And When She Was Good, page 13
“Who could that be?” Scott says, sounding for all the world like a fussy old lady, as if they are two spinsters living together. Heloise is reminded why she’s determined for him to play soccer, how good it is for him to have some male attention, even if it’s secondhand and second-rate. Personally, Heloise wouldn’t mind if they were two fussy old spinsters growing old together, but she knows that’s no life for a boy.
“Probably a neighbor. I’m sure I’ve violated the homeowners’ rules again.” Heloise tries to be scrupulous about staying within the law, as defined by Turner’s Grove. Nothing gets meaner faster than a neighborhood dispute.
It’s Leo, her accountant and he looks strange to Heloise. Drunk, she thinks at first, but there’s not a whiff of alcohol on him and he’s steady on his feet. Still, he’s loose and giddy.
“I wasn’t expecting you,” she says. Rude, but—Heloise does not like anyone arriving at her home unannounced.
“Quarterly filings,” he says. “I was in the neighborhood, thought I’d stop by and get your signature.”
“Don’t you usually messenger those over?”
“I do. And it costs seventy-five dollars, which I charge to your account. This visit is free!” His voice soars a little on the last word—he sounds like that squealing pig in the insurance commercial that Scott and Audrey love—and Leo giggles at the sound.
“Do you have a pen?” Again, rude. She should ask him in, offer coffee or a drink, even something to eat. After all, he knows about Scott. As her accountant, he had to know she has a dependent. She was tempted, when Scott was young, not to claim him, calculating that the tax benefit was not worth creating a paper trail for his existence. But another accountant, Leo’s predecessor, had convinced her that it was in Scott’s best interest. She was paying into Social Security, he was her only heir, if anything should happen to her, God forbid—so Leo belongs to the “legitimate” side of her life ledger, and she has tried her best to keep him there.
He pats his chest. “How about that? I don’t.”
There is nothing to do but open the door and let him in. He goes to the dining-room table where Scott is working. “I don’t suppose I could have a soda,” he asks Heloise.
“We don’t have soda,” Scott says. “It’s very bad for your bones.”
“Juice? Iced tea? Oh, what the hell, I’ll have a glass of that.” He indicates the quite nice pinot noir that Heloise is nursing. Disciplined as always, she has cut back, so it’s her first glass of the night. But she resents sharing a twenty-five-dollar bottle of wine with Leo. She pours him a rather stingy serving, using a milk glass.
“Hell of a season,” he says. “Seems like more and more of our clients are treating October fifteenth like April fifteenth.”
“Not me,” Heloise says.
“Not I,” Scott corrects her matter-of-factly, and it’s odd how shame and pride can simultaneously fill her heart, although she knows it’s a grammar lesson learned from the musical Peter Pan, which Scott loves. She reminds herself that educated people make such gaffes all the time, that she has brilliant clients who say “between you and I” and use “whom” even when “who” is correct.
“No, I wish all my clients were like you,” Leo says. “So honest. So ethical. I’ve never seen anyone as careful as you.”
A compliment. That is, it should be a compliment. But there is an odd tone under his words.
“You’re really worried about being audited,” Leo says.
“Isn’t everyone?” she asks.
“Abstractly, yes. No one wants to be audited. But it’s like a lot of things in life. As much as we don’t want it to happen, as easy as it would be to set up a system to simplify our own lives—like filing stuff, you know? You buy things, you get all those warranties and instruction manuals, and you know you should have a system for filing them, but they’re just in a big stack on your desk. Or passwords! Passwords. You say, ‘I am going to write that down in a safe place, or at least put the hints down in a safe place,’ and”—he threw his hands up in the air—“you never do. Well, you probably do. I never do. Most people don’t. That’s what I’m saying. You’re so careful. Being audited must be a powerful disincentive for you in a way it’s not for most of the people I work with. It’s almost like you would die if you were audited.”
She tops off his glass, then turns to her son. “Scott? Are you almost done? It’s getting close to bedtime.”
“Forty-five minutes,” he says, correctly.
“Well, when you are done, you can watch television.”
