Unbelievable Honesty

Chugging along on autopilot, using the routine to help me relax and take the edge off my anxiety, I made us a nice meal, a simple roast chicken and salad. We were eating less Mex: I think we were working it out of our system. Eating different stuff helped us understand we had moved on.

The weather was warming so we ate outside the cabin, in sight of the lake, mountains behind us; enough sun to keep off the chill but the freshest spring air to breath life from.

‘How’s baby feeling, babe? I asked.

‘Good. Happy. Moving now.’

‘Right now?

‘Yeah, but not like you’d feel it, not that much.’

‘We’re going to be going soon, you’re ready for that, yes?’

‘Sure I am, Angie said.’

‘Because it’s a big break. I mean we’re talking about living in a new country, a different continent.’

‘Sure, Micky, I get the idea. Big bird in sky carry Angie in belly.’

‘Funny you should say that.’

‘It is?’

‘It is. Because I thought, for such a big move, it might be better if the move happened nice and slow. Give us time to get used to the change.

‘It’s a couple of months, nearly three since we left Nogales, Micky. How slow were you thinking?’

‘That’s what I thought. We’ve taken it slow so far. So here’s what I thought. Let me tell you straight. It isn’t just an idea—I bought the tickets. We’re sailing.’

‘On a boat?’

‘On a ship. A liner. A huge, luxurious passenger liner. The Queen Mary.’

‘Doesn’t that cost a lot of money, Micky?’

I held my hands up.

‘It costs a lot of money. Heaps. We’re going in a first class suite—like a bedroom, a big one, and a sitting room. Plenty of space to hang out if you don’t want to be wandering round the shops and the restaurants and stuff. I mean we aren’t going to be crawling round the bars. I don’t like booze and you’re pregnant.’

Angie’s brow was creased. Only slightly but I could see she was bothered. Her reasoning started the way I’d guessed it might.

‘Baking Mex bread, Micky. You’ve been baking bread and pizza and folding burritos and frying chimichangas, yeah? It’s honest work, you work long hours, but it don’t pay for no suites on no high class cruise liners, Micky. So what does? Where does that kind of money come from?’

A last attempt to save her from the truth while using only the truth. Sounded like a riddle. I can’t do riddles.

‘The tool chest.’

‘Yeah, well I kind of figured there was something going on with the tool chest, you look at it a lot you know. But you know what I want—what I want to know. Tell me how it is there’s money in the tool chest, Micky.’

I was hurting. I was in the one place I’d tried to avoid being. I thought she was happy to leave it to me—play the old fashioned woman and leave the decisions to me. Stupid. Or maybe that was right, but I’d missed something. Her part was to leave it to me, so my part was to make the decision—and explain it, loud and clear.

‘Would it be enough to say ‘trust me,’ and promise you I didn’t break a single law?’

‘No it wouldn’t.’

I scrunched up my face and breathed deep.

‘OK babe. I love you and I’m telling you I’ve never lied to you, OK? You understand that?’

She nodded. ‘I guess so, not that I ever heard and knew about.’

‘So I’m not about to start now. I’m going to tell you a couple of things and they’re both true. You don’t have to believe me, that’s up to you, but on my life, they’re both true. Here’s the first thing. You remember when you came back from the clinic and my trailer was wrecked, with the big hole in the roof, and I told you it was storm damage. That was true. Just like everything else I ever told you. But the damage was right in the middle of the storm and a tool chest, not that one, another bent up one, dropped out of the sky into my trailer. It had money in it. A lot of money.’

‘How much? How much money did the fairy godmother leave, Micky?’

‘I haven’t counted it. Enough not to care. Millions. Millions of dollars. That’s the first thing. Millions of dollars fell out of the sky into my trailer. For me. For us. Now here’s the second thing.’

‘This part is the hard to believe part right? After the easy part in the fairy story?’

‘Maybe it is. Because I can see you believing one part but not the other, I can see you believing neither, but believing both could be hard if you didn’t have any faith in me. Hard even if you do. But both is what you have to believe, because both parts true is the truth.’

‘You say believe and truth again Micky, I’m going to slap you upside the head.’

‘That’s a shame, because here they come again. The other thing I need to tell you is that you can always, always believe me, because truth is more important to me than anything. Maybe more important than you, more important than Lucia…’

‘The Chilean kid.’

‘Sure. Truth is more important than all that, more than the money. Truth is so important to me that you can believe everything I say. And that doesn’t sound such a biggy, except I just told you how I got the money. So that’s the truth. Millions of dollars fell out of the sky and I always tell the truth. And that’s why we’re sailing, because I hope I can slide nice and quiet into England with nearly a cubic metre of money, because if the customs people say ‘what have you got in this bag sir, I’ll have to say clothes, a toilet bag and money, and then they’ll open the bag and I’ll have to answer a lot of questions and then who knows what will happen because they won’t believe the answers because they don’t love me and believe me.’

‘And I do?’

‘That’s what you have to decide. Because I don’t have a simpler or a better story. That one is true so that’s the only one I have to tell you. You believe me or you don’t.’

‘You put me in a position, Micky.’

‘I guess.’

‘You sure did. ‘Cos you make out it’s all about trust and faith. Course, if you’re not telling the truth and you got a pile of money because you’ve been running drugs and this story is the heap of cockamamie nonsense you’ll admit it sounds like..’

‘It isn’t, but sure I know what it sounds like.’

‘Well if it is a crock, and you look deep into my baby blues and tell me all I have to do is believe ‘cos I love you, then I do, then what does that make me?’

‘A gullible horse’s ass, is I guess one way you could look.’

‘Exactly, Micky. On the button. And a girl doesn’t like to look like a horse’s ass. It ain’t the image du jour.’

‘So the other way is to believe, because you only look stupid if I’m not telling the truth. Remember, this is just between us. You don’t look one thing or the other for believing the story in anyone else’s eyes because we’re the only ones get to hear the story.

‘Great, so “Angie’s a horse’s ass” is a little secret that only Micky and Angie know. I feel a lot better.’

‘I don’t know it. You’re on your own. Because I know I told the truth. Two of us know the story, I know it’s true. You do too and we’re happy. You don’t and we have a problem.’

‘I have a problem with the story, Micky. You’ll admit you were maybe expecting that a little, but I’ll give it some time, let it percolate through a little, see if it starts to look less like something you use to make the roses grow nice. I guess I can stop worrying about the money running out, maybe see a hairdresser, get a colour on, get a manicure.’

‘We can run to that.’