Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood Street (5 page)

Mom shook her head. “I don’t deal with him at all. My contact is an in-house lawyer, and it’s mostly done through e-mails.”

“What’s ‘it’?”

“My work? Structuring debt—haven’t we been through this?”

“Let’s go through it again,” I said.

Mom went through it again. There were oceans of debt out there, which was just the flip side of lending… or something like that, and then I lost the thread. “The pressure,” she said, reaching the end, “comes from the deadlines and the fact that you just can’t make a mistake.” I was sure of only one thing: Dad’s job was better than Mom’s.

“So, uh, why does Sheldon Gunn want to wreck Bread?” I asked.

“It’s not really a question of that,” Mom said. “He’s probably never heard of Bread.”

“But he must know about all these people who come to get a meal.”

“Maybe,” Mom said. “In general.”

“Then couldn’t you could call him and, you know, fill him in?”

Mom gave me a long look, like she was sizing me up, kind of strange, since we were mother and daughter.

“That would certainly clear up any doubt about whether I’m on the partner track or not,” she said, which blew by me, but there was no time for a follow-up because at that moment Mom got a text. She checked it and sighed.

“You have to go in today?”

She nodded, downed the rest of her tea.

“To work for Sheldon Gunn?”

My mom isn’t one of those people who gets annoyed very often, so when she does, it’s always a surprise. “I told you—” She stopped herself, took a deep breath, and her voice went back to normal. “No,” she said, “this is something else.” Mom rose. I wrapped the rest of my muffin in my napkin and stuck it in my pocket for later. We woke Pendleton and went outside. At the same time, two big black cars drove up and parked in front of Bread.

A man got out of each one. They were both rich looking in that well-dressed Manhattan way, the collars of their dark topcoats turned up.

“Oh, my God,” Mom said, and just as she said it, the shorter of the men glanced across the street and saw her.

“Jane?” he called. His gaze went to me, then to Pendleton, then back to my mom. “Did you get called on this?”

“No, I—” Mom began, but then the short man—bald with a round face and small features kind of lost in it—waved her over in an impatient sort of way. Mom hesitated. I thought maybe she was thinking of handing me the leash and telling me to wait where I was, but that didn’t happen and the next thing I knew, we were crossing the street, Pendleton hanging back the way he did if meeting new people was a possibility, but not actually digging in his heels.

“Mom? What—”

“Jane?” the short man said. “Did Mark send you? I don’t understand.”

“No,” Mom said. “I—”

“Andrew?” the taller man interrupted. “What’s going on?”

Andrew, the shorter man—he also had a thick neck and very broad shoulders—said, “I’m finding that out. This is one of our associates, but she works in debt, not real estate, so I’m a little puzzled—”

The taller man held his hand out to Mom. “Sheldon Gunn,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”

Sheldon Gunn! I thought of that phrase “speak of the devil,” but Sheldon Gunn didn’t look at all like a devil. He had swept-back silvery hair, smooth skin, and a handsome face, reminding me of one of those top-hatted actors in old black-and-white movies.

Mom shook hands with Sheldon Gunn. “Jane Forester,” she said. “And there’s no puzzle. We… we were just out for a walk. This is my daughter, Robbie.”

“Um,” I said, forgetting to extend my hand, not doing a good job on the whole introduction thing in general, but I was distracted by what my mom had just said, since we weren’t just out for a walk.

“Hello there,” said Sheldon Gunn, giving me a smile.

“Um,” I said again. His smile vanished in a flash, and his eyes changed, too, like he’d stopped seeing me. How
dumb could I be? I got mad at myself for being such a useless dweeb, and in my madness blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “What about Bread?”

“Bread?” said Sheldon Gunn.

“Just one of the former tenants, I believe,” said Andrew. “Not important. Nice running into you, Jane.”

“And you,” said my mom, turning to go and giving Pendleton’s leash a little tug.

