Envious Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

cage and I hugged her.
    â€œWork comes early tomorrow,” she said.
    â€œI wish you didn’t have to go,” I said, and I remembered the money in my pocket.
    â€œNo rest for the wicked,” she said, and she smiled and leaned up and kissed me.
    â€œGood night, Mama,” I said.
    In my bedroom I opened the window and I looked out to the other houses and the small sandy yards with their chain-link fences. I dangled one leg out in the air and I lighted a cigarette. Berta hated when I did this but she had stopped saying anything to me a while ago. The wind had picked up since we had left the water and I listened to it move through the stubby trees.
    I looked back into the room and to the bureau where I had put the money when I came upstairs. When I took it out from under my shirt, there it was, all those bills. I had not intended to count it. But when I saw them spilling out, I couldn’t help it. I took them out onto the bed and they were all thousand-dollar bills and I had never seen a thousand-dollar bill before. I picked one of them up and on front was Grover Cleveland. Fat with a thick mustache. I laid them out on the bed, one next to the other. There were sixteen of them. Sixteen thousand dollars. More than Berta made in a year. Enough for college, I thought, though I did not know that.
    I tucked the bills in among my socks. Now my thoughts turned to the stairs inside that great house. If only I had not melted into the wall. If only I had been able to stop staring at the girl. If only I had run when the light came on. Then I would have made it outside before her father reached me. He wouldn’t have been able to tackle me. I wouldn’t have ridden him into the railing and he wouldn’t have fallen. And I wouldn’t have heard him hit below. There was nothing terribly human about it, the sound of him. It was like a sack of flour had dropped to the floor.
    Â 
    I woke to rain, heavy, driving rain, coming down so hard that to look out the window was like looking into the back side of a waterfall. I was just staring at it blankly, and I had this strange feeling, like I had been awake for a while and I didn’t know it. The phone was ringing. It had been ringing for a long time, I realized. The incessant peal of it. When I finally trotted downstairs in my underwear to answer it, Victor told me that the man had died. It was all over the papers and on the radio and the television. His name was Jacob Forbes, Victor said. His daughter, the newspaper said, was named Hannah Forbes and she was the lone witness to the robbery. They were from Boston. The house had belonged to his late mother. Victor went on about all the details. Police searching for two men in a boat and all that. Nothing appeared to be missing, etc. And to be honest with you, I stopped listening to him when I heard her name. Hannah Forbes. I said it a few times over and over in my mind. There is something that happens when something that had previously been unnamed becomes named. It becomes more important somehow. Or maybe just clearer. Either way, hearing her name did something to me. As Victor read the article to me, I pictured the girl sitting in some cold police station, in a metal chair next to a metal desk. Perhaps she had a blanket slung over her shoulders since she had not had time to change yet. Her long hair hung down over the bars of the chair. She was crying. A police officer consoled her, and I wondered if it broke his heart to watch a pretty girl cry.
    I met Victor for lunch at his apartment and he chain-smoked and paced back and forth and said we should turn ourselves in. He showed me a copy of the Journal with its front-page picture of the mansion in daytime, when it was even more impressive, rising up against an uneven sky.
    I said, “We can’t turn ourselves in.”
    â€œWhat else we going to do, Tony?”
    â€œListen, I was the one who went in there. Not you. I’m the one who’d go to