Trust Your Eyes Read Free Page A

York Times Book Review a few weeks back. I can always tell your style. The people all have really bignoggins and the tiny bodies, looks like their heads would make ’em fall over. And they all have these rounded edges. I love how you shade their skin tones and everything. How do you do that?”
    “Airbrush,” I said.
    “You do a lot of work for the Times ?”
    “Not as much as I used to. It’s a lot easier to run a file pic than hire someone to do an illustration from scratch. Papers and magazines are cutting back. I’m doing more for Web sites these days.”
    “You design those things? Web sites?”
    “No. I do artwork for them and hand it off to the Web site builders.”
    “I would have thought, doing stuff for magazines and newspapers in New York and Washington, you’d have to live there, but I guess these days, it doesn’t much matter.”
    “Anything you can’t scan and e-mail, you can FedEx,” I said. When I said nothing else, Harry opened the file on his desk and studied the papers inside.
    “Ray, I take it you’ve seen the will your father drew up,” he said.
    “Yes.”
    “He hadn’t updated it in a long time. Made a couple of changes after your mother died. The thing is, I ran into him one day. He was sitting there in a booth at Kelly’s having a coffee and he offered to buy me one. He was by himself, at a table by the window, staring out at the street, looking at the Standard but not really reading it. I’d see him in there every once in a while, like he just needed time alone, out of the house. Anyway, he waved me over and said he was thinking of amending it, his will, that is, that he might need to make some special provisions, but he never got around to it.”
    “I didn’t know that,” I said, “but I guess I’m not surprised. What with how things have been with my brother, I could see him wanting to give more to one than the other.”
    “I think, to be honest, if Adam had come in here wanting to make some changes, I might have tried talking him out of anything that would have favored one child over the other. I’d have told him, the best thing to do is treat all your kids the same. Otherwise, that’s going to lead to resentment after you’re gone. Of course, it still would’ve been his decision. But while this existing will is fairly straightforward, there are things you’re going to have to think about.”
    I was picturing my father, sitting in the diner, the rest of the booth unoccupied. He’d had plenty of time to himself in the house since Mom died, even if, technically speaking, he wasn’t alone. He didn’t have to leave the house for solitude. But I could understand his need to escape. Sometimes you needed to know that you were absolutely alone. You needed a change of scenery. It made me sad, thinking about it.
    “So I guess the way it is now, then,” I said, “is fifty-fifty. Once the estate is liquidated, half goes to me and half goes to my brother.”
    “Yes. Property, and investments.”
    “About a hundred thousand there,” I said. “What he and Mom had managed to scrape together for retirement. They’d saved for years. They never spent anything on themselves. He could have made a hundred grand last him till the day he died.” I caught myself. “If he’d lived another twenty or thirty years, I mean. And I gather there’s a life insurance policy that’s fairly small.”
    Harry Peyton nodded and leaned back in his chair, lacing his fingers at the back of his head. He sucked in some air between his teeth. “You’ll have to decide what to do about the house. You’ve every right to put it up for sale, split the proceeds with your brother. There’s no mortgage on the place, and I’m guessing you could get three, four hundred thou for it.”
    “About that,” I said. “There’s nearly sixteen acres.”
    “Which, if you got that, would leave each of you with about a quarter million, give or take. That’s not a bad chunk of change, all things considered.