by Jonathan Dee
“No, that’s okay,” Candace said. “How are you?”
“All right, you know,” Karen said. “Haley’s great. Kind of a handful, but she knows how to be charming when it suits her. Can’t imagine where she gets that from.”
“Sure. The thing I was actually calling to tell him, maybe you guys already know. About Gerry losing his job?”
Karen’s eyebrows went up. “No, I did not know that. Shit. What happened?”
“He won’t really tell me, so I’m going to assume he lost his temper and told somebody off. He’s always this close to doing that, wherever he is.”
“Wow. Is he okay? I mean does he need anything? If Mark knows about this, he hasn’t told me.”
Karen walked through the upstairs as she talked, in and out of the unholy mess of Haley’s bedroom, in and out of Mark’s office, full of furniture catalogues and old free weights. She headed down the back stairs that led to the kitchen.
“I don’t know whether he needs help,” her sister-in-law said. “He’s apparently been up at Mom and Dad’s a lot. But no way he’d ask Dad for money. Knowing him, things would have to get pretty bad before he’d ask any of us for anything.”
“Well, listen, of course we’ll do whatever we can do,” Karen said, looking out the window, where their view of the Hadi house was filtered by spring again. “We’re not exactly sitting on a pile of money over here. Not that that matters, I mean it’s family. I’m really glad you called.”
“Yeah, well, I have to run. But anyway, tell Mark to call me if he wants to. And to call Gerry, even though Gerry will probably hate that. Just wanted to make sure the family knew what was going on, since I only found out today.”
Karen left Mark’s phone on the kitchen table. Haley was at a birthday party. Some mom was taking eight kids to laser tag and then to Benihana. She still had an hour to kill—the pickup was right from the restaurant—and as the sun went down she really felt like a glass of wine, but not if she had to get in the car. Too windy to sit out on the porch. Television was a waste of time. She looked down with displeasure at the silhouette of her seated body. She should exercise more. But all the forms of exercise were so boring. Running was okay, but around there you really had no choice but to run along the thin shoulder of the road, struggling along past your neighbors’ windows, listening for the hiss of cars behind you. No thanks.
Gerry had always seemed like the powder keg in that family; Karen didn’t think he’d been quite right since he left that poor girl Lindsey practically at the altar, though wherever her erstwhile sister-in-law was now, Karen hoped she’d come to understand what a bullet she’d dodged. Not that she couldn’t imagine what Lindsey had fallen for, since she’d essentially fallen for a version of that herself. A little gallantry, a little self-confidence, some well-muscled forearms went a long way in a small town like that, especially when you were young and dumb.
Six o’clock now and still no sign of Mark, and of course she couldn’t call him because his phone was sitting right there. What kind of work could he be doing, at this hour on a Saturday? Maybe he was having an affair. It struck her as unlikely, even if she couldn’t have explained why. She picked up his phone and scrolled through the call history, just for the hell of it, and there was nothing there to trip any alarms. Hardly even any number he’d called more than once. She tried to feel guilty for doubting him, but she hadn’t doubted him really. If anything, she might have been a little excited to find something incriminating, to learn that there was something about him she didn’t already know.
She got in the car and let it run. Then she had an idea and went back into the house for some CDs. She never got to listen to music anymore—certainly not loud music. And she used to love loud music. The drive to Benihana was only long enough for four or five songs; she put in the first Pretenders album, one her older sister used to play. In the bubble of the car she nodded her head and sang along lustily, remembering to keep her eyes open, skipping past the slow tracks, great though they were, to get to the harder ones, remembering how shocked she was not just by the lyrics but by her sister—back before their parents kicked her out of the house—daring to sing along with them, just as Karen was singing now, not me baby I’m too precious yeah fuck off!
She was one of the last parents to arrive even though she was exactly on time. Her ears were still ringing a little as she crunched across the Benihana parking lot. Haley of course did not have her coat on or even know where it was, so Karen stood by the door and chatted with Whitney, the mother of the birthday girl. Whitney looked like she’d just driven a hundred miles with the top down, but she was still smiling, she was one of those mothers determined to pretend that nothing was hard.
“They didn’t tear the place apart?” Karen asked.
“No, they were great,” Whitney said. “Everybody had fun. I should warn you that I don’t know if I saw Haley actually eat anything, so she might be hungry later.”
“Yeah, I don’t know if she’s ever had Japanese food before.”
“Well, it’s more about the show, of course.”
“Sure. I remember loving these places when I was a little older than her. There can’t be too many of them left now. Weren’t they kind of a seventies thing? I’m surprised this one is still hanging on.”
Whitney raised her eyebrows and leaned closer. “Funny you should say that,” she said, “because it isn’t. Hanging on. They sold the place and they’re out of here in two months. The manager told me.”
“No kidding? Please tell me it’s not going to be another Dunkin’ Donuts.”
