After the Parade

17

On the board, Aaron wrote the day’s phrasal verb: turn into. He added a definition—“to change from X to Y; to become”—and beneath it, examples:

1. We turned the garage into a study.

2. He started studying more and turned into a straight-A student.

3. She turned her jeans into a pair of shorts.

Behind him, the students copied everything into their notebooks, which was always the case when they studied phrasal verbs. To truly understand English, they agreed, they had to know the difference between turn into and turn in. They sat in pairs writing sentences while Aaron circulated, checking their work. He read aloud what Chaa had written: Tommy used to be a man, but then he turned into a gay. The Thai boys laughed, except Tommy, who looked around for Aksu, worried that she might have overheard their teasing.

“You do know that gay men are still men?” Aaron said.

“Yes?” said Chaa. He sounded surprised.

Finally, it was break time, and the students turned on their cell phones and borrowed change from one another for the coffee machine. As Aaron passed the smoking balcony on his way down to the faculty room, he saw that the sliding door was ajar and that smoke was drifting into the hallway.

“Smoke travels,” he called to the two smokers, before slamming the door shut.

He recognized them, two young Japanese women who planned to remain in the class one level below his because they were afraid of him. “He looks too serious,” they had told his students, referring to his ties and the horn-rimmed glasses, his tallness and the severe part of his hair. The Thais had reported this to him gleefully.

The women began gesticulating. They pointed to the door, their mouths moving, and he pointed to his ear and yelled, “Louder.”

“Broken,” screamed the one on the right. She tugged on the door. Nothing. Aaron tugged. It was indeed broken, like everything else in this building.

“Okay,” he called. “I’ll get help.” Instead of going downstairs to find Bart, he turned back toward the detective’s classroom, assuming that a man who visited the smoking balcony with such regularity would be familiar with the door’s idiosyncrasies. He had not actually met him yet, but they often nodded at each other down the hallway. The detective’s door swung open just as Aaron reached it, and the two men collided, hard. Aaron extended his hand. “I’m Aaron,” he said.

“Bill,” said the detective, his grip unexpectedly loose. “Carpal tunnel,” he added, as though reading Aaron’s mind. “All those years of writing out reports.”

“I was wondering whether you might have some advice regarding the sliding door on the smoking balcony?”

“My advice is ‘whatever the hell you do, don’t close the damn thing.’ ”

“Well, I’ve already done so — slammed it, in fact,” Aaron said.

Bill put an unlit cigarette in his mouth, jiggled it up and down. “Let’s go take a look,” he said. Students had already gathered around the door, but they stepped back, no doubt reassured by Bill’s capable appearance. “Yup, it’s definitely off the track,” Bill confirmed. He turned to Aaron. “I remember seeing a toolbox in the basement when I got the tour — in the corner by the Christmas tree.”

Aaron understood that he had created the problem, which made retrieving the toolbox his responsibility. Generally, he avoided the basement, a dark, low-ceilinged place used for storing extra desks and blackboards as well as the numerous holiday decorations of which Marla was fond — bats and leprechauns keeping company with Chinese lanterns and turkeys. It was also used for hosting school-wide parties, the only space big enough to accommodate all the students. They had begun the term down there, the teachers and students collectively welcoming the new year and the new semester, and because he was new, they had welcomed him also. He recalled how uncelebratory the event felt, the dirty windows and flickering fluorescent lights, the ceiling pressing down on them. Marla had run off copies of “Auld Lang Syne,” which they sang together, ruining for Aaron, possibly forever, a song that had always invoked in him a sweet nostalgia.

He made his way down the back stairs and paused to let his eyes adjust. He did not know where the light switch was, but he could discern the Christmas tree, which lay on its side like a giant tumbleweed. Near it was a pair of chairs, facing each other as though they’d been set up to facilitate an interrogation, an interrogation of the sort that required a dim, isolated, innocuous place. He stepped carefully over to the tree and saw the toolbox, just as Bill had described, but as he bent to retrieve it, he heard a low, throaty exhalation of air. It frightened him, the way that human sounds do when you think you’re alone, and he jerked his head toward it.

There, almost close enough to touch, was a young man leaning back against a column. His eyes were closed, but his mouth was open wide, like that of a thirsty man trying to catch a drop of rain.

Perhaps Aaron made some small noise, or the boy simply sensed a presence, but his chin dropped and his eyes opened, and he was looking right at Aaron, each regarding the other with surprise. Just as quickly the boy looked down, though not before Aaron had seen the fear in his eyes. Aaron followed the young man’s gaze, down to where darkness shrouded his body. From this darkness rose a form that became another human being, a man with black hair that stood on end as though mussed from a pillow or a lover’s restless hands. It was Melvin.

* * *

Two stories up, in the well-lit faculty room on the second floor, it was easy enough to believe that he had imagined the whole thing, for there in front of him sat Felix eating a potato still steaming from the microwave while Kate passed around a bag of preserved plums, her weekly gift from a Japanese student who was concerned about her digestion. Eugenia was looking through a box of cassette tapes, and when she saw Aaron in the doorway, she said, “Aaron, do you have the Lake Wobegon tapes?”

“I have no interest in Lake Wobegon,” he said. He was tired of people assuming he did. Nobody asked why he was carrying a toolbox.

Even Taffy was there, sorting through magazines, no doubt in preparation for a cut-and-paste activity of the sort that introductory ESL teachers relied on, snipping out pictures of people and labeling them with straightforward adjectives: HAPPY, SCARED, CONFUSED, EMBARRASSED.

“Taffy,” Aaron said, “may I speak to you in the hallway for a moment?”

He needed to tell someone what he had seen, to try to put into words the mix of emotions he had felt as he walked away from the two men. Taffy followed him out and stood with her hands on her hips. “What is it?” she asked in a voice that made it clear she had more magazines to sort through.

“Actually, it’s nothing,” he said, put off by her tone, but then the words tumbled out anyway. “It’s just that I went down into the basement to get the toolbox, and I came upon two students.” He held up the toolbox as though his story hinged on it.

“They were skipping class?” asked Taffy.

“I’m not sure.” This was a lie. Melvin had been sitting in his desk right up until break began, but noting this meant implicating him.

“You didn’t ask? The basement is off-limits to students. You should’ve asked.”

“They were… busy.”

“Busy?” said Taffy loudly, as though she took offense at the notion of students being busy, but then, perhaps noting his discomfort, she said, “Busy how? Are you telling me that they were doing something down there?”

He nodded.

“Did you recognize them?” she asked.

He thought about the look of shame in their eyes, shame not just at being caught but at the need that had brought them to this moment.

“No,” he said. “It was dark. I didn’t recognize them.”

* * *

The sliding door had been removed and propped against the wall. Bill and four students stood on the balcony smoking, as though being on the balcony were what mattered, the door itself inconsequential. The freed Japanese women regarded Aaron warily. He looked at his watch and saw that somehow only half an hour had passed since the break began. His students were filing back into the room, but Melvin, who never missed class, did not return with them. Nobody commented on his absence, perhaps because Melvin’s absence felt much like his presence. Later, when the afternoon session began, he was back, sitting at his desk, not laughing or smiling or talking — in short, acting as he always did, which meant that there was no way to know whether what had happened in the basement had upset him.

