He opened a drawer and pulled out a cigar box. Inside the box was a piece of red cloth, and when Mr. Hopkins unfolded it, David saw a round, shiny piece of metal—some type of coin he couldn’t quite identify.
“My son won this at some auction. He knew I’d fall in love with it.”
“What is it?” David asked, as Mr. Hopkins placed it into his palm.
“This is a silver half-dollar piece from 1861.”
David took the coin delicately between his thumb and forefinger and turned it over. A woman draped in a toga sat on a rock holding a flag and a shield that read, Liberty. She was looking over her shoulder. She seemed afraid. David felt like he knew her.
“A rare opportunity to do what you’re doing,” Mr. Hopkins said. “To think that may have been used to pay a shoeshine boy working on the boots of Abraham Lincoln.”
“The month of February 1865 was the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon,” David said, raising the coin to his eyes to inspect what he might have missed. The edges were serrated by age. The center, nicked with small divots. Perhaps the bite marks of distrust.
“Lincoln’s not impressive enough for you?” Mr. Hopkins asked, grinning.
David took his eyes off the coin and made a face. “I’m more interested in the shoeshine boy,” he said, dropping the coin into the red cloth Mr. Hopkins was holding out.
“A rotting piece of nonhistory, the boy.” Mr. Hopkins patted a porcelain statue of a foot waiter donned in a red overcoat, smiling. David felt a chill.
“While I have you here, would you mind moving this chair over to that corner?”
And now the true purpose of calling me over is revealed, thought David. He marveled at Mr. Hopkins’s knack for getting people to do things he needed done. David smiled to himself and gripped the backrest firmly, lifting it a foot off the ground.
“You know, it didn’t take long for me to get used to not being able to do these sorts of things anymore,” Mr. Hopkins said as he followed David across the room.
David waddled the chair into place, and as soon as Mr. Hopkins was satisfied, David dropped it.
“What I’m saying is, when I got older, what bugged me the most, what kept me up some nights, were the things I didn’t do that I regret.”
“How do you regret something you didn’t do?” David asked. The old man was trying to stuff a twenty-dollar bill into David’s pocket, but David kept covering it with his hand.
“You’ll see, David. It’s funny, but on a long enough timeline, the things you didn’t do haunt you more than the things you did.”
“So I get to spend the first half of my life regretting the stupid things I do, and then the last half envying the stupid things I wished I’d done?”
“And happiness is a thing in the corner of your eye that moves aside every time you try to look at it.”
“Not me,” David said, handing Mr. Hopkins back the twenty. “I’m going to do everything I set out to do. No regrets.”
“You’ll need money for that.” Mr. Hopkins waved the twenty in and out of the light that glared from a sconce behind him.
“Money means nothing,” David mumbled.
“Say the people who never have any,” Mr. Hopkins replied, and, for the final time, stuffed the twenty into David’s front pocket without meeting protest. “When you make the big bucks off your art, David, you’ll become aware of the things that not having money took away from you. Let’s have a drink.” He gestured to the Buddha-head ginger ale dispenser.
David shook his head. “That thing creeps me out. Like I’m drinking his ear wax.”
“See, now I’m brokenhearted over things passed. A couple years ago you could hardly control your laughter when I poured you a drink.”
David let the comment linger between them like a moment of silence for a dead friend. He looked at his shoes. Mr. Hopkins shrugged and David glanced up at him. “A fresh egg will sink in water, but a rotten one will float,” he said finally.
At the front door, David thanked Mr. Hopkins for the money and glanced up at the sky, which was now tattered with holes of sunlight. Rays draped over David’s house. It looked peaceful. As he walked down Mr. Hopkins’s driveway, he allowed himself to wonder if the remorse he felt for banging on Julia’s door would eventually turn to anger that he hadn’t done something more.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MICHAEL DARWIN DANCED AND SKIPPED across the small puddles forming in his driveway, and used his shirt to shield his head from the falling rain. He ran to his mailbox. Letting his shirt drop back down to cover his torso, he took the letters and used them as an umbrella before darting back up to the porch overhang. Once he turned the doorknob, he realized he’d locked himself out. Safely under the overhang, he rang the doorbell and flipped through his mail while he waited for Dallas.
