other, trying to cheat Angelo and me. One of them even tried bottom-dealing.”

“On you?” Charlie said. “He’s trying to out-mechanic the mechanic?”

“Fat chance,” Teppo said. He was five-foot-squat, a hundred and forty pounds, but Teddy had seen him crush the windpipes of men twice his weight. “So what’d you do? Start cheating back?”

“Of course,” Teddy said. “But I couldn’t make any big moves during my deals, because I can’t tip ’em off that I’m a plant. But I can’t let the game keep going, because Angelo’s losing money every hand.”

Bert the German grunted in appreciation of the conundrum. Bert hardly ever spoke. He was more dangerous than Teppo, and completely loyal to Nick.

“It was eating you, too,” Nick said. “Admit it. You didn’t like these guys trying to out-cheat you, Teddy Telemachus.”

“Of course he was mad!” Charlie said. “Who wouldn’t be?”

Shut the hell up, Teddy thought.

“Pride,” Nick said. “Pride starts to creep in.”

Teddy looked up into Nick’s eyes. “Yes,” Teddy said. “A little bit of pride.”

“So you had to take them down,” Nick said.

Teddy nodded.

Teppo and Bert had gone still. They could feel the change in the room. But fucking Charlie was swiveling his head between Nick and Teddy, laughing. “How’d you do it? Teddy? How’d you do it?”

“I’d like to know that myself,” Nick said. “Somehow he rigged the next hand, without even dealing it himself. How’d you do that, Teddy?”

Teddy tapped the surface of the table, remembering the last hand of the game. One of the New Yorkers was dealing. He pushed the deck to Teddy for the cut. Teddy made an amateurish cut using both hands and slid the deck back to the dealer.

So much preparation had gone into that simple transaction. Teddy had arrived in Cleveland with all the decks that they’d be using that night. One was clean, but the rest were pegged so that he could read the bumps under his fingers as he dealt. Plus he had two extra decks, one in his jacket pocket, one in a felt pocket stitched to the underside of the table, loaded in two different schemes.

Nobody noticed when he slid the pocket deck free. Nobody noticed when, thirty seconds later, he borrowed a card from the jacket deck and slipped it into the deck in his hand. And nobody noticed that the deck he returned after the cut was not the one he’d been handed.

Nick was waiting for an answer. Teddy shrugged. “Does it matter?”

Nick smiled. “I guess not.”

“Okay, so what happened?” Charlie asked.

“I only know this secondhand from Angelo,” Nick said. “And he was pretty hard to understand through all the bandages. But supposedly? Incredible. See, those two cheating fucks from New York, they find themselves with incredible hands. They start outbidding each other, and Angelo’s too stupid to get out of the way. Soon the pot’s huge, and everybody’s still in. They turn over the cards, and one of the New Yorkers’s got a straight, and the other’s got four of a kind, all deuces. Amazing, right? But here’s the topper: both New Yorkers are holding the two of spades.”

Charlie was laughing, confused. “What? Holy shit!” Teppo and Bert weren’t laughing, though. Teddy had suspected that the two of them had already heard this story from Nick, and the suspicion was turning his gut to ice.

“You can imagine how pissed off Angelo is,” Nick said. “Not the coolest head in the best of times. He starts shouting, and the New Yorkers know that somebody’s just fucked with them, and now they’re pissed. The goons storm in from the next room, and that’s when the shit hits the fan.”

Nick is looking at Teddy now. “A gun comes out. Angelo holds up his hand, and the bullet goes through his hand and into his jaw. The docs think the jaw can be fixed, but the hand, well the hand is just fucked. He’s going to bat lefty now.”

“Holy shit,” Charlie said. He was not an imaginative curser.

“I drove him to the hospital,” Teddy said. “I apologized to him.”

The men mulled the end of the story as if savoring a meal.

Then Nick shrugged. “I’d have preferred you held on to my money.”

Teddy felt his heart thump once in his chest. Everyone looked at Nick.

He wasn’t even pretending to work with the dough now. He flipped the switch on the pizza roller, and the two big cylinders whined up to speed.

Bert the German put a beefy hand on Teddy’s arm, tugged for him to stand up.

But Teddy couldn’t stand up. His legs had stopped working. Acid stung the back of his throat.

Teppo and Bert hauled him upright. Charlie said, “What’s going on, guys?” He was the only one in the room who didn’t know what was about to happen.

“Take off the watch,” Nick said.

After three hours of poring over files, Irene told him and Graciella that two things were clear: there was too much to copy, and there was definitely something fishy going on with the numbers. Irene, though, was due for her shift at Aldi’s.

“Let’s pack it up,” Graciella said. She no longer trusted for the paperwork to be safe in the office, because she had no idea how many people had keys, and who those people were loyal to. The only solution was to take everything they could get their hands on and move it off-site, where the women would go through it at their leisure. They filled the Buick’s trunk and the back of Graciella’s station wagon. She followed Teddy and Irene to the house, where they enlisted Buddy and Matty to help them unload.

It was an odd experience for Teddy. He’d been intending to keep Graciella away from the males of the family, so as not to scare her off. But she seemed charmed by Buddy’s shyness, and laughed at Matty’s hesitant jokes. In retrospect, that made sense: Graciella was raising three boys, and Buddy was as much a kid as any of them. Fortunately, he was a kid with a hobby. In the basement he’d been building deep shelving units out of spare lumber. The file boxes fit perfectly into place, like they were meant to be there.

Graciella said nothing about the metal window shades, but she asked about the large structure taking shape at the other end of the basement.

Buddy ducked his head and went upstairs.

“I think they’re bunk beds,” Matty said.

“Best not to ask questions,” Irene said. She’d pulled on the polyester Aldi’s smock. “I’ve got to go. Graciella, I’ll get back to the ledgers tomorrow.”

“I can’t thank you enough,” Graciella said. She went to Irene and took her hand in hers. “I mean it. I can’t. But I’ll try to make it up to you someday.”

Teddy thought: They’re having a moment! My girls are having a moment!

Graciella said that she should be going, too, because her mother was probably getting tired of watching the boys. Teddy said, “You can’t go, I need your help with something. I have entirely too much gin in the freezer, an oversupply of tonic, and an abundance of cucumbers.”

“Not limes?”

“It’s Hendrick’s, my dear. Cucumber slices, always.”

“I suppose I can do my part during this difficult time,” she said.

They took their drinks outside, into the August sunlight, and Graciella said, “You have hammocks!”

“We do?” They did. Two Mexican hammocks, slung in the shade between the three oaks. Another Buddy project, Teddy thought, financed by yours truly.

“I love hammocks,” Graciella said. She skirted the dirt patch—Buddy had provided as much explanation for filling the hole as he had for digging it—and eased into one of the hammocks, laughing while trying to keep her drink from spilling.

Teddy carried over one of the lawn chairs. “Aw, what are you doing with that?” she asked. “Take the other one.”

“I’m not a hammock person,” he said. He set up the chair across from her, removed his jacket, and draped it across the back. The white envelope slid out onto the seat of the chair. He’d forgotten about it. He picked it up nonchalantly and slipped it into the jacket side pocket. Graciella noticed but didn’t remark on it.

He sat across from her and they sipped their drinks while Graciella said pleasant things about Matty, the house, the yard. Perhaps some were lies but he didn’t care. The moment was as fine as any he could remember. A warm day at the end of summer, a beautiful woman in orange and green like a tropical flower blooming in his own backyard, a cold glass in his hand. It made him want to say philosophical things to her. He tried to construct a sentence about old age, bitter gin, and sweet tonic—the sweet tonic of youth!—but then lost concentration when Graciella kicked off one shoe, then the other.

“Did I ever tell you the story about how my act was stolen by the king of late-night?”

She laughed. “I think I would have remembered.”

“At last! A fresh audience,” he said. “It was 1953, and me, a high school pal who did magic, and L. Ron Hubbard were all sitting in a watering hole in L.A.”

“The Scientology guy?”

“The very same. We were discussing how easy it was to separate a mark from his money—especially one who was a true believer. I began to demonstrate my abilities as a billet reader—”

“The three wishes thing?”

“Again, spot-on, my dear. I dazzled the barflies in attendance, and afterward, a kid from Nebraska introduces himself, buys me a drink, and tells me he works on the radio but got his start as a magician. Tough to do magic on the radio, I say. He asks me to show him the billet gag, out of professional courtesy. Now, I’m not one to show some fresh-faced mook how I make my living, but he keeps after me, keeps buying me drinks, so I figure, why not, he’s bought himself one trick. I walk him through the gag, and you know what he asks me?”

“I have no idea.”

“Why the hat? That’s the question. Why the hat? I tell him, the hat’s the whole act! It’s not just that it distracts the audience from looking at your hands; it concentrates attention! The hat is the theater, it’s the drama!”

“I have to agree,” Graciella said.

“And the kid says, Maybe it could be bigger. I coulda punched him. He walks out of the bar, and ten years later, I turn on the TV, and what do I see? That kid, with his own talk show. And what does he do for laughs? He does my act, wearing a God damn turban!”

“Johnny Carson stole your act?”

“Carnac the Magnificent my ass,” he said.

He loved the way she laughed. “How much of that is true?” she asked.

“As much as you’d like,” he said. “As much as you’d like.”

Graciella began to swing toward him, then away from him. Her toenails were pink.

“Ever hear of a guy named Bert Schmidt?” she asked. “They called him Bert the German.”

“I may have heard the name,” he said.

“He testified against Nick Junior this week.”

“Huh.” He never would have thought Bert would turn on any Pusateri.

“He said he heard Nick Junior bragging about killing Rick Mazzione.”

“But not Nick Senior?”

“Nope.”

Maybe Bert was still loyal to Nick Senior after all. Was the father really setting up his own son? Or had Nick Junior been stupid enough to brag about a murder he didn’t commit?

“It’s looking like I’ll be on my own soon,” Graciella said. “I really hope Irene can figure out what’s happening with the NG Group.”