It had upset Aaron, his sense of decorum, for there seemed something unsavory about engaging in such activity in a school, the place where one went to improve one’s mind. The incident had reminded him of something else, something from his childhood that he did not like to think about because thinking about it reminded him of his own shame, never far away, even after all these years. When he was eleven, a man from Mortonville named Ronnie Hopkins was arrested and sent to jail. He was an older man with large hips who was married to a much younger woman with no hips at all; she had a “boyish” figure, people in Mortonville liked to say knowingly, after Ronnie Hopkins was arrested for having sex with a student — a male student — at the vocational school for the developmentally disabled where he worked.

The student was technically an adult, forty, but mentally a boy, and so the police had come to the house where Ronnie Hopkins lived with his hipless wife and three children, and arrested him. While he was in prison, his wife divorced him and his children refused to write, yet when Ronnie Hopkins was released two years later, he came back to Mortonville and settled in one of the trailer houses on the edge of town. That Ronnie Hopkins chose to return had made no sense to Aaron — no sense to anyone in town really — and as Aaron worked to understand, he considered two possibilities: Ronnie Hopkins was punishing himself, or he simply had no sense that the world beyond Mortonville might offer something different. He had always kept to himself, had never sat with the other men in the café, drinking coffee and rolling the tumbler of dice to determine who would pick up the tab for the table. Instead, he came in alone and sat alone, generally to eat a hamburger before work. He was polite, almost apologetic, when he needed something, ketchup or a refill of pop.

After prison, Ronnie Hopkins stayed even more to himself than before. He no longer went into the bank, where his wife, his ex-wife, was a teller, nor did he buy gasoline or groceries in town or come into the café for a hamburger. Yet he still went into Bildt Hardware to pick up some necessity like batteries or nails, even though everyone in town knew that Harold Bildt had become fixated on Ronnie Hopkins. Each night after he finished his paperwork, Harold drove by Ronnie Hopkins’s trailer house, making sure that Ronnie was inside and accounted for. Often, Aaron overheard Harold and his friends discussing Ronnie Hopkins, so he knew also that Harold refused to wait on him when he came into the store. Even if Edna, Harold’s wife, was not around, Harold stayed in his office with his pals, laughing loudly and ignoring Ronnie Hopkins, who would never dream of demanding assistance. He had not been that kind of man before his arrest, and he was certainly not that kind after.

One afternoon Aaron’s mother sent him across the street to let Harold know that the dishwasher was acting up again. Aaron did not like going into Harold’s office, where Harold and his friends talked about sex in coarse language that often made no sense to Aaron and about everything else in the world according to a rigid code of right and wrong that seemed never to require examination or recalibration. As Aaron made his way through the quiet store, past Gardening and Hunting, he came upon Ronnie Hopkins standing in Households, scrutinizing the Scotch tape as though he were picking out a wedding ring, but Households was near the office, so Aaron knew that he was actually listening to the men talk. While Aaron stood observing Ronnie Hopkins, he heard Marvin Hultgren say loudly, “What kind of man wants someone’s business up his rear end anyway?”

Aaron had always thought of blushing as a public function, but that day in Bildt Hardware, hearing for the first time a graphic description of what men did to each other sexually, he learned otherwise. His face grew hot. He watched Ronnie Hopkins put a roll of tape in his pocket and turn to leave.

“When I joined the army back in ’42,” Marvin Hultgren continued, “the first thing was they had us strip down to nothing. There we were, buck naked, and we had to line up and bend over with our palms on the floor, asses straight up. This feller comes by with a fire hose and lets each of us have it — straight up the ass. I’m telling you, if that didn’t clean you out, nothing would. Hurt like hell. We walked around like sissies for a week.”

The men laughed and then one of them passed gas loudly, and so they laughed again, and Aaron knew that all of it — the story and the laughter and the passing of gas — was meant for Ronnie Hopkins. Ronnie Hopkins knew this also, and he stood still for a moment, unaware that he was being watched, and then he took the roll of tape back out of his coat pocket, slid it onto the display prong, and left.

Aaron could not tell his mother that he had failed to relay her message to Harold Bildt, so he walked quietly through Households, waiting for his face to cool, but everything he looked at — the corn skewers that went into the ends of cobs, the ketchup and mustard squirt bottles — reminded him of what he had heard. He took a breath and went into the office and told Harold Bildt about the dishwasher. Harold looked at the calendar on his desk, trying to figure out a time that he could walk across the street to fix it, and Aaron looked down at the floor because he could not look at the other men, now that he understood: what they hated about Ronnie Hopkins was not that he had done what he had to a retarded man but simply that he had done it to a man.

18

After classes were dismissed that afternoon, Taffy appeared in his doorway, wanting to go out for a drink in order to talk about what he had seen in the basement. Taffy had never come up to his room before, but he knew that the incident had aroused something in her, brought out the part of her that liked being in charge, handling situations, maintaining order. He suggested that they have a drink in the Castro, knowing she would decline. Taffy did not like the Castro because she did not like the way gay men regarded her. The truth was that he did not feel at ease there either, especially when he saw men walking around almost naked or couples holding hands, but he had begun cutting through the Castro on walks and had recently stumbled upon a café that he liked, a busy place, not the type of place he normally chose, but as he sat in the corner with a beer and a slice of pie, he discovered that the café’s busyness made him feel invisible.

He liked feeling invisible, and he sat with a poetry book open before him because he had learned that reading was a way to help that feeling along. At Milton’s, he had sometimes read through an entire week’s worth of newspapers, and the last time he ate there, the Friday right before he left Albuquerque, he had come across an article in The New York Times that he read with great interest and now wished he had clipped and saved. It was about the letter writers of India, a disappearing breed of men who set up shop — makeshift desks, paper, ink, stamps — day after day under the same trees in the same village markets in order to take down the letters of those around them who could not read or write but wished to record and share the details of their lives. It was a natural desire, this need to account for one’s life, to say it out loud or see it written down before abandoning it to the dusty shelves of memory — to suggest, in some way, that it mattered.

As he sat with his book and his pie that day in the Castro, a man, a very nice man named George, had come up and asked what he was reading. As this man George stood next to his table, his head inclined toward the open poetry book, Aaron considered how much of his life had been spent listening to the stories of others. It was not a complaint. He had felt nothing but fondness for the tellers. But now, nearly forty-two and alone for the first time, he had begun to think that his own life added up to nothing more than the stories of other people. He looked up at this stranger with kind eyes who wanted to know what he was reading and said, “ ‘Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg.’ ”

The stranger smiled, which made his eyes appear even kinder, and began to recite: “You might come here Sunday on a whim. / Say your life broke down.” He stopped abruptly because the next line was about a kiss, and they both looked down awkwardly. Aaron felt a tightening in his chest, a jolt to his groin, and he thought about how long it had been since he’d felt either. He recalled the farm boy he’d slept with in college, the boy from his poetry class. He had known so little about poetry then, only what Walter had taught him, but put off by the boy’s veneration of Wordsworth, he had used poetry as an excuse not to engage in sex with the boy again. He looked up at this man who could quote from Richard Hugo and said, “I’m Aaron. Would you care to join me?”

George sat down, and Aaron tried hard not to think about Walter, who had first read this poem to him all those years ago as they sat in a boat together fishing, just before Walter took him away and helped him become the person he was meant to be, which he now thought of simply as the person he was, the person this stranger, George, had seen reading poetry and wanted to get to know.

