The Broken Teaglass (30 page)

“You shouldn’t do that,” I said. “You’re going to rip a hole in your sleeve. Is that cashmere?”

“Billy.” She stopped her fiddling but didn’t look at me. “How come you waited all night to show me that article?”

“It just seemed like we should have dinner and presents first. This Brownlow murder isn’t a very Christmasy story, you know?”

Mona finally looked up. Her eyes looked dark and grave. I wasn’t sure if it was the seriousness of her expression or the dim lighting, but for a moment, she looked much older than
usual. “Neither was Ebenezer Scrooge weeping at his own sorry grave. Neither is Jimmy Stewart contemplating suicide.”

I folded up the
Claxton Daily
article and slid it onto Mona’s coffee table.

“You know what’s the least Christmasy thing, really?” This was a subject I could really get into. “That song ‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.’ I heard it on the way home from the mall yesterday.”

“I kinda like that song,” she protested. “I liked it when I was little, anyway.”

“I used to like it too. Until one Christmas Eve when I was about thirteen. It came on the radio while we were sitting around my grandmother’s living room. She was like, ‘What is this? Is this supposed to be funny? I’ve never heard anything so asinine.’ Then she started ranting about how grandmothers are always treated like some kind of joke. My grandmother was a little like you, actually. It was often a little surprising what would offend her.”

I was afraid Mona might be put off by the comparison, but she just grinned.

“But what really depresses me about that song,” I continued, “is not the lyrics so much as the fact that it survived my grandmother. She died four years ago, but that stupid song keeps going on. On and on, year in and year out. My grandmother in all of her dignity and intelligence is gone, but that song’s still jingling its way into eternity. That stupid song will bury us all.”

Mona sat back and closed her eyes.

“Oh wow,” she said. “That takes the cake. Pour me another glass of wine.”

I picked up our wine bottle and filled her glass.

“Christmasy …,”
I said, feeling I should somehow lighten
the mood. Her eyes were still closed. “I wonder if that’s in the dictionary?”

Mona sighed and opened her eyes.

“Surely it is,” she said. “But frankly, does anyone care?”

For that, I leaned over and kissed her on the side of the head, just behind her ear. Her hair was stiff with gel or hairspray or something.

“Merry Christmas, Mona,” I said.

Christmas with my family went without
incident. Dad’s flaming rum pudding was a success, and I drove home the following afternoon. On the eve of my return to work, I stayed up late flipping through 1952 cits, and found:

Regardless of the fact that I couldn’t quite imagine my boss holding a girl like that, kissing a girl on the mouth, I had enough confidence in him to assume he could do both. But I couldn’t figure out about Mary Anne and Scout. What
was between them? I didn’t ever feel I could trust her take on Scout. He never said much. Did they really say so little to each other? Or did she choose to leave most of his words out?

I arrived at Samuelson early the
next morning, to put most of the cits back and restock with new ones. I thought I was alone, but when I rounded the corner near the water cooler, I saw Dan. He was looking something up in one of the old unabridged books when I passed him, my hands already full of pilfered cits. He straightened with a slow and graceful movement that reminded me of a quiet surprise in a nature show—a silent hazy veldt, a giraffe lifting its head unexpectedly out of bushes.

“Good morning,” he said, blinking at me. I resisted the urge to thrust the cits behind my back.

“Morning,” I mumbled. “How was your holiday?”

“Quite good,” he said thoughtfully. He looked a little distant, as if thinking back to specific, delectable moments from his Christmas. He turned again to his dictionary without volleying back the requisite holiday pleasantry. As I made my way back to my desk, I remembered that I’d been meaning to ask for the twenty-eighth off. I should’ve asked him weeks ago. I almost turned back to him, but decided to get my bearings first. This was my second time caught red-handed, pulling an unusual number of cits out of the files. It probably meant little to him, but it was making me nervous.

My phone buzzed later that morning
.

“Billy,” Sheila said. “Line three. A question about ‘venial’ and ‘venal.’ Can you take it? Sounds pretty straightforward.”

“Alrighty,” I said, clicking over.

“Hello? Editorial.” I did my best to chirp.

“Billy,” someone rasped on the other end. “It’s Phillips.”

“What? Where are you calling from?”

“Shh … now. Don’t say my name, son. Just act natural. I’m calling from home. I wanted to talk to you. Since I don’t know your extension, I trotted out the old ‘venal’ versus ‘venial’ just as a ruse for Sheila. Grace tells me you’re taking the sadder, gentler calls these days. The old folks and the confused children. Cliff’s still getting the loonies. For now.”

“Is that so?” I sighed.

“So I tried not to sound too nuts. But I disguised my voice. Listen. I don’t want to keep you, Homer. I just thought you should know something.”

Mr. Phillips paused and breathed heavily.

“It was Needham,” he whispered. “In the editors’ library. With the lead pipe.”

“Sir …”

“Seriously, though. I just wanted to let you know that I might have tipped Dan off a little.” Mr. Phillips hesitated. “At the Christmas party, I made a few cracks about a ‘Splintered Winecup.’”

“Excuse me … a
what?”

