“It for sure wouldn’t be fun.”
“Why not?”
I paused to eat a hard-boiled egg. I didn’t pop it in my mouth whole and moosh it up, as I might have done if I had been alone or with other kids. And I never for a moment considered mooshing it up in my mouth and then slamming my hands against my bulging cheeks and spewing egg debris all over the desk, which in those days could be funny in the right crowd. I cut the egg in four and used a fork and swallowed discreetly. Then I said, “It might be fun if we had small brains like birds and fish do. Their routines probably are fun for them. But our brains are too big for us to do the same thing every day, the same way, all the time. We’d go freaking nuts.”
She blotted her mouth with a napkin, so I did, too, and she said, “What would be the point of making big-brain humans and then having all of them do the same thing as all the others?”
“Yeah, it wouldn’t make sense. That’s what I’m saying.”
She smiled. “We need to have the ability—the right—to make our own choices, even though we make mistakes. We learn from our mistakes, or we should. Scientists learn from their mistakes, and that’s how science advances. Trial and error. Without error, there would be no progress.” We ate in silence for a few minutes, until she said, “Now we come to the hard part, huh?”
“Totally,” I agreed.
“Tell me what you think the hard part is.”
After I finished my chicken salad, I said, “If we can make choices, we can make either good ones or really bad ones.”
“It’s called ‘free will,’” she said. “We can be kind to one another and love one another—or we can be cruel and do evil.”
I didn’t want to cry, and I didn’t think I would, but then I thought of the evil that Litton’s father committed, and tears came. They were quiet tears, but I couldn’t stop them for a while.
Then I said, “So that’s the deal, I guess, huh?”
“It’s a package deal,” she said. “Free will and freedom itself require the problem of evil. People who are truly grown up, not just in years but also in their minds and hearts, understand that freedom can’t exist without the choice between right and wrong. To be free, we accept the problem of evil—and then resist it.”
Resistance didn’t seem enough to me. “Maybe someday aliens from another planet, like thousands of years more advanced than us, will show up, and they’ll have figured out how to do everything right and how to stop people from ever making mistakes, doing the wrong thing, and then they can teach us.”
“You better hope they don’t show up, Quinn. Such a race would be a hive. A tiny ruling class, certain of its moral superiority, would have obliterated the free will of the drones, crushed those who resisted. They would have no patience to teach us. They would just destroy us.” She smiled broadly. “Dessert?”
She’d bought the Italian equivalent of chocolate éclairs from Bellini’s, the bakery and specialty store at the far end of the block from the orphanage. Anyone who had ever eaten one would know that these fantastic treats could have come from nowhere else.
After she put the plate in front of me, I stared at it for a long moment without picking up my fork.
Having returned to her chair, she said, “Something wrong?”
I met her eyes. “That’s where it happened.”
“Where Litton’s father shot him. Where Michael Bellini then shot the father.”
“Yeah. That’s where.”
She picked up her fork but didn’t yet use it. “Bellini’s has been in business sixty-one years, Quinn. They have made a lot of people happy. Three generations of the family have worked there. Should we tear the place down because of what happened on one day out of twenty-two thousand days? Should the Bellinis go out of the food business and start all over in another line of work?”
“No. But . . .”
She cut a piece of the éclair, though she didn’t lift it to her mouth. “You know who in all the world has been the most hurt, the most saddened, by what happened that awful day? For all that you loved Litton, I’m not talking about you, dear Quinn. The Bellini family has been devastated, especially Michael, who saw Litton shot, who was forced to pull the trigger to save Sister Margaret from Corbett Ormond. They had to clean up the aftermath. They couldn’t crawl into bed and surrender to depression. They had to go back to work the next day and every day after. Their store won’t feel the same to them for a long, long time, if ever. Do you understand?”