“James Tillerman,” she said when she had found the letter he’d written.
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered, sitting up straight. He thought she was probably in her forties, from the lines around her eyes and mouth. She wasn’t married.
“We had a number of inquiries about the position, but yours looked the most promising,” she told him, her eyes on the letter.
“It did?”
“You can spell and write a clear sentence,” she said. “You seemed to try to be honest about anything that might be against you. Your age. Your bicycle.”
“Thank you,” James said. She was the kind of person who made him sit up straight and pay attention.
“The letter could be a slick con job, of course,” she said. “Is it?”
“No, ma’am,” he told her. “I don’t think so.”
“Do you want the job?” she asked him. She certainly didn’t waste time deciding things.
“Can I do the work?”
“James, it doesn’t require one of the great minds of the Western world to file and fill out insurance forms. To answer the phone. I assume you do well in school?”
“A’s,” James told her, for once proud to be able to say just that.
“Unless the educational system has taken a complete dive—which, as a taxpayer, I sincerely hope is not the case—you should have no trouble with the work. It’ll be only a few hours a week, I don’t think more than ten to start with. We’ve only been down here, my partner and I, for a few months. Business isn’t booming. I should warn you: We’re liable to need someone full-time as things get busier, so it’s not a permanent job.”
“Yes, ma’am,” James said.
“So you’ll take it?”
“I’d like to,” James told her. “But—” Her mouth moved impatiently. He hurried on. “I have to ask my grandmother’s permission. We live with my grandmother. She’ll give it, I’m pretty sure, but I do have to ask her first.”
“I can see that.”
“And for a few weeks, not long, I can only come on Saturdays. Because of sports,” he explained.
“You don’t look the athletic type,” she remarked, looking at him.
“I’m not. But anyway the season ends in just three or four weeks, and then I can come after school. Because there won’t be late practices, or games.” He wondered, if she said he had to be able to come after school starting right away, if that would be reason enough to quit the team. He decided it might be, and he hoped she’d say that.
“All of that’s fine by me. We have office hours Saturday morning. Let me get my partner, so if she doesn’t like the look of you she can tell us now. I should warn you, she wanted to get another nurse, not a file clerk. But I made her see reason. It’s the paperwork we need help with, at this point, not the weighing-in and sampling of blood.”
James didn’t say anything. He wouldn’t know about that. Dr. Landros picked up her phone and pushed a button. “Leslie? Can you step into my office just for a minute? That young man is here.”
The other doctor was younger, but not married either. She had a stethoscope around her neck, and all she did was take a quick look at James’s face, shake his hand, say “Good,” and leave. James had a job.
* * *
Gram wasn’t even surprised when he told her he’d been offered a job. “You’re old enough,” she said. She asked him what he’d be doing and he told her. “You’ll do well,” she said, her attention on the chunk of potato she was swooshing around in the pot roast gravy. “I’ve never heard of these doctors,” she said.
“But—” Sammy started.
James interrupted, to answer Gram’s question. “They’re new here, they just opened up a few months ago.”
“You make them sound like some store,” Gram objected.
“But, James—” Sammy tried.
“What do you know about them?” Gram asked, in her unquestioning way. James thought to himself how he liked the way his grandmother took it for granted that he’d get a job, as if it wasn’t anything so special.
“They’re women,” he told her.
“So,” she said, looking at him, “are fifty percent of the people in this world.”
James was only trying to tell her whatever was different from what would be predictable. “Actually, it’s closer to fifty-two percent,” he corrected.
“Present company not excepted,” she continued, looking around the table.
James gave up, and laughed. “Okay, okay. One’s a GP and one’s an obstetrician. It’s a small office and when they get busier they’ll want somebody full-time.”
“Yeah, but who—” Sammy tried again.
“You can wait a minute,” Gram said to him. She turned her attention back to James. “Clerical work, just thinking about doing it makes my ears droop.”
“Not me,” James promised her. “I’ll need work papers.”
“I can still sign my name,” Gram said. “Now, Sammy, what is it?”
“Who’ll go crabbing with me?” Sammy demanded.
“I may be able to,” James said. “I don’t know what hours I’ll be working. Or you could get one of your friends to work with you.”
“But then we’d have to split the money with him,” Sammy pointed out.
“I could do it,” Maybeth offered.
“That’s a good idea,” James said. She looked so pleased that he admitted, “I never even thought of it.” He wondered how difficult it was on her, always to be treated as slow-minded, and maybe stupid, as if you couldn’t have good ideas just because you weren’t good at schoolwork. James still hadn’t gotten over getting the job, and so easily. He never would have thought he’d write the best application letter.
“Anyway, you won’t make as much money,” Sammy continued. “How much are they paying you?”
That stopped James in his tracks. “I think three twenty-five, but I didn’t ask.”
“I’m glad to see your self-sufficiency is flawed,” Gram remarked, but James barely heard her he was so surprised at his oversight.
