Page 127 of Joey

“Who were the checks made out to?” Wald asks.

“Us,” I say.

“You?” Brooke asks.

“Yeah. It was for us.”

“Was this a one-time thing? Or—”

“No,” I say, cutting Huck off. “No. Every month.”

“What?” all three of them say together.

Then Wald—“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Huck asks. “People write you twenty billion dollars in checks every month and you put that in your little bank account for safekeeping, and you don’t even know why?”

“Didn’t you ask Johnny?” Wald asks.

“Of course I asked him. He doesn’t know.”

“How could he not know?” Brooke asks. “This makes no sense.”

“It was something my father and uncle set up, I think. Or maybe my grandfather and great-uncle. Or hell, their grandfathers. I don’t really know. He doesn’t know. My uncle died when I was eleven and my father died when I was thirty-one. And those fuckers took it to their grave. Johnny’s spent the last five years searching through documents up in our building trying to find answers and meanwhile, those assholes in the white masks keep showing up every month to hand us checks. And meanwhile meanwhile, they are getting sick of this shit, you guys. They are getting pissed off. I don’t fucking blame them. I want to end this to. But something tells me that Michael Conner is about to blow this shit up in a very big, bad way and I have no idea how to stop it.”

“Stop taking the money!” Huck yells. “For fuck’s sake, Joey. Just tell Johnny to stop taking the money.”

“Don’t you think that if it was that simple, he’d have done that by now?”

“Did he try?”

And this… this is the secret that will ultimately bind us.

If I choose to reveal it.

This one last detail, this one last revelation, this one last disclosure will alter my relationship with these three people forever. Because once they know this about me, they will never be able to unknow it.

I choose to tell it. “He did try. He told me he tried.”

“And what happened?”

“With him? I dunno. He didn’t tell me that part. Jesse told him that too. Jesse said just… stop taking the money. And Johnny looked at me, and I looked at him, and we knew.”

“Knew what?” Brooke says.

“I don’t know what he knew. I just knew he did.”

“You’re not making any fucking sense,” Wald says.

“Joey,” Huck says. “Stop fucking around and tell us what’s going on!”

He doesn’t say ‘or.’ He doesn’t. But I hear it at the end of that sentence.

Tell us… or we will leave you. Tell us… or we will stop being loyal. Tell us… or this is all over.

So I take a deep breath and say, “I saw something once. Twice, actually, now that I think about it. Once when I was very small. Like three years old. And once when I was seventeen. Forget about what happened when I was three. I don’t even know if I remember it correctly. But right before I left for college, right before I met you guys, I was up on my father’s floor in our building. In the secret stairwell, because… well, that’s a long story. But I saw something and didn’t tell anyone about it because I was leaving for college the next day, and it was… ugly, and made me afraid, and my father was hurt, and I didn’t understand it so I just…” I swallow hard. “I just… didn’t tell anyone. I made myself forget. But that night, when Johnny looked at me, and I looked at him, I knew he knew why we could not stop taking the money.”