The Most Dangerous Thing

by Laura Lippman

  The phone rings. For a second, she thinks it’s Stu Kerr, and she panics because she doesn’t know the count and the amount, but then she remembers the show is on only in her thoughts. She rushes to the kitchen, taking inventory yet again of the sink of dishes, the cast-iron frying pan filled with bacon grease.

  “Mrs. Halloran?” It is Father Andrew’s lovely voice, but she doesn’t want him to know she recognizes it instantly.

  “This is she.” She stands up a little straighter, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. Where’s the curler that held the hair? She spots it on the drainboard.

  “Father Andrew up at St. Lawrence. We have a little situation with Gordon.”

  Doris appreciates the euphemism but knows it has to be bad for the school to call.

  “He’s OK,” the priest says, rushing to assure her. He is so nice. “But you see, another boy brought a baseball mitt to school today, a birthday gift he wanted to show off. It went missing and we found it in Go-Go’s desk.”

  “He isn’t a thief,” she says quickly. “He just likes . . . nice things.”

  “He was also very forthright. Didn’t lie or pretend it was put there by mistake. Just said he admired it and couldn’t help wanting to touch it. Still—I thought it might be effective if we spoke to him together.”

  Together.

  “I would be right there, but we only have the one car and Mr. Halloran has it and—” She breaks down, begins to cry, which is as shaming as Go-Go’s thievery. It’s too much. Her son, stealing from a classmate. Her husband unavailable to her, and even if she could reach him, she would never dare ask for his help in such a situation. Tim Senior would probably take a belt to Go-Go for this offense, and Lord knows, a part of her has yearned to beat him, to scream at him, to shake him. Father Andrew being so nice—that makes it worse. The thing is, she would like nothing better than to drive to the school—after taking out her curlers, maybe a quick bath—and talk to Father Andrew. Men who give up women, as priests do, are so much easier to talk to. She can take him some cookies, store bought, and maybe he will make her tea on the little hot plate he keeps in his office. She is surprised to realize how much she has noticed in her visits there—the hot plate, the mug from Northeastern University, the photos of children, presumably his nieces and nephews, a large photo of what was clearly a family reunion in some place very green. It could be anywhere, but she wants to believe it was Ireland. They would speak to Go-Go constructively, then send him back to class, and then talk privately about what a challenge he is. Like Father Andrew, she will find positive, optimistic words. Challenge, situation, incident. She might even tell him about the chronic bed-wetting, ask if he has any insight into why an almost ten-year-old boy would regress this way. Father Andrew probably has all sorts of reassuring insights.

  But she is stuck here because they have only one car. No other family in the neighborhood has only one car, except for that chaotic single woman across the street, the one who doesn’t mow her lawn until the neighborhood association insists, tells her it’s a breeding ground for rats. What are they going to do when Tim Junior gets his license? How are they going to afford the extra insurance for having teen drivers on their policy? She cries harder.

  “There, there,” Father Andrew says. “I can handle it alone.”

  “Does everyone know?” she chokes out.

  “I’m afraid it was a little public for my tastes. But he was caught, he confessed, he was punished. I’ll make sure that the children understand there is no point revisiting such things.”

  He will, somehow. Father Andrew has that kind of power. The children love him as much as their mothers do. Only the fathers don’t seem to get Father Andrew’s charm. The thick, dark hair, the high color in his face, the bright blue eyes, the broad shoulders. It would be unbearable if he were a regular man, because then he would have a girlfriend or a wife. But as a priest, Father Andrew is available to her.

  “Maybe we should still have a meeting one day?” she asks. “About Go-Go’s . . . situation.”

  “Sometimes, the less said, the better. Let it go. He’s learned a valuable lesson.”

  She is torn, wanting to tell him about the sheets, the other problems, if only to prolong the conversation, yet feeling it would be a betrayal.

  “About Go-Go,” she starts.

  “Yes?”

  She can’t do it. “What do you think of him? Truly.”

