“What, you think I won’t let you drive it to T.J.Maxx?”
He had not paid in full for the car. He had spent all his remaining Findlay money on it and gotten a loan on the spot for the rest, around fifteen thousand dollars. He knew he’d made a mistake but wouldn’t admit it. Grace was embarrassed for him. They’d become so unhappy, and the surface failures, small though they were, seemed rooted too deeply to express. Disappointment stuck in the back of their throats like pills swallowed sideways.
He sold the Volvo to a pregnant graduate student from Lexington and put the thirteen hundred toward the auto loan. Now Grace would have to drive the Jaguar to Pitchfield. She parked it far from the strip-mall storefront, not wanting her coworkers to see.
Not two weeks after Riley bought the car, Grace was driving home from work, doing a responsible fifty-five on the Dry Valley Parkway just after six o’clock, when she found herself seemingly suspended in air as she abruptly slowed to the speed of a bicycle. She shoved down the gas pedal and then yanked her foot right back, yelping, when she heard what sounded, impossibly, like an explosion. A wide white pickup rushed up on her from behind, horn screaming on the two-lane road, and Grace wrenched the steering wheel all the way to the right, drifting onto the shoulder like spreading molasses. The truck swerved into the oncoming lane, just missing her.
She didn’t want to pop open the hood, because she knew a teenage girl alone on a country road at dusk with her hood up might attract uncharitable attention, to say the least. She locked the doors, smashed one of Riley’s hats over her hair, and sank down in her seat to call him. She watched the thick ribbons of smoke coming from the hood and prayed that this was not her fault.
Riley got there forty minutes later with Alls, driving Greg’s car. It was pitch-dark already and freezing.
“What happened?” Riley shouted.
“Nothing!” she said. “I didn’t do anything! The engine light wasn’t on. Everything was fine!”
“Jesus,” he said. “You didn’t even look at it?”
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m a girl.” This didn’t say at all what she’d meant. He snorted.
Alls was not watching them. He already had the hood up. “You smell that?” he said. “Look at that hole, man. You don’t even want to know.”
? ? ?
The car had thrown a rod. There was a hole in the block. Grace didn’t know what any of this meant, but she could see the hole just fine. It was the size of a Coke can. Riley didn’t believe Alls, even when he showed him, but Alls said that fixing it was beyond him anyway.
Pat, the mechanic the Grahams always went to, said they were looking at twenty-five hundred dollars minimum, and that was the friends-and-family price.
Riley bent forward, his hands on his knees, groaning and laughing at the same time.
“You still got the Volvo?” Pat asked.
Grace shook her head. Riley shook his head too, but at his shoes.
“Who’d you get this from, anyway?” Pat asked. “This comes when the oil ain’t getting changed.”
They had the car towed home, where it sat in the driveway like a big dead bug. He agreed to sell it, but there were no takers. And now she had no way to get to T.J.Maxx. She and Riley had each gotten something they’d wished for.
Shortly thereafter, Greg’s father cut him off. Grace learned that Mr. Kimbrough had made this threat at the beginning of the semester: Greg was ruining his chances of getting into any law school, and if he didn’t pull in a 3.0 that term, his parents would “withdraw their support.” Grace subsequently learned the extent to which the Graham and Kimbrough parents had subsidized the rent and utilities on Orange Street, where she, Riley, and Alls each paid only $150 a month. Greg had not believed his parents were serious.
If those things had not happened just like that, right on top of each other, and if they had not all become so lost and unglued from their plans, they each might have struggled through. None of them could tell their families what had gone wrong. Their problems were all too juvenile, too embarrassing. Grace knew they had only themselves to blame—they had all been too comfortable in their seats. With the exception of Alls, whom she despised for different reasons, the boys had not realized how insulated they’d been by privilege. She too.
18
Research brought Grace her only satisfaction, and she could do it safely from their bedroom, avoiding Alls and also Greg, whose regular brattiness had curdled into unpredictable nastiness. He’d never been broke before. Riley wasn’t mean, only muddled. He’d thought his optimism was a quality of his person, not a consequence of his upbringing. Without it, he was lost even to himself.
Three framed Audubon prints hung in the Wynne House, all of them songbirds, and so Grace made a careful table of Audubon values. Original paintings were of course the most valuable, then completed but unpainted drawings, then sketches, then limited-edition prints, and mass prints at the very bottom. Dr. Graham had a framed Audubon something—she wasn’t sure if it was a print or a poster—in his study, some pheasants and quail. She’d ask him about it; he would like that.
She did hope, though she hated to admit it even to herself, that such research might help her spot treasures at yard sales and flea markets, like the people on Antiques Roadshow who found themselves millionaires after picking up a “pretty picture” for twenty dollars. Who didn’t hope that would happen to them? Instead, her research led her to an old news story about some college boys in Lexington who had stolen rare books and original Audubon sketches from their school library and attempted to fence them at Christie’s. She laughed, with both delight at their bravado and pity for their mistakes. If you were going to pull a stunt like that, you wouldn’t steal art. To steal anything one of a kind would be to steal a tracking device. And they’d Tasered the librarian. The thieves had been caught in a matter of weeks.
The spoons she had rescued from the Upper East Side bachelorette estate—that was the kind of thing you should steal. They were rare enough to be worth something, but they would be easy to sell without raising any eyebrows. Without violence, resources, or experience, one could take only unguarded, underappreciated treasure. Silver. Small clocks. Prints that were signed but not numbered. One couldn’t steal them from a museum, with its deep records and security guards, or even a library. Not from someone’s house, where the missing family heirlooms would be wept over. Not from a store. You’d want to take them from somewhere like the Wynne House.
She looked for the flaw in her logic. There had to be one; otherwise the historic houses all across the country would be treated like ATMs. But she couldn’t find the tangle. Her pulse quickened.
Grace could probably get a job cleaning the place and slip one thing into her pocket at a time. But when something went missing, people always accused the cleaning woman or the poor kid. She could hardly see setting herself up as both.
At three o’clock in the afternoon, Grace put on a flouncy skirt that had deep interior side pockets.
If she met one of the same docents, she would just take the tour again, pretend it was for school, and go.
She rode her bike there, propped it against a crabapple tree, and went up to the door. The old lady who opened it was a woman she recognized from the Grahams’ church. Grace didn’t know her name, and the woman didn’t recognize her.