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The last time Caryn called Ford and got a response instead of dead ringing, Filbrick didn’t bother to come over and talk. He was manning the shop. Caryn’s raspy voice filtered through the worn wood of the walls, asking winding questions that, by the briefness of the pauses, beget only one-word answers.
Filbrick leaned back towards the door to their living quarters and told Caryn to ask Ford when Filbrick would get a cent of that damn grant money. Caryn ignored him. When the call finished and Caryn came out to the front with pursed lips, he didn’t ask what they had spoken about.
The next time Caryn called, Ford didn’t pick up for his mother. He didn’t pick up the next time, or the next, or the next. Caryn kept trying. Filbrick told her that if Ford wanted to kick up a fuss, let him, and don’t feed it by playing along. They had a row about that.
It took another six weeks until someone from Gravity Falls bothered to call them about a missing person’s case.
Caryn sputtered her way through habitual lies, insisting that Stanford was fine, he had to be fine, now why would you scare a mother like that, unable to help herself in her shock until Filbrick took the phone from her hand and started answering instead. The voice on the other side asked if they had any contact with Stanford, if there had been any hints in conversations months before that Stanford was unstable, if he was perhaps unenthused with life.
Filbrick told him in no uncertain terms that Stanford was a Pines, and that he was not one to give up. He thought of the furious silence behind a bedroom door for weeks, the pile of letters from colleges that sat scattered in the living room for too long, and amended only to himself that Stanford was not one to give up in most circumstances. Saying it aloud would do nothing.
The officer did not care much about what a Pines did and didn’t do. He did not seem to care about the case at all aside from perfunctory interest.
Filbrick said, “Tell me something useful then: what’s been done with his effects?”
Caryn’s eyes narrowed dangerously. Filbrick did not concern himself with what she thought he was saying; liar that she was, she couldn’t be trusted to construe what others meant when they spoke.
“There are no effects, Mister Pines,” the officer drawled. “The whole house burned. Including everything inside.”
By his tone, he thought Filbrick was a damn fool for even asking.
“Then I don’t have anything to say to you,” Filbrick said, and hung up the phone.
“Of all questions—” Caryn snapped.
“The ass didn’t know a thing more than us,” he said. “Don’t see why we should humor him.”
And Caryn couldn’t argue the truth of that. She tried anyway. It was a distraction.
Filbrick went back to the shop, He rearranged shelves, polished worn items that were showing their age just a little too much. Every single thing in the shop had passed through at least one set of hands, had spent time sheltered in at least one home. Multiple, maybe. He had people coming in selling old family jewelry for quick cash every month, desperation outstripping sentimentality. He always got good money out of those sorts.
He picked up a snow globe, turning it in his hands. It was old-fashioned, one of the pieces he’d sell as a ‘curiosity’ to some easily-amused woman with a pocketful of cash to spend on the most useless thing she could find. There was a small cottage on a snowy hill inside, with windows painted as though lights were on.
Stanford had never made the slightest insinuation they should visit. Even if he had, Filbrick would not have stood for the price for a plane ride or the gas cost to drive. Why Stanford wanted to run off to the other side of the country eluded him in the first place.
He had no idea what Stanford’s house looked like. Only that it was now a scorched foundation out somewhere in Hickland, Oregon. Out of three children, Sherman’s house was the only one he had ever stepped foot in, and it looked as though it would stay that way.
He set the globe down and went to run the numbers on the cash register.
Some time after that, Filbrick found a duffel bag in their living room.
He had almost walked right past it, determined to make his coffee, and only saw that it was tucked in between the couch and the coffee table from the peripheral of his vision. In the weak light of dawn filtering through the window, it looked like nothing more than a black lump.
Filbrick regarded the shape with the same cool disinterest he presented to the rest of the world. His first thought was that Sherman had come by to drop something off, but the boy always announced he was coming over well ahead of time. Stanford was as good as dead even if the official word was still that he was missing, and wouldn’t have come to give them anything anyhow, miser that he was.
His thoughts trended dangerously towards his last son. But Stanley had never shown hide nor hair of himself since Filbrick had brought the lay of the land down on him, and he had no reason to do so now. If the boy wasn’t a fool, he would never bother coming back.
Filbrick never changed his mind. He refused to change his mind about that.
A burglar, then. A weak excuse of a burglar, to either forget his bag after stealing from them or to break in to leave it instead.
Standing there and staring at the damn thing wasn’t doing any good, so Filbrick hauled it onto the coffee table to take a better look. On the side of the bag there was, of all things, some sort of green cloth cut-out of the dollar symbol glued on. Like something out of the funnies the boys had all once begged to read after Filbrick was done with the newspaper. He found one on the other side as well.
On the top of the duffel bag was a note stuck on with a safety pin.
As he unpinned it, Caryn came into the room as well, her hair done up and her make-up half-applied. She was looking down at her hands, shaking out a marlboro from its box, absentmindedly flipping the light on as she walked. She stopped at the sight of him in the living room instead of the kitchen.
