Chapter 101: Twenty-Eight Years of Carbons
Roz Achebe met me at a Peruvian place on Clark on the second of January, because she would not meet me near Astor Street and would not meet me at her sister’s.
She was still employed. Hold on to that. Everybody else in this story had lost something already. Roz had not.
She ordered soup and did not eat it.
“I want it back,” she said.
“The sheet.”
“The sheet.”
I had it in the sleeve on the seat beside me and I did not move.
“Rosalind.”
“Don’t.”
“If I give it back, then in a year there is nothing.”
“If you don’t give it back,” she said, “then in a year there is nothing and I am sixty-three.”
She had her hands around the soup bowl for the warmth and had not picked up the spoon.
“You know what I get,” she said. “You lived in that house.”
“I know what you get.”
“Say it, then. Because everyone likes to talk about the right thing and nobody likes to say the number.”
So I said it, because she was owed that.
Health coverage until she leaves. Nine hundred and six dollars a month if she goes onto COBRA, for eighteen months, and then nothing until Medicare at sixty-five.
A retirement provision that is not a pension and not a contract. A paragraph in a letter of wishes signed by Constance Blackwood in 2011. A promise from a woman to a woman, enforceable by nobody.
“Twenty-eight years,” Roz said. “I have never taken so much as a candle out of that house.”
“I know.”
“I took carbons. Carbons are mine. I made them. That is not the same and I will say that to anybody.”
She finally picked up the spoon and put it back down.
“But if I hand you papers, I am a thief. Then I am the woman who took things. Do you understand the difference between what I did and what you are asking?”
I said yes.
I want to be clear that I said yes and then asked her anyway.
“I need to know where 7420 came from.”
She looked out the window at Clark Street for a while.
“December of 2025,” she said. “After. When I was doing the year-end. It came over in the batch with the house sheets and it wasn’t a house thing, so I telephoned Mr. Pruitt at the office.”
“Dennis Pruitt.”
“The controller. Very polite man. He said, leave it, that’s ours, it shouldn’t have gone to you.”
“And?”
“And it went to me anyway. Twice. October and again in the year-end summary.” She looked at me. “Things that go to the wrong place twice went there on purpose or somebody is careless, and nobody at Halloway Kesten is careless.”
I wrote down: PRUITT — CONTROLLER — SAID IT SHOULDN’T HAVE COME.
“There’s another thing,” Roz said, “and I have thought about whether to tell you since October and I am going to tell you and then I am going to go home.”
“All right.”
“The sixth of November, 2025.”
“That’s a Thursday.”
“A lunch. Six people, in the small dining room. Mr. Victor was in Houston.”
“Ana?”
“Upstairs. She had a bad week.” Roz turned her cup on the saucer. “There was a woman at that lunch I hadn’t seen before. About thirty. She sat at Mrs. Blackwood’s left.”
I did not say the name. I made myself not say the name.
“Mrs. Blackwood introduced her,” Roz said, “as a friend of the Kestens.”
“Did you—”
“I served her sole and did not look at her twice, because that is the job.” Roz put the cup down. “I looked twice in February, when she came through the front door with eleven suitcases.”
The waiter came and asked about the soup and Roz said it was lovely and had him take it away.
“Three months before Ana died,” I said.
“Fourteen days after that piece of paper.”
We sat with that.
Then Roz said, “So now you know why I keep carbons.”
I asked her the only question I had left.
“If a court asked you. Not me. A court. A subpoena, a room, a person swearing you in.”
Roz put on her coat before answering, which is how I knew she had decided before she sat down.
“Twenty-eight years I have never lied in that house,” she said. “Not about a broken dish, not about a bottle. I am not going to start now by volunteering.”
She buttoned the coat to the throat.
“But if they ask me, Lily, I will answer. Every question. And I will bring the binder.”
“They’ll have to ask.”
“Then somebody had better make them ask,” she said, “because I am not going to walk into that building on my own and hand my life over on a maybe.”
She left the sleeve with me. She did not say she was leaving it. She simply did not take it, which is a different thing, and I never asked her which she meant.