  “I think he’s a boy, ma’am, with all the inherent contradictions and conflicting impulses. He wants to be good. He really does. But it’s hard to be good.”

  This is such a generous assessment of her son that she yearns to believe it. Yet a part of her mind steps back and hisses like a goose: You’re a fool, Father. He’s a bad, bad boy. He’s an awful boy. And maybe he has every reason in the world to be that way, but I don’t know how much longer I can keep all his secrets.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Tim Halloran starts each weekday by circling job prospects in the morning paper, the Beacon, every red loop an exercise in positive thinking. He has never used the want ads before to find a job, managing to rely on word-of-mouth leads from friends and colleagues. But since he left the seasonal job at Goldenberg’s, there is nothing. Or so people say. Sorry, I don’t know about anything. Sorry, things are god-awful tight. Tim knows what’s going on. His boss at Hutzler’s was a vindictive little prick, and he’s spread the word all over town that Tim has a bad temper. Bad? He simply has a temper, unlike that faggot, who liked to hold forth about film—as opposed to movies, some airy-fairy distinction that the guy insisted on—when he didn’t know shit. Guy went on and on about how John Wayne had died on-screen only once, such complete and utter bullshit that Tim, who loves John Wayne, all but recited most of the titles in one breath. (SANDS-OF-IWO-JIMA-MAN-WHO-SHOT-LIBERTY-VALANCE-THE-COWBOYS-THE-SHOOTIST. And that was off the top of his head, not even complete.) OK, Tim’s fuse is a little short, but it’s never affected his work. Tim’s only failure is not kissing ass. He is good at what he does, probably could have been a true mathematician instead of a bookkeeper if he had the freedom to fart around with that academic bullshit. But he was a husband at twenty-one and a father at twenty-three, which means parking the ego and providing for your dependents.

  Only he isn’t exactly providing now. They are running through their savings at an alarming clip. Running through? They have run through the savings and kept on going, like a car with no brakes. After the first of the year, he started dipping into the boys’ college funds to keep them afloat. Luckily, the boys don’t even know they have college funds, although Tim Junior seemed kind of surprised when Tim Senior told him last fall, anticipating the worst, that anything beyond community college was going to be a DIY project. For once, Tim took something seriously. His grades are decent and he even won a prize for something called moot court. He says he wants to be a lawyer. Just what the world needs, another lawyer.

  Sean will be OK, that’s a given. He’s got a shot at the National Merit Scholarship, which would be sweet. And maybe the little one will straighten out. He’s a mess, but Tim sees something of himself in Go-Go’s chaos, a too-big-for-itself energy that needs only to be organized and focused. Tim was the same way before the Marines put him together. He volunteered when he was eighteen, knowing he wasn’t going to get a deferment or exemption. But by volunteering, he had been free to choose the branch he wanted. The Marines suited a scrappy little bantam like Tim, who had learned to fight growing up in the Pigtown neighborhood in Southwest Baltimore. He also happened to catch a break, for once in his fucking life, got in after Korea and out before Vietnam started to escalate, then went to UB on the GI Bill. There’s another option for his boys. Volunteer, then let Uncle Sam pay for tuition. What’s the risk? There are no wars. Let those towelheads scream and gibber. They couldn’t organize a panty raid in an underwear factory.

