Where the Money Went by Kevin Canty

Author:Kevin Canty [Canty, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-53007-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

Sleeping Beauty

ANDREW STANDS AT THE WINDOW looking out at the dark street, waiting for his friends: Susan and Ray, Elizabeth and Mark. They’re late. The married are always late. He has made everything ready for them: candles lit, wine decanted, a spinach salad ready for dressing and the makings of a seafood risotto circled around the new gas stove. This is his one trick, risotto, but they say they like it. They finish it, anyway. And on a night like this one, dark and threatening snow, it’s a good thing, warm and filling, a little breeze out of the south….

Then they arrive, all together in Elizabeth’s minivan. He lets the curtain slip back so he won’t be caught looking, starts the Rubén González CD he was saving for them and waits. A suspended moment, his own little quiet, waiting for the Cuban piano. He can hear the married talking in the building’s hallway.

Then kisses, coats, and now they’re all together. A sense of relief.

“The new place,” Susan says. “Andrew, this is great.”

“Ah,” he says, half embarrassed. “It’s almost done, almost finished, always almost.”

“No, it’s beautiful,” says Elizabeth. “Let me see.” She rushes past him into the one big room, taking it all in: the fire in the fireplace, the bookshelves and the sofa, the big lithograph of the Yellowstone River at dawn on the one good wall. He can’t, suddenly, stand to watch her taking the room apart, the work of months. He gathers the coats and retreats to the bedroom and then she’s there, too, after just a minute, gathering in all the details: the big bed in dark wood, the telephone, the high-fidelity clock.

“You did it,” Elizabeth says. “You really made something beautiful out of this place. It looks wonderful.”

She says it with absolute certainty. Andrew wonders what she would have said if she didn’t like it, then instantly wonders if she really does like it. But she circles him in her arm and kisses him on the cheek and she does, she does like it.

“It looks like somebody lives here,” she says. “No more college-student. It was time.”

“Past time,” he says. “You like the color in here?”

“I ought to,” she says. “I picked it out, didn’t I?”

And then Susan is in the room, too, appreciating.

“Wow,” she says. “This is really nice, Andrew. You did this all by yourself?”

“I had some help,” Andrew says.

Susan says, “You’re going to have seductions in here, is my prediction.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Elizabeth says. “I helped with the colors a little.”

“I don’t know,” says Andrew. “Do women like men with furniture?”

Both women stop, consider.

“Grown-up women do,” Elizabeth says. She’s talking about Jude, Andrew’s what?—ex-girlfriend seems too vague and too definite all at once. Jude who is now in Cyprus with somebody else but always a threat to return. A little spanking, thank you very much. Elizabeth never liked Jude in the first place but now that Jude has been back and gone and back and gone again, Elizabeth thinks it’s Andrew’s problem.

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