“I didn’t mean it.”
“I know you didn’t. I just feel like this is the best it’s ever going to be. I sort of opened up to this girl. And what, did her friend think we were going to kidnap them from the dance place or something?”
“I don’t know what people think, Stefan.” I got up and touched his shoulder lightly. I didn’t know what to do. He was an adult. I couldn’t sit him on my lap. I wondered if he would ever have a child and have to understand this delicate dance of the years, of approach and retreat, offer and hold back. I wanted to say, she’s shallow and a coward and she’s not worth it. But I’m a zealot. What, I thought, would Julie say? “I’m sorry that such an unkind thing happened to you. You must feel awful. I hope you won’t let the way you feel about this thing set the tone for all the other things to come.” I then made myself get up and pass by him where he sat, huddled and ashamed, up the stairs to my room, closing my door behind me as tears streamed into my mouth and every muscle fiber in me tensed with the desire to go back to him and say, I will make it better. Mom will make it better.
He was on a road where I couldn’t follow. He was on it alone.
He texted me the next morning from his truck. I am an advertisement for aspirin. Sorry. Really sorry.
Right after his came another text, an angry one. YOU WENT AND TALKED ABOUT IT AGAIN IN FRONT OF A WHOLE AUDITORIUM OF PEOPLE. I SAW IT IN THIS STORY ONLINE. WHY DON’T YOU LISTEN? DON’T YOU REALIZE THE REAL DANGER STEFAN IS IN? DO YOU THINK I’M LYING OR SOMETIHNG?
She made it sound as though we’d spoken earlier that day instead of weeks before. At last, I could give Pete Sunday a number I knew was current. I looked at the phone as if a genie would emerge from its bland face and then I called Pete Sunday and sent him a photo of the phone number and the message. When I called the number on my own, though, it was disconnected.
I made some more tea and then walked outside, into our backyard. I’m not sure why. I certainly didn’t hear a sound that summoned me. But when I glanced over at my rose garden, the many-legged creature of fear walked along my neck. All the roses had been uprooted and lay tangled on the soil, like a miniature forest after clear-cutting. After the shock, I made my feet scamper to the back door, and only when it was closed and locked behind me did rage flush my face and chest.
It was a modest plot of suburban real estate, not Buckingham Palace or The Cloister Club…but it was my real estate and the thought of someone plundering it for malice while I slumbered a mere dozen feet away was just one more ugly sin.
Then for a moment, as if from nowhere, something Pete Sunday had said in passing went through my mind like the sound of a coin rolling across a wooden floor above my head.
He was talking about suspects, and he said that the way that you could tell a person was lying was if the answer included too many details, like the way Jill answered when I asked if she knew anyone named Esme, when she brought up other popular names for young women. And there was something else, and maybe that didn’t mean anything at all, except perhaps that Jill didn’t care much about me. She didn’t ask why I wanted to know…
13
I promised myself I would wait until after Christmas to contact Pete Sunday again. Even police work must diminish at the holidays, I thought, even bad guys must take some time off. This, although Christmas and Thanksgiving were notorious dates for family massacres.
We spent Christmas Eve at home quietly, just the three of us. The next day, we went to Amelia’s for brunch and an evening gathering with relatives. Stefan delighted in his godson, Gus, for Phoebe and Walker, who were staying with my parents for the holiday, had figured out a way for him to have the honor in absentia. This was the first time we’d seen the baby since he was born. We gathered around the extravagant tree, Stefan eagerly showing my sister pictures of our outside décor.
“Will you do this for me next year?” Amelia asked. “I’ll pay you anything.”
“Consider it done,” Stefan said.
He then gave each of my sisters a scarf he had knitted by hand, and for my mother, he’d made a shawl in bands of rose and gold. He had taken up knitting to calm himself when he felt stressed, at the suggestion of his therapist, and he had taken to it. My mother held the shawl carefully up to the window light, and for a moment, I thought she was going to say something about how this was no work for a man, but when she looked up, her eyes were brilliant with tears.
“This is something you have not heard me say so very many times in my life,” my mother said. “And here it is. I was wrong.” She stopped for a moment. “I was wrong about Stefan coming back home. Father Kanelos sings out his name in church. All my daughters’ friends praise him for his hard work and his kindness. For the wrong he did, I will always cry, as he will cry, the angels cry. But I am proud of my grandson. I am proud of the man he is becoming.”