Meanwhile Andrew was unrolling a big set of plans. “Now, what I wanted to show you, Sheldon, is this suggestion of the planners, that the parking garage could come all the way to here and replace this whole block, so that…” Sheldon Gunn bent his head to examine the plans, but I stopped being aware of what was happening out in the world, because inside my head the pressure was suddenly building, faster than ever before, all the stages speeding by—electric ball, vision, pain, fluttering heart—and the red-gold beam flashed out, aimed hip level at Sheldon Gunn’s side. Then something fell from under the folds of Gunn’s topcoat and landed on the sidewalk with a very soft thud. It took a strange long sideways bounce in my direction and landed at my feet. Without a thought, like a figure in a dream, maybe of the soaring kind, I stepped on whatever had fallen and then, after making sure that no one was looking, I picked it up and dropped it in my pocket. By now I knew what
I had in there: a fat wad of bills, neatly packed as though they’d just come from the bank, Benjamin Franklin on top. And that without-a-thought part wasn’t quite true.

I glanced around. Andrew and Sheldon Gunn were examining the plans, their backs to me. Pendleton had gotten his leash twisted around a parking meter, and my mom was trying to free him. No one had seen a thing. As for the red-gold beam, I was starting to get used to its invisibility to everyone but me.

“Come on, Robbie,” Mom said. “Let’s get going.”

All the way home I could feel that wad in my pocket. Or was it just the muffin I was feeling? I wanted desperately to make sure, especially about the Benjamin Franklin part—oh, the imagination and how it plays tricks, from out of nowhere a big concept in my life—but I didn’t.

“Are you all right?” Mom said, glancing at me. “You look a little flushed.”

“I’m fine.” Oh, yeah? Getting used to the appearance of a red-gold beam visible only to yourself was fine? Comfortable with being—let’s face it—kind of a thief? Was I going crazy?

“And your voice sounds funny.”

“Funny how?”

“Like you’re upset about something.”

“Well, of course, Mom. Bread. Aren’t you upset, too?”

Mom nodded. She opened her mouth to say something, but then came a vibration on her phone and another text arrived.

When we got home there was a note from Dad on the fridge: “Gone trolling.” That was his expression for taking a long walk, hoping to hook some ideas. Mom started packing her briefcase for the office. I went upstairs.

Maybe I should describe my room. It’s small, just big enough for my bed, desk, and chest of drawers, but in the city you’re lucky to have a bedroom all to yourself. The walls are decorated with pictures of volcanoes: Vesuvius, St. Helen’s, Mauna Loa, Etna, Santorini, Nyiragongo (my favorite because I like the name). I did a project on volcanoes in fifth grade, and the pictures have been up there ever since. There’s also a window that looks out on the back of other buildings like ours and a tiny garden down below. Sometimes in warm weather I climb out and sit on the fire escape, actually a no-no from my parents’ point of view, but it’s perfectly safe. What else? Oh, yeah, Pookie’s tail hanging from the bedpost. I’d had a stuffed dog named Pookie until one day I was at school and Pendleton got hold of him.

I took off my jacket, emptied my pocket. Not my imagination: in my hand, covered with muffin crumbs, I held a thick wad of bills, Benjamin Franklin on top. I
started counting. One, two, three, four, five—all of them Benjamins! I kept going—seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, Benjamins each and every one, my hands no longer steady. In the end I counted thirty-one. Thirty-one hundred dollars! Also, thirty-one was a number that had meaning in my life: it was on my basketball jersey. Okay, maybe not a lot of meaning—especially since the number I’d wanted was six, already worn by Ashanti—but some, and I took it as a good sign, encouragement for this plan that had been forming in my head the whole time.

First I had to re-count the money, just to make sure. One, two, three, four, five—

There was a knock on the door. Mom’s knock. I hadn’t even heard her footsteps. Did my hearing suck, too? Was I wandering the world with practically no senses at all? And had I been counting aloud?

“Robbie?”

The door opened. By that time I was sitting on the bed, bills and muffin underneath me. “Yeah?”

