Instead Audra told Graham that while he’d been in class (she made it sound like he was the one who wanted to go), she had unpacked their suitcases, removed the macadamia nuts from the minibar so Matthew wouldn’t eat them, called down to the front desk for extra conditioner, explored the fitness room, done some yoga, and bought a knockoff of a Chloé handbag in the parking lot from a Hispanic man named Smoke.
She had the handbag with her, in an ordinary plastic grocery bag, and she took it out and showed it to Graham. It was a deep mahogany color, with about a hundred zippered compartments, and looked large enough to hold a terrier comfortably.
“How much did you pay for that?” he asked.
She beamed. “Fifty dollars!”
“That’s amazing,” he said. “I think you’ve done really well.”
He didn’t actually think that. He actually thought there was a limit on how many handbags any one person needed and that limit was probably one. But Graham thought that the secret to understanding women (if in fact there was a secret and they could be understood at all) was to admire their purchases. Approve of the stuff they brought home after shopping and they thought you were wonderful.
Audra looked at him happily and put the handbag on the table and began showing him all the little compartments and telling him what she planned to keep in each one.
“Now Smoke told me that the lining is actually the same as the lining in a real Chloé bag,” she said. “Apparently the factories in China always make extra fabric and sell it and the companies know but they just consider it part of the cost of doing business. So the only real difference is the quality of leather, and…”
There was more like this, but Graham didn’t listen to it, although he kept an attentive look on his face. He knew Audra hated it when he did this, but he still couldn’t stop himself. She didn’t understand that it wasn’t that he wanted her to be quiet; it was that he didn’t want to be held accountable for paying attention. He liked the sound of her voice, which was warm and bubbly, and it flowed over Graham, as cozy as bathwater, as comforting as milk.
—
The name Jasper and the fact that the number was written on a fragment of legal-pad paper caused Graham to picture a lawyer, someone older and respectable and dependable. Someone like Graham himself. And wouldn’t that make sense? Didn’t most criminals get caught because they made the same mistakes over and over, because they couldn’t break familiar patterns?
So when Audra took Matthew to his afternoon class and Graham went into the bathroom and changed the settings on his cellphone to disable his caller ID and dialed the number written below Jasper’s name, he was expecting a mellow confident voice to answer. Instead it went straight to voicemail and a man said, “Hey, this is Jasper. Leave a message.”
There was a hurried quality to the voice that Graham associated with young people: breathless, staccato, busy.
He rapidly abandoned the mental image of the older man with the short white hair and the blue eyes and the long, interesting face (who, Graham realized suddenly, was the lawyer who’d drawn up his will) and replaced it with the image of a tall thin young man with unruly dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses. Then he realized he was thinking of a children’s folksinger he’d taken Matthew to see last month. Apparently he was so lacking in imagination that he couldn’t visualize someone he’d never met.
“Hey, this is Jasper. Leave a message.” Hardly words to haunt you.
He knew he should throw the piece of paper with the phone number away or, better yet, flush it down the toilet. Graham had a poor memory for phone numbers and he wouldn’t be able to recall this one—even this one—a week from now. That would be the sensible thing to do. Get rid of the number, clear it from his phone, forget about it, let Audra think it had fallen out of her wallet.
But instead Graham put the number back in his pocket and splashed cold water on his face, already thinking about when he might call again, and what he might say. Criminals were not the only people who made the same mistakes over and over again.
—
Graham put on a suit for dinner and then sat on one of the beds in the hotel room and waited for Audra to get ready. They were late but he didn’t try to rush her. By now he was used to being late wherever they went. She was wearing a long butterscotch-colored velvet dress. She had owned it for many years—in fact, it had been her backup choice for a wedding dress. But she’d stuck with her first choice and married Graham wearing jeans and an ivory blouse of shattered silk. Graham could still remember the feel of that blouse, its silky-rough texture against his fingers when he put his hand on the small of Audra’s back.
He watched as she pinned her hair up. It always surprised him that a woman whose hair was not even long enough to touch her shoulders could have so many hairstyles. She clipped on dangly earrings and then turned to face him.
“You look beautiful,” he said sincerely. “I’m sure you’ll be the most beautiful woman there tonight.”
She laughed. “I’m not sure that’s all that much of a compliment, given this group,” she said. “But thank you.”
They retrieved Matthew from the lobby, where he was examining a display of origami animals, and went in to dinner and found the table with their name cards. Graham was sitting between Audra and Matthew, and next to Matthew was Clayton, and next to Audra was Li. (“Li!” Audra exclaimed, the way someone might cry “Grandma!” at Thanksgiving.) On Clayton’s other side was a girl of about thirty, who Graham thought would be really pretty if she weren’t so full of hard edges. Her flat blond hair hung past her shoulders and was cut straight across with what appeared to be razor precision. She had a nice but very square jaw, and her eyebrows were straight lines without a hint of arch. She wore wire-rimmed glasses, and the lenses were perfect rectangles. Her dress was stiff and white, with a row of gold buttons marching down the front.
Her name was just as hard-edged. “Trina,” she said when Graham introduced himself and Matthew. “And you must be the Matthew everyone’s talking about.”
Matthew looked puzzled. “Why is everyone talking about me?”
“Because you’re so good at origami,” Trina said.
“But everyone here is good at origami,” Matthew said. “Well, except one lady who couldn’t collapse multiple creases.”
Graham expected the service to be awful, but to his surprise the waitstaff were efficient and he was pleased that instead of taking individual drink orders, they put entire bottles of wine on the tables. As Graham filled up his glass and Audra’s, Li and Trina and Clayton pulled stacks of origami paper from their bags (Clayton had his backpack and Li had a man-purse of some sort) and began folding. Audra laughed and reached into her own handbag and produced a stack for Matthew. “I don’t leave home without it.”