He was making, he learned the next Saturday, three fifty an hour, which meant he’d earned seventeen fifty by the time they closed the office at two. James had spent his time quietly at the back of the office, behind the desk, sorting and alphabetizing, finding old file folders or starting new ones, and studying the long insurance claim forms to see what information went into which boxes. When he had any questions he asked the nurse, but he didn’t have many. If you thought about them, things made sense. All the five hours he was aware of the coming and going of patients in the office, of the doctors doing their work, and the nurse coming and going between the desk and the phone and the back examining rooms. He liked the work, and the office. He didn’t exchange more than a few words with his bosses. “The accountant will get the check in the mail Monday, first thing,” Dr. Landros said as they locked the door behind them at two.
“Thank you, ma’am,” James said.
“Don’t call me that. I’m a doctor.”
If James hadn’t known Gram, he would have been sure he’d made the doctor angry. As it as, he wasn’t sure he hadn’t. He made a mental note to address both the doctors as doctor, from then on.
The check arrived on Wednesday, and James signed up the next day to go on the school trip to Annapolis. How he’d get shed of the group, he didn’t know; but he’d think of something, once they got there. He had a lot to think about, so baseball barely dented his consciousness, even when he was at practice and actually had to do something. He had the English paper to write. He went ahead and wrote it on kings in Macbeth; he didn’t have time to think out another topic, and he didn’t want to do another. By the time he handed the paper in, nine typed pages and one more of footnotes, he had forgotten that he hadn’t done the exact assignment she’d wanted, so when she smiled at him and asked if the paper was going to be as good as usual he just answered yes. He heard a voice nearby say, “Did you hear that?” and another voice answer, “Yeah, but he do
esn’t have anything else to do but get the grades and butter up the teachers.” James would have liked to turn around and see who had said that, but he didn’t. Besides, it wasn’t as if he was kidding himself about people liking him, anyway.
He didn’t kid himself about the way it bothered him, either, even if there was nothing he could do about it. But after all these years, he had to admit it was starting to get through to him.
Adults liked him all right, there was that. Anyway, the doctors did, and so did their nurse. It wasn’t just teachers who liked him. Kids acted as if they were the only people in the world, but they weren’t. They weren’t even an important part of the world, although they acted as if they were the reason the whole world had been made. It was pretty unrealistic thinking, James thought. He wished he could show everybody how stupid they were. Because they were, always trying to make someone feel bad because he wasn’t just like them, or even just ignoring him because he wasn’t someone like them.
* * *
Gram took James into the town dock so he could get to school by seven thirty for the Annapolis trip. It was a warm, moist morning, with clouds hanging over the flat water. Everything was gray—the clouds a smoky gray, the bay a stony gray. “Call me when you get back, if you miss the school bus,” Gram said. “You have money for a phone call?” she asked.
James had five dollars in his pocket and other things on his mind. “Yes, sure,” he said.
Gram didn’t even cut the motor on the boat, because she was in a hurry to get back. James stood on the dock, looking down at her, waiting, in case there was anything else she wanted to say. She looked up at him, from the rocking boat. “Enjoy yourself,” she said. “Whatever it is you’re up to.”
Before he could deny anything, she had pushed off and was heading out into the harbor. He wondered what she guessed, and why she suspected anything. But she had gone, and the red boat was hobbling along across the choppy water, so he couldn’t ask her. He didn’t want to know, anyway. He didn’t know that he expected to find anything in particular in Annapolis, but he planned to go to the Hall of Records and see what there was there under Verricker. He might find his father’s family. He walked up along the broad main street to the school. He’d be more than on time, he knew, so he took his solitary time. Stores were deserted, their fronts like sleeping faces. He might find one of those sisters, somewhere, in business somewhere, and she might know where her brother was. James didn’t know whether he actually wanted to meet his father, whom he couldn’t even imagine. He wondered what it would be like to see him, from a distance, or even talk to him, without James giving away who he was. He wondered what kind of a man Francis Verricker was, what kind of a father he would have made.
Toby Butz was among the group gathered at the front of the school, waiting for the bus to arrive. The U.S. history teachers were the chaperones for this trip, only three of them for the sixty kids who would fill the bus. That was good, James thought, good that Toby, someone he knew, was going, and also good that U.S. history was a junior course, so none of the teachers knew who he was. He wasn’t the kind of kid they would know was there, or not there. James went to stand beside Toby.
“James,” Toby said, hesitant.
“I didn’t know you were going.”
“Anything’s better than a day here.”
That surprised James. He always felt safe, in classes at least. He stared at Toby, looking at the eyes magnified by the thick glasses. He thought, Toby had always felt the same way he did about school; he wondered, what had changed Toby’s mind. “You really don’t like school,” he said.
“I hate it. You can’t think about anything.”
“If we have to have partners, let’s be partners,” James suggested.
“If you want to,” Toby said. He said it as if he weren’t sure he wanted to. James wondered if Toby felt as strange about him as he did about Toby. It was hard with people you used to be good friends with, best friends, and then just weren’t—especially if they turned out to be dorks.
