Keller in Des Moines Page 4

  There was a way to bid online in real time, during the actual floor auction, and he’d planned on doing so but always seemed to be at work during their midweek auctions. Then a few months ago he’d had the day off—he and Donny had the whole week off, actually, although they’d have preferred it otherwise. And he remembered the Peachpit sale, and logged on and went through what you had to go through to bid, and he found the whole process impossibly nerve-wracking. An auction was anxiety-ridden anyway, but when you showed up in person you could at least see what was going on, and know that the guy with the gavel could see you in return. Online, well, he supposed a person could get the hang of it, but he hadn’t, and wasn’t inclined to try again.

  Then, a couple of weeks ago, Julia and Jenny walked into his upstairs office—Daddy’s Stamp Room—to find him shaking his head over the new Peachpit catalog. Julia asked what was the matter.

  “Oh, this,” he said, tapping the catalog. “There are some lots I’d like to buy.”

  “So?

  “Well, the sale’s in New York.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Daddy ’tamps,” said Jenny.

  “Yes, Daddy’s stamps,” Keller said, and picked up his daughter and set her on his lap. “See?” he said, pointing at a picture in the catalog, a German Colonial issue from Kiauchau showing the Kaiser’s yacht, Hohenzollern. “Kiauchau,” he told Jenny, “was an area of two hundred square miles in southeast China. The Germans grabbed it in 1897, and then made arrangements to lease it from China. I don’t imagine the Chinese had a lot of choice in the matter. Isn’t that a pretty stamp?”

  “Pity ’tamp,” Jenny said, and there the matter lay.

  Until the phone rang two days later. It was Dot, calling from Sedona, and the first thing she did was apologize for calling at all.

  “I told myself I’d just call to see how you’re doing,” she said, “and to find out the latest cute thing Jenny said, but you know something, Keller? I’m too damn old to start fooling myself.”

  Dot still called him Keller. And that figured, because that’s who she was calling to talk to. Not Nick Edwards, who fixed houses, but Keller. Who, in a manner of speaking, fixed people.

  “The last thing I should be doing,” she went on, “is calling you. There’s two reasons why this is a mistake. First of all, you’re not in the business anymore. I dragged you back in once, that business in Dallas, and it wasn’t your fault that it didn’t go off perfectly. But it wasn’t what you really wanted, and we both agreed it was what the British call a one-off.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “One time only, I think. What’s the difference what it means? You went to Dallas, you came back from Dallas, end of story.”

  But if it was the end of the story, what was this? A sequel?

  “That’s one reason,” she said. “There’s another.”

  “Oh?”

  “Three words,” she said. “New. York. City.”

  “Oh.”

  “What am I even thinking, Keller, calling you when I’ve got a job in your old hometown? I didn’t throw New York jobs your way when you lived there, because you lived there.”

  “I worked a couple of New York assignments.”

  “Just a couple, and they weren’t exactly what you’d call problem-free. But at least you could walk around the city without wearing a mask. Now it’s the one place in the world where it’s not safe for you to be you, where even a waitress in a coffee shop can take a second look at you and reach for a telephone, and here I am calling you with a New York assignment, and that’s as far as this is going, because I’m hanging up.”

  “Wait a minute,” Keller said.

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