“He stole from your pension?” Augustine asked, his voice rising in dismay.
“Yes, he called HR, told them to screw the penalties for early withdrawal, and sucked it dry for everything he could, and he did the same thing with our credit cards we had together. He maxed them out with cash advances. I found the ad on Craigslist where he sold my car. He negotiated online. He gota thousand dollarsfor it. That’s all. It was only eight years old! With everything he stole, my whole life, he couldn’t have gotten more than thirty thousand dollars,total,and now I’m probably in debt that much again from the credit card advances. He even took money from a checking account where I put money for my sister and her kid.”
Augustine said, “Tell me about your sister.”
Her family had kept this quiet for years because they might have gotten thrown out of their church if they’d just said it outright. “Mandi got pregnant in high school. She wouldn’t tell anyone who the dad was because then his family would be in trouble, too. We sent her to live with my aunt over in Flagstaff to have the baby, and then she ‘adopted’ the kid while she was there. Nobody believes it, but they don’t have to. It’s just what we say. When her kid didn’t start talking by the time he was four, we figured out he was autistic. He’s on the far end of the spectrum, too. He’s ten now, and he’s non-verbal. She lives in Tucson so she can be nearer to doctors and get him therapy at the medical school there.”
“And you give her money?” Augustine asked.
Dree shrugged. “Someone has to. She waits tables at Applebee’s. My parents try to send her twenty bucks a month, but money is tight around the sheep ranch, like always. Raising sheep in southern New Mexico is not like having a sheep farm up in Massachusetts where you can sell overpriced sheep cheese to the rich people.”
“What’s his name?” Augustine asked her.
Dree was confused. “The guy who knocked her up?”
“Your nephew.”
“Victor.” That was weird. No one asked what her nephew’s name was. Some people were cruel about it and said it didn’t matter what his name was because, like barn cats, he wouldn’t come when he was called, anyway.
“And his last name is—” Augustine asked.
“Clark. Like mine.”
“Ah, all right.”
Oh.“I didn’t mention my last name last night, huh?”
His smile lifted a little more, but it was still kind. “It didn’t come up.”
“It’s a really common last name. There are a thousand Clarks all over southern New Mexico. I mean, it’s in the top twenty-five most common last names in the U.S. and, like, number fourteen in Scotland. Over a million people in the U.S. have the ‘Clark’ surname, and then there’s a bunch in England, Scotland, and Wales, too. There’s a Clark University and a Clarks shoe store. It’s as common as mud.”
He smiled. “You’ve looked into this.”
“There is not a lot to do on a southern New Mexico sheep ranch on weekends at night, and my parents were always proud of their name. So, yeah.”
“Do you have any pictures of Victor?”
“Um, I suppose, if I can access them. I don’t know if I can get to my cloud storage.” She grabbed her phone from where it was lying on the countertop and turned it on. As soon as it powered up, she pulled up the main settings menu and turned off the Wi-Fi so Francis couldn’t call her again.
It took just a second to scroll through her pictures—swiping quickly past the hundreds of pics of her with Francis—to find pictures of when she’d driven down to Tucson last month. She did that a lot on her days off because, in addition to seeing her sister and nephew, she also went to Victor’s therapy clinic with them to talk medicine with his therapists. Medical practitioners can get impatient with people outside the discipline, so Dree went with Mandi to ask the hard questions and then interpret the answers later for her.
She found a decent one of her holding onto Victor and grinning. He was just a little blurry from thrashing around while Mandi took the picture. She turned around the screen to show it to Augustine.
He looked at it and reached for her phone. “May I?”
“Sure.”
He took the phone out of her fingers and studied it. Then, he tapped it once and scrolled by moving his finger up and down.
“Dude, privacy?” she said. “Besides, I’m lying to you about everything.”
“Right, you are,” he said and handed her phone back to her. The pictures app was still open. The top half was pictures of her with Victor and Mandi. Most of the pictures of Victor were less flattering than the one she’d chosen, with Victor striking out or running from them. Mandi usually had her mouth open and was reaching toward him. His thin limbs’ flaccid muscle tone due to autism was evident to anyone who knew what they were looking at.
The bottom half of the screen was filled with pictures of her with her friends and Francis.
It was the most boring photo scroll in the history of time.
“So, that’s him,” she said, her chest tightening again. “That’s Francis.”
