The Assistants(24)

Carolena, in a gold lamé bikini that she absolutely had to have bought at a store for strippers, looked like a Real Housewives of New Jersey reject. Her skin was the blackened bronze of a tarnished penny, the kind of pennies I used to dunk in Taco Bell hot sauce to make them shiny again. She peeked at us over her enormous sunglasses, waved, and then turned over to sun her back.

“She’s not a big talker, that’s why I like her,” Wiles said, before re-pacifying himself with his cigar.

I followed Dillinger to the patio bar and poured myself a glass of white wine. Dillinger had bourbon because Robert was having bourbon. Kathryn, who’d finally stowed away her Kindle, disappeared into the house with Robert’s wife for a tour—because that’s what women did. They looked at house stuff. Though biologically I, too, was a woman, I had zero interest in oohing and aahing over period details and antique linens, so I stayed put and took a seat at the patio table.

Robert pulled up a chair beside me, slid my wineglass aside, and placed a tumbler of bourbon in front of me. “You want this,” he said.

I looked at him with owl eyes.

“That’s twenty-three-year-old Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve.” Robert urged the glass to my hand. “Best bourbon you’ll ever drink.”

I took a sip. He was right; it was good. And I wondered how he got it.

During the workday, Robert would often shoot me an e-mail along the lines of: Can you run down to the liquor store and get me a bottle of Famous Grouse forty-year-old blended malt . . . And I would then spend the next four hours calling every liquor store in New York trying to locate the rare bottle, which I’d go pick up myself or have rush-messengered. He had no idea how much effort went into fetching such things, or how much money it ended up costing. All he knew was by six p.m. the bottle was on his desk.

So it blew my mind when Robert stood and fired up his own barbecue grill. He planned to do all the grilling himself, just like a regular person. And his wife started bringing out side dishes—carrying them herself—from the kitchen. Avery Barlow was serving us? I was expecting maids and butlers, white gloves. Maybe even someone on standby to chew the bigger pieces of food for us, I don’t know. Instead, Robert ordered Dillinger and me over to the grill to show us exactly how he buttered the steak.

“You have to do it this way,” he said, dipping a brush in a bowl. “This here is a mixture of butter and oil.” He painted each slab of thick meat on both sides, while Dillinger snapped photo after photo of the process with his phone.

I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why now, after six years, I’d finally been invited here to be fawned over and schooled in the essentials of barbecue grilling. And why I thought it was okay to come given the present (criminal) circumstances.

Robert turned each steak over with a pair of tongs. “You flip once,” he said. “That’s it. You flip too much and you won’t get a well-seared crust.”

What if Robert brought me here to soften me? To knead me with kindness, leaving me no choice but to come clean? He was such a brilliant manipulator, anything was possible. Then again, it was entirely plausible that it simply hadn’t occurred to Robert until now to invite me out here. Like most powerful people with a lot on their mind, that’s how he worked. The world around him functioned according to his whims.

“Now, you paying attention?” Robert removed all the steaks from the grill and set them on a cutting board. “You let them rest for about five minutes, it gives the juices time to circulate. And in the meantime you can refresh your drink.”

He stepped past me to the bar cart. “Another bourbon for you, Tina?”

“Yes, thank you,” I said.

When the five minutes of juice circulating were up, we all sat around the patio table to eat. I was seated between Robert and Dillinger, and across from Glen Wiles. It was difficult having to look at Wiles while I ate, but the steak was so unbelievably delicious that—

“This steak is unbelievably delicious,” Dillinger said.

Robert nodded, pleased with himself. He was so much more relaxed here than at the office. Some of the wrinkles in his forehead had taken the day off, and his face had a glow about it. He told the story of how he and Avery first met. She was the prettiest cheerleader on the fifty-yard line, pretty as a pie supper, and I knew right then we’d get married. It’ll be forty-nine years in October.

Then he told another story, and another, and another.

Let me tell you something about crawfish . . .

We had a ranch hand once who . . .

My daddy back in his wildcattin’ days . . .

And like Aesop’s fables and the oeuvre of Eminem, many of these stories concluded with a moral.

There ain’t no such thing as the wrong bait.

And that’s why you never insult another man’s wife.

Just because a chicken has wings don’t mean it can fly.

I wiped the juice dripping down my chin with my cloth napkin. This was better than NPR’s Story of the Day podcast.

“See that barn over there . . .” Robert gestured in the general direction of the barn, which was actually too far away for any of us to see from where we were seated. “You know who painted that barn? Billy from the office, the mail carrier.”

Dillinger halted midbite. “Are you talking about Patchouli? The guy who skateboards down the building’s handicap ramps?”