  He glances at his wristwatch, at Doris’s back at the sink, where she is moving a dishrag around with few noticeable result
s. A day is a hard thing to fill, especially in these gray winter months when he can’t throw golf clubs in the trunk, spend the afternoon at the public Forest Park course. Doris has to know he isn’t looking for work the whole day long, but she doesn’t dare question him. She doesn’t dare oppose him in any way. And it’s not like he’s ever raised a hand to her. With Doris, all it takes is getting loud, really loud, and she caves. She can’t stand the sound of a raised voice. She’s weak. The weakness in the boys—and there is weakness, a softness, in all of them, even Sean—that’s pure Doris, her blood and her ways. He should have taken a closer look at that family of hers, picked up on the fact that her prettiness wasn’t so much prettiness as frailty. Doris at eighteen was so thin and so pale she glowed, like one of those catfish in the Ozarks. He mistook that for class, breeding, when it was probably anemia and malnutrition. She can barely stand up straight these days. And that glorious, glorious red hair, which once promised to fulfill Tim’s every The Quiet Man/John Wayne/Maureen O’Hara dream of Ireland—it has faded to a pinky color, and you can see her scalp in spots. When he met Doris, her mother was dead and there weren’t a lot of womenfolk in the family, so he didn’t have anyone to study. He should have looked at the men, the most rabbity, watery, bucktoothed, swaybacked bunch of Irishmen he had ever seen in his life. But, like the song said, he only had eyes for Doris. Doris made him feel tender and protective, where other women just made him want to fuck, fast and dirty. Those aren’t the kind of girls you pick to bear your children.

  Then again, a milky white, pink-haired rabbit of a girl whose uterus killed as many babies as it made wasn’t the best choice for motherhood, either.

  He stubs out his cigarette and stalks out to the car, not bothering to say good-bye. He tells himself that he’s going to Security Square Mall or maybe Westview, drop off a few applications, see that guy he knows at Gordon’s Booksellers. But no one’s in, not at the first couple of places, and he’s at Monaghan’s when it opens its doors at eleven. Not that Tim is a drunk. He can’t afford to be. He nurses one beer, then two, all the way to happy hour, then asks for one more, knowing that the bartender won’t charge him for the third one. The bartender, Jim, is a good guy. He understands that Tim is looking for a job, and he mentions leads here and there. He even suggested that Tim could work at Monaghan’s. But he can’t do it, can’t squander all he has fought for—a job where you wear a shirt and tie, a desk, regular hours, benefits.

  Not that he actually likes bookkeeping. But you aren’t supposed to like your job. It makes him a little crazy, listening to Tim Junior and Sean talking about what they want to do. Not when they were little, still in the astronaut-firemen phase. Heck, he wished they’d go back to the firemen phase. With overtime, those guys make out like bandits. No, it was all this current talk of fulfillment, of what would be meaningful to them, that makes him crazy. Sean wants to be a doctor, and while Tim knows he would burst with pride if that happened, he resents it, too. Same with Tim Junior, with his half-assed dream of being a lawyer. As for Go-Go—the last vocational desire he expressed was being a garbageman. Sincere as anything. He thought it would be fun, he said, picking up other people’s trash. Two kids aiming too high, one aiming too low.

  He blames their mother’s blood. He wonders about the children lost, what they might have been. All daughters, Doris claims, but she has no way of knowing. Tim believes a son, his real son, the boy most like him, was one of the lost children.

  The bar grows dimmer as the day grows brighter. About 4 P.M., as he’s getting ready to ask for his last beer, he sees a vaguely familiar woman enter the place, a real slinky piece even in her nylon waitress uniform. She feeds the cigarette machine, yanks the knob hard, curses, and slaps the side. She’s overdoing it, making a spectacle of herself. She likes having everyone’s eyes on her.

  “Can you make good on the money I lost?” she asks Jim.

  “Didn’t you read the sign?”

  “What sign?”

  “The one plastered on the front of it that says ‘Out of Order, do not use, no refunds.’ ” Jim’s smiling, though. She’s too cute to ignore.

  She glances back over her shoulder. “Oh, that sign.” It’s droll, the way she says it. “I was in such a goddamn hurry to get to work I didn’t even look. Can’t you cut me a break?”

  “Best I can do is take your name and the amount lost and the boss will fish it out for you when the repairman comes by.”

  “Aw, c’mon.” She doesn’t put much oomph into it. She might have gotten what she wanted if she had. She is a good-looking woman. Maybe that’s her problem. Too proud to use charm, thinks her looks alone should carry her. Where has Tim seen her before, or is that wishful thinking? Then he remembers.

  “You’re—that girl’s mother. Mickey. We’ve met.”

