Julie asked, “Any of those friends girls?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I would be surprised if they weren’t. Will’s a nurse, and a lot of the other student nurses are girls.”
“What does he say?”
“I would not go to that topic with him wearing a bulletproof vest, Jules.”
It wasn’t as though I hadn’t thought about that myself, but when I did think about it, it seemed like getting off a flight of stairs and climbing K2. I didn’t even know how to bring it up with my son again, because any way I did would be borderline creepy. I also didn’t know what the whole public revelation about his rival for Belinda’s affection being a girl had wrought in his consciousness. It was one thing his knowing; it was another everyone knowing. And not for nothing, it spelled motive with a capital M.
That very night, speaking of synchronicity—which I was not and never would—Stefan came home early. “What did you do?”
“We went to Molinaro’s for dinner and then back to Katie Molinaro’s and played Ping-Pong.”
“It’s her family’s restaurant?”
“It is. I didn’t realize I knew her and her sister in high school. They live up on Wapheton. I mean, her family does. She lives downtown now. She’s a nursing student. She has a very deluxe condo at Capitol Place, and the game room has like, a nickel bar and an Olympic-size pool and ten pool tables and all these big-screen TVs. They even have a sort of bar for kids where they can get milkshakes and candy and stuff. It’s very nice. I would take Julie’s son Ernie there sometime. He would think it was heaven.”
“She’s nice then. Is she going out with Will?”
“Will has sworn off other nurses for a while, at least until after January. He says they’re exhausting, and yeah, he means like that. I realize that is a stereotype.” He paused. “It wasn’t Will she was interested in, though.” I just waited. “She was flirting with me. But how can I, Mom? The elephant isn’t just in the room, it’s a herd of elephants. Of course, she knows. Anyone I meet around here will know, and I know she knows. To say this is awkward doesn’t really begin to cover it. I don’t know why she isn’t running from me screaming and the fact that she isn’t running from me screaming is kind of, like you would say, unsettling.”
They had actually been having a great time when Stefan suddenly got so tense he was short of breath and had to beg off. “I’m sitting in Will’s car in the parking lot, breathing in this old McDonald’s bag from his back seat, which smells like pickles, because Will’s right, I’m having a panic attack, and I think, this is great. This is what happens when a pretty girl flirts with me.”
He further told me that Will directed him to A Deux, a dating site for Midwesterners, and when he put his picture up, he got a rainstorm of pings. “But then, we start to chat, and I hate the word chat, I have to tell her right away. How do I bring it up? I’ve actually never gone snorkeling, but you should probably know I killed a girl. It wasn’t as though I embezzled, or even that I was in the car when some guys stuck up a convenience store. And what if they still like me? Like those women on visiting day at The Hill? I told you about them. That would creep me out. I don’t want to go to any party where they’d want me as a guest.”
He slumped back on the couch. I began flicking through channels. Everyone on TV seemed to be kissing or screaming. Did we have only the murder channel, like the Christianity channel at Connell’s Glory Be Bed-and-Breakfast? Stefan went on, “Are there Greek Orthodox monks? Do you think I should become one? I could raise dogs in Switzerland or something.” He went to get his yarn bag, which was overflowing with the beautiful gifts he was knitting for my mother and my sisters. “I could knit when I wasn’t training the dogs or ringing the bells or something.”
I didn’t want to laugh, but Stefan grinned at me, and then I relaxed a little and grinned back. At least, he could still joke a little. We watched a decorous English murder mystery, only because I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off without risking Stefan’s irritation. He knew full well that, before all this happened, I delighted to the Edward Gorey montage that introduced the PBS series Mystery, and he would know I was switching leads because of him. We watched some story in which the new vicar was actually a former Scotland Yard inspector, and I was uncomfortable the whole time: I hadn’t watched a program like this one for years. How had I ever been able to watch and forget these polite, cold-blooded crime stories? And if my flesh crawled, how did Stefan feel, seeing scenes of ersatz police peering down at a crumpled body, the actor-as-world-weary-coroner suggesting blunt force trauma…？ How did he shrug off such dense, heedless bruiting about by popular culture?