“Well then, let me make you some lunch.”
“Mother, we don’t need you to—”
“Are there any pasteles left over from the other night?” Charlie asked hopefully. She had called me at work to invite me and Charlie, but we had been too busy to get away. Apparently, he had not forgotten.
“Oh my God, you’re such a suck-up,” I told him as I was smacked hard in the bicep. “I didn’t even feel that,” I assured her. “Did you hurt your hand?”
“No,” she sassed me, glaring, shaking out her fingers.
“You know, you should give the old man time to do these things for you,” I scolded her. “He likes to be your hero.”
“Then he should do things when I ask, as soon as I ask.”
“Mother, do you have any idea how demanding that is?”
“Did I ask you?” She shot me another look and pointed at the refrigerator. “Charlie, get the casserole dish from the bottom shelf. I’ll make lunch for you.”
She had emphasized the word you, which I had not missed. No one could have. “Wait.” I smiled at her. “C’mon, I’m sorry already. I want pasteles too.”
“Do you?”
The sarcasm was not lost on me. “Yeah, and I’m doing this for you, so could you feed me, too, please?”
She squinted at me.
“First-born over here, only son you got.”
Her grunt let me know I had her.
When we were ready to leave, I got my usual big kiss and hug from both my parents and told them to play nice. Charlie got a hug and kiss from both of them, too, and then we were back in the truck getting ready to go look at Mrs. Lewis’s bathroom to give her an estimate on the cost of renovating it.
“I wonder if they would look at me different if they knew what I used to do.”
I turned to look at him, groaning as I did so. It elicited the smile I was after.
“Fuck, I know what you’re gonna say.”
“C’mon, is this how it’s gonna be from now on? You going to worry what the teller at the bank thinks too?”
“No, but—”
“Give it a rest. Nobody cares.”
“Someone will care, Leo. You’re being naïve.”
I didn’t think so, but I had a thought. “Maybe ya need closure, huh?”
He was fiddling with his cell phone.
“Are you listening to me?”
“I wasn’t, no.” He smiled at me when he turned. “But I am now, g’head.”
I growled at him.
His laughter, as always, diffused my irritation.
“Tell me what you said.”
“I said, maybe you need closure.”
“What do you mean?”
“I dunno. Did you leave anything there?”
“Where?”
“Where you used to live.”
“In Miami, you mean?”
“You lived in Miami, and now you live here in Nevada?”
“I love Nevada,” he defended the state. “And you’re in Nevada.”
It was a weird thing to say. “Okay, so did you leave—”
“I had a savings account with some money in it.”
“Yeah?”
He coughed. “Yeah, and I know that Doran, since he was my producer, he had access to it.”
“So it could be cleaned out.”
“Could be.”
“But maybe not.”
“Maybe.” He shrugged. “But there would be money from the sale of—”
“The film,” I cut him off, because bringing it up changed his face, and I didn’t really like it. I wanted him back to how he had been before I brought it up. I was still glad I had come clean with him about what I knew—any kind of secrets in any kind of friendship were destructive—but still. “But it’s money from other stuff, too, right? Other stuff you did.”
He nodded.
I took a breath. “Okay, so maybe you access the account and see what’s in it, and if there’s something still in there, then you close it and give the money to a place that helps people, like a shelter or a counseling center or something. That would be sort of karmic, ya know?”
His eyes were heavy on me.
“Charlie?”
“You’re really smart sometimes.”
“Only sometimes?” I teased him.
“Yep. Definitely only sometimes.”
He was quiet after that, so I guessed we were done talking about it.
3
I was going to tell her that it couldn’t be done, but Charlie interrupted me and asked for clarification.
“Like a grotto,” Mrs. Lewis waxed on, using her hands as though she were doing the hula, making them fluid, presenting her boudoir. “I want it to be a sanctuary of plants and animals and light. Can we put in reflecting pools and a water wheel?”
In her bathroom?
“And butterflies?”
In her bathroom? Really?
“I was thinking of having a huge aquarium too.”
She looked so hopeful; her eyes were so big and bright and looking at me and Charlie like we were the Second Coming or something. I was going to kill Paul when I got back to the office.
“Mrs. Lewis—”
Charlie cleared his throat. “How ’bout this: we enclose the area right outside the window and build a grotto that you can see every time you take a bath. You can fill the space with butterflies and put fish in a small man-made pond. We’ll put in a filter system and door on one end so your husband can take care of everything.”