“I have complete confidence,” Teddy said. “She’s got a head for numbers. It’s a crime that she’s not running her own company.” He loosened his tie. “But are you sure you want to know what’s going on?”

Graciella made a questioning noise.

“Say that NG really is a front company,” Teddy said. “Would you shut it down on principle, forgo all that income?”

“If Nick Senior is involved, then yes.”

“My guess is that Nick Senior is involved up to his God damn neck.”

He’d never been much of a sleeper. Restless mind, restless fingers. But after the accident (for that was what he called it when he came home from the hospital with his hands in bandages, and that was what Maureen told the kids, even if Maureen didn’t believe it herself), neither fingers nor mind were working and he found it nearly impossible to get out of bed.

Or rather, couch. He’d moved down to the basement after coming home, like a wounded dog going to ground. The pain pills made all hours equal, and in the basement he could watch TV or sleep at any time, night or day. The boys accepted the living arrangement without questioning it, though Frankie did ask if he could sleep in the basement, too. Irene repeatedly attempted couch-side interrogations, but even in his pill-fogged state he knew it was better to evade her questions than to try answering them. He’d open his eyes and there she’d be, frowning down at him. She’d ask blunt questions like “Why aren’t you sleeping in your bed?” and “Why is Mom crying?” He’d say something like “This is where the TV is,” or “Everybody cries.” What choice did he have? The truth was off the table. He couldn’t tell a ten-year-old, “I lied to your mother, betrayed her, and put our entire family’s future at risk.” The real reason he’d moved to the basement was so he didn’t have to see the expression on Maureen’s face when she looked at him. He wanted to stew and sulk in darkness.

He sat in that basement through the winter and into the spring, and slept in a bed only when he was at the hospital for the hand surgeries. Every morning Destin Smalls picked up Maureen and drove her to a government office downtown. (So vital was she to the project that living in D.C. was not a requirement; remote viewing, after all, could be done remotely.) Smalls dropped her off in the afternoons, though not always on time. Sometimes Mo—or her new assistant cook, Irene—didn’t get supper on the table until six. Sometimes it was little more than stove-top C rations: macaroni and cheese; bean and bacon soup; or the kids’ favorite, Breakfast for Dinner.

Mo tried to talk to him. When that failed, she tried to get him to talk to someone else—friends, his doctor, his hand surgeon, or “anyone who might help”—without using the word “psychiatrist,” which she knew would set him off. Men of his generation did not go to shrinks, certainly not men who’d emerged from the war unscathed. Teddy’s luck was largely due to the fact that he’d never left the States. He served on the front lines of the bureaucracy, deploying his typewriter with machine-gun speed, while at night embarking on daring raids to local bars and engaging in furious hand-to-hand poker games.

But after the accident, he knew his luck had run out. He began to see his body as an unreliable vehicle, prone to failure and breakdowns, and as protective as cardboard. Was this how Mo thought of herself, when she was out traveling the astral plane? Did she know how fragile this shell was? One day he climbed out of the basement—aka the pit of self-pity—to ask her what it was like.

Mo was washing up after dinner, scrubbing the cheap JCPenney pots she bought after their wedding. It was summer, months after she’d told him the diagnosis. He was alarmed at how exhausted she looked, how pale.

“Where’d you go today?” he asked. He made his voice cheery. “You know. Out there.” He’d not asked about her job since she started it.

“You know I can’t talk about it,” she said flatly. She was too tired to make that sound angry.

“I have a security clearance, too, you know.”

“Had.” She moved the sponge automatically, as if she wasn’t seeing what her hands were doing.

He said, “Agent Smalls must know that he can’t keep a wife from talking to her husband.”

She looked at him, and her face was so sad. “I was in the ocean,” she said.

“In the ocean?” Hunting for submarines, he thought. Smalls was obsessed with submarines. “Was it beautiful? How deep did you go?”

“Deep,” she said. “It was so beautiful.” She dried her hands with a cotton towel. “I need to talk to you about something.”

He braced himself. He knew he’d been failing her. But he didn’t have the words ready to apologize. Or to tell her what he was going to do different. He had no plan, no scheme. What he had was two useless hands, a couch, and a TV.

She sat down next to him. “It’s about the children,” she said. Immediately he felt relieved. “I want you to promise that you’ll never let them do what I do. Never let them work for the government.”

“That’s an easy promise,” Teddy said. Buddy had stopped being able to predict anything. Frankie couldn’t bend a paper clip. And Irene was too honest to work for the government.

“This includes the grandchildren,” she said.

“What grandchildren?”

“Someday our children will have children.”

“Sure, but—”

“Don’t argue with me!” Mo shouted. The anger seemed to erupt from nowhere. Her body looked too worn out to make such a noise, and it had left her even emptier. Her eyes welled with tears.

“I promise,” he said. He was good at promises. They came easily to him. “You can depend on me,” he said.

He was touched when Graciella fell asleep in the hammock. Even after he finished his drink he did not get up to refill it, for fear that he’d awaken her. He watched her for a while, and then pushed back the Borsalino to gaze up at the leaves moving in the breeze. Two squirrels scampered across high limbs. The hat began to slide off his head, and something about touching the crown of the hat reminded him of the letter.

He took it from his jacket pocket and looked again at his name in Maureen’s sharp cursive. Then he held the envelope, unopened, to the crown of the hat in the traditional manner, just in case Graciella happened to peek. Then he opened the envelope, the glue so old the flap almost popped free on its own. Inside was a single page of coarse drawing paper. He unfolded it, then grunted in surprise.

Graciella stirred, but did not awaken.

He picked up the envelope and thought, God damn you, Mo. God damn you and Buddy.

The crayon drawing was as crude as you’d expect from a six-year-old. On a field of green, two stick figures lay inside a rectangle. One of the figures wore a triangle on its head.

At the top right, Maureen had written him a message:

13 Irene

“Not exactly Barbie’s Dream House,” she said to Graciella. The two women stood on the street outside a 1967 ranch home with foot-high weeds in the yard, a cracked driveway, and a garage buckling under the weight of gravity. The FOR SALE sign leaned against the front door, even though the house had sold two months ago. No one had moved in, and no one probably ever would.

“You’re saying NG Group sold this?” Graciella said.

“Yep. Ask me for how much.”

Graciella looked at her over the top of her sunglasses.

Irene said, “One point two million.”

Graciella looked again at the house. “Is it on top of an oil well?”

Irene laughed. “Nope. Strictly a fixer-upper.”

“Then my husband’s a real estate genius. Who bought it?”

“That’s the interesting part,” Irene said. “You did.”

“NG Group?”

“Not immediately. But eventually, yeah. It’s now back in your portfolio.”

“And you’re dying to tell me why.”

“I am.”

“Go on, go on. Don’t let me stop you.”

“Say you have a million in cash you don’t want to explain,” Irene said. “You can’t just deposit it in the bank—banks have to report big deposits. So you go to a friendly real estate agency and buy a little starter home for a million. But a week or a month later you decide you don’t want that crappy house. So you sell it back to the company for the same price, they take their realtor’s cut, and they deposit the rest in your bank account.”

“And banks don’t raise an eyebrow for house sales,” Graciella said.

“In practice, you don’t buy and sell to the same company,” Irene said. “There’s a handful of real estate companies that NG works with, and they’re all passing cash and properties around to each other like chips in a poker game—it’s not real money till someone cashes out.”

“You mean when the cash is all clean.”

“You got it.”

“Well, damn,” Graciella said. “I don’t own a real estate company. I own a laundry.” She looked at Irene. “And you’re smiling.”

“I’m sorry, it’s just that—”

“Don’t apologize! You love it. Figuring it all out. How they’re fooling people.”

“I can’t help it,” Irene said. “I was raised by a cardshark.”

“When I first met Teddy, I was hoping for a miracle. But I think the real miracle is that I found your father at all. And you. It’s funny how these things work out, from one chance meeting. That wasn’t even a grocery store I go to. An envelope showed up in my mailbox full of coupons and cash gift certificates for that Dominick’s. Some little girl must have sent it—my address was written in pink crayon.”

“What?”

Graciella frowned at Irene’s extreme reaction. “You know something about pink crayons?”

“No, no,” Irene said. And thought, Buddy. “Go on.”

“There’s not much else. I decided to try out the store. Then I met your father, and it turned out that he knew my husband’s family. It’s kind of amazing.”

“That’s the word for it,” Irene said. She’d have to talk to Buddy and find out what the hell he was up to. She changed the subject. “I’ll be able to get more done on the financials after my trip.” She was going to fly out to Phoenix tomorrow morning. She’d been referring to it as “my trip.” Not “my trip to Arizona” or “my big job interview” or “my long weekend of hot sex.”

“Whenever you can,” Graciella said. “I’ll make sure you’re paid for your time.”

“You don’t have to do that. Dad asked me to help. It turns out I could be of use, so—”

“Your father, sweet as he is, doesn’t get to loan you out like a lawn mower. You have useful skills, Irene, and you’ll be compensated.”

With a shock, Irene realized that Graciella was not simply being nice. She believed she was telling the truth.

That was the great catch in her ability, the reason it hardly ever helped: she could only detect when people knew they were lying. If they believed what they were saying, she was powerless to determine the truth of it. The great lesson of her childhood was that most adults, but especially her father, believed much of the bullshit they generated. When she was ten, she went to him and said, “Something’s wrong with Mom.”

He was sitting on the couch in the basement, his headquarters since the car accident, watching the Cubs on channel nine, dressed in his uniform since the accident: undershirt, Bermuda shorts, black dress shoes. It was deep August, and that year they’d had nothing but the three Hs: Hot, Hazy, and Humid. The basement was slightly cooler than the rest of the house—but only slightly.

“Mom’s fine,” he said.

“She is?” Irene asked. Relieved, disbelieving, wanting to believe. Tears pooled hot behind her eyes.

“You’re blocking the TV,” he said.

Irene didn’t move. “She threw up in the bathroom.”

He finally looked at her.

“This morning,” she said. “And last night.” Mom had tried to keep it quiet, but the sounds were unmistakable.