He turned two bills over and slipped them behind the rest of the stack. Dallas was not coming. He rang the bell again, and knocked on the frame. He looked back down at a familiar envelope from the Walter School District, the third in as many months.
“They have persecuted me, they will persecute you too,” he whispered under his breath, as he ripped it open and unfolded the letter.
Dear Mrs. Darwin:
The T. Walter High School Administration and its Board of Education wish to meet with you regarding the community’s concerns. As you are aware, a disciplinary action stemming from the alleged incident of April 13 is still pending.
Michael heard the door unlock, and peered through the small panes of glass to see Dallas yanking on the knob. His son leaned closer to get a better turn, and soon the door creaked open. Michael pushed it the rest of the way. Dallas looked confused.
“Locked myself out,” Michael explained, still thumbing through the letters. Dallas asked where Mom was, and his father told him she’d gone to the store. He turned to rejoin his friends but then wheeled around.
“Dad, we all want to go back over to Felix’s house. Can I go?”
“I don’t want you out in this rain. Why don’t you play in the basement?”
Dallas nodded and turned away, trying to think of another excuse.
Michael tossed the mail on the coffee table and dropped onto the couch with a heavy sigh.
He looked back at the letter again. It had been a lingering ordeal ever since Rebecca had broken up a fight while she’d been working as a monitor in the hallways of T. Walter High. It was three against one, and the one getting beaten kept trying to run away. Kept trying to get to his feet so he could make it to where Rebecca sat petrified at her desk. Michael could still remember how her hands trembled when she got home and told him the story. The boy at some point had called to her for help; he’d reached his hand out to her. Seeing the look on his face had somehow stilled her nerves and she sprang into action. She rushed to the boy and draped her body over his. The three boys stopped kicking and Rebecca screamed at them to go away. They ran down the hallway, laughing.
Rebecca had sat with the boy in the nurse’s office while his parents were called. His name was Odin. He wanted aspirin, but the nurse would only give him a cold compress and remind him to pinch the bridge of his nose to stem the bleeding.
Rebecca thought a hand on the boy’s leg would calm him, but he already seemed eerily still. Like he’d been through this before. That was when Rebecca first noticed. She had been so frightened, so singular of mind to stop the beating, that she hadn’t seen in the hallway that he was wearing a skirt. But now, in the nurse’s office, with the boy out of harm’s way, the world beginning to return to its predictable pace, the order of things took shape again, and she stared down at the skirt, clear as the nurse’s indifference. The skirt was long and black. Like something a peasant would wear in the middle ages—ratty, with decorative black trimming at the hem. She looked at his hands. His fingernails were painted black as well. Rebecca thought he had to be the strangest child she’d ever seen. She thought his parents must have been working all day and night not to notice. She
was horrified, but said nothing. Not even when the boy caught her looking and silently pulled the cold compress away from his eye for a moment.
After his parents picked him up, saying nothing to Rebecca, she resolved to call the cops. She got the boy’s full name and made a report in front of the school.
Days later the three kids were caught. One of them, Joe Ragone, was the son of Mr. Ragone, the guidance counselor; the other two were Joe’s friends—all three on track to get into college with honors.
Rebecca would have known none of this had Mr. Ragone not approached her in the hallway to explain the misunderstanding. You see, Joe’s friend Alan, one of the other boys—who may be getting into NYU, isn’t that something?—had thought Odin was trying to pick up his girlfriend. Alan had felt threatened; you know how boys are when it comes to their girlfriends.
When Rebecca cast her mind back to the meek child in the black skirt, she’d nearly laughed in front of Mr. Ragone. But what did all this mean? she wondered.
