The Canterbury Sisters by Kim Wright Page A

here or like America, where you have to work to get yourself into serious trouble. Down there, one thing is just smashed up against another. You could go from sanity to insanity within the course of a city block, from the school where my children wore their little blue uniforms to a street corner where a woman was trying to sell her baby. I don’t know why Allen went out that night, not exactly. But he was far across the city, somewhere near a bridge . . .”
    At the word “bridge” she falls silent and we walk a bit with no one talking. Steffi finally stops circling us like a border collie and pulls up breathless, ready to hear the end. We’ve come to a bridge , I think. Now something is going to have to go off of it.
    “I’m afraid I’ve left out a piece of the story,” Jean says. It seems to me she’s left out a rather large piece—like the actual story—but she goes on. “When businessmen were robbed, which was a common event, the bandits would take their wallets. Not just for the money or for the credit cards, but so they would have their identification, with their addresses. And then they would know where they lived with their families. Sometimes other things were in the wallets too, like pictures of the children, or the wife. One man was even foolish enough to have written down all the security codes to his house and put the paper in his wallet. That’s how they got that poor teenage girl. Her father had been robbed at gunpoint and within hours, while he was still down at the police station . . . even that quickly . . . even though it was still daylight when they came . . .”
    “Seriously,” says Becca sharply. She has sped up now, is walking slightly ahead of the clump, and she calls back to us over her shoulder. “I thought we agreed not to talk about the teenage girl.”
    “And so we won’t,” says Jean. “But my point is that back then, maybe ten or twelve years ago, if you had a man’s wallet, you had his life. Much like phones are today.” She looks at me apologetically as she says this, but I’ve already thought of everything that could happen. Already imagined whatever London thug swiped my phone happily going through my online banking accounts, draining one after the other, charging meth on my American Express. “And so Allen always said that no matter what happened, they would never get his wallet. He said that he would die before he gave up the wallet.”
    It’s a funny thing about this story , I think. Jean claims she is telling it as a tribute to her late husband, and she furthermore has made the grand pronouncement that she will start off our trip by giving us an image of the perfect man. But nothing she has said so far has given me any sort of image of Allen at all. I can only conclude that he was the sort of person who tried to do the right thing. A man who would probably still be alive if he’d followed his original impulse and left his family back in Houston. Yet, beyond that, he is strangely absent from his own story—a shadow, someone who comes and goes at all hours in a limo with darkened windows. Faceless, voiceless, and I suspect that even his children remember him mostly for the money that he left behind.
    “Two cars blocked off the bridge,” Jean is saying. “One on one side and one on the other. I got all this from Antonio. They roughed him up a bit, but let him live. He was one of them. Once they had the car stranded over the water—and I knew that bridge, you know. I drove over it every day on my way to the dump. The water was so polluted, so full of . . . of things floating down the river. But that’s where they stopped them and pulled Allen from the car. He gave them all his money, of course. He wouldn’t have been that foolish. Antonio said he dropped it at their feet and said, ‘Take everything. Just leave me in peace.’ But when they reached for his wallet—”
    “He threw it over the railing into the water,” Becca says. “And they shot