Home Safe by Elizabeth Berg Page A

human nature. She wanted whimsy and beauty and openness, she wanted a unique design that spoke to the people she and Dan were. She wanted many places to read, a stove with six burners and a griddle, oh, she had a million ideas, she actually had a folder marked “dream house” with ideas from magazines and ones she'd just made up.
    “But, Helen,” he'd said. “What if your roof was the sky? What if your view changed every day, every minute? What if you could be hunkered down below with a big fat novel and a quilt, while I fished for our dinner off the stern? If we were becalmed, we could take off our clothes and go swimming at night, and the phosphorescence would make it look like we were covered with stardust. I'm talking a big boat, Helen, where we'd have a galley with a dining banquette, and a chart room with a navigation table, and a stateroom big enough for a queen-size bed. And we wouldn't be on the boat all the time! We'd put in to ports of call and stay for as long as we wanted: Corsica. Tenerife. Lisbon. We could actually do that! And if you wanted to stay in a hotel sometimes, we could do that, too.”
    “But … what about Tessa?”
    “We'll come home a lot. And on her vacations, she could go places with us. Helen, think of it! We've worked hard for so many years, and now we can reap our reward. It wouldn't be forever. But before we check into the nursing home, let's do something that will give us such incredible memories. Let's go together around the world.”
    And she had said—oh, she remembers this now with such longing—she had said, “Wait. Isn't that a term for a sexual act, ‘go around the world’?” It was the looseness of the day, it was the wine, it was how handsome Dan looked at that moment, his hair mussed, his face colored by the sun. He'd stood up and said, “Let's make it one.” And then he'd taken her hand and led her inside.
    Now Steve says, “Why don't you come in to the office? We need to talk.”
    Helen pulls over, puts on her hazard lights. “What is it,” she says. Her voice is flat, nearly accusatory, and she regrets it. “Can you tell me what it is?” she asks, trying with some success to modulate herself.
    “You want me to tell you now?”
    “Yes. Tell me.”
    “I don't know if … All right, I will tell you now, but I want you to come in and see me, too. Will you do that?”
    “I can't today. I could tomorrow, though. Ten o'clock?”
    “That's fine. So … Look, I'm just sorry as hell to tell you this, Helen. Dan withdrew a large sum of money from this account a year ago.”
    “Well,” Helen says, “he did that sometimes. He would pull money out of there and put it in our checking account sometimes. As much as fifty thousand once, when we were redoing the kitchen.”
    “Yes, I saw that,” Steve says. “But this withdrawal was eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
    She sits frozen, pressing the receiver of the phone hard against her ear.
    “Helen? This is why I wanted you to come in. Are you all right?”
    “This is a mistake,” she manages.
    “It appears not to be.”
    “I'm coming down there right now,” Helen says, and Steve says he thinks that's best.
    She pulls back out onto the road and calls Midge. “I can't come,” she says. She is speaking oddly; it's as if her mouth won't open all the way.
    “What's wrong?” Midge says. “What happened?”
    When Helen tells her what the accountant said, Midge says, “Oh, honey. I'm sorry. Do you want me to come with you?”
    “No,” Helen says. “It's just a mistake. It has to be. He never said a word. It's a mistake. We'll go to the museum another day.”
    She snaps her phone shut, accelerates, then immediately slows down. What if she gets a ticket and has to pay some huge fine? What if she has to sell her house? What if Dan had another woman, another family, a gambling problem, he actually did gamble too much at one point in their marriage, that was part of the reason she went to the