SAN FRANCISCO
“All that effort and trouble and then
he went and died anyway before we could get a cent,” said Molly’s brother,
leering as she closed the front door behind her. “And now our darling cousin
gets it all.”
“Shut up Ruben.”
He was at the foot of the circular
stairway, one elbow on the bottom of the banister, the other arm down by his
side. She caught for a second the glint of a crystal tumbler hung loose from
his fingers.
Molly raised her eyebrow as she
started past him toward the rest of the house. “You taken up drinking now?”
He chuckled. “Nothing I haven’t been
doing for fifteen years or more.” He raised the glass. “But this is ginger ale
as a matter of fact. What did you expect; that I’d become a reclusive alcoholic
after our nefarious schemes fell through?”
“I didn’t really care enough to
wonder,” she replied and left him behind her in the hall as she moved down the
main corridor. There was an opening in the wall on the right and down a couple
of steps was the corridor leading to the kitchen door. She dropped down them
and opened it. The afternoon light was very dull. There was barely any to speak
of. She opened the refrigerator and took out some bread and chocolate spread.
“And what about you Molly?” asked
Ruben, leaning now in the kitchen doorway as though he hadn’t moved at all to
get there. He was wearing a black shirt and khaki slacks. His feet were bare.
“How do you feel now so much time has passed? What if I told you what I
overheard mother saying on the phone?”
Molly set the ingredients for her
sandwich down on the worktop and started fishing inside the bag for the French
stick. She didn’t reply to her brother at all or even show through her actions
that she’d heard him.
“Because we’ll be selling this house
soon,” he continued, “and be finding accommodation more in keeping with the
amount of money we have. And your little sideline of translating is going to
have to become a bigger earner fast.”
She finished slicing herself a chunk
of loaf and slit it down the middle, then opened the chocolate spread and
smoothed it onto the bread. “I don’t care Ruben. I really don’t care about any
of it.”
He smiled. “That’s my exact problem.
I just can’t visualise it actually happening. The change is going to be so
big.”
She put the finished pair of half
cuts onto a plate and poured herself a glass of milk from the fridge. “We knew
it would come one day. It’s only ironic it’s come now.”
“Now that some cousin we’ve never met
is about to take everything that should have belonged to us you mean?” he
asked. Molly didn’t answer. “You need to start asking yourself what you’ll say
to him when he comes to collect his prize.”
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