“I knew that. Sweetheart suits you better, though.” Susie smiled, and Flynn dropped an envelope on her desk. “Give that to the boss, will you? I don’t want him to send the cavalry out after me.”
“Your son was in this morning,” said Susie.
Susie made eye contact with the girl seated behind the other computer, a pretty, fair-skinned strawberry blonde, voluptuous for her thin bone structure, couldn’t have been more than two or three years out of high school. Flynn had noticed her before but had never heard her speak.
“Say hello to Katherine,” said Susie. The girl looked down at her desk in a self-conscious gesture and smiled.
“Nice to meet you, darling,” said Flynn.
“And you,” said Katherine.
“Chris never says more than a couple of words to me,” said Susie, once again glancing at her office mate. “Course, I’m spoken for. But he doesn’t mind talking to Kate.”
“It’s Katherine,” said the woman, gently correcting her coworker.
Kate would be twenty-seven now.
“Chris is just shy around girls named Susie,” said Flynn, forcing a grin. “Not like me.”
“He doesn’t even look like you,” said Susie. “All that blond hair.”
Again the girl named Katherine looked down at her desk.
“He got that from his mom,” said Flynn, then comically puffed out his chest and made a bodybuilder’s pose. “But he got the beef from me.”
“Get out of here, Tommy!” said Susie, her boisterous, wheezy, Marlboro Light-inflected laughter trailing Flynn as he left the office.
Out in the hot sun, he put on his shades and walked to his van.
Kate would be twenty-seven. Amanda and me would be getting her ready for a wedding, or visiting her where she works, some professional job in New York City, maybe, or Chicago.
Flynn passed a guy he knew in the parking lot but did not say hello.
Chris is twenty-six. No college, time in prison, his days spent on his knees, laying carpet.
Flynn opened the van’s driver’s-side door.
Thirty-five grand a year, tops.
He got into the van and fitted his key to the ignition.
What’s going to happen to my son?
ELEVEN
Should we count it?” said Ben Braswell.
“No,” said Chris, staring at the money, shaking his head slowly. “I don’t even want to touch it.”
“You don’t want to know how much it is?”
“Zip up the bag and put it back in that hole,” said Chris. “Then seal it up again with that cutout piece. We’ll get this new carpet down and move on to the next job.”
“You’re serious.”
“I am.”
Ben stood up, went to the window that gave to a view of the street, and opened it. He meant to cool the room, but the air outside was still, and there was no discernible relief from the heat.
“Why?” said Ben, walking back to join Chris. “Why you don’t even want to talk about this?”
“It’s stealing.”
“You just told me yourself, the dude who lived here died, and he had no kin. You can see how old this bag is. Prob’ly the man who lived here last wasn’t even the one who buried it. And you know that real estate lady didn’t bury no money. Whoever put it under this floor got to be buried now, too. So how is this stealing? From who? ”
“It’s not ours,” said Chris.
“It ain’t nobody’s, far as I can tell.”
Chris ran his hand through his longish blond hair.
“Forget this,” said Ben, and he got down on his haunches and reached into the bag. “I gotta know.”
Without removing the band, he slowly counted one of the stacks of money, bill by bill. His lips moved as he mentally tabulated the sum.
I’ve seen this movie, thought Chris. Innocent, basically good people found some money and decided to keep it, rationalizing their act because the cash belonged to no one. The money corrupted them, and they betrayed one another and were ultimately brought down by their own greed, a basic component of their human nature that they thought they would overcome. It always ended up bad.
Ben finished counting the one stack, then counted the number of stacks in the bag and multiplied.
“It’s damn near fifty thousand in here,” said Ben.
“Now you know,” said Chris. “Zip up the bag and put it back.”
Ben pointed a finger at the money. “That’s two times what I make in one year, Chris. Working on my knees. I could buy something nice for my girl, take her out to dinner to one of those restaurants got white tablecloths. I could have some real clothes, and not the off-brand shit I got now. A pair of designer shades-”
“Put it back.”
Ben stood up and faced Chris. He was going for confrontational, but he couldn’t get there. There wasn’t anything like that inside him. Instead, he looked hurt.
“How you gonna do this to me, man?”
“I’m doing you a favor.”
“Nobody would know, so what’s the harm? You can’t tell me I’m wrong.”
“My father gave us a chance here,” said Chris. “Wasn’t anybody else looking to hand us a decent job, was there? Someone does find out, it’s his reputation we’d be messin with. That’s his name on the truck.”
“And yours,” said Ben.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Means that I got nothin. Someday, whatever your father’s got, whatever he built up, it’s gonna come to you.”
Chris moved his eyes from Ben’s. “I’ve never taken anything from him but a paycheck.”
“Comes a time, you will.” Ben’s features softened. “You know I appreciate what your pops did for me. But this thing we’re talkin about here, it could change my life.”
“It’s already changed,” said Chris. “You don’t see it yet, is all. I’m sayin, there’s no shortcut to where we’re trying to get to. Just work, every day. Same as how it is for everyone else.”
“Don’t you want more?”
Chris stared at Ben. “Put the bag back in the hole. Let’s finish the job.”
“Damn, you just stubborn.”
While they were laying down the new carpet, Mindy Kramer called and said she was on her way to the row house. She arrived shortly thereafter, just as they were finishing the installation. Mindy eyeballed the work, walked on it, questioned the bubbles, and carefully inspected the line where the carpet met the bead at the edge of the wall.
“I guess it’s fine,” said Mindy Kramer, constitutionally incapable of telling them that their work was satisfactory. “I need a little time to let it marinate. If I have any problems, I’ll call Mr. Flynn.”
“Any concerns you got,” said Chris, “he’ll take care of it.”
They cleaned up the work site and packed the old carpet and padding in the back of the van. On the way out the door, Ben looked for an indication of an alarm system and saw none. He and Chris climbed into the van and took off.
Driving down U Street, Chris said, “Hungry?”
“You know I am.”
“I’ll buy.”
“That’s gonna make us late to our next job.”