“No! Way better. Todd Van Dyke bought it!” Karen’s game expression must have given away that she didn’t know who Todd Van Dyke was. “The guy that owns Iron and Wine, in New York City? Like literally a world-famous chef. He’s opening a new restaurant right where we’re standing.”
“Why here?”
“I have no idea!”
“Well, that’s exciting,” Karen said, glaring at Haley to induce her to wait for her mother before sprinting out the door. “A little sad about old Benihana, though.”
“Well, out with the old,” Whitney said.
“What’s sad?” Haley said.
“Nothing is sad,” Karen answered reflexively. They walked to the car; she turned in her seat and watched until Haley had buckled her seatbelt, and a few moments later the sound of the restaurant’s gravel driveway disappeared beneath them.
“Did you have fun?” Karen asked.
“Yes!”
“Did Kristine like her present?”
“She didn’t open them.”
“No? That’s odd. Kind of more polite to open the gifts in front of everybody, I think.”
“Maybe she was scared food would get on them,” Haley said.
“Yeah, maybe.”
In the dark the car became a bubble. You couldn’t see out, only yourself reflected back in. Mom always talked more, Haley had noticed, when driving at night. Even though she was in front and could see out, because of the headlights.
“So was laser tag fun?”
“Laser tag was the best! I only got shot two times. Mom?”
“Yes, Bug?”
She didn’t know why her mother sometimes called her Bug, but it always meant she was cheerful. “Can we do laser tag for my birthday this year?”
“I don’t see any reason why not.”
“Yay! Thank you, Mommy!”
“You’re very welcome. I’m glad you liked it so much. Did you say thank you to Ms. Reed?”
“Who?”
“To Kristine’s mommy. Whitney.”
“Oh.” She tried to remember. “I don’t remember.”
“Well, you have to do that. It’s important.”
“Okay.”
“You have to remember. It’s not my job to remind you every time.”
“Okay.”
“Do you hear me?”
“Okay!”
Sometimes—often when she was being picked up from
somewhere—the mood would just flip like this, and her mother would start looking for something Haley had done wrong, or failed to do. She wouldn’t stop until she found it. And there was always something; knowing that there was always some failure for her mother to unearth, that she was never in the clear, was what made Haley hate those moments so much. She wished Dad were there. “Where’s Dad?” she said.
“Beats me. Working. He forgot his phone at home, so I can’t call him.”
“I’m hungry,” she said, to change the subject.
“You’re hungry? You just had dinner!”
They passed something in somebody’s yard that looked like a scarecrow. Haley tried to turn her body to look back at it but she couldn’t because of the seatbelt.
“How can you be hungry?” her mother said. One of those questions that had no answer, but then she always waited like she was expecting one.
“I don’t know.”
“You just ate, I thought.”
“No.”
“Why not? She went to all that trouble and expense and then you didn’t eat anything?”
“I ate something.”
“What?”
“Some rice. But it had stuff in it. Everything else I didn’t like.”
“Well, God forbid they fail to serve one of the five things on earth you like,” her mother said as they finally turned into their driveway. “There, Daddy’s home, so maybe he’ll make you something.”
“How can I eat it if I don’t like it?” Haley said, hearing tears in her own voice.
“It’s just good manners. You eat what you are served. You are not the Princess of Persia, as my mother used to say to me.”
Haley, having unbuckled herself, was waiting for her mother to stop talking; when the pause was long enough to seem definitive, she opened the door and ran past Dad’s truck into the house. He was in the living room, with the TV on, drinking one of those smoothies he made for himself: they looked like they would taste good but they didn’t, and she had learned never to say yes when he offered her a sip. She jumped into his lap and burrowed quietly into him for a while. Then he made her a grilled cheese sandwich, and he ate the half she didn’t eat.
The next day was Sunday-quiet—no playdates, a little homework, an hour on the computer, ninety minutes watching TV—and she mostly played alone in her room. She liked playing alone, particularly after a day of mayhem like yesterday when kids kept trying to impose their will on other kids. In solitary games your will wasn’t even your will, it was just what happened, like Fate. Power made Haley beneficent, though. If one of her animals or dolls was sad, the others all rushed over to try to figure out why.
Recourse to that imaginary world of caring helped her bear the worst of school. Bad things happened to Haley herself only rarely—she was kind and nonassertive and had no qualities, good or bad, that made her stand out, and anyway boys, the source of most bad things, were easily and effectively ignored—but she suffered when others suffered, less from empathy than a sense of justice, heightened if not especially modulated. Kids made other kids cry all the time, sometimes in private and sometimes in front of everybody, and the teachers didn’t seem to care as much as she believed they should. Group playdates were a thing now, and there were some girls who went on seemingly every one and others who never got included at all. Haley would report this to her mom and dad when they asked her how school was, and they would try to act all outraged, but she could tell that it was just for her sake, that they didn’t really feel the injustice of it, and she could not understand why.
