The Tell (23 page)

Two islands of red stain spread on his pale blue shirt. Wilton sat. His daughter had made him look old and useless, his touch for charm gone. Edward, who'd once called white bread the devil, stuffed a soft cottony roll smeared with margarine into his mouth. He was going to try and swallow all the tension in the room. Katherine took his face in her hands and kissed him gratefully, the crumbs on his front transferring to hers.

“Christ. Teenagers,” Mira said, laughing—with relief, Owen thought. “Get a room.”

“Eddie's moving in,” Katherine announced.

“Are you serious?” Brady put down his fork and looked at his mother. “You haven't known each other very long. Don't you think this is a little fast?”

“Not too fast at all. When you're my age, just because a year goes by quickly doesn't mean it isn't still three hundred and sixty-five days. Long enough,” Edward told him. “You have to be willing to make a change at our age, because if you're not willing, then you've written off the future and you might as well be dead already.”

“But what's the hurry?” Brady asked.

Edward ignored him and spoke to Owen as though it were just the two of them at the table. “I'm all alone on the pond these days.”

“I know you are.”

“Even Porter's gone now. Sometimes I think about that guy who died in his house in the woods, and his dogs got so hungry locked in there that they finally ate him.”

“Is that for real?” Lynn asked, finally animated by something. “That's foul.”

“Can't be true,” Brady told her.

“But it's absolutely true,” Edward said.

“Rey prefers dry food,” Owen told his father, “so you don't have to worry about that happening.” At the mention of his name, the dog got up and stuck his wet nose in Owen's hand. “Anyway, I think this is great news.”

“I think it's great, too,” Anya said, and looked again at Owen. “Very romantic.”

“Yes,” Mira said, her eyes moving between the two of them. “Very romantic.”

The baby began to cry, and Brady retrieved him from the bedroom. When he brought him back to the table, Edward held his arms out for the kid and buried his face in the baby's belly. Owen saw how easy and contented his father was with the child. He had a flash of memory—his father holding him at the pond's edge, his father inching into the water, the feel of it reaching his own chest, the beginning of life in the water, the introduction of named pleasure.

After they'd cleaned up and sat through their post-meal stupor, they took a walk to the golf course. Katherine and Edward linked arms and Anya walked next to them. Owen and Wilton followed—the others were back at the condo—but Wilton was slow and dour and they fell further behind. By midafternoon, dark waited to rush in and sea mist coated Owen's face with a briny wax.

“The ants have been let out of the ant farm,” he said, noting the other families walking, stuporous and cold.

Wilton stopped to catch his breath. His face folded into a grimace as he put his hands on his knees and sucked in the air. His ears were bright red; he was too vain to wear the orange wool cap Edward had offered him. His bare ankles looked like pure white bone.

“You all right, old man?” Owen asked.

“Old man?” Wilton bristled uncharacteristically. “Don't call me that.” He watched the others cross the road to the golf green and its undulating paths. Anya was describing something with her hands and dancing backward so she could face Edward and Katherine. “Look at my sunny daughter talking up a storm. A real chatterbox,” he said, bitterly. “She's said more to those two on this walk than she's ever said to me in all this time. And she doesn't even know them. When she was a little girl, she used to tell me every thought in her head.”

“That was a long time ago. She doesn't know you now.”

“She knows me,” he snapped. “I'm her father, aren't I? What's to know? I'm the same person I always was.”

“Be patient. You're asking a lot.”

“You seem to be some kind of authority on my daughter. You two obviously have some private understanding. You look at each other all the time, in the car, at the table, even on this walk she keeps turning around to look at you. All those meaningful glances.” He grabbed Owen's arm. “What do you know?” he demanded. “What has she told you? What have you told her about me?”

“Jesus, what's the matter with you?” Owen shook him off.

Wilton's eyes narrowed in the wind. “I thought you could help me, you could help me get her back—but you've turned out to be no fucking help at all. In fact, just the opposite. You've made it worse.”

“No fucking help? I was the one who got her to come today. I told her it would make you happy. I did it for you.”

He walked away from Wilton. The man was desperate to be forgiven by his daughter for something he wasn't ever going to confess to her. Maybe it was never going to work. At the complex's clubhouse, Owen cupped his hand against the glass to see the residents' many grandchildren cannonballing off the sides and into the pool. He heard their shrieks, saw their tucked bodies. In the window's reflection, he watched Wilton bend again to find his breath, then turn to go back to the condo and the soothing comfort of Mira. Owen watched the man take a right on the road instead of staying straight until the next turn, and he didn't run to correct his friend's mistake.

D
owntown was emptying out at 5:30 on a Tuesday. Owen watched the Department of Corrections van back out of the courthouse lot and slide into traffic. He couldn't see through the dark windows, but he knew those inside could see him. At Kennedy Plaza, people waited for their buses, some forced to stand beyond the reach of the skimpy, overcrowded shelter. They perched on the curb with the tilt of impatience. In the soft rain, nylon parkas gleamed like rock and shopping bags slumped on the pavement. Christmas decorations, left hanging into January, still festooned the decidedly unfestive plaza, a crisscross of slushy walks bordered by winter trees and ringed by the city's few tall buildings. At one end, the glass elevator of the Biltmore rose over the park and a cluster of wet men hanging out by the waterless fountain. This center of the city—scene of frequent high school fights and, recently, the death of a drug addict who was run over by a bus that refused to let him board—was gazed upon indulgently by City Hall. The building's ornate façade presented a perverse kind of civic pride. We might be provincial and historied with corruption, but this is who we are, the city proclaimed. Providence—the entire state, in fact—was without pretension but full of self-importance.

