The Last of the Stanfields(73)

“You certainly know how to spin a yarn. I hate lying. The poor fellow is dead set on appearing in a novel that doesn’t even exist. And I bet he goes straight home and brags to his wife tonight. Because of us, he’ll come across as a total chump.”

“Sure. Or maybe we inspired him to finally write his own page-turner. Besides, when you claimed to be there on assignment for your magazine, wasn’t that a lie?”

“A white lie.”

“Right, of course. White lies, real lies. Not the same thing at all.”

“Exactly.”

“The woman I was with for nearly five years just up and took off one morning, leaving behind nothing but a tiny little note. The day before, everything was normal. She didn’t let on a thing, not a single thing. You really think she made up her mind overnight? So, where does that one fall? White lie or real lie?”

“What did she say? In her note?”

“That I was a bear deep in the woods.”

“And what about that, was that a lie?”

“I hope so. I hope that’s not all I am.”

“Well, if you’re trying to avoid the bear look, you might want to lose the beard. Why did she leave you?”

“It was the same stuff that drew her in at the start. Our bedroom started to seem too small, and my studio too big. She hated if I even set foot in the kitchen, whereas before all I had to do was put on an apron and she’d get turned on. Suddenly, she didn’t want me dozing off while we watched TV. Before, she would let me sleep on her shoulder and run her fingers through my hair.”

“Maybe it was more because of the silence, what with the TV and all, that she started to hate the whole thing. Monotony, too. Maybe she really hated what she had become in that world, and there was nothing you could have really done.”

“She was upset that I spent too much time in my studio.”

“I could see that being quite painful, to be honest.”

“My door was always open. All she had to do was to come in for us to stay together. I’m passionate about my work. I didn’t know how to live with somebody who didn’t care about what I was doing.”

“Didn’t it occur to you that maybe she wanted you to be as passionate about her as you were about the work?”

“Sure it did. But it was too late.”

“Do you regret it?”

“How about you? Are you with somebody?” asked George-Harrison, sidestepping the question.

I sidestepped his. “You know, we’ve gone really off track with the Stanfields. I just can’t picture my mother as some master thief. There’s no way that she could have broken into a safe. No way.”

“Right. Just to be clear: you didn’t exactly answer my question.”

“If you were a woman, you’d know that no answer is an answer.”

“Right. But I’m just a big hairy bear.” George-Harrison sighed.

I caved. “To answer your question, just for posterity’s sake: no, I am not with anybody.”

“Would you have imagined, in your wildest dreams, that your mother and mine could have had a relationship like that?”

“Nope. Not at all.”

“Well, that tells me we might not be as far off track as you think. Maybe they did pull off the heist, and maybe it wasn’t your mother who broke into the safe.”

“What makes you say that?”

“My mom never really had much of a job,” George-Harrison explained. “At least nothing steady enough to raise a kid on. We certainly weren’t rich, but we had everything we needed.”

“She could have set some money aside before having you.”

“This is years without work we’re talking about here. Years. And the cop did say one thing that confirms it for me: there were bonds in the safe, not cash. And, well, my mother had a nice big stack of bonds. At the start of each summer, she’d cash some in, and then again just before Christmas.”

There was nothing to say to that. The facts spoke for themselves: my mother was far from the woman I thought she was. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to accept it. And even more troubling: What other lies would I uncover along the way? George-Harrison searched my face for a reaction, letting the silence hang in the air until I at last opened my mouth to reply.

“You never asked her where the bonds came from?”

“I didn’t really think about it as a kid. I just remember her telling me she had inherited them.”

“Well, our family was barely able to scrape by,” I replied. “If we’d learned that Mum was sitting on a stack of bonds, we would have been shocked, to say the least.”

“So, that makes her innocent and my mother guilty. Does that come as a relief?”

“Nope. Not at all, actually. My mother—the chemistry teacher, a total do-gooder with these uncompromising values about raising her kids—was really a crazy rebel who pulled off a heist? Honestly, the idea was starting to grow on me.”

“God, you are a walking contradiction.”

“I’ll take walking contradiction over boring any day! Does your mother still have any of those bonds?”

“I cashed the last of them when she went into the home. I guess I should apologize; I should’ve held on to them, at least shared what was left with you.”