“Huh,” her father said. His hand came up and scratched his jaw, four fingers held together. His hands had become shovels since the accident.

“Do you think she has the flu?” Irene asked.

“I’ll ask her about it.”

“She shouldn’t be working if she’s sick,” Irene said. “You should tell her to stay home.”

He almost smiled. If he’d let the smile come on, she would have screamed at him. “You don’t like Agent Smalls, do you?”

This was a month after Smalls had failed to lie to Irene. He was in love with her mother. The fact that she kept getting in the car with him every morning, kept working with him, was inexplicable to her. That her father let her mother do it infuriated her.

“What are you going to do about Mom?” Irene asked.

“I told you, I’ll ask her.” Irene thought, He believes that he’s really going to do this.

“But she’s okay?” Irene asked again.

“Madlock’s up to bat,” he said wearily.

Later, Irene started supper, with Buddy prompting her with the right ingredients from their mother’s recipe. It was chop suey, an ultra-bland dish as Chinese as meat loaf. When Mom came home, she didn’t try to take over as she usually did. She sat in the chair with Buddy on her lap, and told Irene that she was doing fine.

“How was work?” Irene asked. This seemed like an adult thing to say.

“Busy. And what did you do today, Mr. Buddy? Did you draw any pictures?”

They went on like that, talking about nothing as ground beef simmered in the skillet, until Irene called Frankie and her father to the dining room. Irene wasn’t about to ask her mother what was wrong. She was terrified that Mom would tell the truth.

Once they sat down, Frankie was there to distract them. At ten years old he was a motormouth, before teenagerdom turned him sullen, and aging desperation made him a yammerer again. This was the summer he found the Encyclopedia of Greek Gods and Heroes at the Bookmobile and kept asking Dad which ones the Telemachus family should worship. He was the only one who could get Dad to laugh since the accident.

“No paganism,” Dad said. “Your mom won’t stand for it.”

Mom had been moving the chopped celery and ground beef on her plate without eating any of it. When she thought no one was looking, her face went cold, as if all her energy had to be redirected elsewhere. But Irene was watching.

“Please stick to Christ and the Blessed Virgin,” Mom said. She touched her napkin to her lips, and pushed her chair back. “Excuse me a moment.” She was pale, and sweating in the heat. Buddy put his face in his hands.

Mom stood, and placed her hand on the chair back. But she put too much of her weight on it, and the chair tipped. She fell sideways, and the side of her head struck the linoleum with a sharp sound.

Everyone leaped up. Everyone except Buddy, who kept his face covered. Mom was embarrassed. “I’m all right, I’m all right, please everybody sit down, I just lost my balance.” Dad helped her out of the room, and up the stairs, to the bathroom.

He returned to the table a long time later. “Mom’s going to rest.” He looked at Irene. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

Liar, she thought.

Six in the morning and Matty was blearily awake, volunteering to carry Irene’s bag down to the car and see her off to Phoenix. She knew he’d be asleep again before she left the driveway, but the effort touched her.

“I feel like I’m abandoning you to the wolves,” she said to him.

“But it’s my wolf pack,” he said. “Awhoo.”

The joking didn’t fool her. For the past two weeks, ever since he quit on Frankie, Matty had been moody and tense.

From downstairs, Dad said, “We’re twenty minutes late! Are we leaving or not?”

“Leaving!” Matty said.

“Give me a second,” Irene said.

She didn’t want to leave him. She’d already raised one set of feral children, her brothers, and knew the dangers. Was it any wonder she was so eager to find a man who’d take care of her for a change?

“So this Joshua guy,” Matty said. “You’re not moving to Arizona, right?”

“Did you pick up your room like I asked?” She’d learned to dodge questions by watching how others dodged hers. “That’s what I thought. Do it this morning, okay? And c’mere.” Before he could stop her she pulled him into a hug. “I love you, Matty. Don’t forget to—”

She pulled back, frowning.

“What?” Matty asked.

She bent, and smelled his shirt again. He tried to step back and she grabbed his collar. Sniffed hard.

“Holy shit,” she said. Matty’s eyes went wide.

“Let’s go already!” Dad called.

“Are you smoking pot?” she asked.

Matty opened his mouth. The lie died before it could break the surface.

“Currently?” he asked.

“Oh God. You’re smoking pot. You’re smoking pot. You’re doing this to me right as I’m leaving town?”

“Doing what now?” her father asked. He stood at the bottom of the stairs, ready for duty: hat on, suit jacket buttoned, cuff links shining. He would have made an excellent limo driver, if not for his petulant attitude. “He’s not to leave this room,” Irene said. “All weekend.”

“The room?” Matty exclaimed.

Dad looked at her, then at Matty, then back to her. “I’m supposed to ensure this incarceration how?”

“It’s real simple,” Irene said. “You watch him. Night and day. If he leaves the room, you beat his ass until he goes back inside.”

“That sounds an awful lot like you’re grounding me,” Dad said.

“Jesus Christ!” Irene said. “Be an authority figure for once.”

“Not really my strong suit,” Dad said. “Now come on, don’t do that.” She’d burst into tears. “We’re late already.”

“Promise me,” she said.

“All right, all right,” Dad said. “I promise. Also, Matty promises. He will not leave his room except for necessary bodily functions. Can we go now? I’m meeting someone for breakfast.”

“I promise, too,” Matty said. He knew she’d want to hear it directly from him.

“You shut up,” she said to him. She marched past him, heading for his room. He came after, emitting panicky squawks.

“Where is it?” Irene asked. “Where’d you hide it?” She kicked open his room. There were clothes littering the floor. To her newly drug-sensitized nose, the room reeked of marijuana. “Get it. Now.”

Any teenager with a normal mother would play dumb at this point. Wait her out. But Matty knew better than to lie or delay. She’d trained him from birth to accept the infallibility of her instincts. He walked to his dresser, opened the third drawer, and reached in. He handed the baggie to her without speaking. Two joints, one half smoked.

“If you miss your flight,” Dad said from the door, “don’t blame me.”

“Where’d you get this?” Irene asked.

Matty flushed. Beet red, she thought, was the color of being beaten.

“Train’s leaving the station,” Dad said. “Off we go. Toodle-oo.”

In the delay created by his grandfather, Matty found some words. “I bought it from an older kid.”

“Which older kid?” Irene said. “Where? I want names!”

“I’ll find out while you’re gone,” Dad said. “Irene. Look at me. I’ll interrogate the boy to your satisfaction.”

She looked at her watch. If she didn’t leave now, she’d miss her plane.

She howled.

Eight hours later, she howled again, in a different key.

“Mmhmm,” Joshua said, from somewhere south of her navel.

Both of them wordless. That was what she needed, and what he gave her. Skin, and sweat, and the urgent action of bodies, free from the interruptions of a frontal lobe frantically turning experiences into nouns and verbs and adjectives. Labeling. She needed the pure thing, fire and not “fire,” heat and not “hot.” His body was enough for her. She loved the smell of him, the tang of his skin. She adored the damp at the back of his neck. His hard, bitable nipples. She even liked the friendly pooch of his belly. They’d spent three hours in this hotel room without exchanging more than a handful of sentences, and all she wanted now was to live the rest of her life in this primitive, nonverbal state.

But of course that was impossible. As they lay side by side in the gigantic bed, feet touching, holding hands, breathing, Irene let slip an appreciative, exhausted, “Fuck.”

“Past tense, honey,” Joshua said. “We shall fuck. We are fucking. We have fucked.”

That was the rub. She wanted him as well as his body: now, in person, not behind a screen, separated by satellites. But the only way to his mind was through a buzzing swarm of words. A more talented psychic could have reached straight in and grabbed the honey of his thoughts, but Irene had never been able to do that. Words, stupid words, were still required.

“Fucking is not an adequate name for what we just did there,” Irene said. “We need a better word. Something more festive.”

“Fucktivities?” he offered.

“Celebratio,” she said.

“Funnilingus!”

Even though they were in Tempe, only miles from his house, he’d agreed to meet in a hotel, just as they’d done every time he’d come through O’Hare. (The word “layover” never stopped amusing them.) In Chicago she hadn’t wanted to show him her house or introduce him to the family. And now that she’d traveled across the country to see him, she didn’t want to see his home, either. Not the furniture that was no doubt better than hers, nor the clothes in his closet, or the dishes in the sink. Not his daughter’s bedroom. If Irene saw how he lived, if she met his daughter, Jun, then there were only two possibilities: she would be repulsed and love him a little less, or she’d see herself in that house and want to move there. She couldn’t risk either of those outcomes, not yet. Their relationship had blossomed in the greenhouse of Hotel Land. Why complicate it?

Yet this trip was all about complications.

“Do you need to go shopping?” he asked her. “For, like, shoes. Or an outfit?”

“You think I need an outfit?”

“If you were interviewing me, you wouldn’t need any clothes at all.”

“Answer the question.”

He thought for a moment. “You did complain about your interview clothes being out of date.”

Good dodge, she thought. “I went to Talbots before I came here. In fact, I need to hang everything before it gets wrinkled.”

But still she didn’t leave the bed. She didn’t want to think about the interview. He’d set it up for her at his company, given her résumé to HR, and even made sure the interview could happen on Friday so they’d have the entire weekend after. This annoyed her, but she couldn’t tell him that. He was only trying to help. And why mention it, when it might turn out, after the hiring process had run its course, that these people wanted her on her own terms, and she wanted them? What trumped all intervening annoyances was her desperation to get out of her current life. Her father was toying with gangsters, her son was smoking pot, and she was flat broke and working a cash register for near–minimum wage.

She needed a game changer. She needed a home run. She needed the grand slam of all sports metaphors.

“I got something for you,” Joshua said. He hopped up from the bed, and she admired his muscular buttocks in motion. The man loved to be naked. He became as free as a toddler as soon as they unlocked the hotel room door, and that allowed her to shed her own self-consciousness. The natives of Hotel Land knew no shame.

