same time I thought maybe Ernest deserved to be played by her, that he’d made his own bed, after all. I definitely remember thinking about that.
“Let’s talk about it when you get here,” he said.
“If I get there,” Hannah hardened up again, “not when. I can’t promise, Ernest. It’s not a given. I can’t just drop everything.”
I wondered what it was she reckoned she was carrying, what it was she’d have to drop, apart from credit cards and cigarettes and gum.
There was a silence then. I heard the loose wet rattle of him sighing into the phone. Hannah counted with her fingers, slowly, for my benefit, to show she knew already how this would go. She winked at me, like we were in it together.
“You’ll be rewarded,” Ernest said. “You know how generous I can be.”
“I do,” she said.
“Come soon,” he told her. “I don’t have much time left.”
When she put the phone down she was glowing. She couldn’t wait for Lowell to get back from his audition so she could tell him the good news. Everything about the way my mother moved around the room was different after that call, lighter, like she’d just mainlined a barrel full of hope.
I asked her how come Ernest was so keen to get eyes on me all of a sudden, after so many years of nothing. I didn’t feel like humouring him. The last thing I wanted was to be the centrepiece of an old man’s guilt trip.
“Who cares?” she said. “This is good news, Iris. Don’t try and spoil it.”
“Good news how?”
“Your father,” she told me, “was a very wealthy man.”
“Is,” I said. “You just got off the phone with him. He’s not dead yet.”
“Yes, OK.” She dialled Lowell’s number, pulled a face. “Is. But he’ll be dead soon.”
I laughed. “You look human,” I told her, “but inside you’ve got to be part android.”
“Don’t give me that,” she said. “You know he left us with nothing.”
“You’ve told me enough times.”
“So don’t waste your time sticking up for him. He’s been a terrible father to you.”
“And he’s going to be a better one when he’s dead? Is that the logic?”
Hannah hooked the phone between her jaw and her shoulder, and poured herself just an inch or two of vodka. Morning measures, Thurston called them. Breakfast of Champions.
“Get what you can out of Ernest Toby Jones,” she said. “That’s my advice to you, free of charge.”
Nothing is free of charge in my mother’s world. She never gave a thing away without making somebody somewhere pay for it. I knew her well enough to know we weren’t in this together, not for a second.
“Is that what you plan to do?” I asked her. “Get what you can?”
“You’ll feel the same way,” she said, “once you see the pictures he’s got on his walls.”
“What pictures?”
“Priceless ones,” she said.
“Which artists?”
She waved the question away with a flip of her hand and rubbed her fingers and thumbs together, the way people do when they can smell money.
“You’ve got me all wrong,” I said. “I’m not interested in how much they’re worth.”
“You will be,” she said.
“And how do you figure that?”
She smiled. “You think you’re immune to the dollar,” she said. “You think you’re above all that, but you’re not.”
She knocked the vodka back with a quick snap of her head. I watched her swallow it, watched the mechanism working in her throat like rocks in a sack. Mother’s little helper.
“To Ernest,” she said, recalibrating her smile as the drink hit her bloodstream. “You and me and his millions are all he’s got.”
Hannah and Lowell stayed up later than ever that night, getting reckless, lurching towards triple-strength cocktails and dancing in the living room. Neither of them had to be up for work in the morning. They probably thought they’d never have to work again. I could hear them talking about cruise ships and second homes in the South of France and film financing and cosmetic surgery. They were celebrating their sudden, soon-to-be fat fortune, counting their chickens, peaking too early, as usual.
I thought about the time Thurston and I talked about what we’d do with a vast, Forbes Top Ten Rich List, silly, unforgivable amount of money.
Change the world, Bill and Melinda Gates style.
Live on another planet, but only on weekends.
Get $10 bicycles for 4 million of the world’s poor.
Buy United Technologies (or Fox or Walmart or all three) and close them down.
“Give it all away to strangers,” he said, “face to face, in random, life-changing acts of generosity.”
“Set fire to it,” I said, “and enjoy the look on my mother’s face.”
He said that if by some miracle I ever got that kind of rich, I should be sure and let him know, and that he would help me decide.
“You’ll be the first person I call,” I said, even though I knew he didn’t have a cell phone and never would. Tracking devices, Thurston called them, and he refused to be tracked.
A fine principle, I told him, an interesting stand. Worse than useless, it turns out, when you’re trying to find somebody, when you want to tell them where in the world you’ve disappeared to, when you need to see if they’re anything like even halfway to OK. After we left in such a hurry, I realised I didn’t even know where Thurston lived. I never went there. He never told me. It just didn’t come up.
I rolled on to my side and pressed a pillow over my head to shut Hannah and Lowell’s noise out. I tried to think about Ernest. I’d only ever seen photos, one or two, of a serious, comb-haired, indoors sort of a guy, a bit of a geek, startled by the camera. They were yellowed and faded with age those photos, like they came from a different time, like they had nothing at all to do with me. I wanted to feel something about him dying, I knew I ought to, but really he was no more than biology to me. We had nothing in common, unless you’d count a total lack of interest in one another. His silence my whole
