Page 83 of Nobody's Fool

I take the next twenty minutes to search the streets. It is an awkward thing to do, what with him knowing what I look like. But I don’t see him. I check my texts periodically, even though I’ve now set my phone to notify me if anything new comes in. Nothing else about my wife’s wardrobe.

How long can I keep this up?

Molly says, “Henry is getting antsy. And by ‘antsy’ I mean thirty seconds until a full-fledged thermonuclear meltdown.”

Enough. There is nothing to be done. I tell Gun Guy I’m calling itoff. He says, “Roger that.” I head into Katz’s Deli and find Molly and Henry sitting in the back corner, Molly facing the door so she could see if Scraggly Dude entered. She stands as soon as I enter. I hurry over and scoop up Henry just as he’s about to burst into tears. Seeing Daddy fends that off, at least for the moment. My son smiles at me, and I think about Talia Belmond and not knowing where her child was for eleven years, and the thought alone almost breaks me.

“What is it?” Molly says.

I shake it off. My wife stands. She has a take-out bag in her hand.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Pastrami sandwich on rye, mustard, slice of kosher dill,” she says.

My favorite. “I love you, you know.”

“I’d say I love you too, but I think this sandwich says it better.”

“The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” I say.

“More like two inches lower than that.”

I smile at her. The more nervous she gets, the more she jokes. “It’s all going to be fine,” I assure her.

“I know.”

We start back home. Scraggly Dude (or should I call him Tattoo Face?) already knows where we live, so there is no point in trying to lose him or any of that. I attempt to spot him on the sly. Twice, I wait after turning a corner. Sometimes, without warning and in midsentence, I spin, seeing whether maybe I can catch him behind me or something. After I spin for the third time, Molly says, “Please stop that. You look like you’re having a seizure.”

When we get back home, I check the entire apartment thoroughly. No one here. Molly comes in and puts my sandwich on a plate. The sandwich is so stacked with meat I almost ask her whether it came with Lipitor. It’s an old joke, but there’s a reason they stick around.

“So,” she says, “fill me in on what the Belmonds wanted.”

I do. When I tell her about the money, she whips out her phone and checks the bank app.

“Oh my god,” she says.

“Right?”

“It’s…” She bites down on her lower lip and blinks away tears. I reach my hand across the table and put it on hers. She turns away for a second. It’s hard for me to watch this. She never made me feel stupid or bad or guilty for being thrown off the force, even though getting fired was all my fault. I know that. I can chalk up my excesses to a need for justice and going the extra mile and all that. But it was dumb and careless.

My point?

Me losing my job has put us into a precarious financial position. We lost everything. We are in debt up to our eyeballs. Molly never wants me to feel bad about that, pretends it isn’t a big deal, proudly and bravely battles through our bills, like so many of us are doing. But now, as I see her so overawed by our new bank balance she can’t even look at me, I realize the toll my mistakes have taken upon the woman I love.

“It’s for real,” I tell her.

We sit there for a bit, holding hands, her looking away and then at our account balance, now in six figures from low fours, and back up again. Eventually she says, “If you keep holding my hand, you can’t eat that sandwich.”

“I can try with one hand.”

“You’ll make a mess.”

She lets me go. I take a bite.

“It feels right, Sami,” she says. “This job. This money. It feels good. Like kismet. You need to find out what happened to her too. It’ll give you closure. It’ll give her family closure. And maybe it’ll give that poor woman closure, I don’t know. It’s the right thing. But this money, am I wrong to be excited about it?”

“You are not wrong.”

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