  “Have we?” She extends a hand so limp that the fingers curl like cocktail shrimp.

  “Halloran. Father of Tim, Sean, and Gordon.”

  “Rita.” She studies him. “Oh yeah, the night of the storm. Mickey went out looking for your boy—”

  Is that how she remembers it? Is that all she knows? The men told the children never to speak of Go-Go’s secret, not even to their mothers. Tim didn’t want everyone knowing his son had been touched by that queer. A story like that could ruin a boy’s life. He had to tell Doris, but he didn’t tell her much. He’s pretty sure that faggoty Dr. Robison has kept his mouth shut. Rita’s boyfriend, Rick, shouldn’t have had any problem not telling Rita. It’s Mickey and Gwen that Tim wonders about, though. Do girls tell their mothers stuff ? How many people know?

  He says: “Funny how the kids used to be together all the time and now they’re not. I guess Tim and Sean are too old to be playing with girls.”

  “You don’t think boys and girls can play together?” Her mouth curves, not quite a smile. Something else. Something better.

  “Not into high school. It’s not natural. They were right to segregate kid by sexes in school. They learn more when they’re apart. At least the Catholic high schools are still all-boy.”

  “You know what? I kinda agree.” She sticks out her lower lip and blows upward, ruffling her bangs. She wears her hair in an upsweep. Not quite a beehive, but something with some height to it. It’s not fashionable, but he likes it. Better than those crazy hippie curls women are wearing now. He also likes her liquid eyeliner, laid on thick.

  “Where’d you go to school?”

  “I’m not from here, not originally. We moved here my last year of high school and I didn’t bother going anywhere.” Her tone borders on rude.

  “Well, I still might be interested in the answer, did you ever think of that?”

  “No. People here, they only ask that so they can play ‘Do you know.’ I’ve never lived in a place where people were less interested in people not from here.”

  “I’m sure lots of people are interested in you,” he says, trying to stick up for his hometown and flatter her at the same time.

  “If by people you mean men and if by interested you mean want to fuck me, yeah, then some are.”

  He hates women who use that kind of language. He also has a hard-on. Which she notices, and tries not to.

  “Doesn’t it seem like spring’s never going to come?” she asks the room in general. “I grew up in Florida. I cannot deal with these winters much longer.” Softer, to him. “I got a guy. He’s a good guy. You know that.”

  She’s being kind, the most insulting thing she could ever be. And just because she has a good guy—what did she mean, “You know that”—doesn’t mean she’s happy with him. She would definitely fuck someone else. Just not him. Not that he asked, by the way. She shouldn’t be so full of herself. Popping a boner was a reflex, nothing more. His stomach had been known to growl when he couldn’t be less interested in food. Fuck her. No—don’t fuck her. He won’t even whack off to her, although he was thinking about doing that a little later.

  She glances at her watch. “I’m going to be late. And n
ow I gotta make it through a six-hour shift with no cigarettes.”

  He takes out his pack and offers it to her.

  “Marlboros?”

  “You were expecting maybe Virginia Slims?”

  She laughs, selects two, as if picking chocolates from a box, as if one might be better than another. “You’re a nice guy, Hank.”

  “Tim.”

  “Right.”

  He is a nice guy. Having a temper doesn’t mean you are a bad guy, just that you were born with a shorter fuse, less tolerance for bullshit. No one blames short-legged people for not being able to walk with longer strides. How can people hold him accountable for his temper? Plus, he gets mad only when people fuck up. He always has a reason for what he does. He’s not a bully. True, sometimes he yells at his kids or Doris, but he has his reasons. He’s trying to explain things to them. What the light bill is every month. Why they can’t have a dog or a cat. He’s trying to get everyone else to join him here on Planet Earth.

  “You know, maybe the adults should get together, have dinner sometime.”

  “The four of us, or do we have to invite the good doctor and the grand lady?”

  He misunderstands this for a second, thinks she said grandbaby. “Oh, the Robisons.”