The Cash

The Cash


The book was still open in Isabel’s hands when the trilling started up again.

She had carried it from the bookshelf to Jean’s reading chair and had not, in the ten minutes since she had sat down, made it past the second page. The book was old in a way that did not, technically, refer to a single century. The leather of it was dark and warm under her fingers. The pages had the soft brown deepening at the edges that books got when they had been read a great many times by a great many hands. The first page had a name written in it in slanted pencil that she could not quite make out, and a date she suspected was older than her grandmother. The second page had a single sentence at the top in a script she did not recognise the language of, and underneath it, in English, in a different ink, in what looked like a much later hand, the words for the one who arrives.

She had read those four words six times in a row when the phone in the kitchen began to ring.
The trill of it was the same indignant gran’s-kitchen sound that had pulled her up out of sleep that morning. Her first instinct was to ignore it. The phone was not hers. The cottage was not hers. Whatever Jean MacKenzie’s landline situation was on a Wednesday morning, Isabel had no business answering it, and she settled deeper into the chair and turned the page.

The phone kept ringing.

Three rings. Four. Five. Six.

The answering machine, somewhere on the kitchen counter, clicked. Jean’s recorded voice came through faint and warm and impossibly Scottish, telling whoever was calling that she was not in at the moment and asking, with a small audible smile, for them to leave a message after the beep.

The beep happened.

Then Jean’s actual voice, in real time, came through the small speaker.
It was a yoohoo Isabel had not heard a woman use sincerely since 1998, and it landed like the kind of permission Isabel had not realised she was waiting for. She set the book down on the arm of the chair and went, with her legs still doing that small soft buckle they had been doing all morning, into the kitchen and picked up the receiver before Jean had finished her second yoohoo, dearie.

The conversation that followed was the warmest, most breathlessly apologetic, most cheerfully unrepentant five minutes Isabel had spent on a phone in years.
Jean was apologising before Isabel had even said hello. Mora, in the background, was apologising less. There had been a hotel. There had been a casino. There had been, by Mora’s estimation and Jean’s mortified confirmation, an unscheduled overnight that had not, technically, been planned but had also not, in honest hindsight, been entirely an accident. Jean wanted Isabel to know that the Porsche was perfectly safe and was, at this very moment, parked in a hotel valet being polished by a young man who had been tipped a hundred dollars on entry and would, in all likelihood, take a bullet for it. Mora wanted Isabel to know that the Porsche was a wonderful car and that she had every intention of returning it to her in approximately the same condition as she had received it, give or take the small amount of casino-floor glitter currently on the passenger seat.

Isabel, sitting on the edge of the kitchen counter in her bare feet with the cord of the receiver wrapped twice around her wrist, found herself laughing into the phone in a way she had not laughed in a long time.

She told them not to apologise. She told them to take longer. She told them, in the most direct, calm, slightly conspiratorial voice she had used on anyone in months, that she was perfectly happy at the cottage, that she had absolutely no need for a car for the foreseeable future, that they should consider the Porsche on extended loan for as many days as they wished to be away in it, and that the only thing they needed to bring back when they finally rolled home was themselves, intact, with all their teeth.

There was a small pleased pause on the other end of the line.
Mora wanted to know if Isabel was sure.Isabel was sure.
Mora then wanted, in a voice Isabel could hear actively suppressing the joy of the news, to confide that they had won quite a lot of money at the blackjack table the night before. Quite a lot turned out to be, on follow-up, somewhere on the agreeable side of six thousand dollars in casino chips, currently sitting in a small neat stack on the writing desk of a Hyatt suite they had also acquired without paying for it, and that Mora intended, with Isabel’s permission and Jean’s reluctant complicity, to convert the chips into something useful before the day was out.
Isabel put her hand over her mouth and laughed silently for a long second.

Then she remembered the cash.

She told them. Slowly. Carefully. With the pleasure of a woman delivering very good news to people who were going to know exactly what to do with it.
There was, under the passenger seat of the Porsche, behind the small black panel that lifted up if you pressed the right corner of it, a wad of cash she had stuffed there the day she left. The original plan had been to use it for the drive. The actual plan, after the cottage, had been to forget it existed entirely. There were several thousand dollars there. She did not remember the exact figure. She had not counted it since she put it there. It was, by any honest accounting of the morning, more useful in a casino than it was under a panel in a parked car.

She told them to use it.

She told them to use all of it.

She told them, in the soft slightly wicked voice of a woman who had spent four years writing checks that did absolutely nothing for her happiness, that she could not think of two more deserving recipients of a slightly grubby American casino weekend than the two of them, and that she would consider it a personal favour if they would do their absolute best to lose every single dollar of it at the highest-limit table they could find and walk out of the building with nothing but stories.

The silence on the other end of the line was the silence of two old witches who could not quite believe their luck. Then Mora, very softly, told her she was a good girl.Isabel almost dropped the receiver.She managed, in a voice that did not, she hoped, betray the small flush moving up her neck, to wish them both a wonderful day and to please call when they decided to head home so she could put a kettle on, and she said her goodbyes and hung up and stood in the kitchen for a long quiet second with both hands flat on the warm stone of the counter.

The hum behind her sternum was very, very awake.

Somewhere, very far underneath the surface of her own thoughts, a small ancient creature on the back of Jean’s reading chair made a low approving sound that did not quite make it to a purr.
The book was still open on the arm of the chair, waiting for her.
She went back to it.