He retrieved something from his roller bag, hiding it behind his back, and then held it out to her: a gift-wrapped box, a little bigger than a shirt box, tied in green ribbon. When she didn’t immediately take it, he swung his hips to waggle his penis at her, and she laughed.

It was this DNA-deep silliness that drew her to him, pushed her away, and drew her back again. She was a serious woman who’d grown up surrounded by frivolous men; by all rights she’d have no more truck with goofs, even gallant ones. Online he constantly poked at her, punned at her, and issued all-caps rants on her behalf that were directed at whoever had dared offend her that day. In person, where she had discouraged him from using words, he turned on the physical shtick.

“Nice bow,” she said. “You wrap this yourself?”

“Mr. Johnson held down the ribbon for me.”

She pulled off the shiny paper, opened the box. Inside was a portfolio, the brown leather glowing and buttery. Her initials were stitched into the front.

“You put your résumés in it,” he said. “And look: Yellow notepad! Pen loop!”

“All this, and rich, Corinthian leather,” she said. She pulled his face to hers, and was surprised to feel tears on her eyelashes. Tears, Irene? Really?

“I know you’re nervous,” he said. “But you’re going to knock ’em dead. You know that, right?”

She loved him when he thought he was telling the truth. But did she love him enough, all the other times? They’d known each other for only two months and already he wanted her to cross the continent to be with him, his Internet-order bride. He talked as if this was No Big Thing. A grand adventure. A lark. He had no idea how hard this was for her. Mostly because she hadn’t told him.

He grabbed her arm. “Come on. Up.”

“What are you doing?”

She held on to the portfolio as he pulled her to the big wall mirror. “Stand in front of me.” He placed his hand on her shoulders, put his cheek beside hers, and together they looked into the mirror.

“Repeat after me,” he said. “I, Irene Telemachus, will get this job.”

She narrowed her eyes.

“I, Irene…” he said.

“I will get this job,” she said.

“Not to me. Say it so you know it’s the truth.”

Irene looked at the naked woman in the mirror, clutching the portfolio as if it could protect her. “They’d be lucky to have me,” she said.

It was impossible to tell if Mirror Irene was lying. She gave nothing away.

Joshua slipped a hand under the portfolio and tweaked a nipple. “Damn straight.”

The interview started out well enough. Amber the HR rep, a twentysomething nymph constructed entirely of freckles and positive attitude, led her on a tour of the building, highlighting the open-plan office where Irene would sit if she took the job. Her desk would be surrounded by more windows than anyplace she’d ever worked except for a Burger King drive-thru. Everyone was smiling and pleasant, and Amber enthused about how friendly the working environment was and how laid-back and cool everyone was. The girl believed every word she spoke. And it was certainly true that the dress code was relaxed. Everyone wore southwestern casual: polos and khakis, sundresses, even shorts and sandals. Only upper management seemed to wear anything with buttons, and Irene felt like an eastern stiff, dour as a missionary.

The interview proper began in a large, glassed-in conference room with a surfboard-shaped table. Amber introduced her to Bob, her potential boss, and Laurie and Jon, her potential colleagues. Those two had the same job title, though Laurie said she’d been there four more years.

Bob described the consulting business, the kinds of clients they worked with, the array of experts they had on staff, the kind of person they were looking for to fit into their “family.” Jon and Laurie chimed in with details. Each of them took time to mention how they loved Joshua, Joshua was great, sharp as a tack that Joshua.

Finally it was time for the interrogation. The others opened their folders, pretended to study Irene’s résumé, and fell silent.

Irene resisted the urge to open the portfolio. The monogram now struck her as pompous and ridiculous.

“So, Irene,” Bob the boss said. “I’m not seeing a degree on here.” As if he’d just noticed this.

“No,” she said, “but I have experience in bookkeeping, accounting, and, well, money management.”

“Right…” Jon said. Then he winced apologetically. “But you know the job requires at least an undergraduate degree? In business, accounting, or some related field?”

“I saw that,” Irene said. “But we—I wasn’t sure if that was a hard requirement.” Joshua had encouraged her to apply anyway.

“Hmm,” Bob said.

Another long moment of silence, as if they were mourning the death of her prospects.

“How about postsecondary schooling?” Bob asked. “Perhaps courses at a business school?”

Did he think she would have left that off the résumé if she’d taken any? “I plan on continuing my education as soon as possible,” she said.

“That could be tough,” Jon said, putting on a concerned expression. “I mean, while working here full-time, and taking care of a son.”

Irene had not mentioned her son, and he wasn’t on her résumé.

“Any experience with accounting software?” Laurie asked.

“I know how to use spreadsheets,” Irene said. “The firm where I worked last used a homegrown system that was mostly paper-based.”

“Aldi’s uses a paper system?” Jon asked in mock surprise.

Fucker, Irene thought. He knew she wasn’t talking about Aldi’s.

“We have something a bit more complex,” Bob said. Jon laughed an ass-kisser’s laugh. Even Laurie chuckled.

The interview continued to spiral downward. She realized that they’d agreed to this interview only as a favor to Joshua, and now they wanted to make it abundantly clear that she didn’t belong here, would never belong here. Amber the HR rep never asked a question, but scribbled and scribbled and scribbled on her notepad like a five-year-old in a church pew.

Irene’s skin grew hot. She kept a smile nailed to her face. Held her voice steady.

Ten minutes or an hour later, depending on whether you were on the insulting or insulted side of the table, Amber finally spoke. She smiled and issued the obligatory words of benediction: “Do you have any questions for us?”

Irene remembered being onstage, blinking in bright lights, looking out into the darkness, where strangers were waiting for her to fail. She was so thankful when Archibald had debunked them and Mom had called an end to the act. She’d become disgusted with being judged.

Amber said, “All right, then, if you don’t have anything—”

“There is one bit of work experience I forgot to mention,” Irene said. The group regarded her blankly. Mentally they’d moved on to the next meeting, the next candidate. “When I was a girl, my family had a psychic act. Teddy Telemachus and His Amazing Family. It sounds crazy, I know, but we were famous for a while. We toured the country. We were even on national TV once.”

Laurie said, “Psychic act?”

Bob the Boss said, “That sounds interesting, but I’m not sure that’s relevant to—”

“Let me explain,” Irene said. “We each had a talent. My brother could move things with his mind. My mother was clairvoyant. And I was the human lie detector.” She smiled, and Amber returned the smile automatically, though her sunshine eyes were panicked. “At some point in the show, my father would call up someone from the audience and tell them about my ability. All they had to do was try to tell me a lie and not get caught. It could be something simple, like holding the ace of clubs and telling me it was the ace of spades. Or they could try to tell me their age, or their weight. Then Dad would ask them to write down two truths and a lie—just like the party game.

“Sometimes it got really interesting. If the crowd was right, Dad would prompt them into writing down embarrassing things, things that were a little risqué. I wouldn’t even know what some of the sentences meant. I was only ten. But you know what?”

She had their attention now. More than twenty years since she’d been onstage, but the old skills were still there.

“I never made a mistake,” Irene said. “Not once.”

Bob and Jon exchanged looks. Laurie said, “Not once? What was the trick?”

“It’s just something I could do. Can do.”

Bob smiled uncertainly, not sure if she was kidding. “Well, too bad we don’t have a deck of cards.”

“I know,” Jon said. He reached into his pocket, came out with a quarter. He flipped it, covered it with his hands. Then he peeked at it.

Irene waited.

“It’s heads,” Jon said.

“No, it’s not.”

Jon laughed. “Caught me. One more time.”

Bob said, “Why don’t we move along. If you don’t have any questions, I suppose we can—”

“I do have a few questions,” Irene said.

Bob took a breath. “Sure, sure. Fire away.”

She pretended to glance at her notes. “Everything you’ve told me makes it sound like the perfect company,” Irene said. “Have any of you looked for another job outside the company, say, in the last six months?”

No one spoke, until Amber the HR rep said, “I don’t think that’s a question that—”

“Of course not,” Bob said.

“Not me,” Jon said.

Laurie shook her head. “I plan on being here a long time.”

“Huh,” Irene said, as if mulling this over. “Bob and Laurie are telling the truth, but Jon…”

Amber’s eyes went wide.

“Where did you apply?” Irene said.

Jon’s smile was a little stiff. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“See, that’s a lie, too,” Irene said. “Bob, did you know Jon was unhappy here?”

Bob blinked in confusion. The interview had taken a hard left turn, and he was struggling to keep up.

“Never mind, new question,” Irene said. “Bob, do you pay women and men equally for doing the same job?”

“Of course,” Bob said.

It was a lie, but she was only setting him up for the fastball. She said, “How about Jon and Laurie, here. They’re both assistant managers, but Laurie’s been here longer. Is she making more than Jon?”

Laurie leaned forward and put her elbows on the table. A woman who already knew the answer.

“I have to warn you,” Irene said to Bob. “I never miss.”

“Who are you?” Bob asked.

“I take that as a no.” To Laurie she said, “I think I’d get a new job. Or take Jon’s when he leaves. Just make sure to ask for his salary.”

She picked up the beautiful portfolio and stood. She felt dizzy, but didn’t fall. Wouldn’t allow herself to fall.

“I really enjoyed meeting you,” she said. None of them were human lie detectors, but she was confident they’d be able to evaluate her statement. She walked off without waiting for applause.

Six hours later, Teddy met her at the curb at O’Hare. “I gotta tell you,” he said. “I’m glad you decided to come home early.”

Irene stared out through the windshield as they rode away from the airport. She didn’t want to speak. She’d exiled herself from Hotel Land, but wanted to carry that wordlessness with her.

“I need your help with something. Something that’ll help Graciella. You like Graciella, don’t you? You two really seemed to hit it off.”

Dad hadn’t asked why she’d returned a day early, or seemed to notice that she was a hollow-eyed wreck. But why should that be a surprise? Before she left he hadn’t asked her why she was going to Arizona or who she was seeing. He was oblivious to her nervousness and excitement, and now he was blind to her heartbreak. His sole interest in the trip was when it would start and end, and that was only because he wanted to know how long he was responsible for Matty.