“Splintered winecup. Someone’s plastic cup had rolled onto the floor, and Dan stepped on it by mistake. I kept calling it ‘The Splintered Winecup.’ I think the reference went right over Dan’s head, but—I know how secretive you two kids have been, and I thought you might just want to know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make trouble for you.”

“Hmm. I see …”

“He really didn’t seem to notice. He seemed pretty loosey-goosey after a glass or two of wine. But now that the holiday hoopla is over, see, it just came to mind.”

“That’s interesting,” I said, trying to maintain a customer-service tone. “We’ll make a note of that and file it under ‘discretion.’”

“What’s that?”

“Discretion,”
I said firmly. “D-I-S-C-R-E-T-I-O-N.”

“Are you worried? You shouldn’t worry, son. Dan is a kind fellow. The whole Mary Anne business was ages ago. He probably wouldn’t be much more than tickled if he knew what you’d been up to. At least—well, maybe ‘tickled’s’ not the right word, but I don’t think he’d be—”

“It’s difficult to say,” I interrupted. “Sometimes it’s hard to find the right word. The human heart is perhaps more complex than any language.”

“Okay, Homer. I get it. You want to get off now.”

“That’s what I’m saying, sir.”

“Have a good one,” Mr. Phillips said.

“You too, sir. Thanks for calling.”

The phones were busy that morning
.

I flipped through
Teaglass
cits and eavesdropped as Cliff handled an especially difficult call:

“Yes. That’s correct,” he was saying. “Our latest CD includes an audio feature. You can hear the pronunciation of any word you select, just by clicking on it.”

I banded up the last of my “C” words and took out
deep-six
.

“That’s correct. Our office is indeed in Massachusetts. But our pronunciation editor is a linguistics expert, and he certainly doesn’t work exclusively with regional pronunciations in our area. And when there are significant, widespread
accepted
variants in pronunciation of a single word, both are listed in our dictionary. In those cases, you’d be given both
pronunciation options on the audio feature. But none of the words is pronounced with any particular regional twang, I can assure you of that—”

I flipped through
deep-six
, silently thanking Providence for giving this call to Clifford and not to me.

“Actually, sir, the pronunciations were recorded for us by specially hired actors.

“… To be honest, I don’t know where they’re from.

“… I can assure you that they sound nothing like Ted Kennedy.”

At that moment, I caught sight of the familiar
Teaglass
heading.

I stared at it.

“In fact, I’ll do a little demonstration for you,” Cliff was saying.

His chair creaked and I heard a few clicks.

“Hold on a sec. Here we go. Here’s the pronunciation given for ‘corps.’ You know, c-o-r-p-s, as in Marine Corps? Or Peace Corps?”

A button was pressed. Then a contented-sounding lady enunciated “corps.”

“Hear that? Here, I’ll turn it up.”

Two more taps of keys. “CORPS. CORPS,” the woman shouted.

I stood up. Took a breath. Sat back down. Set the cit on my desk and rested my fingers on it.

“See, no ‘co-AH.’ And here’s another one for you.”

Tap tap. “CAR. CAR.”

“No Boston ‘cah,’ see? That supposed ‘Massachusetts’ accent is common really only in a relatively small region in and around the Boston area. Our office isn’t in that area. And even if it were, our editors and software development crew
would certainly make sure that our products’ audio features were accurate and accessible to all users.

“… All right. What else do you want to hear?

“… Sure thing.”

More clicks. “GOD. GOD,” said a pleasant male voice … “SIR … FAR … DEMOCRAT … YARD.”

“Good enough, sir?

“… You’re welcome.

“… Yes, it can be ordered online. I believe several chain bookstores carry it as well.

“… Yup. Take care.”

Clifford’s chair creaked and the phone clicked as he put it back into place.

He typed something else and clicked.

“FOOL,” the lady announced into the silent sea of cubicles.

And then the office was quiet again.

I wondered if the whole office could hear the discomfort in the squeak of my chair. Everything Mona and I had learned had pointed toward this, so I wasn’t shocked, exactly. Sickened, maybe, by the physical reality of it. The violence intended for Mary Anne, the blood, the glass, and the jugular. All the stuff we’d hungered for in spite of ourselves.

So we were right about the teaglass. She’d killed her attacker with a weapon that destiny had laid in her hands for
just that day
. I wanted to feel awe and relief for the girl. I wanted to fall head over heels for her story. If I could believe this really happened, I could believe in anything. But part of me felt it was all too convenient. An undeniably sick man. A girl with a shard of glass. A heroic ending.

“Office poll.”

I looked up, my heart hammering.

George was standing over me holding up a little slip of paper that had
feng shui
scribbled on it.

“Feng SHOE-ee,” I said loudly, just to get him out of my face. The faulty pronunciation had a satisfying “shoo-fly” quality to it.

George bristled and stalked away.

I read the cit once more. Then I brought it to Mona.

We huddled in the editors’ library
downstairs again.

“So it’s true. He grabbed her in the park the same day she broke that glass,” Mona said softly. “That’s freaky.”

“Do you think it’s true?” I asked.

“Sure. How else would she have been able to stab him?”

“It just seems pretty … improbable. That she could pull that off.”

“Yeah. But it totally confirms the theory that was in the papers. That he was a psycho and he died in a struggle after trying to grab some girl.”