Free The Widow Waltz by Sally Koslow

tempted.
    “What ring?”
    “Your birthday present, I thought.”
    “My birthday present was a trip to Japan we were supposed to take in January. After I pleaded sympathy, the travel agent gave me a full refund.” Almost.
    “Georgia, are you daft?”
    “Did you just say ‘daft’? Are you?”
    He leans back and cocks his head. “I would suggest that you look very hard for a diamond and emerald ring, probably from the 1920s, a real showstopper. I’ve seen few like it. Ben brought it to me for appraisal—he was hoping I’d sell it for him—and led me to believe he was accepting it as collateral or payment from a client.”
    During our marriage Ben often repeated this practice, one I protested on the grounds that it was as sleazy as it was risky. Why couldn’t he be paid in money like every other decent lawyer? What would be next, sacks of grain?
    “Ben was told the ring would go for close to a million. In my opinion, your husband was taken. It’s a fine old piece but would fetch maybe half of that. This did not make my dear brother-in-law happy and he left with the ring, accusing me of low-balling him, ranting about how he’d take his business elsewhere. ‘Be my guest,’ I told him.” In the tone of a university provost my brother continues. “This was the last conversation I had with your husband.”
    With that, I lose my appetite for dessert.

8.
    “N icola, my sweet,” Stephan said over early morning croissants on Madison Avenue. “You appear to be nonplussed. I’d like your answer.”
    Nicola couldn’t decide if being employed by S. Waltz would be the beginning of the resplendent opportunity on which her mother was trying to sell her or plain and simple martyrdom. She pictured herself modeling pave diamond cuffs, fingering precious gems (or semiprecious, she wasn’t picky), and helping design shoulder-grazing opal and platinum filigree earrings like the ones she’d coveted in Paris. Then she remembered how imperious Uncle Stephan could be. Around him, she felt lumpy, boneheaded, and twelve.
    “Thanks for the vote of confidence”—if the offer was that, or her uncle’s version of pity— “but I don’t have much office experience. I wouldn’t want to disappoint you,” Nicola said, though this was the one aspect of the job she felt she could fulfill.
    “What I need, mostly, is common sense,” Stephan said, not that he’d ever given Nicola the impression that he considered either her, Luey, or her mother, for that matter, to be endowed with that quality. “Beyond that, the primary qualification is trust.”
    “Oh, I am absolutely trustworthy,” Nicola replied with dead earnestness, though a few minutes earlier she’d exaggerated her office experience. She had none. The moment the statement sailed from her lips she knew, from the smile Uncle Stephan was failing to suppress, that the specious answer was wrong. Luey would have responded with something half clever. She took herself for Dorothy Parker, aiming for intellectual flirtation. Repartee was not Nicola’s strong suit, with her uncle least of all, and when he said something like, “A man’s face is his autobiography; a woman’s is her work of fiction,” Nicola suspected that he was testing or insulting her. To compound her irritation, in his case that particular quote wasn’t even true. She’d bet good money—if she had any—that Uncle Stephan had had surgery on his neck and eyes, which looked a lot tighter than before she left for Europe. And those silver sideburns? C’mon. He could thank the hair colorist who left in a bit of gray to add authenticity to his dye job.
    What, however, were her job options? Despite her culinary skills, she’d had only one brief job in a restaurant, in another country, at the bottom of the line—not experience she could leverage or for which she even obtained a reference letter when she walked away—and she could not see herself trying to sell cupcakes or organic baby food at the Brooklyn