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“Yes,” she says sweetly. “I hope you’ll think about coming on Sunday. How about I give you the address and you can think about it?”
I pretend to copy down the location of Patton’s stupid brunch. Really I’m just pouring myself a cup of coffee.
15
WAKING UP IN THE MIDDLE of the day always leaves you with a slightly dazed feeling, as though you’ve stepped out of time. The light outside the windows is wrong. My body feels heavy as I force it up and into clothing.
I stop at the store for more coffee and a prop, then head over to Daneca’s house. I walk across the green lawn, up to the freshly painted door between two manicured bushes. Everything is as pretty as a picture.
When I ring the bell, Chris answers. “What?” he says. He’s got on a pair of shorts and flip flops with an oversize shirt. It makes him look even younger than he is. There’s a smudge of something blue in his hair.
“Can I come in?”
He pushes the door wide. “I don’t care.”
I sigh and walk past him. The scent of lemon polish fills the hallway, and there’s a girl in the living room running a vacuum. For some reason it never occurred to me that Daneca grew up with maids, but of course she did.
“Is Mrs. Wasserman here?” I ask the girl.
She takes headphones out of her ears and smiles at me. “What was that?”
“Sorry,” I say. “I was just wondering if you know where Mrs. Wasserman is.”
The girl points. “In her office, I think.”
I walk through the house, past the artwork and the antique silver. I knock on the frame of a glass-paneled door. Mrs. Wasserman opens it, hair pulled up into a makeshift bun with a pencil shoved through her mass of curls. “Cassel?” she says. She’s got on paint-stained sweatpants and is holding a mug of tea.
I hold out the violets I bought at the garden supply store. I don’t know much about flowers, but I liked how velvety they looked. “I wanted to say thanks for the other day. For the advice.”
Gifts are very useful to con men. Gifts create a feeling of debt, an itchy anxiety that the recipient is eager to be rid of by repaying. So eager, in fact, that people will often overpay just to be relieved of it. A single spontaneously given cup of coffee can make a person feel obligated to sit through a lecture on a religion they don’t care about. The gift of a tiny, wilted flower can make the recipient give to a charity they dislike. Gifts place such a heavy burden that even throwing away the gift doesn’t remove the debt. Even if you hate coffee, even if you didn’t want that flower, once you take it, you want to give something back. Most of all, you want to dismiss that obligation.
“Oh, thank you,” Daneca’s mother says. She looks surprised, but pleased. “It was no trouble at all, Cassel. I’m always here if you want to talk.”
“You mean that?” I ask, which is maybe laying it on really thick, but I need to push her a little. This is her chance to repay me. It doesn’t hurt that I know she’s a sucker for hard-luck cases.
“Of course,” she says. “Anything you need, Cassel.”
Bingo.
I like to think it’s the gratitude that makes her overgenerous, but I guess I’ll never know. That’s the problem with not trusting people—you never find out if they’d have helped you on their own.
* * *
Daneca is on her computer when I come into her room. She looks up at me in surprise.
“Hey,” I say. “Your little brother let me in.” I’m already not being entirely honest by failing to mention I talked with her mother, but I’m determined to do nothing more dishonest than that. I hate myself enough already without conning one of my only friends.
“Chris is not my brother,” Daneca says automatically. “I don’t even think it’s legal for him to live here.” Her room looks exactly like I would have expected. Her bedspread is batik, studded with silver discs. Fringed scarves drape over the tops of the linen curtains. The walls are covered in posters of folk singers, in poems, and with a big worker rights flag. On her bookshelf, next to copies of Ginsberg and Kerouac and The Activist’s Handbook, is a line of horses. White and brown, speckled and black, they’re arranged like a chorus line.
I lean against the doorjamb. “Okay. Some kid who’s always hanging around at this address let me in. He was pretty rude about it too.”
She half-smiles. I can see past her to the paper she’s writing, the letters like black ants on the screen. “Why are you here, Cassel?”
I sit down on her bed and take a deep breath. If I can do this, then I can do everything else.
“I need you to work Lila,” I say. The words come easily to my lips, but my chest hurts as I speak them aloud. “I need you to make her not love me anymore.”
“Get out,” Daneca says.