Mom looked in. She’d changed her jacket for her coat. “I’ll only be two or three hours,” she said. “Hopefully.”

“Okay.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Do?”

“While I’m gone. How about calling that Ashanti kid? Doesn’t she live close by?”

“I don’t really know her.”

“You could get to know her.”

“Mom. She’s in eighth grade. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

“Sure?”

“Yeah. Uh, Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Who’s Andrew, exactly?”

“A senior partner.”

“What’s he like?”

“A shark.”

I laughed.

“The kind,” Mom went on, “that has to keep swimming or it drowns, so they’re always hungry.”

I stopped laughing.

Mom left. As soon as I heard the door close downstairs, I counted the money again. And once more. By that time I was forming opinions on what Ben Franklin must have been like, just from seeing his face so much. But that wasn’t the point. The point was I had in my hands $3,100. I cleaned up the remains of the muffin.

T
he house grew quiet, at least quiet for the city, meaning a constant noisy hum with no nearby sirens, shouting, sudden braking, garbage trucks, or low-flying airplanes. Real actual quiet, which I’d experienced at times, such as last summer when I spent two weeks at a camp in Vermont, bothered me. I got up, stuffed the money back in my jacket pocket, and started for the door. At that point, I got the idea of wearing my hoodie instead of the jacket, hard to say why. My hoodie—a heavy sweatshirt with a hand-warmer pocket and the Mets NY logo on the chest—hung in the closet. I opened it and heard the voice of Mitch the landlord rising from his apartment down below. This was a strange quirk of my closet, something to do with the pipes, my dad said. Sometimes I could even make out the words, like now, for instance: “A quarter point?” Mitch was saying, maybe on the phone. “Why would I bother?” Was
he talking about money? A big difference between adults and kids occurred to me then: adults talked an awful lot about money, and kids did not.

But at the moment I was a kid with money on my mind. I put on my hoodie, transferred the $3,100 to the hand-warmer pocket, and went downstairs. Pendleton lay under the table, eyes open but not moving, in one of those trancelike states of his. There were all kinds of rules about going out by myself, such as never at night, only certain streets allowed, and having a good reason, which included meeting friends or shopping for a necessity we were out of, such as kibble; plus always calling Mom or Dad first, and failing that, leaving a note on the fridge. I left a note, right beside my dad’s: “Back in a flash.”

Not long after that, I was standing in front of the no-name hole-in-the-wall café again, looking across the street at Bread. It wasn’t a busy street for cars, and not many walkers were around either, maybe because the sky had turned cloudy and a cold wind had risen. The windows of Bread were dark, and I saw no sign of anyone inside. So things were going my way! Then I thought of something Ms. Kleinberg liked to say: You make your own luck. Suddenly I was in a great mood, like I could accomplish just about anything. I looked both ways and crossed the street, pulling on my hood at the same time. Why did I do that? I didn’t have anything bad in mind, quite the opposite.

The sign was still on the door at Bread:
SORRY—CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
. Someone had tagged the front window, a tag I’d never seen before that said
vudu
in thick purple letters. First tag I’d ever seen on Bread; even though I had nothing against tags, I couldn’t help thinking how fast things could fall apart. Graffiti showing up almost right away: what was next? Floods and fires, like one of those disaster movies about the city? But none of that changed my mood. Wasn’t I trying to keep things from falling apart? I walked right up to the door, a door with a slot for letters, and looked both ways again. A woman entering the café, a man hailing a cab, a couple hurrying toward the bus stop at the next corner, none of them watching me. I bent toward the door, took the wad of money from my hand-warming pocket, and—thinking too late that an envelope or even a rubber band might have been nice—shoved $3,100 inside. The bills landed with a faint fluttering sound.

I backed away, glanced around again—out of nowhere, someone was standing on the sidewalk, practically within touching distance! My heart started pounding in my chest so hard I thought I might rise straight up in the air. And then I saw the face of this person, a small person with a face not easy to see, on account of he, too, was wearing a hoodie.