They talked for two hours, eating their individual slices of pie and then sharing a third (apple again) to prolong the conversation, forks intertwining for one awful, glorious second as they both reached for the same bit of crust. Most people were not interested in the specifics of teaching, perhaps because they had spent their youths in school and thought they already knew every boring detail of what it meant to be a teacher. They offered overly zealous praise for teachers and all that they had to endure, right before changing the subject. But George wanted to know everything — why Aaron had become a teacher and whether he ever regretted it, where he taught and what his students were like and whether he got along with his colleagues — and Aaron found himself describing it all: Melvin’s fiancée, Paolo’s motorcycle club, the week without heat, even that Marla wrote “Love you guys” on the box of pineapple buns.

“But she’s your boss,” George said, voice rising, and Aaron wanted to lean across the table and kiss him. “So what was the thing that surprised you most when you started teaching?” he asked next. “I don’t mean about education.” He looked flustered. “I mean something more personal, I guess, about how it feels to be in the classroom.”

“When I first started teaching, I couldn’t sleep most nights because I was so worried I wasn’t teaching them enough,” Aaron said, but as he spoke, he remembered something else: Walter lying awake with him, listening to him talk through the details of his teaching day. Some nights, he got up and brought Aaron a plate of saltine crackers and ketchup, that childhood snack for which he had never lost the taste. “You need to sleep,” Walter would whisper, but he always lay beside Aaron, stroking his brow for as long as it took because he understood that sometimes the only way to fall asleep was with the knowledge that someone was awake beside you.

George smiled encouragingly. He did not know that Aaron was thinking about lying in bed with the man with whom he had lived for more than twenty years. “But you just sort of get used to it,” Aaron finally continued. “To the overwhelming sense of responsibility, I mean. Or maybe you just get better at teaching.”

George nodded. “What else?”

“Well, one of the little things I really wasn’t expecting was how intimate being in a classroom feels, like you’re all on this long trip together. Sometimes the students act like they’re invisible, like I can’t see them doodling and rolling cigarettes, yawning and staring at the clock when they’re tired or waiting for the break. The strangest thing — I guess this is where intimate and invisible meet — is that an inordinate number of them poke their fingers into their ears and noses, beneath their arms, even into the little crevice between their shoe and foot. They poke, and then they bring their fingers to their noses and sniff deeply, taking stock of their hygiene. And even though they’re sitting right in front of me, it’s as if they have no idea that I can see them.”

George smiled again, and Aaron noticed that his front tooth was chipped, that one eye crinkled up slightly more than the other when he smiled. He was handsome, Aaron thought, the type of handsome that had to do with being slightly awkward and not caring about a chipped tooth.

“Sometimes, when all the twitching and poking and sniffing becomes too much, I’ll stop what we’re doing and remind them that I can see them. ‘It’s not like at the police station,’ I’ll say. ‘There’s no one-way mirror. You can see me. I can see you.’ They always look a bit sheepish, but then they go right back to twitching and doodling and clock-checking.”

“It makes me wonder what I was like,” George said. “You know, when I was sitting in my desk feeling invisible.” He looked down. “I think your students are lucky to have you.” He did not say it like someone who went around handing out compliments, and Aaron felt at once pleased and terrified.

“Actually, I’m lucky to have them,” he said. “They’re young, and they speak about everything with such passion. They see everything as possible.” Aaron stopped, embarrassed by his own earnestness, but George nodded, so he went on. “One of the things I most like about teaching is knowing there’s a part of my day that’s solely about them. I don’t mean that in a ‘doing my part to make the world better’ way. It’s much more selfish. I like knowing that when I go into the classroom, my needs and problems get set aside, that I’ll be able to escape my own head, even if it’s just for a little while.”

“What’s going on in your head that needs escaping?” George asked softly.

Instead of answering, Aaron said, “I’m talking too much. What do you do?”

George laughed. He knew Aaron was sidestepping the question. “Do you want to guess?” he asked. “Twenty Questions, maybe?”

“I am extremely bad at Twenty Questions,” Aaron said. “I forget what I’ve already asked and ask questions that are entirely too specific or that have nothing to do with the topic at all. I can assure you that the best approach is for you to just tell me.”

George picked up their pie forks and pretended to make a drum roll, which Aaron normally would have found silly or annoying but instead found endearing because he could see how foreign the gesture was to George, that he was not someone who punctuated his conversations with drum rolls. “I’m a Muni cop,” George said. “I’m one of those guys that rides around all day asking to see your ticket.”

“Do you like it?” Aaron asked.

“I like the hours. I don’t like spending my days underground watching people get nervous the minute I get on the train.” He paused, and Aaron could tell that he was thinking about something. “Today, for example, I got on the K at West Portal, and I saw this young couple with a baby, all three of them looking like they hadn’t eaten in days. I knew right away they didn’t have tickets, that they were probably just riding around hoping the motion would lull the baby to sleep.”

“How old was the baby?” Aaron asked.

“I don’t know, maybe a year. She was at that point where you could tell she was a girl. Anyway, I had to ask them for their tickets along with everyone else. I figured they were going to either hand me expired tickets they’d taken from the garbage or feign some type of ignorance, pretend to be tourists who don’t speak English or act like they were looking everywhere for their tickets, and I already knew what I was going to do: make them get off with me at the next stop for appearance’s sake, and then just send them on their way. Except the father says, ‘I’m sorry, Officer, but the baby grabbed our tickets and ate them.’ And I look at the baby, who’s hungry and clearly needs her diaper changed and didn’t ask for any of this, and I want to punch the guy. I mean, I just felt this rage inside.

“So I say, ‘Both of your tickets?’ And he nods. ‘Without either of you being able to stop her?’ And he nods again. ‘Well, then, we need to call a medical unit,’ I say, and I make a move toward my walkie-talkie, ‘because that’s a lot of paper for a little thing like her to digest. They might even need to keep her — you know, for observation or something like that.’ I was just talking, trying to get the guy to admit he’d lied. Listening to myself tell you the story now, it doesn’t make any sense — that I was so angry, that I thought it would change anything for that baby if he admitted he’d lied.”

George shook his head, and Aaron wanted to say something to let him know that it did make sense, but George continued with the story. “So then the girl jumps in. ‘Please don’t call,’ she says. ‘They’ll take her. We lied. Okay? We don’t have tickets,’ and the guy turns and yells at her to shut up and makes this move toward her with his fist. It was obvious she was used to stuff like this from him because she cowered back in her seat and got quiet.”

“What did you do?” Aaron asked.

“You mean did I add even more to the mess I’d already made?”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Aaron said. “The guy’s a jerk.”

“I know,” George said. “But I also know that I lost sight of what I was supposed to be doing, which was checking tickets. Anyway, you asked what happened next, and that’s the best part. The whole time this big butch is sitting next to them, reading. Well, she stands up, sets her book on the seat, and nails the guy. Just boom. Then she sits back down and begins reading again. Jonathan Livingston Seagull, of all things. The baby starts crying, and the guy shakes his head like something’s loose, and he turns to me and says, ‘You saw it. I want that dyke arrested,’ and I say, ‘Saw what?’ ”

George laughed but his eyes were red. “Anyway, if you ask me a different day, I’d probably say that I like the job well enough. I like the pay and the fact that I can do a forty-hour week in four days and have three left over for other stuff.”

“What sort of stuff?” Aaron asked.

