Standard Deviation: ‘The best feel-good novel around’ Daily Mail. Katherine Heiny
bad in a refrigerator, and even daylight saving time. How could you not know about daylight saving time and live on your own? What were her parents thinking? But for all that, she was a pretty good secretary—an extremely fast typist and she never ran out of cheerful, friendly energy. (Graham’s previous secretary had been a woman in her fifties who sighed heavily, like a dog or a teenager, whenever he asked her to do anything.)
“What?” he asked now.
“I’ve locked myself out of my apartment!” Olivia said. “Just as the door clicked shut behind me this morning, I thought, Wait!—wait! And sure enough, I’d left the keys sitting on the kitchen counter.”
Graham recognized that feeling. “Call your roommate,” he said. He knew Olivia had a roommate. It was the only reason he could, in good conscience, stand to let her go home at night.
“She’s in Kentucky visiting her parents,” Olivia said.
“What about your neighbors?”
“What about them?”
“Do any of them have a key?”
She looked puzzled. “Why would I give a key to my neighbors?”
“In case you lock yourself out.”
“Oh! I see what you mean. But keys are expensive to make—like twenty-five dollars just for the one for the dead bolt.”
This was another thing about Olivia—how she and her roommate seemed to live on no money at all. Although she brought a giant Starbucks Frappuccino to work every single day, so Graham suspected it was not lack of funds but how those funds were spent.
“What about the super of your building?”
“Luis, you mean?”
“If that’s your super’s name, then yes.”
“But I don’t have his phone number,” Olivia said, “and he hardly ever answers when we knock on the door.”
“Well, then I guess you’re going to have to call a locksmith,” Graham said gently.
Olivia’s eyes got very wide, and she nodded gravely.
She went back to her desk and Graham could hear her pressing buttons on her phone and an instant later she said, “You won’t believe this! I locked myself out of my apartment!” and then she had basically the same conversation she’d just had with Graham. “No … She’s in Kentucky!? … No … No …”
She hung up and dialed another number. “You won’t believe this! I locked myself out of my apartment!”
Graham sighed and got up to close the door to his office. He supposed that when Olivia had called all her friends, she would get around to calling a locksmith. He could still hear the beginning of every call, even through the door, with Olivia squawking the word believe like a pterodactyl.
Almost as soon as he returned to his desk, Olivia buzzed him on the intercom. “Phone call for you on line one,” she said. “Esp—Els—Elsp—”
“Elspeth?” Graham said. “Elspeth Osbourne?” (Like he knew more than one.)
“Yes,” Olivia said. “Can I put her through?”
“Go ahead,” Graham said.
Elspeth had never called him at work before. Well, not in ten years, at least. Imagine: it had been over a decade since he had spoken by phone to a woman he had once married. People were not meant to live like this, he sometimes thought. It was too confusing. He lifted the receiver and punched the button.
“Graham Cavanaugh,” he said, figuring that it was best to start out formally.
“Hello, Graham,” Elspeth said crisply, causing Graham to have an unexpectedly vivid image of her. Audra and every other woman he knew tilted their heads slightly when they answered the phone, so they could slide their handsets under their hair. But Elspeth always wore her hair pulled back in a French twist. She answered the phone without any nonsense. He could visualize the rest of her, too: her perfect posture, the silk blouses she favored, the narrowness of her shoulders, the way she always sat with her feet tucked slightly under her chair because she believed that crossing one’s legs caused varicose veins. (“It does?” Audra had said in a horrified voice when Graham had told her this years ago. She’d lost nearly a whole night of sleep worrying about it before deciding it was an old wives’ tale, like that thing about leaning on your elbows making them ugly.)
“Hello, Elspeth.”
They sounded like characters from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Graham thought. Won’t you be my neighbor? Won’t you please?
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Elspeth said, “but—”
“It’s no bother,” Graham said, interrupting without meaning to.
Elspeth paused for a moment. She didn’t like to be interrupted. “I’m calling because my great-aunt Mary died—”
“I remember Aunt Mary,” Graham said, interrupting again. He seemed to have forgotten how to talk to Elspeth. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yes, well, this is slightly awkward,” Elspeth said, “but Aunt Mary left us a joint bequest. She hadn’t updated her will. She had quite advanced dementia for many years.”
The implication was clear: only someone with advanced dementia would leave anything to Graham, after what he’d done to Elspeth. But Graham decided to ignore that.
“I see,” he said.
“So,” Elspeth said. “I was wondering if you might be able to meet me at the estate lawyer’s office so we can both sign for the bequest.”
“Certainly,” Graham said. “When?”
“How about tomorrow?”
She gave him the address and he wrote it down and they agreed on three o’clock and it was just like a normal phone call really. Almost.
Elspeth was waiting in the lobby of the estate lawyer’s building when Graham arrived. Her ash-blond hair was pulled back neatly, and she wore a tightly belted pale pink trench coat over a matching pink turtleneck and white wool pants. She was still Elspeth, still absolutely immaculate.
“Hello, Graham,” she said. “I’m sorry to put you to so much trouble.”
“It’s no problem.”
They took the elevator up to the lawyer’s office and signed together for the bequest, which turned out to be a small marble statue of a cat. Graham recognized it instantly—it had arched its marble back on a shelf directly over Aunt Mary’s head at the dining table during a dozen Sunday lunches.
“Oh, right, that cat,” Elspeth said flatly.
The lawyer explained that they could have the statue evaluated and then one of them could buy the other one’s half, or they could sell the statue and split the proceeds.
“I know,” Elspeth said. “I’m an attorney.”
The lawyer’s secretary boxed up the marble cat, and Graham and Elspeth took it with them, along with a sheaf of papers for each of them, the top one of which had a photograph of the statue paper-clipped to it.
“You can have the cat,” Graham said as soon as they were on the street. “I only came because the lawyer needed my signature.”
“I don’t want it,” Elspeth said. “I think we should sell it.”
“Okay,” Graham said. “But you sell it and keep the money.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t feel right about that,” Elspeth said, and Graham knew enough to realize that it wasn’t that she felt she owed him anything, it was that her lawyer’s mind had leapt ahead to the potential problems that might arise from such a casual arrangement.
They