“Like when you went to UCLA?”
A sudden sharp vision of Dr. Meyers floated in front of her. “No.”
Madeline cocked her head to the side. “Are you okay, Mom?”
Without realizing it, Elizabeth had covered her face with her hands. “I’m just tired, bunny,” she said as the words slipped out between her fingers.
Madeline laid down her fork and studied her mother’s stricken posture. “Did something happen, Mom?” she asked. “At work?”
From behind her fingers, Elizabeth considered her young daughter’s question.
“Are we poor?” Madeline asked, as if that question naturally followed the former.
Elizabeth took her hands away. “What makes you say that, honey?”
“Tommy Dixon says we’re poor.”
“Who’s Tommy Dixon?” she asked sharply.
“A boy at school.”
“What else did this Tommy Dixon—”
“Was Dad poor?”
Elizabeth flinched.
* * *
—
The answer to Mad’s question lay in one of the boxes she and Frask had stolen from Hastings. At the very bottom of box number three lay an accordion folder labeled “Rowing.” When she first spied it, Elizabeth naturally assumed it would be filled with newspaper clippings recording the glorious wins of his Cambridge boat. But no; it was stuffed with Calvin’s post-Cambridge employment offers.
She’d skimmed the offers jealously—chairs at major universities, directorships at pharmaceutical companies, major stakes in privately held concerns. She’d sifted through the stack until she found the Hastings offer. There it was: the promise of a private lab—although all the other places had guaranteed that, too. The only thing that made the Hastings offer stand out from the others? A salary so low it was insulting. She glanced down at the signature. Donatti.
As she jammed the letters back in, she wondered why he’d even labeled this folder “Rowing”—there wasn’t anything rowing-like about it. Until she noticed two quick penciled notations at the top of each offer: distance to a rowing club and area precipitation. She returned to the Hastings offer letter—yes, the computations were there, too. But there was one other thing: a big, thick circle drawn around the return address.
Commons, California.
* * *
—
“If Dad was famous, then he must have been rich, right?” Mad said, twirling her spaghetti around her fork.
“No, honey. Not all famous people are rich.”
“Why not? Did they mess up?”
She thought back to the offers. Calvin had accepted the lowest one. Who does that?
“Tommy Dixon says it’s easy to get rich. You paint rocks yellow, then say it’s gold.”
“Tommy Dixon is what we call a flimflam man,” Elizabeth said. “Someone who schemes to get what they want through illegal means.” Like Donatti, she thought, her jaw locking in place.
She thought back to another folder she’d found in Calvin’s boxes, this one full of letters from people just like Tommy Dixon—wackos, get-rich-quick investors—but also a wide assortment of fake family members, each of whom desperately wanted Calvin’s help: a half sister, a long-lost uncle, a sad mother, a cousin twice removed.
She’d skimmed the fake family letters quickly, surprised at how similar they were. Each claimed a biological connection, each provided a memory from an age he wouldn’t be able to remember, each wanted money. The only exception was Sad Mother. While she, too, claimed a biological connection, instead of asking for money, she insisted she wanted to give it. To help your research, she claimed. Sad Mother had written to Calvin at least five times, imploring him to respond. It was really rather heartless, Elizabeth thought, the way Sad Mother persisted. Even Long-Lost Uncle had called it quits after two. They told me you were dead, Sad Mother had written over and over again. Really? Then why had she, like all the others, only written to Calvin after he’d become famous? Elizabeth assumed her ploy was to hook him, then steal his research. And why did she think this? Because it had just happened to her.
* * *
—
“I don’t get it,” Mad said, shoving a mushroom to the side of her plate. “If you’re smart and you work hard, doesn’t that mean you make more money?”
“Not always. Still, I’m sure your dad could have earned more money,” Elizabeth said. “It’s just that he made a different choice. Money isn’t everything.”
Mad looked back, dubious.