My father is a narcissist, she thought. This was not a new thought. She’d learned when she was ten that if you’re not part of the act, you’re part of the audience.

He took the wrong exit off North Avenue and she gave him a look.

“One last errand,” he said.

“Just take me home,” Irene said. She’d taken too many car trips with her father recently, and she’d be happy never to take one again.

“I helped you, now you help me,” he said. “I absolutely need you at my side for the next half hour.”

“What scam are you running now?”

“I’m just trying to do something nice for a woman.” His imitation of outrage was unconvincing.

“Sure, it’s all for Graciella. Look at you. You’re practically hopping up and down behind the wheel.”

“I like helping people,” he said.

She made a rude noise.

“What?” he asked. “Why are you acting like this?”

“Jesus Christ, Dad. I can’t believe I’m still doing it. I’m a grown woman, and I’m still—never mind.”

“Doing what? Please, enlighten me.”

“I spent most of my life waiting for you to notice me.” She shook her head. “What a waste.”

“Notice you? How could I not notice you? You were the one scowling at me every time I did something that your mother wouldn’t have done.”

“There we go. It took you one sentence to get back to how you’re the victim.”

“You’re making the same face. Right now.”

“Did it even occur to you to ask me why I needed a babysitter for Matty?”

“I’m sure it was important.”

“Unbelievable.”

“If you wanted to tell me, you’d tell me! I’m sorry for wanting to respect your privacy. Now, here’s the bar.”

“A bar? We’re going to a bar?”

“Technically, a tavern. Don’t you remember this place? I used to bring you with me sometimes.”

“You never brought me here. That was probably Frankie.”

“Maybe so, maybe so.”

He parked in the spot closest to the door, which happened to be a handicapped spot. Irene started to object, and he shushed her. “It’s legal, it’s legal. Open the glove compartment.”

She found the handicapped tag and pulled it out with two fingers, as if it were a dead fish or a loaded gun. Dad rolled his eyes and hung the tag from the front mirror. “Come around and help me out.”

“What?”

“Help me walk in.”

“Help yourself out!”

“Damn it, Irene, it’s a simple request. Hold on to my arm like I can barely walk. Help me sit down, fuss over me—”

“Jesus Christ, why?”

“I can’t explain, not now. But rest assured—”

“I’m sure it’s important,” Irene said, throwing his line back at him.

“It is! It surely is!” He was oblivious to sarcasm. “Now remember, I’m feeble.”

“Minded,” Irene said, loud enough for him to hear.

They performed a geriatric mime on the way to the front door, Teddy placing one foot meditatively in front of the other, hand gripping her arm. He was pretty good at it. Irene could almost imagine the hip replacement.

“A cane would really sell this,” he stage-whispered to her. “Maybe one with the three rubber feet?”

She couldn’t believe she was participating in this.

“It’s the saddest of the canes,” he went on. “You can’t even pretend to be stylish. Fred Astaire never danced with a tri-support.”

Irene pulled open the door for him, and he hobbled inside. The dim interior smelled of stale beer and inadequate bleach.

“The usual, Teddy?” said a huge, indistinct shape behind the bar.

Teddy chuckled. To Irene he said, “Twenty years since I’ve been here, Barney still knows my drink.” Somehow he’d made his voice shakier, as if it needed its own tri-support.

“Let’s sit at the bar,” Teddy said to Irene. There was no one else in the place. Maybe it was too early on Saturday for even the drunks.

“Sure, Dad,” she said flatly. “Let me get the stool for you.”

“Nothing for her,” Teddy said to the bartender. “You been using the same bar rag since 1962. She doesn’t have the antibodies for this place.”

“I’ll have a beer,” Irene said. “In a bottle.” Barney nodded. He was about the same age as Dad, but three times his size.

“So how’s the place doing?” Teddy asked. He threw some extra quaver in his voice, an old man struggling to sound jovial. They started talking about people Irene didn’t know and would, she hoped, never meet.

Irene watched Mirror Irene sip her beer. That woman lived in an alternate universe called Arizona, with a man who loved her.

When she came back from the interview, Joshua could see she was upset—unlike her father, he was no narcissist—and kept pressing her for answers. For words. She couldn’t explain why she’d gotten so mad, and so couldn’t explain why she’d all but set fire to the conference room. She couldn’t tell him how angry she was at him.

“Never do me a favor again,” she told him, and started packing.

He tried to talk to her all the way to the airport, kept talking as she exchanged her ticket. He even paid the transfer fee, all the while asking, “What are you saying?” As if she were speaking another language.

Only the gate stopped him. “You’re never leaving Arizona,” she said. Her anger had turned to sorrow, so that now she was a blubbering mess. “You can’t leave, not with joint custody. And I can’t just live off whatever crumbs you throw my way. There’s no future for me here.”

How could she explain? She loved their time in Hotel Land, but that wasn’t a place you could live forever. The smart thing to do was to let him go now.

“So,” Dad said to the bartender. “Is Mitzi in yet?”

Barney nodded over Teddy’s shoulder. A woman whose age was in the same ballpark as the men’s walked toward Teddy, her arms out. “Well, look what the cat dragged in,” she said.

“That cat is my daughter,” Teddy said with a grin.

“And you’re an old dog.” Mitzi kissed him on the cheek. To Irene she said, “Now I feel old. Your dad used to talk about you.”

“Nice to meet you,” she said to Mitzi.

“She’s such a good daughter,” Teddy said. “Takes me everywhere.”

“It’s good to have a strong woman at your side,” Mitzi said.

“Talk about a strong woman,” Teddy said to Irene. “You want a role model, look no further. Mitzi’s run this place through fat times and thin.”

“Charmer,” Mitzi said. She was a scrawny bird of a woman, with a finch’s glitter in her eye. Mitzi said, “You’re not selling that UltraLife stuff, too, are you?”

“What’s that?” Dad asked. He wasn’t faking the confusion.

“Frankie started bringing it with him,” Mitzi said. “Damn if it didn’t straighten me out.”

Irene shot her father a hard look. Was this visit about Frankie, and not Graciella? But no, Teddy didn’t know what Mitzi was talking about.

“So Frankie’s been stopping by?” Teddy said.

“Oh yeah,” Mitzi said. “On a weekly basis. Mostly weekly. He’s missed a few.”

Dad seemed shaken. “I apologize if the boy’s been pushing the stuff on you. Frankie’s been so excited about it.”

Mitzi said, “You want to come back in my office and talk about it?”

Dad hesitated, then said, “We can talk in front of Irene. She knows all about Frankie’s business.”

An outright lie. Irene had no clue what was going on. She wasn’t reassured that Teddy seemed to have no idea, either.

“All right then,” Mitzi said skeptically. She took the stool next to Teddy’s. They were all sitting now, facing away from the bar. Barney had disappeared into the back room.

“So. Frankie’s visits,” Dad said. “How much are we talking?”

“You know I usually keep those numbers confidential.”

“How much, Mitzi?”

“As of yesterday, forty-nine thousand, seventy-four dollars and twenty-four cents.”

Irene suddenly realized what those numbers meant. Dad was shocked, too, to judge by his frozen expression.

Mitzi said, “I asked him not to bring you into this. He’s going to talk to Nick next week. They’ll work it out.”

Fuck, Irene thought. Bad pictures flickered in her head from a dozen violent movies. She pictured her brother trying to talk his way out of trouble, the way he tried to talk his way out of everything. He’d never learned that when he was drowning he should keep his mouth shut.

“No,” Dad said. “I’ll talk to Nick.” Irene watched her father. A moment ago, he didn’t know about Frankie owing money, but now he was putting on to Mitzi that he not only knew about the situation, but had already put a plan in motion. Teddy Telemachus, world-class bluff. That poker face made him the only person in the family who could keep secrets from her. That, and the way he dealt his words as carefully as his cards.

“You want to talk to Nick?” Mitzi asked. “That might not be such a great idea.”

“Your brother stands a lot better chance of getting the money from me than from Frankie,” Teddy said.

“It’s not that, and you know it.”

“This is my son, Mitzi. Please. Make it happen.”

Irene did not speak until they were back in the car. He let her get behind the wheel, for appearances.

“What the hell was that about?” she asked.

“I’m as surprised as you are.”

That was the truth. He’d dropped the bluff now that he was out of the tavern.

“I wanted an appointment with Nick so I could talk to him about Graciella. But this?”

Still, she wanted to make sure they were on the same page. “Frankie’s in debt to the mob for fifty K,” she said.

“It seems so.”

“That explains how he was able to keep Bellerophonics going so long with no customers.”

“He kept coming to me for money,” Dad said. “Third time, I told him I was tapped out and he should close up shop—work for somebody else and actually get paid. I didn’t think he was stupid enough to go to God damn Nick Pusateri. The whole point of raising kids is to make sure they don’t make the same mistakes as you did.”

There was an entire story there that she was pretty sure she didn’t want to know. Instead, she asked, “You’re not going to pay it, are you?”

“Just drive me home, Irene. No. Wait. Drive me to Wal-Mart.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“I need to buy a cane and a baseball bat,” he said.

“I understand the cane.”

“The bat is to whack your brother with.”

“Let’s buy two,” Irene said.

14 Frankie

He could hear Loretta calling for him from the house. Eventually she thought of the garage.

The black hunk of metal nestled into the hood of her car like an egg on a pillow. The impact had also cracked the windshield. The safe door, however, was closed. Still fucking closed.

She walked toward him. He was sitting on a folding chair next to the front bumper of the car. The floor was littered by a garden of crushed Budweiser cans—and locks. Padlocks of every kind were scattered around the cement floor, none of them open.

“Can I help you, Loretta?”

She took in the sweatpants, the undershirt, the empty Doritos bag. She looked again at the Corolla and the black safe, then back at him.

“Are you going to work today?” Her voice was surprisingly soft.

“Sure,” he said. “What time is it?”

“After nine.”

“Huh.” He rubbed his jaw. Normally he would have left a couple of hours ago. He probably should have gone. Work would have occupied him. Kept his mind off of what was waiting for him this afternoon. Who was waiting for him.