George looked embarrassed. “I want to make documentaries,” he said. “But that’s a discussion for another day because, unfortunately, I have somewhere I’m supposed to be. I’m already late.”

“Oh, right. Sorry,” said Aaron. He jumped up, and they paid and walked out of the café and onto the street. He wanted to ask something that would indicate whether George had enjoyed their conversation as much as he had or whether this was just the way he passed his afternoons, but he knew that asking would require subtlety, and he did not know how to be subtle in a hurry. They turned in opposite directions, Aaron heading toward the Muni entrance and George hurrying off toward — Aaron imagined — a tryst or a lover at home.

Then, like two men dueling, they spun back around and looked at each other. “You might come here Sunday on a whim,” George called, and Aaron laughed and nodded, understanding that he was agreeing to a date.

However, when Sunday came around, Aaron could not bring himself to go because he was overwhelmed by desire, a desire that was not only sexual, though there was definitely that. It was the nonsexual part that frightened him. Specifically, in the days after their meeting, he had found himself wanting to tell George things: that he enjoyed taking public transportation, sitting on Muni surrounded by people from all over the world; that he rode public transportation sometimes just to be near people, not for companionship but because he never felt as keenly alone as when he stood pressed uncomfortably close to strangers; that he needed to feel alone. He wanted to tell George about something that he had recently witnessed in United Nations Plaza. He was on his way to an afternoon concert at the symphony hall, Dvoák’s New World Symphony, one of his favorites, but he’d arrived early, so he settled on a bench. As he sat there in his suit and tie, a group of young people, grubby and presumably homeless, had engaged in a ritualistic shaving of one another’s underarms. They stood in a circle near the fountain and took turns stroking the shaver against the underarms of the person beside them, dipping it into the fountain, then passing it on. Aaron felt repulsed yet could not stop watching. In the end, he had to run to make it to the concert on time. He could imagine telling George the whole story while George nodded and asked questions. He liked imagining it, and that was what frightened him, this desire to have George listen and nod as he tried to describe the trust involved in lifting one’s arms like that, in letting another person take in your smell and touch a razor to one of the most tender parts of your body.

He had told no one about George, not even Taffy. “The Castro?” she said. “Why don’t we have a drink somewhere nearby?” He knew that she assumed he would agree to this request, and he supposed he should, but he also knew that if they were really friends he would have told her about meeting George and standing him up and wanting to go back to the café in the hope of fixing things. He had not told her because they were not really friends. He appreciated her help, he did, but when he thought about his future, he did not picture Taffy in it, except as someone with whom he might occasionally have a drink while discussing nothing more personal than students and pedagogy.

“Rain check?” he said, though he supposed they both knew this was unlikely. They walked down to the first floor together and got on different buses outside the school, and when he arrived in the Castro, he went directly to the café, where he looked through the window. He saw a man — just the back of his head — that might be George, and he did not go inside. Instead, he walked up Market to Civic Center, where he sat for a long while on a bench, waiting for something to happen, for strangers to start shaving the underarms of other strangers, to begin stroking their brows or brushing their hair or feeding them by hand, to begin doing the kinds of things that strangers did not do for other strangers — because he knew now that sometimes they did.

* * *

Aaron did not know how the friendship with Bill began, even whether it could be called a friendship, since they had nothing in common. Still, in the weeks following the episode with the broken smoking balcony door, they came to know things about each other, and wasn’t that what friendship came down to? He knew, for example, that Bill had been married three times. “First to a black lady, Marabelle,” he told Aaron as they stood in the hallway during break, “and then a white lady. That was Peggy. Last was Misclaida from Cuba. So you see, I’ve tried this marriage thing from different angles, but none of them took. Now I play the dating sites a bit, but that’s about it. How about you?”

Aaron wanted to tell Bill that he would never meet a woman if he thought of dating sites as something to be played, like slot machines, but Bill had not solicited his advice. Instead, Aaron told him about Walter, and Bill nodded. “I had you pegged that way,” he said, clearly pleased with himself.

“What way?” Aaron said. “As someone who could pull off a twenty-year relationship, or as someone who would leave that relationship behind?” He knew that Bill meant neither of these, but he wanted to make him say it.

Bill laughed. “No, I could just tell you were a little light in the loafers.”

“You do know that people don’t really use that expression anymore? If, in fact, they ever did.”

Bill laughed again. He knew all about “the gays,” he said. He’d grown up right here in San Francisco — okay, technically in Daly City, which was where you found yourself if you went all the way down Mission and kept going even after it stopped being interesting. Aaron said that he had not explored that part of town yet, and Bill said, “You remember that song ‘Little Boxes,’ right?” and Aaron said he did, and Bill announced proudly that the song had been written about Daly City.

“My impression of the song is that it’s not meant to be flattering,” Aaron said.

“I suppose that depends on how you look at things,” Bill said. “Sometimes it’s just plain nice not to have to think about who’s got the better house ’cause ‘they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.’ ” He sang this last part. Aaron was surprised at his voice, which was soothing and sweet.

Chaa came up to them with a bag of durian chips, and Bill, who had never heard of durian, took several and then spit them back into his hand. “That is the absolute worst thing I’ve ever put in my mouth,” he said to Chaa, who laughed as if this were precisely the response he had hoped for. After Chaa walked away, Bill turned to Aaron. “I bet it’s not the worst thing you’ve ever put in your mouth,” he said.

“You’re sure you’re not gay?” Aaron replied. “Because you have the sense of humor of an aging queen.”

Quickly, they progressed from talking in the hallway during breaks to having a drink together several times a week at a nearby café. Bill referred to it as the hippie café because of the menu, though Aaron pointed out that a true hippie café would not have so many ringing cell phones. It was there that Bill told Aaron the story of his father, who had been one of those people who could figure out a money angle on anything. During the Korean War, he’d gone on a two-week leave to Thailand, where, at a roadside stall that sold gasoline from cans and fixed cars in a small shack behind, he had stumbled across a shedful of old car parts, never used, all still in their boxes and covered with dust. Bill said that his father was the sort of man who was always stumbling across things. He came home from Korea, started a family, and it was only years later that he thought about those parts and went back to Thailand. He made his way through Thailand as well as Malaysia, stopping at any out-of-the-way place that looked like it might service cars. When he came across a stash of parts, especially those for vintage Mercedes-Benzes, he acted like he could not imagine anyone wanting such things — pristine gearshift knobs and hubcaps, mirrors and window cranks — even as he bought everything up, offering fifty cents or a dollar and the illusion that he was the one granting favors.

“We were dirt poor,” Bill said, “and then my father came home with that shipping container of parts, and within a year, he’d sold it all, sometimes for a five-hundred- or even thousand-time markup.” He paused to drink half of his beer. “He loved to tell stories to anyone who’d listen about how he’d acquired all those parts, but he never let on that it had made him rich. It wasn’t until he died years later that we found out he owned buildings all over the city, land up in Napa, but we never moved out of the ticky tacky house in Daly City. He kept locks on the cupboards and the fridge that only he had keys to, and he instructed my mother that we were to eat just one meal a day. It was served at five sharp, and if we missed it, well, we missed eating that day. The rest of the time we drank coffee, gallons of it. He kept a big pot going in the kitchen because he’d heard somewhere, maybe in the army, that coffee was a hunger depressant. We filled our stomachs with it until our insides were bloated and raw and we couldn’t sleep, but that was fine with him because exhaustion was also a hunger depressant.

