Харлан Кобен - Run Away

Yvonne.

He quickly answered it.

“It’s not about Ingrid,” Yvonne said right away. “No change there.”

“What then?”

“And nothing is wrong.”

“Okay.”

“Today is the third Tuesday of the month,” she said.

He’d forgotten about Sadie Lowenstein.

“Not a big deal,” Yvonne continued. “I can call Sadie for you and postpone or I can head out myself or—”

“No, I’ll go.”

“Simon...”

“No, I want to. It’s on my way anyhow.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. If something changes with Ingrid—”

“I’ll call you. Or Robert will. He’s taking over for me soon.”

“How are the kids?”

“Anya is with your neighbor. Sam is on his phone all the time, texting or whatever. He’d started dating a girl two weeks ago. Did you know that?”

Another pang, though a small one this time. “No.”

“The girlfriend wants to come down from Amherst and sit here with him, which is making him smile in spite of himself, but Sam’s told her not to yet.”

“I’ll be back soon.”

“They miss you, but they don’t need you, if you know what I mean. They get what you’re doing.”

Sadie Lowenstein lived in a brick colonial in Yonkers, New York, just north of the Bronx. The neighborhood was no-frills and working class. Sadie had lived here for fifty-seven of her eighty-three years. She could afford better. As her financial advisor, Simon knew that better than anyone. She could get a place down in Florida for the rough winters too, a condo maybe, but she scoffed. No interest. She took two trips per year to Vegas. That was it. Other than that, she liked her old home.

Sadie still smoked and had the raspy voice to prove it. She wore an old-school housedress/muumuu. They sat in her kitchen, at the round Formica table where Sadie once sat with her husband Frank and their twin boys, Barry and Greg. They were gone from here now. Barry died of AIDS in 1992. Frank succumbed to cancer in 2004. Greg, the only one still living, had moved out to Phoenix and rarely came home to visit.

The floor was filmy linoleum. A clock above the sink had the numbers displayed with red dice, a souvenir from one of her early Vegas trips with Frank, maybe twenty years ago.

“Sit,” Sadie said. “I’ll make you some of that tea you like so much.”

The tea was a store-brand chamomile with lemon and honey. He didn’t drink tea. For Simon, tea was weak, a “coffee wannabe,” and much as he wanted tea to be something more, tea always ended up being little more than brown water.

But a decade ago — maybe more, he couldn’t remember anymore — Sadie had made him tea with this particular flavor bought at this particular store, and she’d asked him if he liked it, and he said, “Very much,” and now that tea was here, waiting for him, every time he visited.

“It’s hot, so be careful.”

A monthly calendar, the kind with generic photographs of mountains and rivers, hung on the ivory-to-yellow refrigerator. Banks used to hand out calendars like these for free. Maybe banks still did that. Sadie was getting them somewhere.

Simon stared at the calendar, that simple, old-world scheduler and to-do list.

He did that pretty much every time he came. Just stared at the thirty or thirty-one boxes (yes, twenty-eight or twenty-nine in February for the anal). Most — almost all — of those boxes had no writing in them. Just white. A blue ballpoint had scratched out the words “Dentist, 2PM” for the sixth of the month. Recycling day was circled every other Monday. And there, on the second Tuesday of every month, written with a purple marker in big, bold letters, was one word:

SIMON!

Yes, his name. With the exclamation point. And an exclamation point was really not Sadie Lowenstein.

That was it.

He had first seen that calendar entry — his name in purple with an exclamation point — on this same refrigerator eight years ago, when he was debating cutting down his visits because really, at this stage, with her investments and costs pretty much fixed, there was no reason to come out monthly. It could be handled by phone or by a junior colleague or at the most, they could wrap it up in quarterly visits.

But then Simon looked at the refrigerator and saw his name on the calendar.

He told Ingrid about the entry. He told Yvonne about it. Sadie had no family nearby anymore. Her friends had either moved or passed away. So this meant something to her, his visits, sitting at the old kitchen table where she once raised a family, Simon going over the portfolio as they both sipped tea.

And so it meant something to him too.

Simon had never missed an appointment with Sadie. Not once.

Ingrid would be angry if he’d canceled today. So here he was.

He was able to access her portfolio from his laptop. He went over a few of the holdings, but really that was all beside the point.

“Simon, do you remember our old store?”

Sadie and Frank had owned a small office-supply store in town, the kind of place that sold pens and paper and made photocopies and business cards.

“Sure,” he said.

“Have you driven by it lately?”

“No. It’s a clothing store now, right?”

“Used to be. All those tight teen clothes. I used to call it Sluts R Us, remember?”

“I remember.”

“Which I know isn’t nice. I mean, you should have seen me in my prime. I was a looker, Simon.”

“You still are.”

She waved a dismissive hand at him. “Stop with the patronizing. Back then though, boy I knew how to use my curves, if you know what I’m saying. My dad would throw a fit with what I wore.” A wistful smile came to her lips. “Got Frank’s attention, that I can tell you. The poor kid. Saw me at Rockaway Beach in a two-piece — he never had a chance.”

She turned the smile toward him. He smiled back.

“Anyway,” Sadie said, the smile and the memory vanishing, “that whore costume place closed down. Now it’s a restaurant. Guess what kind of food?”

“What kind?”

She took a drag from her cigarette and made a face like a dog had left a dropping on her linoleum. “Asian fusion,” she spat out.

“Oh.”

“What the hell does that even mean? Is fusion a country now?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Asian fusion. And it’s called Meshugas.”

“Yeah? I don’t think that’s the name.”

“Something like that. Trying to appeal to us tribe members, right?” She shook her head. “Asian fusion. I mean, come on, Simon.” She sighed and toyed with her cigarette. “So what’s wrong?”

“Pardon?”

“With you. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“You think I’m meshugas ?”

“Are you speaking fusion to me?”

“Very funny. I could tell the moment you walked in. What’s wrong?”

“It’s a long story.”

She leaned back, looked left, looked right, looked back at him. “You think I got a lot going on right now?”

He almost told her. Sadie looked at him with wisdom and sympathy, and she clearly welcomed it, would probably even enjoy, if that was the word, listening with a learned ear and offering, at the very least, moral support.

But he didn’t.

It wasn’t about his own privacy. It was about the line. Simon was her financial advisor. He could exchange niceties about his family. But not something like this. His issues were his issues, not his client’s.

“Something with one of your children,” Sadie said.

“What makes you say that?”

“When you lose a child...” Sadie said. She stopped, shrugged. “One of the side effects is this kind of sixth sense. Plus, I mean, what else would it be? Okay, so which kid?”