They sat together on the bus, but there wouldn’t be partners, because this was, as the teachers told them, a high school trip and they were certainly old enough to behave sensibly. If they knew what was good for them.
James looked out the window, because Toby had told him to take the window seat. He tried to figure out how much to tell Toby about his plan to ditch out on the group. Getting away shouldn’t be hard; it was not being noticed that was the risky part. He was getting pretty adept, he thought, about sneaking around. He’d given Andy Walker the notes for a report on “The Myth of Sisyphus”; good notes too, so good that James was sorry not to get to make the report himself. He’d just handed them over at the start of French the previous morning, just said “I don’t know if you’d be interested in this,” and passed the papers over. Andy had looked at them and said, “Can I borrow them? I haven’t got time now.” In case anyone was listening. All Andy would have to do was work out the development of the ideas, and then translate what James had written into French. That was so close to cheating, James thought, uncomfortable and not because of the way the bus bounced under him, so close that it probably wasn’t any different. Well, he thought to himself, turning away from the gray and brown landscape, he was his father’s son in more than just the smartness. Besides, it only really mattered if you were caught. If you weren’t caught, then it was as if you hadn’t cheated. The whole thing depended on what people thought. There had even been times when cheating was admired. It was all relative, anyway, everything was relative, especially morality, and besides, there wasn’t anything James could do about it now.
He turned to Toby, more to distract himself than to talk. “How are things?”
Toby shrugged.
“Do you still think extraterrestrial life-forms are a possibility?”
Toby didn’t want to answer, James could see that. But he couldn’t stop himself from talking about his favorite subject. And he was knowledgeable, James thought, listening, as the road rolled on and the towns rolled by, Princess Anne and Cambridge, as the miles rolled by and they crossed over the short humped drawbridge to Kent Island. Traffic got thicker around them, and the voices in the bus grew louder. They rumbled up the long bridge that headed west over the bay. James looked down at the trail of a tanker in the gray wrinkled water, then up to where the low mass of the western shore came toward them.
James was going to have to trust Toby. There wasn’t anything else for it. If he didn’t tell the kid, then he’d . . . have to stay with the group all day, pretending to himself that he’d tried to get to the Hall of Records but circumstances had overwhelmed him, while all the time he’d know he’d been too chicken to take a shot at really doing it. But if he did tell Toby, then he’d have to try.
He kind of hated to interrupt Toby, in the middle of an explanation of the possibilities of life on Venus. “Not humanoid, of course,” Toby was saying, earnest and engrossed. “The chemical composition, the environmental differences, it wouldn’t be anything like human, but—”
“Listen,” James interrupted. “I have a favor to ask. A big one. I want to finish talking about this on the way back, but—”
“I guess I’ve been doing all the talking,” Toby said. He smiled, then hid it behind his hand. “I always talk too much, if anyone listens.” He smiled again, as if smiling was a nervous habit. His smile looked like an apology.
“You are a bit obsessive,” James told him. “But listen—I have to get away from this group.”
“Why?”
James shook his head. He wasn’t going to answer.
“For how long?” Toby asked.
“As long as I can. It’s nothing dangerous or anything.”
“Nothing dangerous? Annapolis is a city, James, you could get—anything could happen. Do you expect to just wander around in it? And not know where you’re going or anything? Aren’t you afraid?”
“No.” Not of anything Toby had mentioned, James wasn’t. “Will you cover fo
r me, if you need to? Or tell them where I am if they find out?”
“But I don’t know where you’ll be.”
“Just tell them I’ll be back to get on the bus at two. That’s if they miss me, which I strongly doubt they will.”
“Do you know how much trouble you could get into?”
James didn’t want to worry about that. He just . . . hoped they’d never notice him, like they’d never noticed him so far. “That’s okay,” he said.
Toby envied him, James could see that, and admired him. Toby’s reaction made James feel like a pirate, like an adventurer, like someone the rules couldn’t hold in. Like his father. Toby was all wrong about him, James knew, but it still felt good.
At the front of the statehouse, where the legislature met, they all clambered off the bus. A guide, dressed up like a colonial woman in long skirts and a little white cloth cap, was waiting for them there. First everybody had to listen, looking up at the brick building on top of a green hill, while she told them how to behave and what the legislature was going to be discussing. Then she led the group up the shallow steps, to begin the first part of the tour.
It was easy to hang back, to hold the big doors open for other people and then just not step inside. It was hard not to just grin and wink at Toby, looking back over his shoulder at James from inside the building.
When the last student had gone through, James let the door close and stepped back, against the brick building. His heart was thudding. He didn’t know if it was fear or excitement. He waited for whatever it was to die down so he could think. He half expected one of the teachers to come back out through the doors, to yell at him to come along quickly, right now.
That didn’t happen.
James went back down the steps, feeling as good as if the sun was shining right down all over him. It was a sort of adventure, his own adventure.
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