“When I was a teenager, I started going to early Mass before school every day, just to have that communion wafer in my stomach. And to this day I’m the best speller you’re likely to meet because every Friday at school we had a spelling contest, and the prize was a candy bar. The teacher didn’t know what to make of it: Billy Dawkins, who failed every test he ever took, winning spelling bees. I wanted to tell her that for a hamburger or a box of cereal, I’d learn anything they wanted, ace every test, but I was too proud for that, and besides, my father would have killed me. Not because he worried about what people thought. He didn’t. He just didn’t want anyone meddling in his business.

“I was sixteen the last time I saw him. I came home from school so hungry I’d almost fainted during PE, and when I walked in, I saw him at the table. Until then, I’d always figured that while he was starving us, he was starving himself also. It was a small consolation to think that way, that we were all in it together — you know, that that’s how being poor worked. The thing is, I think most days he did hold himself to the same standard, but not that day. That day he was sitting there with a mound of pickled pigs’ feet piled high on a sheet of butcher paper, everything about him slick with vinegar and grease, a pile of bones that he’d sucked clean tossed to the side. The bones were tiny, like children’s knucklebones. It was watching him suck those bones that did it. I knocked him off his chair and wrestled him to the floor. I had my hands around his neck, would have killed him too if my mother hadn’t come in then and begged me to stop. When I stood up, my father yelled, ‘Get out of my house. Get out and don’t come back. I’m not spending another dime on you.’

“And I said, ‘Right. Because that would mean doubling what you’ve spent so far.’ ” Bill laughed and finished his beer. “I’ve always been very proud that that was the last thing I said to him, that I had the presence of mind to say something, you know, sort of clever. So I packed a few things and left — never saw the bastard again. It wasn’t until he died that it came out about him being filthy rich, a millionaire actually. Of course, he’d written me out of his will the very day I left. My sisters tried to give me my third anyway, but I refused. I didn’t want a thing from him.”

“How did you survive?” Aaron asked. “You were just a boy.”

“Our priest helped. He was a good man — found me a job working construction and a place to live. I had to leave school, but that was bound to happen anyway. I did that for maybe eight or ten years, and then I got hooked up with this whole detective business, apprenticed myself to an old guy and found out I was pretty good at it. He couldn’t get around so much anymore, so I became his legs, and he taught me everything I know about the business, which is considerable.” He looked down at his empty beer glass as though he wished it were not empty. “It’s a funny thing, isn’t it,” he said. “I drop out of school when I’m sixteen, and here I am, almost forty years later, a teacher. Not a very good one, but it’s still a heck of a thing.”

“Yet another example of life’s abundant irony,” Aaron said. Then, afraid that Bill might think he was mocking him, he continued, “When I was a boy, my mother owned a café, which we lived above. My bedroom window looked out over the street facing Bildt Hardware and Swenson’s Variety Store, which sold primarily groceries but also school supplies and bed linens. At night I lay in bed, watching the Swenson’s neon sign flash off and on: Variety. Variety. Variety. Variety. I’d been watching that sign for years before it suddenly hit me that there was actually something very funny about a sign that promised variety flashing off and on in the same monotonous way night after night.”

It was the first time he had told Bill anything about his childhood, and he stopped there, not explaining about the pleasure he had felt that night at realizing that this was irony. That would mean talking about Clarence, who had predicted that he would grow nicely into irony. He was not ready to talk about Clarence.

Bill laughed. “Yup,” he said, “it’s a fine thing, irony.”

* * *

Bill still attended Mass at Mission Dolores once a week. “Oftener,” he told Aaron, “when I’m involved in a really sordid case.”

Aaron did not think that he had ever had a friend who attended church regularly. “Give me an example of sordid,” he said.

“Cheating spouses. That’s my bread and butter, you know.” Aaron did know, since Bill had told him several times that his caseload was made up, disproportionately, of adultery and workers’ comp scams. “They get messy.”

“Tell me about a recent case that required extra attendance at Mass,” Aaron said.

“I just went this morning,” Bill said. “Fourth time this week ’cause I’m tailing a guy who’s a real piece of work. Guess where he heads every night?”

He had also never had a friend who used words like tailing. “Where?” he said.

“The Castro. He’s got one of those transvestites on the side. You know — looks like a woman, but then the plumbing’s all male. Anyway, so I have to tell the wife that her husband’s a fag, and—”

“Bill,” Aaron interrupted. They were having this conversation in the hallway with just five minutes left of break, and he did not know where to begin.

“What?” Bill said, and then, “Oh, I get it. I shouldn’t say fag around you, right?”

“You shouldn’t say it, period,” Aaron said, and Bill looked at him as though Aaron had asked him to give up smoking or stop eating a hamburger for lunch every day.

Aaron knew what Walter would say about his friendship with Bill — Walter, who believed that gay men and straight men could never really be friends, that the former could never fully trust the latter. Though their social lives over the years had involved a preponderance of heterosexuals — colleagues, neighbors — Walter insisted that gay people could only be themselves, their truest, uncensored selves, in the company of other gay people. Aaron found this argument perplexing and reductive. “Do you think that’s how it was with you and the guys in Moorhead — that you were being your truest, uncensored selves?” he had asked, referring to the group of closeted men with whom Walter had been friends when Aaron came to live with him. “Because the truth is I didn’t feel any more true and uncensored with them than I did sitting around with the men at the café when I was a kid.”

Walter had acted incredulous — perhaps he truly was incredulous. “But didn’t it at least mean something to you, after all those years in the closet, to be able to say things out loud, to not wonder what people were thinking?”

“Maybe,” Aaron had said. He thought about it. “Okay, yes, though I don’t think I ever felt in the closet as a boy — that implies a level of awareness that I simply didn’t have. And I certainly never felt like myself around your guys either. I always felt the way I do when someone who’s really religious suddenly wants to be my friend and I can’t help but think that it’s not me, Aaron, they want to be friends with — because they don’t really know me. That’s how I felt with those guys — like I was just some gay boy that you were lucky enough to catch, and their job was to make clever remarks.”

“Well,” Walter said, “at least they never gave me the kind of look that everyone else did, those here-comes-Walter-with-his-boy looks.”

“Of course they did. The only difference was that they approved. But what were they approving of? What did they really know about our relationship? Did they know that we read poetry together at night? That we didn’t have sex those first four years? They didn’t, because they weren’t interested in poetry, and they believed we were having sex because that’s what you let them believe.” He wondered at what point in the conversation he had become angry.

“You’re mad that I didn’t clarify that we weren’t having sex?” Walter asked.

“No,” Aaron said, “I’m not mad about it.” This was true. “I guess I just don’t know why you can’t see that if they were really your friends, you’d have told them the truth.”

Walter was silent. “Sometimes,” he said finally, “people just need to be around others that are like them.”

“That’s just it,” Aaron said. “I had nothing in common with them, nothing except being gay. Maybe that’s something, but it’s not nearly enough.”

“Surely you don’t hold it against them that they don’t like poetry?” Walter said.

“No, I don’t hold it against them. I’m just saying that if I had to choose between spending time with a straight person who reads and a gay person who doesn’t, I’d choose the straight person.”

“What if both of them read?” said Walter.

“Well, then it depends on what they’re reading.”