He slams the book shut. “I’m done!” He has probably skimped on some essential task. She really should check his work. But getting him away from Leo seems more important.
“Why don’t you watch in my room?” she says. This is a treat. Although she has a television in her room, she seldom uses it, and Scott is not allowed to have any “screens” in his bedroom, not even the cell phone she reluctantly gave him this year after there was a mix-up and he was stranded at soccer practice. “Just put your pj’s on first, so if you fall asleep, all I have to do is steer you to bed.”
He runs upstairs, delighted by the novelty of it all, indifferent to Leo. Good.
“How did you know I would be home tonight?” she asks him. “It would have been a long way out of your way if I hadn’t been here.”
“Audrey has Thursdays off, right?”
“Not necessarily. It varies, according to my schedule.”
“But Audrey usually has Thursdays off, which means you have to monitor the phones.”
She glances at her BlackBerry. “I’m available to my employees, certainly.”
“Like you were available to Sophie?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I mean, you’re sitting here in your five-hundred-seventy-five-thousand-dollar house—six hundred and fifty thousand before the bubble burst, but what do you care? your mortgage is only two hundred thousand—with your cute son, drinking wine, while girls are out there putting themselves at risk and you just sit on your ass and take forty percent off the top.”
This is not the kind of detail that can be gleaned from her books.
“I own the firm. I am responsible for all the overhead costs, as you know. I have a silent partner who takes a big chunk of the profits in exchange for his original investment.”
“Man, Sophie was right. You are a cool customer.”
Heloise takes a healthy sip of her wine. This bottle might get finished tonight after all. A terrible thought crosses her mind. Ply Leo with liquor, send him on his way, hoping he wrecks his car on the famously curvy roads of Turner’s Grove, roads that claim teenagers with such regularity that it’s almost like human sacrifice. But no, she is not that person. She was once, but she decided she must not harm anyone again, if at all possible.
So where does Sophie fit within that vow?
“I’m terribly sorry about what happened to Sophie. You know that. You keep my books. You know that I’ve covered her prescription costs, that she receives the equivalent of a workers’ comp payment.”
“Yes, you’re Lady Bountiful. Sophie’s cool as long as you’re cool. But if you decide to stop, she’s fucked. With a legitimate workers’ comp claim, she wouldn’t have to worry. So why are you standing in her way? That’s what I couldn’t understand. Why would you pay out of pocket when a workers’ comp claim would be a win-win for everyone?”
“Have you been talking to Sophie again? I asked you not to.”
Leo gets up and walks over to the refrigerator, opens it, studies its contents. He begins yanking open drawers and helps himself to an unopened box of Mallomars. Heloise starts to protest that those are for Scott, a treat, but decides to stay still. A part of her mind registers the scene as comical—the bespectacled, never-blinking accountant establishing his dominance by helping himself to a box of Mallomars. She wants to tell him, I’ve swum with the sharks, buddy, and come out alive. I’ve seen men do things that would make you piss yourself. Don’t push me.
“News flash, Heloise: It’s a free country. You can’t keep two people from talking to each other. Sophie needs help. She reached out to me. What kind of person would turn his back on her?”
Heloise assumes this is a rhetorical question.
“No honor among thieves, huh? And no honor among whores, I guess. You’re supposed to take care of these girls. That’s the promise you make them, right? That you’ve got all these systems, that no one who works for you has ever been hurt or arrested.”
“That’s true.”
“So what do you call Sophie, in her situation?”
Foolish. “Unlucky. Very unlucky. But that’s not my fault. And it’s not your responsibility, Leo. Don’t be taken in by her. She’s using you to pressure me.”
“A user? That’s rich. I’m pretty sure that’s what you are. You use these girls and cast them off, indifferent to what their lives are going to be like once they move on.”
“That’s not true,” she says with some heat. More than twenty girls have worked for her, and only one has had a bad outcome.
“I’m going to make sure you do right by Sophie,” Leo says. “I’m your accountant. I know things.”
