The Tell Read Online Free PDF Page B

It’s enough to remember to clean the stuff occasionally and lock the door.”
    Sometimes Mira, struck by an urgent, wordless mood, whipped around the place in her bathrobe, with her hair wild, wielding an ancient feather duster. Nothing in the house had been chosen by her, but it was all profoundly hers at the instant of her parents’ deadly car accident, and she was mostly cold to it. She didn’t think in terms of liking something for its associations or memories; she wasn’t sentimental or nostalgic in that way. She was captive and curator, weary but responsible. Her tenure in the house was for now; someone else’s would follow. Her children, when she was ready to have them, she said.
    â€œBut to be surrounded by it,” Wilton insisted. “It would change the way you see the world. It might look like a more forgiving place.”
    â€œOr less forgiving,” Owen said.
    Mira gave Wilton a long and serious gaze. “We’re not rich, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Her eyes shifted for an instant to Owen, who saw that she was well on her way to being drunk. “Really, we don’t have any money, almost none. Owen teaches in a public school, and I don’t exactly make a profit at Brindle. We eat lots of spaghetti, and we keep the heat really low. What? It’s true, O. Don’t look at me like that.”
    She wasn’t wrong: they were always short and too much was left untended. Their cars were lousy, rusted, close to death, and the house ate cash and time. Their clothes were old. Brindle was always hungry, too. What Owen earned—including the many evenings he spent out each week tutoring kids—disappeared. He was tired of being so strapped, so conscious of every dollar. But it was ridiculous, insulting even, to cry poor sitting in this house and in this room that reeked of deeply rooted affluence. And to worry about Brindle the way she did when a single item, maybe that Merchanti lamp, might float the place—or an entire family—for a good while.
    â€œYou know you could always sell something,” he suggested.
    â€œLet’s not get into this again, O, okay?” she said. “It’s boring. A stupid conversation.”
    â€œBut you could, Mira. You could sell something. Who would stop you?” Though he pushed at her now, a little reckless from too much wine himself and her stubbornness on this point, he knew it was a subject he couldn’t really touch. What was here, after all, did not belong to him. “Sell the fucking lamp out there, for instance. No more spaghetti.”
    â€œStop, please,” she said. “Enough. I’m sorry I brought it up.”
    Wilton looked from one to the other, then leaned against Mira and lowered his voice to a seductive hush. “I have lots and lots of money. I have way too much. It’s obscene. Residuals are recession-proof.” He threw up his hands over and over as if he were tossing a million bills into the air. “Oodles and oodles of it. Cascades. Avalanches.” He paused. “Duck! Here it comes!”
    Owen had the feeling that Wilton had seen the gap open up between Mira and him, measured it, and then maneuvered himself into the space between. He wanted to kick the guy out now and get rid of him. He didn’t like what was happening to his wife, who was acting out this goofy play with a man she didn’t even know. But Mira was delighted by Wilton’s miming, put her head back, and let the imaginary money wash over her. Owen pushed himself out of the armchair. He’d had enough. The late hour and the wine were going to hit him at some point tomorrow in the classroom, and his gaze would float over the heads of his students, looking for somewhere soft to land. Even the kids who never paid attention, the ones who slumped on their desks in the morning as their breakfast of Doritos and Sprite worked its soporific magic, would notice his missed