Wyatt just stood there.
“Yes,” she said. “No maybes. Go.”
Wyatt nodded, his mind made up about lots of things. The most important: he was going home. He glanced down at the remains of his delicious breakfast, then headed for the door. All too much, nothing fitting together: Wyatt’s mind was in a kind of silent uproar. He opened the door and looked back. Greer was standing by the table, arms folded across her chest.
“Did you help or not?” he said.
“Curiosity killed the cat.”
“That’s your answer?”
“Don’t like it? How about this? I did the arson all by myself and my father took the fall for me. Like that better?”
“Is it true?”
“Sayonara,” Greer said.
Wyatt walked out and closed the door. Halfway down the stairs, he heard a crash from above, the kind of crash a table getting overturned might make. He kept going.
Wyatt walked toward the Mustang, parked halfway down Greer’s block. The wind blew between the buildings; from somewhere nearby came the sound of a baseball thumping into a glove. He glanced around, saw nobody. Not quite true: a man was sitting in a dented old car across the street. As Wyatt unlocked the Mustang, the man got out and approached.
“Hi, there,” the man said.
“Hey,” said Wyatt, pausing, one hand on the open door.
The man gave him a careful look. “Yeah,” he said, “I can see it.”
“See what?”
The man smiled; a normal-looking middle-aged guy, small and pudgy, with a double chin. “The resemblance,” he said, “between you and Sonny.”
Wyatt felt his heart rate speeding up.
“Name’s Delino, by the way-Bob,” the man said. “And you’re Wyatt, no doubt about that. Sonny wants to know how things are going, settling in okay, that kind of thing.”
“How do you know?” Wyatt said.
Bob Delino smiled again. “Got his smarts, clear to see.” He reached into the pocket of his frayed denim jacket, took out a pack of cigarettes. “Smoke?”
Wyatt shook his head.
Bob Delino lit up, flicked the match into the gutter. “How I know,” he said, pausing to inhale, “is that he asked me personally to check up.” Smoke drifted out of Delino’s nose and mouth. “He knew I was getting out, see? From Sweetwater. We were friends inside.” He took another drag, squinted at Wyatt through the smoke. “I did sixteen months-all on account of a stupid misunderstanding about some copper pipe, but that’s nothing you need to know. Important thing is the sixteen months was up yesterday, so here I am.”
“Okay,” Wyatt said.
“A free man,” Delino said. “Feels not bad, the first few days. After that is when…” He tapped a cylinder of ash off the end of his cigarette, watched it disintegrate in the wind. “Anyways, I’m heading back up to Minnesota, right after I get done seeing how you’re making out.”
“I’m fine,” Wyatt said.
Delino stared at him. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
Delino shook his head. “Boy oh boy. Must be nice. School okay? Sports?”
“Yeah.”
“This your ride?”
“Yeah.”
“Sweet. Things are going good, obviously.” He glanced at Greer’s building, back to Wyatt. “That’s it, then. Done my job.” He reached into his pocket again, took out an envelope. “Sonny said to give you this. He’s a good man, plus bein’ a standup guy-don’t see that combo every day.”
Delino was holding out the envelope, but Wyatt made no move to take it.
“Not gonna bite you,” Delino said.
“What’s in it?”
“Money,” Delino said. “Couple hundred bucks.”
“No, thanks.”
“C’mon, man.” Delino shook the envelope.
“No.”
“But I’m s’posed to give you this.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Send it to the Salvation Army, then. Makes no difference to me, long as I do my job.”
Wyatt shook his head. “You keep it.”
Delino laughed, a harsh smoker’s laugh. “That’s a good one,” he said. Then, very quick, he leaned forward and spun the envelope like a Frisbee. It sailed by Wyatt and into the backseat of the Mustang.
“For Christ’s sake,” Wyatt said. He climbed into the car, couldn’t find the envelope at first, finally spotted it under the front passenger seat. By the time he got back out, envelope in hand, Bob Delino was zooming past a stop sign two blocks away.
14
Back in his room at Aunt Hildy’s, Wyatt counted the money. Ten twenty-dollar bills = $200. They were all crisp, like they’d just come from a brand-new stack at a bank teller’s window. He was holding one up to the light, seeing nothing obviously fake except Andrew Jackson’s hair-could it possibly have looked like that in real life, so Hollywood? — when Aunt Hildy knocked on his door.
“How does Chinese food sound?”
“Great.” Wyatt stuck the money under his pillow. Real money: kind of paranoid to think it might be fake. He didn’t want this money, but no good plan for getting rid of it came to mind. He couldn’t just throw money away, or burn it, or anything like that. Returning the $200 to where it came from seemed best. Could you mail money into the prison? Or-or maybe Greer could take it inside on one of her visits. But Greer was out of the picture. She’d said go, and he was going-back to East Canton and soon. Period, finito, end of story-except that at that moment nothing would have pleased him more than the sight of her walking through the door.
East Canton had no Chinese restaurants; Silver City had two. “This is my favorite,” said Aunt Hildy as a waiter led her, Dub, and Wyatt to a corner table at the Red Pagoda, although they could have had just about any table, the place being pretty much empty. “I love the fish tank.”
The fish tank stood nearby, a tall glass cube with coral fans and rocks at the bottom and three fish drifting through the water at different levels.
“Which one are you having?” Dub said.
“Very funny,” said Aunt Hildy.
“Like in the Depression,” Dub said. He had a reddish band across his forehead, pressed into the skin from wearing the catcher’s mask. “Didn’t people get so hungry they ate live goldfish?”
“You’re thinking of the Roaring Twenties,” Aunt Hildy said. “And those were prep school kids and Ivy Leaguers, not the poor.” The waiter came. Aunt Hildy ordered a gin and tonic; the boys had soda. “My first husband,” Aunt Hildy said, taking a sip, “was an Ivy Leaguer. Princeton, to be precise. He had a ratty old black- and-gold-striped robe. He was wearing it pretty much twenty-four/seven by the time I threw him out.”
Wyatt and Dub looked at each other. Aunt Hildy took another sip, this one longer. “Go, Tigers,” she said.