The argument had ended there, not because things had been resolved but because they saw that they could not be. It had become absurd, yet they were not able to laugh together at the absurdity. Aaron supposed it was ironic that he was the one who had moved to San Francisco, he who had never required the trappings of gay life, the bars and restaurants and entire neighborhoods populated by gays and lesbians; he who did not go out of his way to patronize gay mechanics and plumbers, did not assume that a heterosexual mechanic or plumber — or detective — would say something homophobic until he said it, and then, you dealt with it. You explained why the comment or word or joke was offensive. It was tiring at times, but he thought it was the price you paid for truly living in the world.

“Do you ever feel bad about what you do?” Aaron asked Bill. “About making money by exposing other people’s secrets?”

“Everyone’s got secrets,” Bill said. “Maybe this guy’s got the right to his, but his wife’s paying me to find out what they are, and I think she’s got the right to know. It just proves what I’ve always said: that you can’t really know another person, and if you can’t know them, you can’t trust them.”

“I’ve always found that people who say you can’t trust anyone are actually saying something about their own trustworthiness,” Aaron said.

“I guess it’s a matter of how you think about trust. For me, if you’ve got secrets, then I can’t trust you.”

“Everyone has secrets, Bill,” Aaron said. “That’s the state of being human. I know you Catholics like your confession, but I just don’t believe we need to confess everything about ourselves to the world. That’s too much to expect of people.”

19

Aaron was awakened one morning by the moan of a foghorn, an anomaly, he supposed, since everyone had said that March would be a respite before heading into the fog of summer. The sound put him in mind of cows, of their low, mournful mooing, which was all that he really knew of the creatures, though numerous people over the years, upon learning that he had grown up in a small town in Minnesota, had called on him to explain not just cows but any number of things: how grain elevators worked and which crops were easiest to grow, how fast a tractor could go and whether it was true that farm boys had sex with sheep. He knew the answers to none of these questions, his only knowledge of farming gleaned from the discussions he had overhead as he served farmers in the café and from the summer he spent pulling tassels from corn when he was twelve, monotonous work that he had enjoyed. His mother had made him quit after just three weeks because she said that she needed his help at the café, but he thought that she resented the way he came home tired but whistling each afternoon.

In fact, she wanted him around the café—around her — even less that summer, and in the fall, she began lending him out. Lent was how he thought of himself, like a library book that entered the homes of strangers briefly. His mother said that people in Mortonville could not forgive them for being outsiders, using the word forgive as if she would like nothing better than to make an apology and be done with it. Aaron supposed it was this need, the need for acceptance, that led her to begin lending him out to people in town, primarily old people, his job to help with tasks that they could no longer manage — carrying boxes up and down steps, shopping for food, applying rubber pads to the bottoms of things — tasks that made him privy to their vulnerabilities. The old people were always grateful for his help, grateful to his mother for sending him, and as he was leaving, they often tried to press something into his hand — a few coins, a Pop-Tart, an envelope bearing colorful stamps — compensation for his services, all of which his mother required him to refuse. The old people fussed then, telling him to zip his coat all the way up, to be careful walking home, not because there was anything to fear in Mortonville but because they wanted to give him something. He felt that his mother was wrong to deny them this small pleasure.

As he made his way across Mortonville late one afternoon in December, the normally pleasant sound of snow crunching beneath his sneakers nearly brought him to tears. In truth, it was not just the crunching or the day’s steady retreat but so many things, all piling up inside him like the mounds of snow that flanked the recently plowed streets, mounds that other children, not he, liked to climb upon. Of course, winter dusk is particularly conducive to melancholy, and though he was young to know such things, to feel them so deeply, his age did not change the fact that he did. He thought about his mother sitting by herself in the café, wanting to be alone, wanting nothing between her and dusk. Back in their house in Moorhead, she used to come into his room some afternoons and wake him from his naps. “It’s getting dark,” she’d say, “and I thought how nice it would be to have your company.” He missed that mother, the one who thought his presence made nightfall more bearable.

He was being lent that day to the Bergstroms. There were no streetlights in their part of town, but all around him houses were aglow, predictably, with Christmas lights and kitchen lights and the steady yellow beam of porch lights, each anticipating a specific event — a holiday, a warm meal, a father’s return. He could tell who was having chicken that night, the odors wafting from these well-lit kitchens into the street where he walked. Meanwhile, his mother was back at the café, creating her own good smells as she cooked, but this thought only added to his mood, surrounded as he was by mothers making meals for their families, whom they solely considered as they cooked. He could not remember the last time his mother had prepared something just for him, something that was not a leftover from the daily special or a kitchen mistake, an overcooked hamburger that became his supper.

Aaron did not really know the Bergstroms because they rarely came into the café, and he trudged along, dreading the visit. Mrs. Bergstrom had been a teacher in a town nearby. They lived in Mortonville because Mr. Bergstrom owned the tire store, long closed because they were retired and their son — their only child — had no affinity for tires. Anyway, their son was dead, had gone through the ice the winter before. This son was the reason that Aaron dreaded the visit, for people in town said that the Bergstroms had not recovered, that having a dead son had made them odd.

They had turned on their porch light, and he stood on their front steps, watching them through the picture window, the two of them side by side on the sofa, an afghan tucked round their collective legs and rising partway up their chests. They were staring ahead, both of them focused on something that he could not see — the news, he thought, for they had about them the look of people distracted by problems that were not their own. From outside, they did not look like two people with a dead son. He knocked, and they beckoned him in. He opened the door and stepped in, anticipating warmth, as one did in Minnesota in December, but when he said hello, his breath hung in the air. The room was silent, the television off, and he glanced over to see what they had been staring at, but there was nothing there.

“My mother sent me? She said you needed help?” His voice rose at the end of both sentences, turning them into questions, and he wished that he could start over, could reenter the house making declarations.

“Come here and let us take a look at you,” said Mr. Bergstrom, gesturing vaguely toward the middle of the room.

Aaron bent to remove his sneakers, which were covered with snow, and Mrs. Bergstrom said, “What a polite young man.”

He came and stood in front of them, and they regarded him without speaking. Then they turned and looked at each other, thoughtfully, as though Aaron were an appliance that they were considering buying, an appliance that offered some but not all the features that they wanted in their appliance. The look that they gave each other seemed to say, “Well, shall we take him anyway? Can we make do?”

“How old are you, Aaron?” asked Mrs. Bergstrom.

“Twelve,” he said quietly. “Almost thirteen.”

They waited, perhaps expecting him to comment on his impending puberty — to describe his first whisker or the new muskiness beneath his arms — and when he did not, Mrs. Bergstrom said, “Well, it’s time for the news, so why don’t we let Father watch while we work on our letter.” She told Aaron to turn on the television, and he did, the newscaster’s voice exploding into the room. She extricated herself from the afghan, and Aaron saw that she had on snow pants, as though she had just come in from an afternoon of sledding. She wiggled herself to the front of the sofa and concentrated, staring straight ahead before she hoisted herself to her feet with a small grunt that embarrassed him.

“Let’s settle ourselves in the den,” Mrs. Bergstrom said. He followed her down the hallway, her snow pants making a phit, phit sound as she walked, and into the den, where she locked the door behind them. The room smelled of cedar, which he liked, and wet cardboard, which he did not. On the wall above the sofa were photos of their son, Tim, their dead son, one from each year of school, lined up chronologically. He was smiling in all of them, and the gap between his front teeth seemed bigger than it had in person. There were no photos of him as an adult, but Aaron remembered him as a sad-looking man who came into the café alone and took a cloth from his pocket to clean the cutlery before using it. He had never ordered anything but water to drink, which Aaron’s mother said had to do with his inability to keep a job for long, which meant he could not afford to drink pop, and he always had a bacon cheeseburger, from which he would not take a bite until he had uncrossed the two strips of bacon arranged in an X by Aaron’s mother because he preferred his bacon parallel.

