PART 3
Tara came in through the front door like someone walking into a cold lake.
She was twenty-six and six months pregnant, with swollen eyes and a stained gray sweatshirt.
She wouldn’t look at her brother.
“I’m sorry, Anna,” she said.
It came out as a whisper.
“I’m so sorry.”
Nick tried once to speak.
“Tara, don’t—”
“Sit down, Nicholas,” Elaine said.
He sat.
Tara told it in pieces.
Last October, Nick had come to her apartment with a box of mail and a story.
Anna was grieving, he said.
Anna had asked him to arrange for the trust letters to go to Tara’s address, just until the house settled down.
“He gave me three thousand dollars for rent,” she said.
“He said it was Anna’s idea, that you wanted to help me.”
“I believed him.”
“In April, I opened one of the envelopes.”
“It said two hundred thousand dollars, and I thought, that can’t be right. Anna drives a nine-year-old Corolla.”
“He said Anna knew all about it, that they were investing, that I should stay out of grown-up business.”
“On Friday, he came over and told me to sell your clothes.”
“He said you’d agreed. He said you wanted the money for the baby’s room, and that you were too embarrassed to ask me yourself.”
Her voice broke.
“I knew it was wrong, Anna.”
“But I was so scared of what Mom would think.”
“I’d already spent his three thousand dollars.”
The room was very quiet.
I thought of the monogrammed Louis Vuitton Neverfull she’d carried at Thanksgiving, a bag no retail clerk could afford.
Elaine closed her eyes.
“I taught thirty-one years,” she said, so softly I almost missed it.
“I could always tell who copied.”
“And I missed it at my own table.”
Nick stood up so fast his chair scraped the floor.
“You’re all enjoying this,” he said.
“I’ve been carrying this family. Do you know what I’m up against? Do you have any idea?”
He grabbed his keys.
“I need air.”
“You’re going to regret this, Anna.”
“You’re almost done being pregnant. Then you’ll see how hard it is to do this alone.”
The front door slammed.
Nobody moved.
Then Elaine took out her phone, put it on the table, and dialed a number from the top of the letterhead.
“It’s Sunday,” I said.
“Judith Abbott,” Elaine answered, “told me she has been waiting fourteen months for someone to call her on a Sunday.”
I spent that night in Elaine’s guest room, under a quilt that smelled of cedar and old books.
Tara sl*pt down the hall.
I didn’t.
At 11:04 p.m., my phone lit up the ceiling.
Nick.