“You signed a confidentiality agreement. As did Sophie. Trust me, you can’t afford to talk to anyone.”
“Hey, that agreement isn’t binding if my silence means being an accessory to a crime.”
“What crime? My accounts are in order. You said so yourself.”
“Jesus, Heloise. You’re a whore. Or a pimp. A madam, I guess. Whatever you call it. And that’s illegal, and I prepared the tax returns that helped you cover it up.”
“My tax returns are in order. I report all my income through my three businesses. I pay FICA, Medicare, unemployment—which Sophie can draw on if she wants to end her medical leave.”
“So why can’t she file for workers’ comp?”
“Because she’s not entitled to it, under the law. There is no evidence that her condition is related to her employment with me.”
“She got sick while fucking your clients!”
“If Sophie had a consensual sexual relationship with one of our clients, that was her choice, but it was not a service provided by WFEN. We lobby for income parity for women—”
“Shut up!” He’s pacing now, pulling at his hair. Her refusal to say what Leo wants to hear—that she’s a whore, that she takes responsibility for Sophie—is only making him more agitated, and she’s beginning to wonder at her choice to stonewall him. But she will not hang herself with her own words, ever.
“Look, Leo, this is a horrible situation. You have to trust me. I’m going to continue to take care of Sophie. She was wrong to bring you into this. Clearly she figured out that you have a very tender heart.” And a seldom-used cock. Leo is so innocent he probably doesn’t require sex from Sophie—is probably terrified of it, given her HIV status. “She’s appealing to your better nature, but she’ll let you down. She lets everyone down eventually. She wouldn’t be in this situation if she hadn’t been greedy.”
“Greedy! You’re the greedy one.”
“I assume one hundred percent of the risk and responsibilities of my business. I feel that entitles me to a percentage of what my employees earn. It’s a pretty common business model.”
He has stopped pacing, seems to be calming down.
“So it is, so it is. And I know the numbers. You make a good living, even in this economy.”
“I’m not complaining.”
“You must be very good at what you do.”
She has been sitting this entire time. Leo now stands directly in front of her. “Do me.”
“What?”
“Show me what those other men pay for. But use your mouth. For all I know, you’re infected, too.”
She speaks quietly but forcefully. “Are you out of your mind? My son is upstairs. This is my home.”
“I’ll be quiet. And you won’t be able to talk at all.” He is fumbling at his fly, his underwear, although it’s clear that he’s not quite ready for any kind of attention. He starts to rub himself. He’s probably so used to pleasuring himself that it’s instinctive to start this way.
“No, Leo.”
“Yes. Or I will—”
She doesn’t even wait to hear the threat, and she doesn’t flinch at the mess she’s about to make. She takes the wine bottle, unconcerned that it’s not even half empty, and cracks it on the edge of her table. The wine splatters everywhere, and a dim part of her mind registers the warning that wine stains need to be removed as promptly as possible from granite and tile, or they will set. She’ll get to them soon. She holds the jagged neck of the bottle at his crotch and says, “I will cut it off. I’ve seen men killed. I’ve had men killed.” One man, her mind amends, and she didn’t “have” it done, but she was responsible for it. “I’m going to write this off to the pressures you’ve been under during tax season. So why don’t you leave? Go home and sleep on what you’ve done tonight, and we’ll talk later about whether you’re still my accountant.”
It’s a bluff, and if he calls it—if he attacks her, if he forces her—she can’t imagine how it will end. Scott is probably snoozing upstairs by now, and she can’t decide what would be worse: allowing herself to be raped as he sleeps or having him hear her screams, being forced to call 911.
But Leo is weak, inexperienced. He doesn’t have the fortitude for this game. He skitters out, zipping up as he goes. Heloise locks the door behind him and leans there for what seems like a long time, willing herself back to composure. Then she channels her namesake—gets out the granite cleaner and the tile cleaner, soaks her clothes in OxiClean, sweeps up the glass and puts it in the trash, figuring that the little pieces will be too dangerous in the recycling bin. Helen makes messes. Heloise cleans them up.