The police involvement was problematic, Mr. Ragone had said. In fact, if the report could disappear it would make the whole thing seem laughable. The trouble boys get into, he added with a dry laugh. But isn’t it something—that three boys from this town could actually get into college with honors? It would be such a proud moment for the school.
Rebecca told Mr. Ragone that she was proud of the school no matter what college the boys attended. Shouldn’t everyone be? she asked, before they parted ways.
Mr. Ragone came back the next day because the police report was problematic for Rebecca as well, he was sorry to say. It violated protocol. She really wasn’t supposed to go outside of procedure. It could be grounds for a disciplinary hearing, and, after all, Mr. Ragone said he knew very well what a hearing meant for a hallway aide. But that could be swept away along with the police report. And, of course, Rebecca’s testimony to the school principal that it was just a hallway scuffle would clean up the whole messy incident quite nicely.
Michael remembered the day she left for work, resolved to do what Mr. Ragone had asked, and how she came home that same day determined to do the opposite. Michael didn’t press to find out why. He’d assumed her Christian conscience wouldn’t permit her to lie. It was a sin, after all.
Now the school was entering into procedures to determine if Rebecca’s violation of protocol was grounds for dismissal.
* * *
Michael was rubbing his eyes in the gloomy, gray afternoon, when he turned his head at the sound of a car door closing. He stood up and looked out the window. Rebecca was pulling two heavy grocery bags from the backseat, getting rained on unmercifully. He thought of how beautiful she looked in the gray light. His chest throbbed for her, and he leaped for the door to hold it open. She bounded up the front porch, and gave him a quick kiss on the lips before rushing her bags into the kitchen. Michael closed the door behind her and sat back down on the couch. Rebecca stood in the doorway after dropping the bags onto the counter.
“It’s raining hard,” she said.
“Yes.”
She looked around, down the hallway, and into the den. “Where’s Dallas?”
Michael pointed downward.
Rebecca smirked. “He’s dead?” she laughed slightly.
“He’s in the basement with his friends.”
Rebecca smiled and sauntered over to him. Sitting beside her husband, she read the worry in his eyes, and asked him what was wrong. He leaned forward and lifted the letter with two fingers, holding it up to her. She read it wearily, as if she’d read it before.
“I’m not looking forward to September,” Rebecca sighed. “I don’t even know if I’ll have a job.”
In silence, Michael reached his arm across the back of the couch and pulled her into his chest. He twirled a lock of her hair around his index finger as she sank into his embrace and then slid down onto his lap, quietly; safely. She spoke a little about the crowd at the supermarket. Michael asked mundane questions. Before long, she was asleep, breathing softly and evenly. He sat and watched her. Petted her hair, looked at the clock on the wall. It was getting late. The rain continued. He listened to it tap on the window behind him, as the occasional car whizzed through the puddles in the street. The boys playing downstairs were soundless. He leaned his head back and prayed that all would go well for his wife and family.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE MUSIC WAS BLARING THROUGH THE TREES, beyond which lay Darryl Knight’s backyard. David, Matthew, and Nick approached from the street after parking around the block. The rain had tapered off, and sunlight was faintly pushing through the clouds in the early evening. A bottle hit the asphalt, exploding at their feet like a snowball in a winter fight. David adjusted the knapsack he’d brought along and peered through the trees to see who had thrown it. All he got back were the whooping sounds of teenagers from the backyard.
They rounded the corner and headed up the front path. Darryl’s mother answered, clutching an empty garbage bag and blowing her blond bangs back from her face. Her smile revealed a perfect row of glossy white teeth that upstaged the deep laugh lines in her tanned cheeks. Her divorce had dragged on, while she and Darryl’s father had tried to live together in the same house. She’d run to the neighbors’ house on a few occasions, clutching Darryl’s hand. There were calls to the cops. The boy would come to school yawning more often than not. But things had been calm since Darryl’s father finally left. She’d been alone now for five years.
