Free Potboiler by Jesse Kellerman Page B

triangle had collapsed into a line, one that ran directly from Pfefferkorn’s heart to hers.
    She drove him to the airport herself.
    “Let’s not wait another year, please,” she said.
    “I don’t plan on it.”
    “I can come there.”
    “That won’t be necessary,” he said.
    It wasn’t necessary, because he could now afford to fly across the country every few weeks. He soon became a regular in coach—this a concession to a lifetime of frugality—growing friendly with the stewardesses who worked the route, enough so that they would slip him freebies or sneak him into business class if the flight was empty. Exiting the airport, he would find the Bentley idling curbside, Jameson at the wheel, a cold bottle of seltzer waiting in back.
    Los Angeles was growing on him. Like every city, it was a lot more enjoyable when you had money. Carlotta took him to quality restaurants. They browsed boutiques. They lounged at the beach club where the de Vallées were members. These were activities he could not have tolerated before, because he would have been too embarrassed to let Carlotta pay. In most instances, she still did pay—she had a way of effortlessly dispensing with the bill when he wasn’t looking—but it bothered him less, for he knew that, were she to forget her credit cards, he had the ability to step in and save the day. Pfefferkorn had heard it said that money was freedom, and this was true in the usual sense: having money enabled him to go places previously closed to him and acquire items previously out of reach. However, there was another, less obvious sense in which money was freedom. Money bred self-acceptance, liberating him from a sense of inadequacy. At times he felt ashamed that he had come to evaluate himself in such crude, stark terms. But the feeling swiftly passed, and he was once again able to enjoy himself.

31.
    “You’re not offended, are you, Arthur?”
    “Not in the slightest.”
    It was a Saturday morning, three weeks before Pfefferkorn’s daughter’s wedding, which Carlotta had just said she would not be attending. The remains of breakfast in bed were on the nightstand. The smell of strong coffee lingered. Pfefferkorn shifted, rustling the sheets and slopping the disordered newspaper to the floor. He moved to retrieve it but she tugged him back.
    “Leave it,” she said.
    He relaxed again and she relaxed against him.
    “It was thoughtful of you to invite me,” Carlotta said.
    “Her suggestion.”
    “Now you really are making me feel guilty.”
    “I’m sure she won’t even notice. She’s trapped in a bubble of self-absorption.”
    “Well, she is the bride.”
    “I didn’t say I blame her,” he said, “only that she won’t care.”
    “I can go,” she said unconvincingly.
    “Not if you don’t want to.”
    There was a silence.
    “I do and I don’t,” she said.
    He said nothing.
    “It would be hard for me, I think, to see her all grown up.”
    “I understand.”
    She shook her head. “It’s not that it makes me feel old. I mean, yes, it makes me feel old. But that’s not what I’m afraid of.”
    There was a silence.
    “You make choices,” she said. “You can’t know how you’ll feel about them twenty years down the line.”
    He nodded.
    “It was my decision,” she said. “It always was. Bill tried to change my mind but I had it made up.”
    She fell silent. He felt a wet tickle on his bare shoulder.
    “Hey, now,” he said.
    She apologized. He brushed the hair from her forehead and kissed her cheeks.
    “You don’t suppose it’s not too late?” she said.
    “Anything’s possible.”
    She laughed and wiped her eyes. “Hooray for modern medical science.”
    “You’d really want to start with that, now?”
    “Probably not,” she said.
    “It’s very tiring,” he said.
    “So they say.”
    “Trust me.”
    “That’s another thing Bill always talked about. What a good father you were.”
    “How would he know?”
    “We admired how you managed it