miserable. He was getting more and more desperate.'
'Desperate?'
'He had already blown two marriages—the one that didn't produce anything but me, and another one to a woman named Roz who would drive me to school in her nightgown and bathrobe and then go to some boyfriend's apartment and hop back in bed. My dad was already getting fat and worn-out looking and he knew it. I think he was afraid nobody else would ever love him. So he gave Delia everything, and he ran out of money earlier each month and charged the rest of the expenses to credit cards. I noticed at one point that whenever he got an offer for another credit card in the mail, he put it in his briefcase. Afterward I learned he filled them all out. How could he not end up borrowing some money from his company? Later, at his trial, the prosecutor went down a big long list of all the things he had bought and charged to his credit cards. It all sounded just awful, and he seemed to be this pig who stole money from his company because he wanted trips and dinners and luxuries. He didn't want all that stuff. He never wanted any of it. He wanted love.'
'There was a trial? So the company caught him and called the police?'
'Not right away. The bookkeepers noticed that he had made out a transfer, and the account the money went to didn't seem to belong to the company. They found more, and found my father had requested all of them. The head bookkeeper told the president. He was a friend. He had known my father for twenty-five years, and he knew this wasn't what it looked like. He told my dad that he would postpone the regular outside audit for a month so my dad could get the money and pay the company back.'
'That was quite a generous offer.'
'It was a gamble,' said Christine. 'It meant the president was doing something just as illegal as what my father did, just because he trusted my father and wanted to save him. He also thought he would be saving the company from a scandal, but there wasn't much in it for him personally.'
'Since you said there was a trial, I assume the plan didn't work.'
'My father collected everything he could and tried to sell it or get his money back. He took pictures of the cars, the boat, the house, and put them on the Internet. He tried to take back a lot of the things he or Delia had just bought. He cashed in his insurance and his retirement and went to the banks for loans. For the first time in years I was proud of him, because he was doing something to pull himself together. What he hadn't planned on was the Delightful Delia.'
'What did she do?'
'Nothing. She wouldn't sign off on anything. The house was in both their names, and she wouldn't sell it. One of the cars was in her name and another in both their names, and she wouldn't sign the pink slips. She got a safe- deposit box by herself and put all the jewelry in it, and probably all the cash she had been skimming off and hiding from him. She wouldn't cosign a loan, get a job, or even stop charging things.'
'How well did he do without her?'
'At the end of the month he had sold one of the cars—his car, with her name forged on the pink slip—for about twenty thousand, which was half what he had paid for it a year earlier. He sold his watch, a TAG Heuer my mother had bought him as a present about fifteen years earlier. He sold my laptop and my iPod and my DVD player for about six hundred. There were a lot of other odds and ends, mostly things he'd had before the marriage. The final count of what he had taken from the company was about a hundred and twenty thousand, and he came up with about seventy.'
'Not enough.'
'No,' said Christine. 'It was a horrible thing to watch. He was defeated from the moment he told Delia and saw the cold, ugly look on her face. He knew it, but he kept trying. He was wounded, bleeding inside, but he kept scrambling as hard as he could to get himself and us out of this mess. He had to keep working full-time, of course, or people would notice and start wondering what was up. He would sleep a couple of hours a night, then go to his computer again to check on the bids and put up more stuff for sale. It was all impossible, one of those situations where you know you can't get there from here. At the end of the month he brought the seventy thousand he had raised and begged for more time. But the president didn't have any more to give him.'
'He couldn't do anything?'
'It was a public company—you know, with stockholders and directors and everything—and there were federal rules about how often they had to have the outside auditors in. He couldn't hold up any longer, or he might be fired, too. Or worse. The president was a friend, as I said. He took the other fifty thousand out of his own pocket—cashed in some of his retirement money—and added it to my father's seventy.'
'That's a real friend.'
'It didn't work. The money was paid back, but it was too late. The bookkeepers had ratted him out to the auditors, or thought putting the money back was dishonest, or something. It came out, and my father was arrested.'
'I'm sorry.'
'Well, it wasn't as though he didn't take the money. And the reason he did it was that he didn't want his wife to realize he was running out of money before the end of every month. I mean, I'm sure she knew what his salary was. So what was he protecting her from? Arithmetic? God. But in the process, he got his giant flash of clarity. The Delectable Delia wouldn't help him save himself, even by signing a paper to give him back a little of the money he'd spent on her.'
'She never relented?'
'Even I was surprised, and I didn't expect much from her. She said, 'I just can't throw away everything I've built and leave my children destitute'—meaning the children other than me. I was
'Did she pay for his defense lawyer?'
'No. What she did was hire a lawyer to separate her assets from his, and she did that right away, so it would be a done deal before he was charged. That way, his creditors could come after her all they wanted, but get zero. This, you see, is a neat trick, because she'd never had a job. Her assets were all money he had earned, and probably even some of the money he stole. From her, Dad couldn't even get bail money.'
'I'm sorry.'
'The reason she could even hold on to the money was that he went along with all of it. He never contested anything. He signed every piece of paper her lawyer sent him, including things that were outright lies—that she had brought money with her when they were married. Actually, when she moved into our house, I remember she had one small suitcase, and what was in it was an outfit to wear to go on her first shopping trip.'
'He probably thought if she had some money she'd take care of you and your brother and sister while he was away.'
'I suppose. What actually happened was that the minute we got home from seeing him off to Lompoc, Delia sat me down at the kitchen table and had a long talk with me. Or, at least she wanted it to be long. Have you ever noticed that the worst people in the world always want you to feel sorry for them?'
'Yes,' said Jane, 'I have.'
'Well, that was Delia. While she was working up to throwing me out of the house, she was telling me how much she'd been suffering with my dad, and how hard it was on her. She even wanted me to feel sorry for her for the pain it gave her to refuse to give him the money to save himself. It had ruined her forever, she said. Her health was shot, and she was too old now to get a good enough job to support us all. She was crying, so I could barely understand her half the time. But what she was expecting was that I would throw my arms around her and tell her I was sorry for living, and would make it up to her by leaving.'
'You didn't?'
'No, so she gave me a month to get out. And that was why I ended up getting a full-time job and an apartment and lying to say I was eighteen when I was sixteen.'
'Didn't you need papers to get the job?'
'I used Delia's computer at home. An eight with a little white on the upper right side turns into a six. I did that to my birth certificate and made a copy of it on the printer. A Social Security card doesn't carry a birth date, but I made a copy of that, too. In California a sixteen-year-old's driver's license has a birth date and a red stripe and a blue stripe saying when you'll turn eighteen and when you'll turn twenty-one. I scanned mine and Photoshopped it