“I was going to go to the grocery store,” Loretta said.

“Okay.”

She stared at him.

“I think we’re out of milk,” he said.

“I was wondering about the car,” she said.

He nodded slowly, as if this was a good point.

“So will it run?” she asked.

He pursed his lips. Thought for a moment. “Hard to say.”

“I’ll call one of the neighbors and see if I can borrow a car.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s probably a good idea.”

“Oh, and your father called. He wants you to call him back. Says it’s important.”

Like hell he was going to call back. It was Teddy’s fault he was in this mess. He’d gone to his father for help when Bellerophonics was tanking, and after the bare minimum amount of financial assistance, his father had cut him off. No, the great Teddy Telemachus only bet on cards, never his own children.

“Did Matty call?” he asked. That was the Telemachus he needed right now. But Loretta was gone. What time did she say it was? He should have paid attention. There were only so many hours to fill until his appointment with Nick Pusateri Senior.

The first time Frankie thought he was going to die was in 1991, in a small room on the bottom deck of the Alton Belle, right after getting his nose broke. The guy whose fist did the damage was a wiry white guy with rabbit teeth and sun-cracked skin like a vinyl chair left in the yard. He was dressed like a janitor, but it wasn’t clear if he was the official enforcer for the casino or just an employee whose job description included the line “Other duties as assigned.” He certainly seemed to enjoy the hitting-people duty.

The two other men in the room—a floor boss and a slick-headed man whom Frankie took to be the casino manager—evaluated the janitor’s work and found it good. “One more time,” said the manager. He was a nervous white guy whose oil-black widow’s peak made him look like a middle-aged Eddie Munster.

The floor boss, a black man in a shiny suit that looked more expensive than the manager’s, said, “Tell us what you did to my table.” Everyone seemed quite concerned about this. For the first half hour that Frankie had been held in the room, the men went over the video of the event using an ordinary VCR and small TV. They had declined to show the images to Frankie, but he picked up from their discussion of it that the tape showed from several angles that Frankie’s hands were inches away from the roulette table when the ball, turntable, and chips flew into the air.

“Was it magnets?” the manager asked.

Frankie was too busy gasping in pain to deny it immediately. He lay on his side, watching an alarming amount of blood run across his cheek and pool on the floor. Magnets? he thought. Still with the fucking magnets? It was their first and last theory.

Frankie lifted a hand to his smashed upper lip, afraid to touch his nose. His fingers came away red, as if dipped into a paint can. Jesus. Where the hell was Buddy? Why the fuck didn’t he see this coming in his vision of chips and riches?

A bad thought crossed his mind. What if Buddy had seen this, and didn’t bother to tell him?

“It wasn’t magnets,” Frankie said. “Or if it was, they weren’t mine.” His voice sounded whiny in his own ears, due to nasal blockage. Mostly.

“Who do you work for?”

“I’m—” He spit blood. “Self-employed.”

The janitor bent and gripped Frankie’s shirt. Frankie put his hands on the man’s forearms, smearing blood on one sleeve. He made protesting noises as he was jerked to his feet.

“Get him off the boat,” the head manager said.

Oh thank God, Frankie thought.

The janitor and the floor boss grabbed him under each arm and frog-marched him out of the room and down a hallway carpeted, inexplicably, with Astroturf. The manager scooted ahead and pulled open a heavy door.

Frankie was pushed out onto a small side deck close by the glittering water. The paddle wheel churned away to their left, but the sound was almost drowned out by laughter, buzzes, bells—the jangling roar of a crowded casino. A large red-and-white motor launch bedecked in Christmas lights idled at the lip of the deck in a cloud of gas fumes. At the wheel was a man in a white shirt and black vest who looked like he should have been dealing blackjack. Other duties as assigned.

“Get him to the garage,” the manager said. “And don’t let anyone see you.”

“Wait, garage?” Frankie said. They shoved him forward, and he stumbled into the boat and sat down hard on a bench. The janitor and the other man climbed in. “Where are you taking me?”

The janitor said, “Shut up or we gag you.”

Frankie shut up. A coldness filled his stomach. He held on to the bench as the motorboat surged around the back of the riverboat’s paddle wheel and pointed toward shore. They weren’t heading back to the brightly lit loading area where he and Buddy had boarded the boat, but south of that, where a sporadic line of streetlights marked the edge of the river.

They’re getting me away from the crowds, Frankie thought. Away from witnesses. In this “garage” they could do anything to him. All his life, Teddy had told stories about gangsters he’d known, mooks with knuckledusters, gun-carrying henchmen, molls with switchblades tucked into their garters. Movie characters. Teddy was the hero of these stories, a trickster with fast hands and a faster mouth. Frankie had longed to be that guy, the smooth-talking confidence man, but by the time he grew up, they weren’t making movies like that anymore. All that remained were secondhand tales, you-shoulda-seen-it stories, and badly edited highlight reels.

So here he was, a failed casino cheat, in a boatful of mobbed-up thugs…and he couldn’t think of a damn thing to say. He was going to die, whimpering, with his own blood smearing his shirt.

The boat charged toward a dimly lit pier. At the last moment the driver threw the boat into reverse, spun the wheel, and brought them alongside the wood with the slightest of thumps. Frankie decided that maybe he was a boatman first, blackjack dealer second.

The janitor gripped the back of Frankie’s neck, and leaned in to his ear. “You’re going to talk now, asshole.”

The floor boss climbed up on the pier, then turned to pull Frankie up. A pair of headlights snapped on, turning the casino employee into a silhouette. A loud voice said, “We’ll take it from here, boys.”

A huge figure appeared in the lights. He waved a badge in the general direction of the floor boss, and then looked down in the boat.

The janitor’s hand tightened on Frankie’s neck.

“Who the hell are you?” Frankie said.

The man laughed. “Are you really choosing them over me?”

That was a good point. Frankie knocked aside the arm of the janitor and levered himself out of the boat.

The big man said, “I’m Agent Destin Smalls,” and extended his hand.

The name rang a faint bell. Frankie shook the hand, and handcuffs appeared on his wrist like a magic trick.

“You’re under arrest,” Agent Smalls said.

He drove toward his father’s house with the air-conditioning blasting into his face. “Embrace life,” he said to himself. Embrace the fact that Matty had quit on him, forcing him to either give up on the heist or learn to do everything himself. Embrace the two weeks he’d spent trying to open locks with his mind, and failing to open a single one. Embrace his inability to get the safe dial to turn a centimeter.

Failure to accept reality led only to frustration, and frustration to rage. What did rage get you? A grown man picking up a safe in his arms and attempting to throw it down onto the concrete, before his back gave out. Rage got you a safe crashing into the hood of a Toyota Corolla that still had two years of payments.

Okay, forget about that. What’s done is done. That’s life. Embrace it.

But Frankie was after something more. And he very much needed to explain this to Matty.

At home the garage door was open and Teddy’s Buick wasn’t there, thank God. Irene’s car was gone, too. Frankie marched up to the front door and its ridiculously tiled front step. A new fire extinguisher had been installed next to the door, the bracket screwed right into the brick. Why put a fire extinguisher outside the house? Who the fuck knows. That was Buddy. After all the crazy projects, maybe he was planning on burning the place down. If this was Frankie’s house he would have kicked his brother out months ago.

It was cooler inside the house, but only marginally so. Teddy, the cheap bastard, had never installed central air, and had put a window air conditioner in one room: his bedroom. “Matty?” he called. No one was in the living room or the kitchen. Then he heard a noise from downstairs.

The door to the basement had been removed, everything torn out down to the frame. Inside the room, metal panels hung above the windows, ready to swing down, like plate armor for a Civil War battleship. Bunk beds were in construction against the far wall, waiting for…crew members? Jesus Christ, if Buddy flooded the backyard he could re-create the battle of the Monitor and the Merrimack.

Matty, however, was engaged in an act of deconstruction. He knelt by the desk, pulling cords out of the back of the computer monitor.

“Matty, we gotta talk,” Frankie said.

“Oh! Uncle Frankie. Hi.” The kid looked miserable.

“What are you doing?” Frankie asked.

“Mom says I have to take it apart. Says she doesn’t even want it in the house.”

“I thought she loved that thing.”

“Yeah, well, she’s been pretty upset lately. Crying all the time. She broke up with Joshua.”

“Who the hell is Joshua?”

“Her boyfriend? In Phoenix? Anyway, it’s over, and she won’t let me use the computer.”

“Part of your grounding with the pot thing?”

Matty grimaced. “She told you?”

“Grandpa Teddy. And it’s totally hypocritical, if you ask me. Irene used to smoke pretty heavy back in high school. Probably because Lev was practically a dealer.”

“What?”

“That’s not important now. Forget about the computer. We need to talk, man to man.”

“Uncle Frankie, I’m sorry that I can’t—”

“I’m not here to convince you to come back to work on the thing.”

“You’re not?”

“Come here.” Frankie led him to the couch, which sat in a cluster of remaining normal furniture Buddy had pushed to the center of the room. “Sit with me, Matty.”

The boy sat hunched on the couch, staring at his feet.

Frankie said, “I’m here to apologize to you.” Matty started to protest and Frankie held up a hand. “No, no. I failed you. Something happened that made you turn away from me, and I want to know what it is—so I can make amends.”

“You didn’t do anything.”

“Did your mother find out? Is she punishing you for more than the pot?”

“No! I didn’t tell her anything. She has no idea about…our thing.”

“Then I’m at a loss,” Frankie said. “What happened to change your mind?”

Matty said nothing for a long moment. “I guess I got scared,” he said finally.

“Scared of what?”

The boy didn’t answer.

“Did you think you’d get caught?” Frankie asked.

Matty seemed to list away from him, which Frankie took for a nod.

“That’s impossible,” Frankie said. “You’re not doing anything. You’re just floating around, invisible. I’m doing all the work—and I’m the one taking the risk.” Jesus, was it hot in here. He was sweating just sitting down. “You have to know, if I got caught, I’d never, never ever, tell anyone you were involved.”