“More of Darryl’s friends?” Mrs. Knight asked. “I know you, Matthew; who are these two?”
“This is Abbott, and this is Costello,” answered Matthew, smiling back.
She shook her head and stepped aside. “That’s nice to say about your friends,” she bantered. Her blue eyes locked with David’s stare and she winked at him. David nodded, and blinked. Something inside him had stirred. The boys stepped through the doorway and entered the house. “Darryl’s in the backyard with everyone else.” Mrs. Knight led the boys through the hallway and into the kitchen where sliding glass doors opened onto the backyard.
“We know. We heard,” answered Matthew.
Mrs. Knight turned around and asked him what he meant.
“Some kids threw a bottle out onto the street in back of you,” said Nick shyly.
Matthew shot him a look. Mrs. Knight’s face sobered from its usual expression of mirth and she threw the empty garbage bag down onto the kitchen table. She stood by the sliding glass door and screamed for Darryl. He quickly appeared from around the side of the house with a curious look.
“I bought you and your friends beer because I want you to have a good time, but if you throw one more bottle out into the street, I’ll kick everybody out of here!” she yelled, stepping through the glass doors and strutting out into the backyard. She was wearing tight jeans with a small halter top. The three boys followed her body with their eyes, speechless. She sauntered over to a table where empty beer bottles sat abandoned, and she scooped them up, inserting her slim fingers with their long manicured nails into their open mouths.
“How did Darryl come out of her? She’s hot,” said Nick, staring.
Matthew turned on him. “Nice going with the beer bottle story. Darryl would kill you if you blew his party.”
“You started to tell her, I just finished,” Nick said.
“I was talking about the noise and the music, you idiot.”
David was staring at the crowd through the sliding glass door. He watched a kid about the same size as Darryl chug an entire bottle of beer and burp as he slammed it down. Then the kid looked into the kitchen doorway, and cupped his hands to his mouth to make a megaphone.
“Milton! Get your ass out here!” he shouted.
With a mischievous smile, Matthew stepped out into the backyard. “Joey Ragone, you bastard, you started without me,” he said.
Nick and David walked outside as well.
“Ragone’s such an asshole,” Nick said. “You hear what he did to Odin Meuller l
ast year?”
“I heard rumors,” David answered. Nick shook his head.
A smattering of eleventh graders recognized Nick and made their way over to say hi. David slid away from the small group, found the cooler, and quickly popped open a beer. Then he sat down to drink at a lone table near the wall of the house.
Darryl’s backyard was large for this development. A piñata hung from a low tree limb, and a quiet nook provided refuge for a keg and Darryl’s closer friends. A group of kids were aiming to play drunken piñata, in which a player had to fail a field drunk test before he could take his whacks. It was still early, and nobody had failed the test yet. The stick leaned against the tree, and the piñata swayed in the slight breeze. A larger table had been set up in the far corner of the yard, and was now completely occupied; a group of kids sat silently, drinking their beers. Nobody paid attention to them, except when a beer bottle pyramid would come crashing down in a loud, rattling noise.
Darryl and his friends had moved to the side of the house and were doing keg stands. Nick had been taken in by a small group of kids trying to fill up so they could hit the piñata.
David looked around to see if Julia had arrived but he didn’t see her. More kids were pouring in by the minute. The yard was filling with everyone from his high school. Almost on cue, Hanna D’Amico—his foe from history class—came stepping through the doorway, smiling as if she’d just won a National Merit Scholarship. She looked around for familiar faces, saw David sitting at his table, and quickly looked away. She craned her neck to watch the boys standing around the piñata, until she recognized somebody in the crowd and screamed out his name. Behind her filed a small group of kids David also recognized from his history class. The air of conflict became so thick, David could almost reach out and grab hold of the comments they were sure to make about his political opinions.
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