“Where’d you get that thing?”
He ignored her, unfolding the white printer paper note.
OLD MAN, it addressed in printed type. GOT THE DAMN MONEY YOU WANTED. YOU WON’T BE SEEING ME ANYWAY. I HAVE BETTER PLACES TO BE.
DON’T BOTHER SPENDING A CENT OF IT. IT’S ALL STOLEN. ONE PURCHASE AND THEY’LL HAVE YOU THROWN INTO A CELL BLOCK BEFORE YOU CAN BLINK. ASK ME HOW I KNOW!
-STAN
And that was it. Filbrick turned the note over in his hand and found nothing else.
He turned to his wife. “Did you know about this?”
It wasn’t hard for her to read the note when he turned it to her; the type was huge and blocky. Like the hand-written notes Stanley had once left on the dining table or the counter in the shop on his days to work.
Caryn looked at him for a long moment, rolling her cigarette between her fingers. Her fake-gold hoops glinted in the pale yellow light of the living room, dust motes circling around her. When she spoke, it was with the sweetest, most confident tone she had, the one she used on callers who paid hand-over-fist to hear that they’d make up with their wife, or that their mother would pull through the surgery, or that their son was happy up in heaven.
“‘Course I didn’t, Fil. I haven’t heard a word from him in years.”
“I can’t spend a bit of it?”
Her mouth curled into a scarlet smile. “Of course you can.”
That was what he deserved, marrying a liar. The bag of useless money was what he deserved as well.
Pines men did not allow emotion to overtake them. Filbrick looked at the duffel bag and let himself laugh. The sound lurched out of him jaggedly, his mouth unused to the motions. It was better than any other noise he might’ve made.
“He got one over me,” he said aloud. He wasn’t talking to Caryn. “He went and got one over me, the damn knucklehead.”
“Filbrick,” Caryn said sharply.
Filbrick wasn’t listening. He picked up the duffel bag, hauled it over his shoulder, and brought it to the storage-space that had once housed two boys for seventeen years. It was a deathly quiet room nowadays. Caryn didn’t follow. He stuck the duffel bag on the lower bunk bed.
Unzipping the top of it, he took a single hundred dollar bill. It was one of many. There couldn’t be a million dollars in there, but it might’ve come close.
The room was small. There were dust motes floating freely here, too. Had it always been so small? It seemed impossible to imagine two teenagers squeezing into this space, fitting in between the desk and the bed and dresser, but they must’ve figured it out before there was only the one. There were more things in here than there had been once, plenty of items not yet sold in the shop crammed onto whatever space there was, but there would’ve been things to stuff the room with when it was occupied as well.
Filbrick never had any reason to come in here for long periods of time. Not before, not after. If either boy was in need of talking to, they’d do it in Filbrick’s space, not theirs. He looked around at the furniture, all exactly as they had been, nicks and splinters and ink-marks included, and wondered if he shouldn’t have emptied it right after it was abandoned. He had thought about it. There had never been any follow-through.
Somewhere in this room, perhaps in the dresser, perhaps in the desk drawers, perhaps behind a dubiously-antique vase, there was a pair of scuffed red boxing gloves. Filbrick wasn’t going to look for it.
There wouldn’t be any follow-through now. He left the furniture as it was, as it always had been.
At some point the hundred dollar bill began to crumple in his grip. He loosened his hold and smoothed it out with the edge of the desk. There was nothing Filbrick hated more than old, crumpled bills. It didn’t look respectable. They were the only kind of bills a pawn-shop tended to get.
He went back downstairs, down to the front of the shop. At some point Caryn followed after him, cigarette still in between her fingers. She didn’t say anything.
She just watched with a furrowed brow as he opened the cash register and slipped the bill into the drawer in such a way that the edge of it stuck out when the drawer was opened, but the denomination of the bill was still hidden. Meaningless to anyone else, but obvious to the both of them. A reminder.
Caryn did not ask him why. Filbrick didn’t tell her. That was how their marriage survived.
When Caryn started meeting cousins that popped out of the woodwork, he said nothing, never forcing her to lie like he knew she would have to. On the day after one of those visits, he said, “He’s doin’ alright?”
“Better than you could’ve ever damn well hoped,” Caryn said. “Better than you can ever figure.”
Maybe she was lying. Maybe she was telling the truth. Years of marriage and there was still that needle of uncertainty. The bills were suggestive of the truth, at least.
“Good.”
He said nothing more.
One of his sons had made his fortune and had paid him back for his care and keeping. One of his sons was dead and ash hundreds of miles from any family. Filbrick did not allow himself to be surprised by which was which. He did not allow himself to regret. He hadn’t for a long while before this, and he wouldn't after.
Pines men always kept their wits about them. One had done so, one had not. That was all there was to it.
The hundred dollar bill stayed in the cash register for years until Filbrick closed the shop.