Matty looked up in surprise. Shit. That possibility had never occurred to the kid.

“What if there are people who can see me?” Matty asked.

“Who? What people?”

“I don’t know, like, the government?”

“Okay, I get it,” Frankie said. “This is my fault. I’ve been telling you all about Grandma Mo and her spy stuff. But what did I tell you? The Cold War’s over. The government’s done with that stuff.”

“Is it, though?”

“Of course it is. But that’s not what you’re really afraid of.”

Matty waited for it.

“You’re afraid of using your powers! You know I’m right. You can’t even say the word. P-O-W—”

Matty looked back at his feet.

“Say it. Try it out.”

“Powers,” Matty said quietly.

“Damn straight. You have powers, and you’re powerful. What do you have to be afraid of? You can’t go through life terrified of using what God gave you. You still want to help your mom, don’t you?”

He didn’t answer.

Frankie said, “She works at that shitty grocery store, wearing that shitty uniform, making shitty money. She can’t even afford to move out on her own! How the hell are you supposed to go to college? How’s she supposed to afford that? Because you’re smart, Matty. You want to go to college, you better go. Or not. Your kind of power, you don’t have to. The thing you don’t want is to end up working some dead-end job, with a bunch of kids you have no control over, wondering what the hell happened to your—”

Frankie waved his hand as if clearing a chalkboard. “Never mind all that. Focus up.”

“You want me to focus?” Matty asked.

Frankie wasn’t exactly sure. One of them needed to.

“I know you want to help your mom,” Frankie said, lowering his voice. “And I know you want to help me. But you’ve also got to think about what’s going to help you. This is not just about the—what we’ve been practicing for. That’s just the opportunity we have in front of us at this moment. Think of it as a first step. You’re going to take a lot of steps, Matty, so many steps I don’t even know where you’ll end up. The other side of the moon, maybe! However—” He put his arm around Matty’s shoulders. “You gotta think of who you are. You’re a Telemachus.”

“I know, but—”

“No buts. Do you know what today is?”

“Thursday?”

“The last Thursday of the month. Which comes right before the last Friday of the month. And you know what that is.”

“Um…”

“Payday, Matty. The big payday. And due to circumstances beyond my control, this is the last time I—we will ever get a shot at what’s in that safe.”

“What’s happening?”

“Too complicated to explain.” Frankie glanced at his watch, then saw that he’d forgotten to put on his watch this morning. He jumped up from the couch. “I gotta go see a guy. I’ll check in with you later. But while I’m gone, think about your future, Matty. Think about embracing who you are. You’ve got to embrace life.”

“The UltraLife,” Matty said quietly.

“Yes! Exactly! I knew I could count on you.”

Frankie spent the first hour of his arrest alone in a motel room, trying to open the handcuffs with his mind. Agent Smalls had deposited him in the room and told him to wait “until we get set up.” Frankie had no idea what he meant by that. Set up what, torture equipment?

He perched on the edge of the double bed closest to the door and stared at his wrists, willing the restraints to spring open. Or unlock. Or merely tremble. But all he could think of was chips flying into the air, and arms grabbing him. He doubted he could move a paper clip now.

His shirt was still damp, not from river spray, but from sweat. He’d been sure the casino operatives were taking him away to be beaten or killed. When Destin Smalls had shown up, Frankie had been relieved, but the longer the handcuffs stayed on, the longer he sat on this floral bedspread that smelled of industrial cleaner, the more he suspected that he’d made at best a lateral move: out of the frying pan and into the frying pan.

The door opened and Frankie jumped up. Agent Smalls filled the doorway. He was in his late sixties, but Frankie gave no thought to bum-rushing him. You could hurt yourself running into a wall, even an old one.

“I’d like to call my lawyer,” Frankie said.

“Sure,” the agent said, and grabbed him by the elbow.

It was near dawn, but there was no light in the sky except the small yellow face of the Super 8 sign. The parking lot was full of dark. Frankie felt another hope die. Not a person in sight to witness his illegal incarceration.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” the agent said. “I came to your house dozens of times before your mother died.”

“To do what, harass my dad?”

“That was a side benefit.”

The trip was all of five feet, to the next motel room door. Smalls opened the door and nudged Frankie inside. “Do you remember him?” Smalls asked.

A bald gnome with a handlebar mustache sat behind a round table loaded with electrical equipment. The waxed, curlicued mustache had turned silver sometime in the past twenty years, but Frankie recognized him all right.

“Motherfucker,” Frankie said.

“It’s a pleasure to see you again as well, Franklin,” said the Astounding Archibald. “Please, have a seat.”

Agent Smalls unlocked the handcuffs and gestured toward the chair opposite Archibald. The devices on the table between them hummed and buzzed. Cables spilled onto the floor and snaked toward a stack of black metal cases. The air smelled of ozone and aftershave.

G. Randall Archibald lifted one of Frankie’s hands like a manicurist and began slipping rubber-tipped thimbles over the fingers. Each thimble sprouted a bundle of wires that led to one of the machines.

“What’s this?” Frankie asked. “Some kinda lie detector?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Archibald said. “The items before you comprise a torsion field detector, mobile version. With it, I can measure psionic potential within two point three taus.”

Frankie tried to snort derisively, but it came out a grunt. He had no idea what a tau was, but he was damn sure not going to admit it.

“I assure you,” Archibald said, “it’s quite accurate. Not as fine-tuned as the larger version in my lab, of course. That TFD prime is sensitive enough to pick up zero point three tau.” The gnome spoke in the clipped, precise diction of a nerd. “There should be no need for such a sensitive measurement in your case. I understand you’ve already had a pret-ty active night.”

“Whatever those guys said they saw, they’re lying.”

“Or,” Archibald said, “they don’t know what they saw. My job, tonight, is to determine whether that activity was truly psi-related, or mere flimflammery perpetrated by the son of a known cheat and fraud.”

“Hey! I’m not gonna sit here and—”

Smalls put two big hands on his shoulders and shoved him back into the seat. “Stay.”

“I thought you were a skeptic,” Frankie said, almost spitting the word. In his family, there was nothing more despicable.

“I certainly am,” Archibald said.

“I’ve seen you on Johnny Carson. What you did to that channeler woman from Australia? Humiliating her like you did us? That was cruel.”

“It didn’t seem to hurt her career. She went on to make a lot of money.”

“And the thing with the faith healer, who knew what people’s ailments were! People believed in him, and you destroyed him.”

“He was using a radio in his ear to receive diagnoses from God, who happened to sound an awful lot like his wife. He was a fake. A fraud. Are you a fake?”

If I say yes, Frankie wondered, does that make me more guilty of attempted robbery, or less?

Archibald didn’t wait for an answer. “I advise the government on using science, not blind faith, to separate the gifted wheat from the fraudulent chaff. Don’t you want to know whether you have your mother’s gift, Franklin?”

“I don’t need you or your machines to tell me.”

“Of course not. You believe in yourself! As your mother believed in you, transferring that faith to you in the manner of all family religions. However—” He leaned across a control panel festooned with gauges and dials. “—wouldn’t it be nice to have objective proof, scientific proof of your ability? A stamp of approval, if you will. A diploma to hang on your wall.”

Oh, Frankie did want that. More than anything. He’d grown up feeling like a prince in exile, his entire family denied their rightful place because of skeptics, rule-bound scientists, and a shadow government afraid of their powers.

“It won’t work,” Frankie said. The rubber thimbles were still attached to the fingers of his left hand, and he made no move to take them off. “The scientific method constrains our powers.”

“You’re quoting your father,” Smalls said.

“A skeptical mind-set is like a jammer. That’s how you got us to fail on The Mike Douglas Show.”

“Is that what happened?” Archibald said. “Just me standing there onstage with you caused all your tricks to fail?”

“They’re not tricks.”

Archibald handed him another thimble. “Then let’s prove it. I want you to succeed, Franklin. Agent Smalls certainly wants you to succeed. Ever since 1974, when your mother died, your country has been without its greatest weapon.”

Frankie stared at him. “It’s true?”

Smalls moved around the table and crouched so that he was eye to eye with Frankie. “Listen to me. Maureen Telemachus was the most powerful espionage asset in the world.”

All his life, Frankie trailed behind his father, picking up each of the clues he dropped about his mother’s government work: an oblique reference to the Cold War, a complaint about secret programs, a cryptic comment about submarines and psychonauts. Frankie assembled these scraps into a sci-fi spy movie that ran in his head. James Bond with a purse and mind powers, starring Maureen Telemachus. It thrilled him to think that even if his Amazing Family couldn’t be publicly famous, it was secretly powerful. Only as he grew older, and Irene pointed out that many of their father’s stories were not, in the strictest sense, true, had he allowed himself to wonder if Teddy might be exaggerating about their mother as well. Now he hated himself for doubting him.

“I knew it,” Frankie said, his throat tight with emotion. “I knew she was great.”

“But now she’s gone,” Smalls said. “And we need your help.”

Did they not know that he had no talent for clairvoyance? He moved things around. Little things.

Archibald said, “We’ve come a long way, and all we need is five minutes of cooperation.”

Frankie nodded at the machinery, this torsion field detector. “Is that how you found me?”

“Pardon?” Smalls asked.

“Tracked me down tonight. I mean, you could have found me anytime in Chicago, but you showed up tonight, way out here, right after I—after the problem at the casino.” Which raised another question: How did they get here so fast? It was at least four hours’ drive from Chicago. “Did you come from St. Louis?” Frankie asked. That was only a forty-minute drive.

Smalls and Archibald did not quite look at each other. “We’ve had our eyes on you for a long time,” Smalls said. Which was not an answer at all.

“Come to think of it, how’d you show up at that exact dock in the middle of the night?”

Archibald said, “Why don’t we do the test first, and then we can answer all your questions.”

Headlights lit the drapes. Agent Smalls looked at the window, frowned. “Did you order the Chinese food yet?” he asked Archibald. The gnome shook his head.

Smalls reached behind his back and his hand came up with a pistol.

“Whoa now,” Frankie said, and stood up.