Owen passed the skating rink on his way to the Donnell Building, which he'd been summoned to by Mike Levi. He assumed Mike was going to fire him for not showing up to one too many tutoring appointments. He deserved it, after all. Squealing skaters were undeterred by the rain. Overbundled, they moved across the ice like Frankensteins. He'd watched Wilton move the same way down his slick, ice-coated driveway a few days earlier. He'd had a lean, distracted look and shivered in a sweater that hung open at the neck. The man wasn't made for winter. Mira said Wilton kept the thermostat in his house turned up high to blast hot air into rooms he never even entered. It was a profligate and lonely luxury.

Mike's company, Educational Excellence Consultants (EEC—sounds like
eek!
Mira had pointed out once), newly occupied the far corner of the third floor. The elevator still smelled of someone's lunch and old coffee. He felt the stuffy, adenoidal silence of office buildings. The view at the end of the hallway was of the low backsides of other buildings, the tops of revolving doors and heads emerging one by one, without umbrellas. On the walls of the reception area, where Owen waited for Mike to get off the phone, were framed letters from grateful parents, thanking EEC for helping their daughter realize her potential, brightening their son's future, building their child's confidence. The testimonials were breathless, written as though Mike and his corps of tutors, coaches, and advisors had heroically pulled these already too advantaged children from the academic trash heap. For some of the parents of his Spruance students, struggle might have already gripped and staggered their lives, but more than anything, they wanted to spare their kids the same disenchantment they'd faced. In that, they were no different than these letter-writing, gushing parents, but the other disparities were astounding. Last month they'd sat opposite him on parent-teacher night, waiting for assurances that everything was going to be good in their child's future. “Your son, your daughter, can do anything,” he said, both always true and untrue.

“So you like those letters or what?” Mike asked. He spoke with a sharp Rhode Island accent.

“Spectacular stuff. Clearly, you're a genius.”

“Twenty-seven years in the public school system and not one parent ever wrote me a thank-you note. Well, maybe one. I got plenty of no-thank-you notes, a few fuck-you notes.”

He hiked up his pants with mocking self-importance. He was like the city—proud but a little disheveled, and mostly likable. Mike had been a devoted and inventive teacher, but he'd also gotten rough with a couple of kids at Spruance in his last years there and had been forced to take a leave for a week or two. He said what he thought even when he knew it would get him in trouble. His marriage to Faye had taken a pounding because of it. He'd put on a lot of weight, and for a time he drank too much. He'd finally left when the classroom window he'd been trying to open shattered and ripped a long, deep valley down his arm. He'd been hurried away in an ambulance, smiling as if he knew this was the only way he was ever going to get out of the place.

Mike led him back to his office and took a seat behind his desk. A motivational poster of enthusiastic clouds hung on the wall.
Fly High: Soaring Is Just Another Word for Success
. The same kind of poster that had been in Mira's childhood bedroom.

Mike saw what he was looking at. “I know, it's awful. A present from Faye. Have to put it up. But I don't have to look at it. You do.” He laughed and then leaned forward, pressing his hands together. It was a gesture of seriousness Owen imagined the man probably used with his clients, and it made Owen smirk.

“So, Owen.”

“So, Mike. You don't have to say it. I know. I've missed a couple of appointments.”

“More than a couple.” Mike looked down at the paper in front of him. “Eight, in fact. And those are just the ones I know about. Your counting sucks, by the way. Good thing you don't teach math.”

“I feel bad about it.”

“No, you don't. Don't bullshit me.”

Owen shifted in his chair. “Fire me, and we can move on. We can go get a beer, talk about something else.”

Mike put up a hand to stop him. “What makes you think I'm going to fire you?”

“Because I screwed things up for you. I deserve to be fired. I'm asking to be fired.”

“Such a martyr. Look, I just explain that you are a rogue employee. I say the good ones usually are, that you just have to be broken in.” He mimed snapping a whip. “That goes over well. Makes us look human but effective.” He took a sip of his coffee and frowned. “What do you think about working here, with me? You and me. Full-time. The business is growing like you wouldn't believe, and I need some help, expanding services, running seminars, setting up satellite offices, marketing. The economy is in the toilet, but this is recession-proof. You have no idea how popular this idea of success is. Lots of very ambitious parents out there.”

“Anxious parents,” Owen said. “Rich parents.”

“Does it matter? You're too good to be stuck at a shit-hole like Spruance. It's a waste. The whole system's broken, it's chaos, it's unfixable. All those things you have to do, and none of what you should really be doing. It's like patching a hole in something that's just going to tear again. No teaching gets done, am I right? I'm offering you something real here, better, a good way to get out.”

“Teaching gets done,” Owen said. “Maybe not in the usual ways, and maybe not everything that's supposed to be taught gets taught, but it's not pointless.”

Mike's shelves held SAT prep books and study guides, expensive promises between soft covers. Owen knew teachers who threw whole years and classrooms full of kids away, others who stood as vacant as burned-out houses. But there were good ones, too.