"Well, he doesn't really remember, but Charlie says we can reconstruct it from the records, the NV-is and so on, it will just take time. Of course, Nelson didn't approach every customer with this sort of shady deal, he had to pick and choose, the ones that looked poor enough not to look a gift horse in the face. He was clever about it, Nelson is much more clever than you ever gave him credit for."
"I never said the kid wasn't clever."
"Oh, but Harry" – the shell of tears is refreshed, the brown eyes spill, shiny trails glitter beside her blunt little knob of a nose, a nose with no more character than a drawer pull. She tugs a paper facial tissue from the box the hospital puts on his night table – as she leans forward he glimpses the tops of her tidy breasts through the loose neck of the magenta peasant-style blouse he has never seen before, something she has bought for the real-estate course and these meetings with Charlie and her general stepping-out into the world, without him. He feels a flash of unpleasant heat, as in catheterization. His own wife's tits, surprising him like that. Janice dabbles at her face, her muddled mutt's face, and leans even farther forward, so he feels her breath on his face, smells some faint mint of a Life Saver. To hide the tobacco on her breath. Her tears shine under his eyes; her shaky voice is low so only he can hear. "- he didn't even stop with that. He was doing crack by this time and the amount of money he needed was incredible. He and Lyle worked out this scheme, here it gets very technical -"
"Wait," he tells her. The culinary aide has come in to remove his tray. She is a plump Hispanic woman with long red fingernails and a distinct mustache.
"You no eat enough," she scolds, with her shy smile of pearlsize teeth.
"Enough," he says. "For now. Very good. Bueno."
She has a notebook on which she writes the percentages of the food he has consumed. A third of the overcooked watery string beans, half the pale oval of tasteless veal, scarcely a leaf of the coarse green salad drowned in an orange grease, a bite of the tapioca pudding, whose wobbly texture in his mouth made him shudder. "For breakfast," she reads from her clipboard, "pieces pineapple, cream of wheat, whole-wheat toast, coffee decal"
"I can hardly wait," he tells her.
"Eat more now," she suggests.
He holds firm. "No thanks, too cold now. My wife's here."
She reads from the chart. "Says here last day tomorrow."
"How about that?" Harry asks her. "The big wide world. I'll miss you. And all your healthy eats. Your comestibles."
As she removes his plastic tray, her long red fingernails scrape on its underside with a noise that puts his teeth on edge. He is reminded ofthat platinum-haired bimbo who used to tickle the computer keys at Fiscal Alternatives. Her fingernails were too long too. Dead, Lyle said. If there is an afterlife where the dead all gather, would he get a chance to deepen their acquaintance? But without money around, what would they talk about?
When the woman goes, Janice resumes. The tip of her tongue protrudes a second or two between her lips as she tries to think. "I'm not sure I understand it entirely, but you know how we keep a rolling inventory – so many trucks and vans and cars a month from Mid-Atlantic Toyota in Maryland."
"Between twenty and twenty-five a month is how it's been running," Harry tells her, to let her know he may be flat on his back but knew his business. "We haven't been able to move three hundred new units a year except that one year, '86, after Nelson first took over. The strong yen's been killing us, and Honda and Nissan taking a bigger bite. Ford Ranger put a real dent in our one-ton pickup last year."
"Harry, try to focus. The way it was explained to me is that there's this Toyota Motors Credit Corporation in California that finances our inventory direct with Mid-Atlantic and gets paid when we sell a car and adds to our credit account when we order one for the lot. What Nelson was doing, each month he'd report one or two sales fewer than there actually were and so Toyota would roll over the indebtedness on these cars while he and Lyle put the proceeds in a separate account they'd opened up in the company name, you know how banks now are always offering you all these different accounts, savings and checking with savings and capital accounts with limited checks and so on. So every month we'd owe this TMCC for one or two more cars than were actually on the lot and our debt to them kept getting bigger and our actual inventory was getting smaller; in two or three years if nothing had happened we would have had no new cars in stock at all and owed Mid-Atlantic Toyota a fortune!"
"How much do we actually owe 'em?" His mind can't quite assign weight to these facts, these phantom Toyotas, yet. He is still thinking hospital thoughts -the pineapple he's been promised for breakfast, and whether or not he has taken his digitalis for the evening.
"Nobody knows, Harry. Nelson doesn't exactly remember and Lyle says a lot of the disks he was keeping the accounts on have been accidentally erased."
"Accidentally on purpose, as they used to say," he says. "What a shit. What a pair of shits."
"I know, it's horrible," Janice says, "and Lyle is horrible on the phone. He says he's dying and doesn't care what we do to him! He sounded kind of crazy in the head; isn't that one of the things that happens?" The weight of the facts hits her and bears her suddenly down into hysteria; the tears flow accompanied by sobs and she tries to rest her wet face on his blanketed chest, but she is too short, perched on the chair beside his high bed, and instead presses her eyes and mouth against the hard mattress edge, burbling her disbelief that he would do this to her.
"He" means Nelson; Harry is off the hook for once. In her grief her whole head is hot, even the top of her skull, like a pot come to boil. He comfortingly rubs it, through her little new hairdo, and tries not to smile. Serve them both right, he thinks. Springers. Her dark hair is so fine it sticks to his fingers like cobwebs. For a good five minutes he massages her warm unhappy head with his fingertips while staring at the blank television screen and thinking that he is missing the six-o'clock news, followed by national news at six-thirty. Somehow he can't believe that what Janice is trying to tell him ranks with the national news, for reality. She may be his wife but she's no Connie Chung, let alone Diane Sawyer with her wide-apart blue eyes and melting mouth and stunned look like some beautiful blonde ox. "So what's going to happen?" he asks Janice at last.
She lifts her tear-smeared face and, surprisingly, has some answers. Charlie must have been coaching her. "Well, once we find out how much we owe TMCC we'll have to settle up. We've been paying interest on the inventory so they shouldn't care too much, it's like a mortgage, only Nelson has sold the house without telling them."
"If he faked any signatures, that's forgery," Harry says, and a black dye of despair is beginning to enter his heart, as he sees what a lost cause his son is. Human garbage, like his own father once said of him. He asks, "What's going to happen with the kid?"
Janice blinks her wet lashes. What she has to say seems to her so momentous she withholds it a moment. Her voice has the juicy precision Ma Springer would speak with when she had made up her mind. "He's agreed to enter a rehab place. Immediately."
"Good, I guess. What made him agree?"
"I said it was either that or I'd fire him from the lot. And prosecute."
"Wow. You said that? Prosecute?"
"I did, Harry. I made myself."
"To your own son?"
"I had to. He's been sinking, and he knows it. He was grateful, really. We had it out right there on the lot, out where the weeds are, while Charlie and the accountant stayed inside. Then we made some phone calls, from your old office."
"Where is this rehab place?"
"In North Philadelphia. It's the one his counsellor recommends, if he can get Nelson in. They're all overcrowded, you know. Society can't keep up. There are some day-treatment programs in Brewer but his counsellor says the important thing is to get away from the entire environment the drugs are part of."