“Stay,” Smalls said again. Frankie was feeling more and more like a dog. “And shut up.”

Someone pounded on the door. “Open up, God damn it! I know you’re in there, Smalls!” It was Teddy.

“He’s got a gun, Dad!” Frankie shouted.

Teddy didn’t seem to hear him, because the pounding continued. Smalls opened the door, the gun at his side.

“Teddy. How in the hell did you find this place?”

“Out of the way, you God damn Kodiak. Is my boy here?” Teddy walked in, looking good despite the hour in a sharkskin suit and matching gray hat. When he saw the rest of the room, he stopped short. “Archibald? You’re working with Archibald?”

Frankie hopped out of the seat and backed away from the table.

The Astounding Archibald stood up, which made only a marginal difference in his height. “Good evening, Teddy.”

“I expect this kind of crap from you,” Teddy said to the man. “But you, Smalls?” He wheeled on the big man. “You made a promise.”

“I kept my promise,” the agent said. “She said don’t involve the children. But they’re not kids anymore. Frankie is a grown man who can make his own decisions.”

Teddy pointed a finger at him. “That’s the most weaselly, self-serving, bullshit sentence I’ve ever heard come out of that Easter Island face of yours. You should be ashamed of yourself, Destin, because one thing’s for God damn sure—Maureen would be ashamed of you.”

Smalls said nothing.

“Get in the car, Frankie,” Teddy said. “We’re leaving.”

“We’re not done testing,” Archibald said. “Frankie, don’t you want to know where you stand?”

“Where he stands?” Teddy said, mocking. “Where he stands is with me. Let’s go.”

Frankie followed his father out of the room. The morning sky glowed peach, but the sun was hiding behind the motel, waiting for the coast to clear. They walked to Teddy’s latest Buick, a turquoise Park Avenue. The passenger’s side door was locked.

Teddy made no move to get into the car or unlock it.

“What the hell were you doing with those bloodsuckers? In God damn southern Illinois?”

Frankie hesitated. Did his father know about the casino or not? “I don’t know how they found me,” Frankie said truthfully. “Smalls arrested me, brought me here, and the next thing I know Archibald is putting wires on my fingers.”

“There’s no such thing as a coincidence,” Teddy said. “What did you do?”

“Wait, how did you find me?”

Before Teddy could answer, a white taxi pulled into the parking lot and stopped just behind them. Buddy climbed out of the back, and the driver rolled down his window. Buddy reached into his pocket and withdrew a pile of casino chips. He put them in the driver’s hands. Then he reached into his other pocket and repeated the procedure. The taxi pulled away.

“Where the hell have you been?” Frankie said.

Buddy ambled toward them wearing a sleepy smile. He stood next to the rear door of the Buick and waited patiently, hands in his now-empty pockets.

“Jesus Christ,” Teddy said. “I am truly blessed.”

The back room of the Laundromat smelled of perfumed detergent and bleach and motor oil. Nick Pusateri Senior stood behind a large wooden table, a mound of loose quarters in front of him, and a stack of filled coin sleeves off to the side. At first glance Frankie thought Nick must be bagging the coins, but it was just the opposite; he was ripping them open and dumping them into the pile. He gestured for Frankie to sit in a plastic chair, then said nothing as he broke open another tube. Finally he glanced at him and said, “You got heat stroke or something?”

Frankie chuckled. It wasn’t a convincing laugh, but it was the best he could manage. Was he really that red-faced? He felt himself sweating through his shorts. How was he supposed to go through with the plan if his body kept betraying him?

The plan was simple: delay, grovel, and charm. All he needed was for Nick to say he’d accept the money in four days. As long as he would agree to that, Frankie could abide all threats, consent to any punishment, acquiesce to any repayment terms, no matter how Shylockian—as long as they took effect after Monday. After Labor Day, Frankie’s labors would be over, and he’d pay back Nick with his own God damn money.

“It’s nothing,” Frankie said. “Summer heat gets to me.”

Nick snorted. “It’s the humidity.” He picked up another full coin sleeve, weighed it in his hands, and swore. He tore that one open, too, and dumped the quarters into the pile. “Chicago in August makes me want to move to God damn Iceland.” Nick’s pompadour was shot through with gray, but he was holding on to his Fonz look. He wore a robin’s egg–blue Tommy Bahama shirt open to expose a gold chain tangled in gray chest hair. His arms were ropy, and his knuckles seemed abnormally large. He frowned at another sleeve, then tore that one open, too.

What the hell was up with the quarters?

“Your dad, he could do things with coins,” Nick said. “Chips, too. Roll them over his hands, pull them out of the air. Hell of a man.”

Frankie started to ask, Is there a problem with the coin bags? and then thought better of it. Delay, grovel, and above all, charm.

Nick said, “I’m surprised you didn’t bring him with you.”

“Who, my dad? Why would I bring him into this?”

Nick looked up. “You two don’t talk much, do you?”

“We talk,” Frankie said defensively. While another part of his brain loudly demanded, What did Teddy say? What does he know about this? “Just not about business. I don’t involve him in this stuff at all. He’s retired.”

Nick nodded. “I hear he’s pretty frail these days.”

“I guess he’s slowing down a bit,” Frankie said. He wouldn’t have described Teddy as frail, but hey: charm.

“Time catches up to all of us,” Nick said. He picked up another sleeve, gripped it, then said, “Assholes!”

“What’s the matter?” Frankie asked. He couldn’t stop himself.

“These cheating motherfuckers,” Nick said. “You got to check every single roll. Sometimes they short it a quarter, or put a nickel in there, or some Canadian shit. If you want something you gotta do it yourself.”

“But—”

“But what?”

Frankie was going to say, Was it really worth your time to check every single roll of quarters, then rebag them yourself? Instead, he said, “But what else are you going to do, right?”

Nick stared at him. “Who would have thought little Frankie would be sitting here in that chair?” He wrapped his fingers around the roll.

Hot bile rose from Frankie’s stomach to his throat. He clamped down, steadied himself. Delay, grovel, and charm. From the front of the shop came the hum of huge dryers. There were customers out there, customers who’d come running if Frankie started screaming. Or go running, out of the place. Either way, possible witnesses who could be tracked down by the police in case Frankie was murdered here.

Finally he could take a breath. “I want to say, right off the bat, I meant no disrespect to you or your sister for failing to make my payments. I know that was wrong, and I sincerely wish to make amends. I also want to assure you that I can pay you, in full, on Monday.”

Nick squinted at him. “Really?”

Frankie nodded.

“Well, that would be incredible news.” He set down the roll and ran his hands through the pile of quarters. “Where’s this money coming from, if not Teddy?”

“I have friends.”

“But do you have assets? That’s what I’m interested in. Tell me about those.”

“Assets?”

“That van you drove up in. I figure it’s worth fifteen thousand Blue Book. You own it?”

“I owe sixteen on it.”

“Ouch. Okay, but still. Inventory. How about the family car, what are you driving?”

“A ninety-one Toyota Corolla.”

“Good shape?”

“It has a pretty big dent in the hood.”

“I know a guy can do dents. Let’s call it five K. And the house?”

Frankie tried to smile. “I don’t know why the house matters. I’ll have the money on Monday.”

Nick made a hurry-up gesture. “How much do you think it’s worth?”

“Uh, I don’t know.” He didn’t like where this was going. “We paid sixty-eight thousand six years ago. So maybe seventy? Seventy-five if we got lucky?”

“How much do you owe on it?”

“Mr. Pusateri—”

“How much.”

Frankie tried to think. A band had tightened around his chest, forcing open the pores across his body. He was full of holes, gushing like a lawn sprinkler. “Loretta’s parents loaned us twenty-five grand for a down payment, so—”

“That’s family. How much to the bank?”

“Thirty-five? Thirty-four, maybe.”

“Well, there you go. Money just sitting around.” Nick walked to a metal desk in the corner, picked up a phone.

Frankie tried to breathe. Abide all threats, he told himself. Four more days. After Monday, after Labor Day, none of this would matter.

Nick was saying, “It’s me, Lily, let me talk to—no, Christ no, not Graciella. Put me through to Brett.” Frankie stared at the tubes of quarters. Each one twenty-five bucks. Was he really so paranoid that he had to check them all? Or maybe he just liked to run his hands through them, like Smaug or Scrooge McDuck.

“Brett!” Nick said. “I need you to give me a ballpark figure.” He looked at Frankie. “What’s the address?” Frankie recited it, and Nick said into the phone, “Right, Norridge. Two-bedroom, basement. Frankie, is the basement finished?”

Frankie shook his head.

“Unfinished. One bath. I’m guessing ‘fair condition.’ Okay. Hurry it up, though.”

Nick put the phone to his chest. To Frankie he said, “When my son first started the business, it was all in binders, but now they can look everything up in computers. My idea. Nick Junior, he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing.”

Frankie thought, So innovative he’s on trial for murder.

Brett came back on the line. Nick listened for a minute, then said, “Ah, both of ’em are on the deed? Okay, still doable. So if we get it for sixty, spend as little as possible on carpets and painting…uh-huh. Right. Usual transfer fees. Got it.”

Nick hung up. “I’ve got some good news and bad news,” he said. “You’ll be able to pay down thirty thousand of your debt. You still owe me twenty, but you get to keep your van and keep working—and keep paying me.”

“You’re taking my house?”

“No, I’m buying your house. And the Toyota. Now here’s the bad news.”

A sound escaped from Frankie’s chest, part squeak, part hiccup. A noise he didn’t know his body could make.

“You’re wife’s on the deed, so we’re going to have to go pick her up.”

“Okay, okay,” Frankie said. He was having trouble breathing. “I can bring her by next week, and we can—”

“No, Frankie. Now.”

“Now? But Monday I can—”

“Monday you can pay me the rest, when your friends come through with all their cash.”

“Okay.” He took a breath. “Okay.”

“Why are you looking at the door?”

He was looking for Teddy. For Agent Smalls. For Irene. For anyone to arrive, in the nick of time, to pull his ass from the fire.