The morning after Tim fell through the ice, the café was exceptionally busy. Aaron came down late, so he did not know what was going on, only that something was, for the tables and booths were filled, the room buzzing.

“Something happened,” his mother told him later. She explained haltingly that this something involved the Bergstroms, who had called the police the night before because Tim had stopped by to visit them and was acting strange.

“Strange how?” Aaron asked.

“He kept telling them he loved them,” his mother said.

Aaron considered this: the fact that the Bergstroms had called the police because their son would not stop saying that he loved them. “They called the police because he wouldn’t stop?” he said at last.

“Well,” his mother said. “There was more to it than that.”

The police had come, pulling up in front of the Bergstroms’ house as Tim was driving away. They flashed their lights, but he did not stop, and like a parade of two, Tim and the police drove slowly through Mortonville and out of town. When Tim turned onto the dirt road that led to one of the lakes, the lake where people in Mortonville went to swim, the police sensed that something was wrong. They began running the siren and speaking to him over the loudspeaker, but he drove straight onto the frozen surface. The lakes had been tricky that year, with soft spots everywhere, which meant that even people who knew them well were staying off, so the police watched from the shore as Tim continued out toward the middle alone. Eventually, his headlights lurched upward, and within minutes he was gone. “You understand what I’m telling you, Aaron?” his mother said.

“Yes,” he said.

“They can’t get to the car. It’s too dangerous.” She tore open a packet of sugar and let it dissolve in her coffee. “Imagine how cold it must have been.”

* * *

He and Mrs. Bergstrom sat down at a card table, atop of which was a half-completed puzzle, the picture side facing down. He studied the gray backside of the puzzle for a moment, wanting to say, “This puzzle puzzles me,” but he was not the sort of boy who engaged in silliness with others. He used to say such things to his mother, who had been sincere in her reactions, laughing only when she truly found something funny, but it struck him one day that his mother was no longer listening.

“Why are you putting the puzzle together upside down?” he asked Mrs. Bergstrom. “Wouldn’t it be easier if you could see the picture?”

“Why must everything be easy, young man?” She pushed the puzzle aside and drew a wooden box toward her, opening it to reveal stationery and pens. “How’s your penmanship?” she asked, and he said that his penmanship was fine. “Good,” she said. “I’m not interested in faulty penmanship. And your spelling?”

“I have the best spelling in my class,” he reported.

“Well,” said Mrs. Bergstrom, “that only means something if the class is not made up of imbeciles.” She removed the top sheet of paper from the box and put it in front of him. “I assume your mother told you that I require assistance with my correspondence.”

“Yes,” he said. He glanced at her hands, which looked capable of holding a pen.

“Dear,” she began dictating, and then stopped as though she could not recall to whom she had planned to write. “Just leave it blank for now,” she instructed before resuming her dictation: “Winter has arrived in Mortonville.”

She picked up the paper and examined it. “You must work on your uppercase letters,” she told him severely, pointing to the W specifically. “The bottoms should be sharp, like two elbows resting on the line. You see how rounded yours are? You’ve made knees of them, as though they are kneeling. I do not approve of kneeling,” she said. “We are not Catholics in this house.” She laughed as though this were funny.

“Should I fix it?” he asked.

“That would just make it unsightly,” she said, “and the first line, in particular, should not be unsightly. No, we’ll leave it, but it’s something to bear in mind.”

He held the pen above the paper, waiting for her to continue.

“You seem like a perspicacious young man,” she said, her tongue darting into the corners of her mouth as she studied him, slyly, wanting to know whether he would ask what perspicacious meant, wanting to know, that is, whether his curiosity would trump his timidity, for he understood that she saw him that way, as a timid boy who would put up with being bullied by an old lady in her den.

Of course, he knew what perspicacious meant, but he did not know how to convey this to her or whether she would make too much of his doing so. “I know what perspicacious means,” he blurted out finally.

She chuckled. “Good,” she said. “Because I want to show you something.”

They stood, and she unlocked and opened the door. The television in the living room was still loud, but she held a finger to her lips as they tiptoed down the hallway to the next door. She opened it, and he felt her hand on his arm, pushing him inside, into the darkness. The door shut. He heard it locking, her hand fluttering against the wall until she found the light switch.

They were in the bathroom, and he could not look at Mrs. Bergstrom, not with the toilet right there, close enough to touch. She took a flashlight from a cupboard and knelt beside the toilet, putting her hand on the seat to steady herself, and then she looked up at him. “Come,” she said sternly. And so he knelt beside her. “What do you see?” she asked, shining the flashlight on the floor around the base of the toilet. She sounded hopeful, and he bent closer, noticing dirt and small bits of toilet paper as well as a few tightly coiled gray hairs. Pubic hairs! The sight of them made his throat constrict and he gasped for air.

“You see it?” Mrs. Bergstrom asked in an excited whisper, for she had heard it as the gasp of discovery.

“See what?” He felt miserable.

“The urine,” Mrs. Bergstrom said, her voice low and urgent. She leaned forward, her face hovering above the toilet bowl as if she were about to drink from it or bob for apples. “Every time Father comes in here, it’s all over the floor, and I have to come right in after him and clean.”

“Maybe he can’t help it,” Aaron said.

“I don’t mind cleaning it up.” She sounded angry. “It’s the way he acts, telling me I’m crazy, that I’m imagining things.” She tapped her finger on the seat. “Well, this afternoon I didn’t clean up after him. I knew you were coming, so I left it.”

Aaron looked away, studying the pattern that the linoleum made, trying to make sense of where the lines ended and began. “Yes,” he said. “I see it.”

Mrs. Bergstrom gave a low, growling laugh. “I knew it,” she said and then, “Help me up.” She extended her arm as though inviting him to admire a new watch, and Aaron stood and took her arm, supporting her as she struggled to her feet.

He wanted desperately to wash his hands, but he thought that doing so would be regarded somehow as impolite. “My mother needs me,” he said instead, and Mrs. Bergstrom unlocked the bathroom door, and they went back down the hallway and into the living room, where Mr. Bergstrom still sat beneath the afghan watching the news.

“Were you any help?” he asked Aaron, shouting over the television.

“Not much,” said Mrs. Bergstrom, answering for him, and the Bergstroms laughed together while he bent to put on his shoes.

“Good night then,” Aaron said.

“Yes,” said the Bergstroms.

Aaron switched off their porch light, which had been on this whole time, and stepped out into the darkness. Once again, he paused to peer through the picture window at the Bergstroms, who sat huddled beneath the afghan, collapsing in on each other like melting snowmen. He tried to assign a word to what he saw, to what he felt, but he did not know the word to describe the way that the Bergstroms sat on their sofa, an afghan and a dead son between them, or the soft ache of his own heart.