Upstairs, she finds that Scott has fallen asleep as the television plays a reality show about men with some horrible job. Do you know, Scott had asked her the other day, what the most dangerous job in the world is?
Mine, she thought, mine. Statistically that’s not true, not even close. She’s not at physical risk doing what she does. But her job threatens her life every day, in a sense.
She lets Scott spend the night in her bed, worrying that it’s inappropriate, then smiles at her own fears. Yes, Helen Lewis, she says, which is how she addresses herself when she’s rattled. That’s what Social Services is going to bust you for—letting your eleven-year-old son sleep in your bed.
1999–2000
It had begun four or five years earlier, with a shovel, a child’s toy, discarded under the dock, rusty and insubstantial. Yet, used with care and patience, it was capable of digging and then filling a small hole, something that wouldn’t call attention to itself.
Not that anyone but Helen spent much time outdoors. After she had dug a hole or two with her shovel, she persuaded Val to let her take up gardening, a hobby that he allowed because he was house-proud in an odd way. He liked the subtle improvements to the grounds—and he liked not having to pay an outsider. He gave her better tools. She began hiding bills, the tips she cadged from her clients, in defiance of Val’s rules. She wrapped them in napkins, then placed the little bundles in Ziplocs. The trick was remembering where she put them, how many there were, but she trained her memory as one would train a muscle, forcing it to take on more and more weight. She used all sorts of marking systems—stones and twigs, strange knots on trees. Her mother had liked to garden and Helen had worked by her side when she was a child, before Hector decided it was a waste of time and money and paved over much of the backyard. She planted bills with the fall bulbs, scooped out new hiding places while cutting back the liriope. That’s how she came to find the gun. She was looking for a place to hide some money.
That would have been two years ago, give or take. Her little shovel, lacy with rust, yet still a sentimental favorite, almost broke when it hit whatever was hidden in the velvet Crown Royal bag. She rocked back on her heels, considering her discovery. Why had Val buried the gun on his property, with the bay right there, ready to carry away anything on its tides? True, Martin’s body had been given to the bay, but it’s not as if the two would wash up side by side. Val was cheap, the gun had value. Perhaps he hoped to recycle it one day.
Or maybe he just wanted a souvenir of the most reckless thing he’d ever done.
She put it back and found another place to hide her own money. But she never forgot where the gun was. She never forgot where her own money was either, and once Val was in jail and the household had been ordered to disperse, it was a simple afternoon’s work to retrieve most of it. She didn’t have even three thousand dollars to her name. It was enough. It would have to be.
Helen had told Val a semitruth: She did need to go home. But it was her father, not her mother, who was dying. She just figured a dying mother was more credible. Girls in her line of work don’t tend to have close relationships with their fathers, and Val had inferred, over the years, that Helen’s was the clichéd SOB. He even assumed that she’d been raped by her father, and Helen had let that assumption pass, much as she wanted to contradict it, to say she wasn’t like Bettina, with her pervy uncle, or Shelley, whose own brother had initiated her, then shared her with all his friends.
Hector Lewis was managing to die with as much inconsideration as he had lived. Ungrateful, belligerent, he disdained Beth’s expert care yet also seemed in no hurry to arrive at his destination despite his oft-stated belief that he would be treated to something spectacular in the afterlife. Because he had never married Beth, he didn’t have her health insurance. And Helen did not offer him any of her money, rationalizing that it would be like tossing a crumb to an insatiable ogre. Her savings would be wiped out in less than a month if she contributed them to Hector’s care.
Instead she paid her mother for room and board, then helped her navigate the maze of Social Services. It quickly became obvious that they would have to bankrupt Hector and get him into a state Medicaid program. For once in his life, Hector—with his lack of bank accounts, no property in his name, all the ruses set up to keep the first Mrs. Lewis at bay—made something easy. It took less than a month to establish that he was indigent, with no money in his own name. He complained bitterly about the facility where he ended up, and in truth it was unpleasant. But it was still too good for him, as far as Helen was concerned. She visited him just often enough to deny him the pleasure of accusing her of abandonment.
