Free All the Dead Yale Men by Craig Nova Page A

said.
    Beyond the kitchen window the first spikes of snapdragons and delphinium grew, no flowers yet, just the green promise, like enormous asparagus.
    â€œWhat are we going to do?” she said.
    â€œI was going to talk to my father for advice,” I said.
    â€œYeah,” she said. “That was your father’s greatest charm. Trouble.”
    â€œSo, we’ll just have to see how it works out.”
    â€œAnd how bad could that be? For you? For us?” she said.
    â€œI wish I knew,” I said.
    She thumbed the edge of the celon.
    â€œI’m sorry about Cal,” she said.
    â€œYou know what the cops call it?” I said. “A Dutch job. Doing the Dutch. Or they call it a kervork. There’s all kinds of kervorks. Water. Air. Parking.”
    â€œParking?”
    â€œWhen you start the engine of the car and close the garage door. That’s a parking kervork.”
    â€œSo for Cal it was just a dumb scandal,” she said.
    â€œScandals aren’t dumb anymore,” I said. “Indiscretions aren’t dumb. Sex is dangerous.”
    â€œSure,” she said. “But it isn’t sex where you’re concerned. At least I don’t think so. You haven’t withheld anything like that, have you?”
    â€œNo,” I said.
    â€œBut, Frank, you’re not going to go out on a bridge or something.”
    â€œNo,” I said. I picked at the green-white guano under my fingernails. “No. I guess not.”
    â€œI guess I better call Ginny. That was Cal’s wife’s name, right?” said Alexandra. “Make a ham and take it over. Maybe pick up the kids from school.”
    â€œYou can tell her not to worry about the money Cal owed me,” I said.
    â€œI’ll let you do that,” she said. “And of course if he didn’t leave a note, and if she asks why he did it, you can tell her. That’s above my pay scale.”
    â€œI’ll tell her,” I said.
    Alexandra took my hand.
    â€œI know you miss your father,” she said.
    Her hand was like warm lotion that penetrated the skin.
    â€œHe had to be such a son of a bitch,” I said.
    â€œBut that didn’t stop you from loving him, did it?” she said.
    â€œNo,” I said. “I loved him for the trouble he’d gotten through or the way he did, but I loved him for the way he fucked up, too.”
    â€œWell, he certainly didn’t short you on that,” she said.

[ CHAPTER SEVEN ]
    MY FATHER’S WILL was in the finished cellar of his house in Cambridge, the room filled with the scent of mold from the condensation on the walls and from the constant leaks, which my father was always slow to repair. Two days after he died I sat at the card table he used, the one with the green top and the gimpy leg, and started looking through what he had left. I always thought he had been lazy or too devil-may-care to call a plumber right away, but the moisture had only made the papers harder to read. The ink on them, the long lines of figures, the notes about which banks he had used and even the canceled checks, were smeared like a woman’s mascara after she has been crying.
    No surprises in the will. Everything was left to me. Then I went through the rest of the papers, those moldy sheets and file folders my father kept in cardboard file boxes he had bought from Kmart then from Wal-Mart, the decline of the stores perfectlymatching the increasing corruption of his efforts to manage the last of the money that his father had left. And, of course, the records showed what he had taken from my inheritance. It had a certain beauty to it. The most interesting items were in a file marked “Records for Frank. Open after death.” “Death” had been put in quotes. The mold here was greenish and speckled, the ink harder to read. I guess he had left it under a place where the water condensed from an overhead pipe and dripped, one drop at a time, season