Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood Street Read Online Free PDF Page B

mouth opened slightly. “I’m afraid I can’t sign this,” she said.
    “No?” said Claire, her eyebrows rising in surprise.
    “It’s a conflict of interest,” Mom said.
    “I don’t understand,” said Claire. Neither did I.
    “With my work,” Mom said.
    Claire stepped back, like she’d been shocked. “You worked on taking over this building and raising the rent?” she said.
    Mom shook her head, hard and quick, as if shaking off the very idea. “I know nothing about this specifically—debt is my area. But the name of the landlord”—Mom pointed with the pen—“NBRP? That stands for theNew Brooklyn Redevelopment Project, meaning that what happened here is connected to what I do.”
    “The New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project,” said Claire. “Is that the one being pushed by the Sheldon Gunn Organization?”
    “He’s one of our biggest clients,” Mom said.

T here wasn’t much conversation after that, probably a good thing because it got kind of awkward. Soon Claire locked the door and went away. Mom took a deep breath. That was something she did deliberately from time to time. Sometimes she’d even speak out loud: “Deep breath, Janie.” No one called her Janie but her. This wasn’t one of those times; instead she said, “How about a muffin?”
    “Okay.”
    We crossed the street to one of those little hole-in-the-wall places that didn’t even have a name, but we knew from experience that the muffins were good. There were three rickety tables inside, all unoccupied. We sat at the least rickety and ordered muffins—cranberry for me, blueberry and acai for mom—and tea. Tea was Mom’s drink. She picked at her muffin, sipped her tea, gazing across the street at the darkened windows of Bread. Longwalks, or even not-so-long ones, tended to tire Pendleton out; he fell asleep under the table right away.
    “You work for the guy who closed us down, Mom?” I said. “Is that what happened?”
    She put down her mug, a tiny wavelet of tea spilling over the edge. “I work for Jaggers and Tulkinghorn.” That was the name of Mom’s firm. From the boardwalk on the Heights, where we sometimes took Pendleton on an outing, you could look across the river and see her building in Lower Manhattan, one of those enormous towers. Mom’s office was on the second floor from the top, and she would have had a view of the Statue of Liberty, but a taller building stood in between. “The Sheldon Gunn Organization is a client. One of many.”
    “What’s he like?”
    “Who?”
    “Sheldon Gunn.”
    Mom laughed, not a happy kind of laugh, more sharp and quickly cut off. “I’ve never met him. It doesn’t work that way.”
    “He calls you on the phone?”
    Mom shook her head. “I don’t deal with him at all. My contact is an in-house lawyer, and it’s mostly done through e-mails.”
    “What’s ‘it’?”
    “My work? Structuring debt—haven’t we been through this?”
    “Let’s go through it again,” I said.
    Mom went through it again. There were oceans of debt out there, which was just the flip side of lending… or something like that, and then I lost the thread. “The pressure,” she said, reaching the end, “comes from the deadlines and the fact that you just can’t make a mistake.” I was sure of only one thing: Dad’s job was better than Mom’s.
    “So, uh, why does Sheldon Gunn want to wreck Bread?” I asked.
    “It’s not really a question of that,” Mom said. “He’s probably never heard of Bread.”
    “But he must know about all these people who come to get a meal.”
    “Maybe,” Mom said. “In general.”
    “Then couldn’t you could call him and, you know, fill him in?”
    Mom gave me a long look, like she was sizing me up, kind of strange, since we were mother and daughter.
    “That would certainly clear up any doubt about whether I’m on the partner track or not,” she said, which blew by me, but there was no time for a follow-up because at that moment Mom got a text.