Her teacher, Mrs. Tuttle, listened to her more patiently than most adults and had offered the theory that if Haley had had brothers or sisters, she might have better understood the inconsistent operation of fairness in the world. Maybe that was true. She did not have siblings or even cousins, unless you counted the ones referred to as the Colorado Cousins because no one seemed confident about their names, of whom she had no memory. Aunt Renee didn’t bring them to visit, and whenever she asked her dad about going to visit them, he said it was super expensive and anyway they couldn’t just show up there, they had to wait to be invited. But in any case the trouble with Mrs. Tuttle’s theory was that it made it all about Haley, and Haley knew it was not about her at all, it was about the meanness of people—again, boys especially.
Sometimes it happened that some boy or girl she stood up for in public decided that that meant they were friends now. The kid, or the kid’s mom, would call up and invite Haley over, and then Haley’s mom would get so annoyed at her for not wanting to go. She would have to make up some excuse why Haley couldn’t do it and then she would be all stressed out. “Why don’t you say yes for once?” she’d ask. “It would be nice of you. And it wouldn’t hurt to get out of your room for a while.” The charge of not-niceness stung a little. But nothing was as calming as her room, because all hurt feelings were redressed there. And when she felt like it she could stop playing and read, yet another thing that was apparently considered impolite if there was another child present, a rule no one had ever explained to her satisfaction.
Even at Thanksgiving or Christmas, when the whole family came over for dinner, she was the only child—which had an upside, certainly, in that all of the Christmas presents were for her, and her aunts and uncles and grandparents seemed to put a lot of thought into them. The grownups did get gifts for each other, but they were small and boring and everyone always joked about how bad they were and how hard it was to think of anything to give. It didn’t make being an adult seem too appealing. But then they all took turns playing air hockey with her in the basement and she beat everyone at least once except for Aunt Candace, who was really good and seemed way more serious than the others.
She didn’t like English class anymore because in preparation for fourth grade they were practicing something called Analytical Paragraphs, interpreting the things they read, and somehow it was possible to be told you were right and still not get an A, which she didn’t think was fair at all. She preferred math, where you were either right or wrong and if you were right there was none of this B-plus nonsense. Social studies was somewhere in between, because their teacher, Mr. Sills, was always trying to trick you into giving what seemed like the right response, only so he could then tell you, in front of everybody, why that was actually the wrong response. The students caught on to this rhythm eventually, though, without quite understanding it, with the result that they would sit silently in the wake of one of his rhetorical questions even when, or especially when, they thought they knew the answer. By April there was a tacit understanding that Mr. Sills, having been outmaneuvered pedagogically, would do all the talking.
“Why are there police?” he asked them. “In cities, in towns like this one. Why do we have them?”
Silence.
“To protect us, right? To keep us safe from criminals, from bad people?”
Outside the window there was a branch that only hit the glass on very windy days.
“Actually that’s not why,” Mr. Sills said. “Policemen and policewomen are very brave, that’s true. But bravery is—well, it doesn’t tell you enough by itself, does it? I mean, flying an airplane into a building on purpose is pretty brave too, if you want to think of it that way. I couldn’t do it. No, the police are very brave but they are also people, just like you and me. Somebody hires them, somebody pays them, and somebody can take their jobs away from them, and of course they need those jobs, they have families and children. So they are not there to serve us, really. They are there to serve the people, or the organization, that hires them. So who hires the police? Who do they work for, who’s their boss? It’s us, right? The people?”
This, somehow, was part of their social studies unit about government. But Haley, like all of them, had learned to ride out Mr. Sills’s digressions by gazing silently at him and not looking too conspicuously at the clock behind his head. If you looked too interested, he would call on you, and if you looked too bored, he would call on you. Haley
only remembered this particular class at all because a week or so later, her dad asked her about it. He was home more often now, working in his office and on his computer. He met Haley at the school bus, walked her up the driveway, made her a snack of apple slices with peanut butter, and then sat down across from her at the little table in the kitchen.
“Did you have social studies today?” he said.
“Today’s Tuesday,” Haley said. “So yes.”
“Oh.” He watched her eat. “Did he—maybe you don’t remember—but did your social studies teacher, Mr….”
“Mr. Sills.”
“Right. Was there one class where Mr. Sills was saying something about how the people who killed all those people on 9/11, the men who hijacked the planes, were brave?”
Haley swallowed, unhurriedly, and shrugged.
“Huh. And what did—did you—” Mark realized he didn’t really have a follow-up question. “Did you think that was weird?”
“Everything Mr. Sills says is weird.”
Mark smiled. “You mean weird like unusual, or…”
“Or like what?”
“I don’t know.” Having started this conversation, Mark now wanted only to escape from it.
“Anyway it’s true,” Haley said. “Right?”
“What’s true?”
“What he said. You can be brave and still be bad. How did you even hear about that, anyway? Why are you asking me about it?”
“Well, somebody from the school told me, actually. She asked me if you’d mentioned it, and I said no.”
“Who from the school?”