Page 13 of Kill Your Darlings
She logged onto her computer to check her emails. Her brother had sent her a photograph of his Thanksgiving dinner, their
mom with a particular grin on her face that meant she wasn’t all that happy to be there. Wendy made a note to herself to book
a trip to Wyoming soon, maybe over Jason’s February break. Thinking of Jason, she clicked the button that showed recent browsing
history, but there was nothing suspicious. She opened up Word and checked to see if any files had been opened by someone other
than her. Even though she was prepared it was still a shock to see that several documents had been looked at by Jason. Two
were poems, both unfinished. One was called “A Murder of Sparrows” and the other “Too Much of Water,” both picked because
Jason, the boy detective, seemed to be investigating the drowning death of Alex Deighton. She looked at the poems again just
to see what he had read and imagined he was more bored by them than anything. “A Murder of Sparrows” was an attempt at a comic
interrogation of bird taxonomy, and “Too Much of Water” was actually about her father’s death when she was fifteen, but written
in a way that there was really no way Jason would ever have figured that out.
But the third document Jason had opened did concern her a little.
It was called “Money Stuff” and it was a list of assets and accounts that she’d put together over a year ago.
She’d only made it because Thom had no idea about how much money they had, where it was kept, or how to get to it.
She’d sent him the document after she’d written it, but he hadn’t seemed particularly interested.
She wondered sometimes if it was an innate failing of his, or if he felt guilt about the money.
Either way, money was simply something he had no interest in thinking about, although he didn’t seem to feel too bad about the enormous DVD library he’d amassed or the yearly trips to Europe or the single malt he drank.
Wendy opened up “Money Stuff” and looked at it.
It was a pretty rudimentary list. She hadn’t included account numbers, just the names of banks and institutions, and roughly how much was in each.
It was funny. They’d spent a lot of money since Wendy had inherited her first husband’s trust fund, but they seemed to have more now than they ever had before. Money made money.
She wondered if Jason understood the numbers he’d looked at.
Probably better than his father did, she thought.
It was a lot of money, mostly because she had been careful about spending it.
She and Thom were basically academics and for that reason neither of them wanted to be driving around in Italian sports cars or wearing designer clothes.
They had their house on the sea. They had traveled the world.
They’d donated huge sums to multiple charities.
Locally, they’d probably single-handedly kept both the New Essex Art Cinema and Mother Hen Cat Rescue in operation.
Most important, Wendy was able to make sure that her mother would never have to worry about money for the remainder of her life.
Her brother, also, although he was less inclined to take money from her unless it was for something related to his kids (she paid the fees for their sports clubs and contributed to their college funds).
Even now, after so many years, just knowing that she had access to money was an enor mous weight off her shoulders.
When she’d been young her parents had mostly tried to hide just how precarious their situation had been, but both she and her brother knew from a young age that they were poor.
She had a childhood habit, one she continued to this day, in which she lay in bed each morning and counted her worries, telling herself to worry about them quickly and get it over with for the day.
Her primary worry back then, besides her father and what he might do when he drank too much, was when the money would run out and what would happen then.
She’d never really shaken that feeling, and maybe that was the real reason she’d made a list of how much she and Thom had in the bank.
People like Thom, who had never really worried about money (even though he loved to talk about his down-and-out days as a video-store employee), were the type of people who would say how money wasn’t all that important.
But Wendy knew its importance, not in buying things but in making sure that you and your family were safe from the wolves.
After deleting the “Money Stuff” file and changing her password as well, Wendy shut down her computer and went to see what
Thom and Jason were up to. They were on either side of the couch in the TV room, both glassy-eyed (Thom from booze, Jason
from his grandmother’s pecan pie), staring blankly at the screen. Wendy sank down between them. Roger Moore was on screen,
wearing a safari suit, in some kind of jungle hideout. “James Bond marathon,” Thom said, and Wendy, tired suddenly from a
day of cooking and entertaining, stretched out to watch for a while, her head on Thom’s lap and her feet up against her son.