“What possible reason would you have to not report it to the police?” I asked.
Andy and Amelia exchanged looks. “The big reason is that Stefan could be blamed too, and he threw the first punch.”
“You said somebody hit him from behind first with a board.”
“But Stefan didn’t just walk away when someone made some comment afterward. He went in hard. Angry. He got physical, too.”
“What should he have done? Do you think anyone would have had any respect for him if he just walked away? Do you think they wouldn’t have come after him just the same?”
Andy leaned back and closed his eyes. He acknowledged how terrible the situation was, and that Stefan didn’t really have any choice. It was a lumberyard, not a hair salon. But he pointed out that while the setting wasn’t unique, the situation was. If something like this could happen in a workplace run by Stefan’s own uncle, with that uncle standing just a few yards away, what could happen in another place?
“So, you’re saying wherever he goes, somebody is going to try to hurt him?”
“Basically, the people who work for me are good guys.”
“Good guys? Good guys that put a nail in my son’s eye?”
“Younger guys, Thea. Hotheads with something to prove.”
“They’re hotheads, but when Stefan gets angry, that’s different?”
“A few of them actually knew Belinda. The past Stefan has, it’s with him right now. Maybe five, ten years from now, people will forget. They’ll know him for other reasons, ten years from now. Right now, they only know him for one reason.” Andy paused and took a sip of his beer. “This was an assault. Of course it was. Did they plan to hurt him? Will they admit it? The point is, it was an assault. Possibly on both sides. Open to interpretation. Yes, Stefan was attacked. He was provoked. But who knows what side the police would come down on? Do you even want to risk the chance of Stefan, just out of prison and on parole, being involved with a violent crime?”
When Andy put it that way, I had to take a long breath. And then I had to take another long breath. A few of them actually knew Belinda. Was one of them the kid in the sunglasses and hoodie? Would the menace always be this close? How could I live in such a world? How could my son? It wasn’t as though I was one of those wives who had some kind of honor promise to tell her husband everything. I was annoyed by women like that and how fulsomely they boasted about being one soul in two bodies; I wanted full custody of my own soul, thank you very much. But I had never wanted to confide in Jep about the hooded stalker more than I did right now. He would be outraged, and rightly so, that I had not. I was leaving Stefan wide open to any threat.
Meanwhile, Andy was saying that he would give Stefan six months of full pay beyond his disability time. And he would give Stefan some clerical work to do at home once his vision recovered to give him enough work time to qualify for unemployment so he could have extra time to consider his options. It occurred to me to ask why he couldn’t just give Stefan work to do at home until he could actually find another job, but I didn’t dare. My brother-in-law had done everything right. This wasn’t his fault or his wish, but I was still aggrieved.
“So, he can’t come back to work at the lumberyard. But everyone else is forgiven.”
“I didn’t say that everyone else is forgiven. I’m going to do my own investigation and there will be consequences, and not just losing a job, when I find out who did this. The fact is, Stefan is not safe there. What if it had been worse, Thea? Your sister and I could never live with ourselves and neither could you.”
Stefan came home two days later. He and Jep hatched a plan in the hospital about how he would help Jep out informally at some local football camps for high-school players, but the eye surgeon had nixed that idea. He said while he couldn’t put Stefan in a bubble, he would if he could, since the slightest speck or inflammation of the injured eye could deep-six the whole intricate effort of repair he had undertaken. Stefan was looking at least more than a month of downtime. By the time he was fully healed, it would be nearly summer.
* * *
One morning a week or so later, on the kind of glorious morning that makes you wish you could live forever, Stefan wanted to visit Belinda’s grave. I was surprised to realize he had never been there. But of course he wouldn’t have gone.
“I thought I’d get arrested or something,” he told me. “I don’t know how this works. I don’t know if I’m allowed.”