Free The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel Page A

now, a life that he'd slipped out of. Unsettling to think of himself as someone else's memory. He found himself wondering how Anna remembered him.

    A s i d e  f r o m  the music, the robin' s-egg-blue headphones, the spray-painted NO s in the park in Sebastian, the scar and the tattoo and the way her hair fell across her face when she leaned over her homework, what he remembered about Anna was that he'd loved her. He couldn't remember her ever being unkind to him, from the day they met in a corridor outside one of the band rooms, Sasha's pretty little sister, until she threw a paper airplane at him through the still night air.
       On long drives through the suburbs he found himself thinking of Anna constantly. He'd let her slip away so easily. He assumed it was too late to make anything right, for Anna or her daughter, but it had occurred to him that the least he could do was find them.

Fourteen

    N ight had fallen by the time Daniel's airplane descended into Florida. He picked up his Jeep and drove the long straight road from Boca Raton to the city of Sebastian, a haze of insects in the air around every streetlight. Impossible not to dwell on the ragged decade that stood between today and the last time he'd gone to Utah, the marriages and divorces, his children, the guilt and the disappointments. He was calmer now that he was home. The blessed familiarity of these streets. Terrible to have to give the inheritance to Paul, but it seemed to him that paying off Anna's debt was honorable, and the idea of honor brought him peace. He drove home to the rented house where he'd been living in the long blank year since his second divorce, showered and drove to his mother's house. His grandmother had been ill for years now, a long slow fade into confusion and morphine, but the fact of her death was still somehow startling to him. His mother's eyes sparkled with tears.
    "I'm sorry I wasn't here," he said.
    . . .

    D a n i e l  w e n t  to the funeral two days later, watched as his grandmother's pitifully small coffin was lowered into the earth. Later in the week he came home from a long day of work and three messages blinked on his answering machine. One was from his mother, terse and businesslike—"Call me when you can"—and the other two were hang-ups, the second hang-up preceded by a sigh. He called his mother and listened to her in a state of increasing agitation.
       "Wait," he said finally, "I don't understand. How is this possible?"
       "As best we can figure out," his mother said, "she decided to invest in a real estate development. The money's gone."
       "How could it be gone?"
       "It just is," she said tightly. "She made a mistake."
       "But she told me . . ." Daniel was sitting in the shadows of his living room. He hadn't turned on the lights and the light from the street shone blue through the blinds. He felt he might be dreaming. "I just came back from Utah," he said.
       "Utah? Were you visiting my sister?"
       "I needed the money," he said. "I thought I had it, I thought the will was being settled this week, she told me—"
       "What did your grandmother tell you, Daniel?" Her voice was thin. Daniel flinched. She'd just lost her mother and now her son was whining about money.
       "I'm sorry," he said.
       "She lived a long, full life," his mother said. "If there's no money, Daniel, is it the end of the world? Don't we all have everything we need?"
       "You're right," he said. He closed his eyes. "She invested all of it?"
       " There wasn't much to start out with," his mother said. "She always talked about how frugal she'd been, all the careful investing she and my dad did, but once we took a look at the accounts, there just wasn't much there. Maybe she thought the real estate development would make her wealthy. Let me put it this way, sweetheart. After the bills for the nursing home and the hospital are settled, after we pay the accountant and the lawyer, I estimate we'll