As she waited for him to speak she saw him scratch one of his earlobes. From this she imagined him saying that he paid the babysitter with money he made from selling earrings like the ones she was wearing. Then, in the daydream, she demanded to know whether or not he had been pilfering bits of her jewelry all along and what he did with the money once he sold them; but in the daydream he did not answer either question leaving inconclusive speculation to run rife.
But she told herself that the daydream had no significance. Once in February when not able to find various pairs of earrings and blaming herself for having lost them somewhere between Tokyo to Tijuana she had engaged herself in comic anecdotes of the boy sneaking into her bedroom in leather gloves and pajamas so that he might mail some of her jewelry to Hispanic Betty before Valentine's Day. She told herself that this daydream was merely the rebounding of her dismissed caprices. And yet she couldn't help wondering if this particular daydream was, as Freud would say, a resurfacing of repressed fears, unwanted knowledge, or strong convictions about a given matter of importance.
She thought about how little of a human's mercurial life was grounded in the present moment: an athlete was in the rush of his adrenalin, a conversation consisted of past events and future expectations, and a current event was impinged by pertinent hunches exhumed from the subconscious in daydreams. Even if she were to have conclusive knowledge about her son's actions throughout each and every day, and even if she were to find him as innocent as a babe, the correct way of dealing with him would still be guesswork. Such was the peculiarity of the human condition.
"With Monopoly money," he chuckled
"With what?" she repeated irascibly.
" Twenty bucks out of my allowance money. Are you going to take my head off for that?"
"For twenty bucks, never. Thirty, maybe." She turned to her husband. "Didn't he tell you where I was at?"
"He said that he didn't know."
"I don't know," said the boy.
"I told you."