Read The Deceivers for Free Online

mother hen in protecting the piece from people like Sammy who didn’t respect its priceless cultural value, to figuring out a way to make money on it … without going to jail.
    My thinking wasn’t straight, but neither was my life. I had to admit that my fall from economic grace had caused me to do some serious thinking about who I was, where I came from, and where I was going. Like people who only pray when there’s hell to pay, I had thoughts about a simpler life … a little house with a white picket fence, rug rats crawling around while I prepared a Sunday pot roast for that man in my life …
    A few months ago I would have howled with laughter from the image. But like a scary medical diagnosis, the free fall that left me financially crippled and my reputation roadkill had put the fear of the Lord in me. They say there are no atheists in the foxhole and right now I was crouching down in a battlefield with the slings and arrows of creditors flying at me. So I watched my cussing, my drinking, and my impure thoughts. At least, I tried.
    Besides desperation, the fall from grace had brought one definite change in me: I now knew I wanted life beyond my career, not just the material accoutrements from having an income that rated a black credit card, but I had to find the right man or there would be no one to cut the lawn and take out the garbage.
    I wasn’t really that cynical about love. I talked facetiously about sex because I’d never found the right person to share my life with. And I was running scared that I might never experience that deep, passionate, soul-satisfying eternal love that books and movies say we need. I avoided permanent entanglements because I wanted to make sure I had all my “wants” satisfied so I wouldn’t end up like my parents with an “I wish I had” attitude that followed them to the grave.
    My dad, a community college art teacher, had wanted to be an archaeologist exploring ancient sites around the world. My mother had dreamed of being a dancer but became a homemaker and librarian.
    What they accomplished should have been enough for anyone, but for inexplicable reasons probably relating back to their own upbringings, it wasn’t. They wanted more and expressed vague feelings of discontent to me about the directions their lives had taken.
    I believed that my parents were great successes. But both of them had conveyed to me a melancholy desire about what might have been instead of them being satisfied with their accomplishments. I always wondered if their discontentment was connected to their relationship with each other rather than their careers; whether something was missing between them.
    They had died in a car accident about the time I was getting out of college and I missed them dearly.
    I picked up from my parents a free-floating dissatisfaction with where and what I was, a feeling that there was always one more step to take, one more hurtle to leap. I knew I should be satisfied with myself … bookstores were filled with psychobabble books to guide people who thought like me. But it was a lot easier to figure out what made you tick than to change the behavior.
    Now what? My parents weren’t here to help me, I was divorced ten years ago, and the few friends I had acted like I’d give them a computer virus if they answered my phone calls or e-mails.
    What did a woman do when she was too educated and too experienced to get an ordinary job? Who was going to hire me to work a cash register at Wal-Mart when my last job paid twenty times more? And I worried about an employer doing a background check. Was there a database of people like me who were arrested but never charged? Not that they’d need it—I was as infamous in the New York art trade as Kenneth Lay was to members of the financial community.
    It used to be a matter of pride to me that I was so single-minded about art. Now I was paying for it. I kept asking