“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked her, his hand on her calf. “They’re not usually this bad, are they?”
She shook her head. “No, not like this. I feel horrible.” She began to cry, her throat burning, and Riley went downstairs for her bag, where there was ibuprofen. He came back upstairs clutching her purse from the side, and he looked so young—his face pale and pink and childish, his green eyes big and worried. He’d poured her a glass of Coke.
When you’d known someone this long, she had often thought before, you could rarely see what they looked like at any present moment. Riley’s face was a composite of every face it had been since she had met him. Only every now and then did his face become singular. Now it shocked her, how young he looked. Like a little boy. She felt desperate to fall back in time with him, to go back, back, back, and sickened that she couldn’t.
20
A week later, Grace was eating a mealy apple, dumbly clicking through auction records, and staring at her phone, both desperate for and dreading a call from Mrs. Graham asking them to come to dinner, when Riley burst in the kitchen, flushed with panic.
“My dad says I have to pay taxes on my painting money.”
“Oh,” Grace said, looking up from a listing on Mdina pottery. “I hadn’t thought about that. All the jobs I’ve had, they were just taken out.”
“Obviously, I hadn’t thought about it either,” he said, blowing up at his hair. “This is fucked up.”
It wasn’t that she had thought about his taxes, but more his look of indignation, as though someone else were at fault. She wanted to smack him.
“Well,” she said, looking back at her reading, “maybe you should rob the Wynne House.”
She was surprised when he laughed. He sank down the wall and sat on the floor, his hands over his face, his laughter muffled.
“Just put on some nice ski masks,” he said. “Just get some flashlights and clean the place out.”
“Strip it,” Grace said, biting a side out of her apple. The cold hurt her teeth. “Lock old Dorothea in the powder room, throw it all in the back of a pickup, and drive to New York City.”
“What do we tell the people who buy the stuff?”
“That your grandfather died. Great-aunt. Great-something.”
“Grandpa Dwight promised me his guns,” he said. “At the home, right before he died, when my mom was out of the room. He also said, ‘The ass is the lass.’ Didn’t elaborate.”
“He died when you were, what, thirteen? Did you get the guns?”
“Nope, he gave them to Nate and Colin. He mixed us up a lot.” He stared at the ceiling. “Maybe we should just move into the Wynne House. Then we wouldn’t have to pay rent.”
Grace got up from the table and joined him on the dirty floor. “We could sleep in the tiny bed together,” she said. “All snuggled up.”
“I will be the statesman and you can be the . . . the—”
“They didn’t have stateswomen,” Grace said. “I get something crappy. The charwoman.”
“No, you just don’t have a job. You’re the lady of the house, just like now.”
She swatted him and he laughed into her hair.
“No,” she said. “We should sell it and move to Canada or someplace, never to be seen again.” She imagined never seeing Alls again, never seeing the Grahams again, and felt momentarily peaceful, as though someone had turned on a white-noise machine.
“Canada? You want to rob the Wynne House so we can move to Canada?”
“Anywhere,” she said. “Belize. Peru. Rome. Anywhere with you.”
? ? ?
Alls got a second job as a cashier at the drugstore, so he bought the groceries. Grace had applied for the drugstore too, but they had not called her, and of course she couldn’t take a job there now. Riley had called the wedding photographer he worked for in the summers, but it wasn’t wedding season yet. So far, he had refused to take less than he owed on the car, but no such offer was forthcoming. Somehow, it had not yet occurred to Greg that he would have to find a job. He ate the pizza Alls brought home as if it had long been his due. If they’d lived in Memphis or Nashville, getting jobs would have been less of a problem, but Garland was too small to employ them, and now Riley and Grace were without a car.
Grace’s heist fantasy became her and Riley’s private joke, increasingly elaborate. At night, eating saltines, they “debated” the pros and cons of single-item theft versus all-out looting. Grace drew “maps” of the site, including floor plans of the interior. They walked by the house sometimes, wondering about the locks on the doors and the windows, noting the curtains and shades, which ones were drawn and when. But these conversations all fell disappointingly within the bounds of their standard what-ifs, no different, really, from folding a four-pointed fortune-teller. Grace wished the robbery were not a joke to him. Each time he made a crack about shoplifting from the Wynne House, he was laughing on the edge of the idea, and Grace waited for him to step over. The real idea would have to be his, she knew.
Even if their Wynne joke stayed a joke, she was grateful for the shared diversion, which gave them something that had been missing: a game, a secret that, unlike their secret marriage, let her imagine them somewhere other than where they were. They read together about the unsolved 1990 robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in Boston, where two men dressed as police entered the museum late at night, tied up the guards in the basement, and stole five hundred million dollars in Rembrandt, Degas, and Vermeer. They read about the thieves who rented a storefront across the street from the National Fine Arts Museum, in Paraguay, dug a tunnel ten feet underground into the museum, and stole five paintings. Never caught.
Riley had been utterly charmed by the San Juan Surfer, later rechristened the Surfer Bandit, who robbed ten banks in Southern California before he was caught, always wearing “casual surfer attire” and escaping on a maroon 1983 Honda motorcycle. Riley had shaken his head in wonder at the published security camera photos; the man bore an uncanny resemblance to Greg. Grace preferred Blane Nordahl, a cat burglar who’d stolen only hallmarked antique silver from wealthy Americans along the East Coast for decades. He chose his marks from Architectural Digest and Town & Country, where people eagerly displayed their most portable capital in situ. To get in, Nordahl would painstakingly cut through a single pane of window glass, so as not to provoke the security system by raising the window. He was at large again. Grace thought of her Dianakopf spoons and felt the glow of camaraderie. She knew which silver to take.
In 2008, four men in drag stormed into a Paris Harry Winston with guns and grenades. They bashed in display cases and swept the diamonds within into suitcases while the employees and shoppers trembled in a corner. All told, they got away with $108 million, never recovered. Grace loved the audacity of it—broad daylight, broken glass, one of the most famous jewelers in the world. She caught her knee bobbing as she read.
The Wynne House had no security guards, no security system beyond locks on the doors. All they would have to do was show up.
? ? ?
Grace, Riley, and Greg were sitting at the kitchen table eating cereal one night when Riley read the local police blotter out loud from the Record. The complaints of Garland’s citizens were always ripe for mockery.
“‘A resident of the three hundred block of Lowery Avenue called police Friday afternoon at four to complain of two youths, estimated twelve to fourteen, cutting through her yard and disrupting her garden. The youths’ parents have been notified.’”
“When I’m an old lady, I will collect dead birds to throw at the youths,” Grace said.
“‘A Garland citizen,’” Riley continued, “‘found a lewd drawing on a napkin near the Lions Club picnic.’”
Greg snorted.