Dead Letters(25)
“Well, Marlon’s ambitions sometimes outstrip his resources,” I say.
Bartoletti laughs for the first time. “That’s the truth. Any chance he’ll be stopping by to settle up some outstanding business?”
“Unlikely, but I’m happy to tell him you’d like to see him.” I don’t even want to know what Marlon left unresolved with this man. I don’t ask.
“Listen, dear,” he says, softening. “I’m sorry about your family’s business. But Silenus is folding. Zelda knew it—she was just too stubborn to face facts. I’ve let the debt slide a little, hoping she could pull it together with this season, but…” He shrugs. “I’m going to have to collect soon.”
Something deep in my stomach squeezes. Money. Dealing with it always makes me feel this way. Like my father, I prefer for it just to appear, and keep appearing, without ever having to peek at checking account balances or scribble out a budget. My mother was the only one in the family with an inclination to pinch pennies. Coincidentally, she was the only one with money.
“I understand, Mr. Bartoletti. If you could just give us some more time to get everything in order…I have a funeral to organize, and everything in the vineyard is a bit up in the air.”
“How long do you think you’ll need?”
“As long as you can give us?” I ask, hoping I sound charming and young, rather than pathetic. But I’ll settle for pathetic if it gets me what I need.
“I’ll give you a month. Then we’ll have to treat the whole thing more seriously. This business, it isn’t a game or a hobby. Something your family has never seemed to understand.” He returns to his paperwork, and just like that, I am dismissed from his presence. As I reach for the doorknob, he calls after me.
“Oh, and I’m sorry for your loss.” He doesn’t sound sincere. I scuttle back out the door, murmuring a deferential thank-you as I shut it behind myself.
“Zelda, what have you gotten us into?” I whisper, my head reeling. I climb into the truck and sit behind the wheel, wondering where to go next. Then I realize I already know. My father has taught me a few things: Where there’s debt, there’s almost always more. I turn the ignition and drive down Route 414, back toward Watkins Glen, and the bank.
—
I don’t know the first thing about finance. Thanks to Marlon’s more successful second venture, due entirely to his third wife’s deep coffers, he’s paid for most of our educations. I almost took out a loan to go to Paris, but at the last second Marlon again came through with a good-sized check, and I’ve been coasting by, supplementing his dollars with French government student subsidies. I’m not good with money.
Zelda and I have had a bank account at the Community Credit Union in town since we were six years old, when Marlon gave us our first “paycheck,” for trimming vines with him out in the field. After we’d done an hour or two of work (“an honest day’s labor” in Marlon’s rather generous assessment) he loaded us into the truck, each of us clutching a twenty-dollar bill. Ten dollars an hour seems like lavish pay for two distracted six-year-olds, but we weren’t going to argue. We still have those accounts.
I park the truck in a fifteen-minute loading zone near the bank, hoping to be quick. Before going inside, I retrieve Zelda’s driver’s license. I’m not sure that what I’m about to try will work, but I can use all the government documentation I can get.
Not many people live in Hector, New York, and I suspect there’s a very real possibility that people at the bank will know that Zelda Antipova is presumed dead. I’m certain they will have heard about the fire, but I’m banking (ha ha) on the fact that they won’t know who was involved in it. It’s probably a crime to impersonate someone in order to gain access to her banking information, but I can live with that.
I look up and down the street: quiet, as ever. Watkins Glen is called “the city” by those of us who live out here, but that is a rather generous description of our Podunk county seat. There are a handful of sadly blinking stoplights and a clothing store that sells Carhartt merchandise, thick woolen socks, and long underwear for the frigid winter. Farmer gear. A gaudy life-sized simulation of a pirate ship sits near the water. This bizarre reproduction houses an ice-cream stand and a miniature golf course; Zelda and I would lobby to be brought into town on hot summer evenings for raucous, giddy fun. Nearby, a stark pier juts out into the lake, and you can meander out to the tip on raw winter days and imagine you are somewhere near the North Pole. In the summer months, a yacht perches by the dock, offering chartered wine cruises. An overpriced hotel and a similarly overpriced fish joint sit next door to the dock, providing tourists simultaneously with a view of the thirty-eight-mile lake and glutinous, flavorless pasta al mare swimming in thin cream sauce, despite the fact that there is no mare anywhere nearby and seafood is about as appropriate here as it would be in Ohio. A burger joint, a brewery, and an “Italian” joint that serves microwaved calzones and meatball subs sit along the mostly deserted main drag. Highlights include the huge, freezing-cold public pool and the hike along the (admittedly picturesque) waterfall’s gorge. For a few unpleasant weeks during the humid month of August, NASCAR enthusiasts flood the town, and the streets are crammed with aspirational muscle cars and mullet haircuts. The place fairly reeks of Budweiser during this period, and locals take care to steer clear of the city, heading to Montour Falls or Ithaca for any supplies not harvested from the garden. I find myself wondering what things will need doing at Silenus in August, how busy I will be (preparing for harvest!), and shake my head when I realize what I have been imagining. I will be safely back in Paris by the time NASCAR rolls into town.