“Mmmm-hmmm.” She sighed.
Chapter 74
CINDY’S PHONE CALL woke me up out of a deep sleep.
“Sorry,” she said. “I know it’s early, but I wanted to catch you before you left the house. Can you have coffee with Richie and me?”
I said, “Sure,” agreed to the time and place. I lay in bed with Martha for twenty more minutes, first savagely missing Joe, then being flooded by thoughts of all the relationships I’d trashed in the previous twenty-four hours.
I supposed my asking Rich if he had cheated on Cindy had prompted Cindy’s call and the breakfast meeting. I owed apologies to them both.
I met Rich and Cindy at Old Jerusalem Café, a coffeehouse on Irving and Fourteenth that had a wide assortment of coffees and teas and delicious Mediterranean pastries. I found Mr. Conklin and the future Mrs. Conklin sitting at a table waiting for me.
I said, “Hi,” slid into the seat across from them, ordered Turkish coffee, and braced myself for a confrontation. I hoped I could handle it without snapping.
Rich brushed his hair out of his eyes with his fingers and said, “Cindy told me. About Joe.”
I nodded miserably, looked down.
“You’ll work it out,” he said. “You will.”
“I’m sorry about what I said, Rich.”
“Yeah. It’s okay. Cindy’s got something for us.”
I glanced up, wondering what he meant.
“Lookit,” Cindy said.
She took her iPad out of her handbag, began to type. My coffee came and I sugared it heavily and then followed up the sugar with a triple dose of cream.
Cindy turned the tablet toward me. “It’s numerology,” she said. She showed me this equation.
1 0 4 = 5
“In numerology, you add the numbers together. One plus zero is one. One plus four equals five.”
“Okay.”
“Now,” Cindy said, “let’s look at six one three.”
She typed:
6 1 3 = 10 = 1
“I get it,” I said. “Six and one is seven, and three makes ten.”
“Right. Then you reduce the ten by adding one and zero together. That equals one.”
“Got it.”
Cindy was typing numbers. She said, “Now add the two reduced numbers together.”
5 + 1 = 6
I waited for drums to roll. Cymbals to clash.
“What does six mean?”