“Pensacola?” There’s a knowing lilt to his voice. His smile transformed.
“Do you know something about Pensacola?” Salem says.
He laughs again, then pauses, seeming to consider something. Finally, he shrugs. A sort ofWhy not?shrug.
“You may want to visit a little gift shop there. Sea . . . something?” He waves a lazy hand.
Helpful, I’m sure. In a literal seaside town. What if I did just a minor flattening?
“Is there anything else you can tell us about that, Curtis?” Salem says. “This gift shop?”
He inhales deeply through his nose, smiles out toward the woods.
“Oh, I don’t think so.” He taps his cane once on the patio, an obvious farewell. “Just keep in mind. Even the best of us don’t workallthe time.”
The Last Con of Lynton Baltimore
Transcript Excerpt from Episode 9, “Mistakes Were Made”
[Durant, voice-over:Baltimore is understandably reluctant to speak about his misdemeanor conviction. His reputation has for so long depended on his shape-shifting that I can only assume he would have rather had his—until recently—spotless record marred by almost anything else. Wire fraud, forgery, even theft. But whether he’s open to talking about what got him here, he doesn’t seem at all to mind talking about the fact of being incarcerated.]
Baltimore:I’ve always made the best of my circumstances. This one isn’t any different.
Durant:I doubt that.
Baltimore:Why do you doubt it?
Durant:I can’t imagine there’s a lot of opportunities for you to do what you do from where you are. I can’t imagine you’re enjoying yourself in a place where you have no freedom of movement, where you can’t be anyone else but whatever your inmate number is.
Baltimore:::laughs:: I thought you were the storyteller here! You’re having a failure of imagination, I think.
Durant:::laughs, slightly uncomfortably:: That’s interesting. Maybe I am.
Chapter 9
Jess
When Tegan was nine years old, she brought home an invitation to something called a “Mommy & Me” birthday tea party.
It was a girl from her class who was having it, or, I guess it’s more accurate to say, the mother of the girl from her class was having it, because I don’t think there are that many nine-year-olds who are excited to drink hot tea or eat cucumber sandwiches. Tegan brought the thick cardstock invitation home and showed it to me as though the Queen of England herself had sent it.
She’d said, “I can’t believe she invitedus.”
Obviously, I did not want to go, but also, obviously, Ididgo. It’d only been eight and a half months since Mom had left, and Tegan was as fragile as spun sugar, barely showing excitement about anything. I would’ve eaten a million cucumber sandwiches for her.
I would’ve curtseyed to the Queen of Fourth Grade.
At the party, it was pretty clear to me that we were a pity invite. I’d heard more than my fair share ofthe mother ran offorthe sister is really her only familywhispers over the previous few months, had endured concerned and curious gazes. By that point—so soon after Mom’s departure, and still close enough to the whirlwind popularity of Salem Durant’s podcast—I was still in the height of my furious, panicked fear that someone, somehow, would put it all together, and I’d barely let myself be seen by other parents at innocuous things like school drop-off. Clearly, that strategy had worked in terms of avoiding questions, but not in terms of rousing sympathy. So when we walked in, women greeted me with exaggerated tongue-clucks followed by versions of “How are you doing,really?” They looked down at my black knit dress and settled for compliments like, “Very classic!” or “I love a simple dress!” They called Teganhoneyandsweetheart.
We were, predictably, seated at a table in the back, six of us in total: a cousin and aunt of the birthday girl, and another obviously unpopular girl from Tegan’s class. Conversation was stilted but mostly harmless, right up until the cousin—while her mom was taking a bathroom break—told Tegan the story about the kitten.
“Yeah, so I heard them arguing about it in their room. My dad was asking her whose kitty it was, and then my mom said it washerkitty. But then he kept asking her a bunch of times, and—”
I froze in my seat, hoping against hope this was going in a different direction.
“So then finally she said it washiskitty, and then they were quiet for a while, well like mostly quiet? I think something is broken in their room. But like, where is the kitten, you know? I thought maybe I would get it for my birthday, but—”
I locked eyes with the other mom at the table. I thought maybe she’d be in the same state of shocked paralysis as me, trying to stifle an embarrassed laugh, but she wasn’t. She looked at me as though it was somehow my fault—the black-dress wearing, tattooed twenty-two-year-old—that she’d gotten stuck at a table with a kid whose parents were into dirty talk.
