“This clause here,” Margaret Sommers said, “it says you don’t refund money if we don’t get the results we’re looking for. Is that right?”
“Yes. But you can halt the investigation at any point. Also, I will report to you after my initial inquiries, and if it doesn’t seem as though they’re going anywhere, I’ll tell you that frankly. But that’s why I ask for a five-hundred-dollar earnest payment up front: if I start to look and don’t find anything, people are tempted not to pay.”
“Hmmph,” she said. “It doesn’t seem right to me, you taking money and not delivering.”
“I’m successful most of the time.” I tried not to let fatigue make me cranky—she wasn’t the first person to raise this point. “But it wouldn’t be fair to say I always am able to find out what someone wants to know. After my first inquiry, I can estimate the amount of time it will take to complete the investigation: sometimes people see that as more than they’re willing to invest. You may decide that, too.”
“And you’d still keep Isaiah’s five hundred dollars.”
“Yes. He’s hiring my professional expertise. I get paid for providing that. Just as a doctor does, even when she can’t cure you.” It’s taken years in the business to become hard-hearted—or maybe headed—about asking for money without embarrassment.
I told them if they wanted to talk it over some more they could call me when they’d made a decision, but that I wouldn’t take the uncle’s policy or make any phone calls until they’d signed a contract. Isaiah Sommers said he didn’t need more time, that his cousin’s neighbor Camilla Rawlings had vouched for me and that was good enough for him.
Margaret Sommers folded her arms across her chest and announced that as long as Isaiah understood he was paying for it, he was free to do as he pleased; she wasn’t keeping books for that mean old Jew Rubloff to throw her money away on Isaiah’s useless family.
Isaiah gave her a hard look, but he signed both contracts and pulled a roll from his trousers. He counted out five hundred dollars in twenties, watching me closely while I wrote out a receipt. I signed the contracts in turn, giving one back to Isaiah, putting the other with the policy in my case. I jotted down his aunt’s address and phone number, took the details for the funeral parlor, and got up to leave.
Isaiah Sommers escorted me to the door, but before he could close it I heard Margaret Sommers say, “I just hope you don’t come to me when you’ve found yourself throwing good money after bad.”
I turned down the walk on his angry response. I’d had my fill of bitterness lately, what with Lotty’s arguing with Max, and now the Sommerses taking each other on. Their snarling seemed endemic to the relationship; it would be difficult to be around them often. I wondered if they had friends and what the friends did when faced with this sniping. If Max and Lotty’s quarrel hardened into the same kind of misery I would find it intolerable.
Ms. Sommers’s gratuitous remark about the mean old Jew she worked for also hit me hard. I don’t like mean-spirited remarks of any kind, but this one jarred me, especially after listening to Max and Lotty go ten rounds on whether he should speak at today’s conference. What would Margaret Sommers say if she heard Max detail his life when the Nazis came to power—forced to leave school, seeing his father compelled to kneel naked in the street? Was Lotty right, was his speaking a demeaning exposure that would do no good? Would it teach the Margaret Sommerses of the world to curb their careless prejudices?
I’d grown up a few blocks south of here, among people who would have used worse epithets than Margaret Sommers’s if she’d moved next door. If she sat on a stage rehearsing the racial slurs that she probably grew up hearing, I doubted that my old neighbors would change their thinking much.
I stood on the curb, trying to stretch out the knife points in my trapezius before starting the long drive north. The curtains in the Sommerses’ front window twitched. I got into my car. The September nights were drawing in; only the faintest wisp of light still stained the horizon as I turned north onto Route 41.