Chump Change by G. M. Ford Page A

was also just the way I liked it. “Guess who came to visit me last night,” I said.
    “Who?”
    I told her the story.
    “Poor kid,” she said when I’d finished. “Taking a life is a scarring experience.”
    I wanted to say especially for the dead guy , but I kept my mouth shut.
    At which point, mercifully, the waiter showed up with the food, and the conversation took a backseat to serious grazing. I make it a point to slow down when eating with Rachel, who, by anyone’s standards, is a very deliberate eater. I’m just the opposite. I can inhale a burger and fries, pickle and all, before she’s through playing with the napkin, so, in an effort to be more genteel, I take little “come up for air” breaks between bites.
    “Did he ever tell you how much?” she asked, out of the blue.
    “He who?”
    “Gordy. Did he ever tell you how much he won in the lottery?”
    “Not that I recall.”
    “Must be a matter of public record,” she said after a few more bites.
    “Must be,” I agreed, and went back to my lamb burger.
    She rearranged her lunch with a fork.
    “Aren’t you curious?” she asked after a bit.
    “No,” I lied.
    “Yes you are.”
    I made my appalled face. “How can you tell me what I do and don’t feel?”
    “I’m a professional,” she said around a bite of falafel. “Your pathetic dissemblings don’t fool me for a minute.” She smiled and blew me a kiss.
    “How’s the falafel?” I segued.
    “It’s the money thing, isn’t it?”
    “What money thing?”
    “The guilt you feel about the money you inherited from your father.”
    “Who says I feel guilty?”
    “ You do.” She waved her fork. “Every time you overtip, you make a joke about inherited money. Every time somebody new sees your house, you go through that song and dance about only living in half the downstairs, and how you do your own laundry.”
    She made a rude noise with her lips.
    “I didn’t realize I was quite so transparent.”
    She dipped a triangular piece of flatbread into the baba ghanoush. I watched in silence as she chewed four hundred times and then swallowed.
    “Nobody realizes,” she said, after a sip of wine. “Everybody believes they can see through other people, but nobody can see through them. It’s what gives us the courage to leave the house in the morning.”
    “Will you be invoicing me for this?” I inquired.
    “Don’t get mad, Leo. It’s just the way it is.”

     
    Carl was thrilled to see me.
    “What the fuck do you want?” he growled as I walked in the door.
    “What do you know about the lottery?” I asked.
    “I never fucking win.”
    “Seriously.”
    He rolled his wheelchair back from the keyboard and slowly turned in my direction. Carl Cradduck had once been one of America’s most prominent battlefield photographers. Twice nominated for the Pulitzer. His work had appeared in Time , Newsweek , Life , and every other magazine I could think of. Came through the jungles of Vietnam without a scratch and was at the very top of his game when a random piece of Bosnian shrapnel severed his spine in September of 1993.
    His shirt was buttoned wrong, and it looked like he hadn’t washed his face in a week, but other than that, he looked like he’d always looked. Like he was eroding, right before your very eyes.
    Paralyzed from the hips down and relegated to a wheelchair, Carl had parlayed his photographic expertise into a highly successful surveillance business. For the better part of two decades Carl did all of my peeper work for me. You wanted pictures of Melvin and the secretary doing the horizontal bop in a downtown hotel, Carl would wire up the room and provide the glossies.
    But, you know . . . times change. No-fault divorce made an even bigger dent in the surveillance business than it had in the private eye trade. While I was willing to work for nearly anybody, Carl had always hated corporations and refused to work the industrial espionage side of the street, and so, when the