13 Little Blue Envelopes(68)

Richard didn’t reply.

This room was too mute. Too cool for the weirdness that

was going on in her head. She wished Keith would make a

crack about the entire nation of Japan calling for Cecil or the fact that she had scrubbed the final remains of what was probably a valuable work of art off her arm just that morning. But he said nothing.

Ginny bored her eyes into the head blotch. It kind of looked like Nebraska.

“All right.” Cecil was standing next to them again, clicking his phone shut. “Are you ready?”

Ginny noticed that Richard was intently keeping his eyes

off the pictures. They were causing him real pain.

“I guess,” Ginny said.

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Cecil took his position at a stand at the front of the room.

Instead of putting away their phones, the people without them suddenly pulled them out and put them to their ears. A few more laptops opened up. He gave a very prim introduction and politely started the bidding at ten thousand pounds.

For a moment, nothing happened. A gentle buzz spread

around the room as this figure was repeated into the phones in a variety of languages. No one spoke out or raised a hand.

“Ten thousand at the front,” Cecil said. “Thank you.”

“Where?” Keith asked, his mouth half full of strawberry and cream.

“And twelve,” Cecil said. “Twelve. Thank you, sir. Now at fifteen thousand.”

Ginny still saw nothing, but Cecil caught these gestures

through some kind of magical transference.

“Fifteen thousand from the gentleman on the right. Do I

hear eighteen? Thank you very much. And twenty? Yes, sir.

Very good. On to thirty?”

Keith very slowly lowered his plate to his lap and grabbed the sides of his chair.

“Did I just bid that twenty?” he whispered. “When I was

eating. Do you think I . . . ?”

Ginny shushed him.

“Thirty. Very good. Thirty-five? Thank you. Forty. Forty to madam in the front . . .”

Richard hadn’t lifted his head from the program that sat

closed on his lap. Ginny reached over and found his hand, and she didn’t stop squeezing it until the bidding stopped at seventy thousand pounds.

309





Seventy Thousand Burlap Sacks

The next morning, Ginny woke up feeling like she’d grown several inches. She squirmed on the bed, twisting toward the right and left, trying to determine if this was just a dream hangover or if the sudden influx of money had actually expanded her spine.

She reached her toes down to see if she was taking up the same amount of space on the bed as she had all along. It seemed to be the same.

The money would soon be shifted from one computer to

another, and then it would just appear in her bank account.

Like magic. It seemed strange to her that it would come

down to money. A figure. It was just a number, and you can’t leave someone a number. That was like leaving someone an adjective or a color.

She imagined the tiny burlap pound sacks again. This time, there were seventy thousand of them. They filled up this room, stacked high against the yellow and pink walls, covering the 311

carpet . . . covering her, going right over the top of the Manet print until they hit the ceiling.

It was a little alarming, actually.

She rolled out from under the phantom pile and slipped out of bed. She’d slept late, she noticed, and Richard had already come and gone. He’d left the newspaper spread open for her on the table, with a circle around the day’s exchange rate. He’d also penciled in the margin $133,000 US.

The imaginary pile reappeared in her mind, and doubled.

This time, it was a sea of light, loose dollars, waist high, filling the kitchen and swallowing up the table.

This couldn’t be Aunt Peg’s big surprise. There had to be something more, she was sure of it now. But she was going to need help figuring out what that something was, obviously.

Which meant only one thing.

The television was on when she arrived, but Keith wasn’t

watching it. A long-haired man was opening up cans of paint for two surprised-looking people in matching shirts. Keith was bent over his notebook and didn’t even look up as Ginny came in and sat down on the sofa.

“Listen to this,” he said. “Harrods: The Musical. In a modern mythological context, the department store represents . . . what?”

She could feel that her eyes were wide and her expression was blank and frozen.

“What do you think she wants me to do with it?” she asked.

“The money?”

Ginny nodded. Keith sighed and closed his notebook on his hand to hold the page.

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“I don’t mean to put too fine a point on it,” he said, “but she is dead, Gin. She doesn’t want you to do anything with it. The money is yours. You do with it what you want. And if what you want is to invest in Harrods: The Musical, it is not my place to stop you.”

He looked over at her in anticipation.

“Worth a shot,” he said. “All right, then. Why not travel?”

“I just traveled.”

“You traveled some. You can always travel more.”

“I don’t really want to travel,” she said.