* * *

When Aaron returned to the café from the Bergstroms’ that evening, Jim Evarold was already there, sitting in his booth. Every Thursday night, while his wife was off at her weekly Weight Watchers meeting, Jim came, sat in the corner booth, and spent a long time staring at the menu. He assessed his options carefully, even though he always chose the special, meatballs, waiting until Aaron’s mother turned toward the kitchen to add, “And a large milk. And some of those Tater Tots.” He always seemed sheepish about his order, perhaps ashamed to be wanting Tater Tots while his wife was off discussing calories and the hollowness of desire, and Aaron’s mother always turned back to him and asked, “That all, Jim?” in a voice that Aaron found aggressive, almost bullying.

Jim Evarold pretended to consider the menu a bit longer then, before clearing his throat to make his usual plea: “Can’t you change the Thursday special to meatloaf?”

“Meatloaf is Friday night,” his mother replied, her voice sour from tending to people’s needs all day. “They’re the same, Jim. Just different shapes.”

Jim Evarold would look at his hands or touch the napkin dispenser and mumble, “But meatloaf doesn’t jump all over the plate when I cut it.”

Aaron supposed some form of this conversation had taken place before he arrived, for Jim Evarold sat with his food already before him. Later, when he picked up Jim’s plate, wiped clean, as usual, of the unwieldy meatballs and the ignominious Tater Tots, he found a scrap of tinfoil resting on the rim. Jim did not mention the tinfoil, which was about the size of a thumbnail, but Aaron knew that it had come from his food. He blew it to the floor, not wanting his mother to see it and be ashamed.

Over the next several weeks, more detritus washed up on the shores of Jim Evarold’s otherwise empty plates: a snippet of butcher string, a scrap of wax paper, rubber bands, twist ties. Still, Jim said nothing, though it was clear that he left them on the plate for Aaron to find. Aaron dispensed with each surreptitiously. Finally, after two months of this, Aaron picked up Jim Evarold’s empty plate one evening and discovered a bristle as delicate as a fish bone teetering on its edge. It was too small to have come from any of the brushes that his mother used in the kitchen to clean the grill or scrub potatoes. He held it on the tip of his finger, wanting to breathe it away with a wish. Instead, he brought it to his mother, who stared at it as though it were an object that had been missing for many years, something she had learned to live without so well that its reappearance now seemed a burden.

“Must be from the vegetable scrubber,” she said at last, turning to flip a hamburger.

Aaron went upstairs and into the bathroom, where their toothbrushes hung from a rack. He reached for his mother’s brush and held the bristle beside it. It matched. He had known it would. What it meant was this: his mother had extracted the bristle from her toothbrush and taken it downstairs, then had cooked Jim Evarold’s meatballs with the bristle inside. She had done this intentionally, and as he pictured the whole sequence of events, he was afraid, for he accepted — somehow only then — how deeply unhappy his mother was. Her despair was like a snowball rolling downhill, growing bigger, moving faster, while he stood at the top of the hill watching it go. He was powerless to stop it.

Yet she had put the bristle in Jim Evarold’s food, marking the world in this small way with her unhappiness, and he wanted to believe that there was something hopeful in her need to do so. He did not know why she had focused on Jim Evarold, whom everyone in town liked, including, as far as he knew, his mother. Jim was a quiet man. He was polite but never appeared to want company, and others accepted this. They greeted him as they passed his booth and moved on.

Just before he and his mother moved to town, Jim’s brother, Matthew Evarold, had killed himself. The skeleton of the story was this: one day after his wife had gone to Florence with the two youngest children, Matthew Evarold went into the barn, looped a rope over a rafter, stood on a feed bucket, and then kicked the bucket out from beneath him. Perhaps he had hoped for someone else to discover his body, but it was his children, returning from school, who found him. Aaron occasionally rode the bus, so he knew where the Evarold family lived, just one stop before his own. Their driveway was long and straight, a dirt path with grass growing down the middle, the house and barn at the end. Aaron imagined the four oldest children trudging up the path that afternoon, laughing and kicking at the grass running down the middle, even as their father was already dead, hanging in the barn directly ahead of them. What had continued to shock Aaron was the way that these two realities could exist side by side, could share the same moment: a man swinging from a rafter in a barn, and his children, laughing and teasing each other just outside.

As a teenager and then as an adult, Aaron had often felt deeply alone and discouraged, had even encouraged himself to feel worse by convincing himself that no one would miss him if he ceased to exist, but those feelings never moved toward the realm of action, for the thought of not existing terrified him. Still, he felt no anger toward people who did consider suicide — who considered it, attempted it, even committed it — which was not the way that people in Mortonville had responded to Matthew Evarold’s suicide. They said he had killed himself because he was selfish, but when Aaron thought about what selfish meant, what his dictionary said, “Seeking or concentrating on one’s own advantage, pleasure, or well-being without regard for others,” he could not reconcile these words—advantage and pleasure, which brought to mind a man grabbing some coveted prize, elbowing others out of the way and claiming the pleasure of it for himself — with the image of a man going into a barn, stepping up on a bucket, and hanging himself.

“Jim took his brother’s death very hard,” his mother told him one night after Jim Evarold had eaten his meatballs and Tater Tots and gone home to the wife who wished more than anything to be thin. “He felt he should have done something to help him.”

“Like what?” Aaron asked. He wondered how his mother knew this.

“Oh, I don’t know. Tried to make him happy I guess.”

“How?” he asked.

“Listen, Aaron,” she said. “You can’t make other people happy. It’s silly to try.”

“Why is it silly?” he asked.

“Because it is,” she said. “And because it will just make you feel like a failure.”

20

When his mother and Pastor Gronseth disappeared, people in Mortonville felt betrayed, not just by their pastor, to whom they had confessed their problems, but by his mother as well. She knew things about them, secrets that she learned not because she pried but because while she poured coffee and took orders she overheard their stories of an uncle who had done something shameful or a child who had gone away and never come back. It made people feel vulnerable to think that two people who knew so much about them had left together, and this vulnerability translated into distrust, aimed at Aaron because he was the one left behind.

Throughout the following year, whenever he walked into Swenson’s Variety Store to pick up something for Mrs. Hagedorn, the cashier would stop speaking midsentence. “Why, hello, Aaron Englund,” she would call out in an artificially loud voice, and the aisles would fall silent. It was the same when he and Rudy went to pick up plumbing supplies at Bildt Hardware, except in this case it was Rudy shouting back to the men in the office, letting them know Aaron was with him because he feared they might be saying cruel things that a son should not hear about his mother. But the worst was going into the post office, where the postmistress, who stood hunched behind the counter in her blue sweater, announced shrilly, “Nothing for you, Aaron.” Though he pretended that he was there only to retrieve the Hagedorns’ mail, he felt sick with disappointment, which he hid with a smile because he knew that the postmistress reported on his mail, his lack of mail, to the rest of Mortonville. Everyone knew that his mother had not written to him.

At school, it was suggested by first one teacher and then another that he make weekly visits to Mr. Brisk, who came in Tuesday and Thursday afternoons because two afternoons a week was the most guidance the school could afford, perhaps the most it felt was needed. Aaron met with him twice, not because he wanted to but because the visits were already arranged. He had always been obedient about such things. They sat in Mr. Brisk’s office, which had originally been conceived as a ticket booth. It had one window, through which the exchange of money — admission to sporting events and school plays — had taken place. It was this office that Bernice would describe just months later on Christmas Eve, and he never let on that he could picture it all: the office’s smallness, the rickety chair on which one sat, knees jammed up against Mr. Brisk’s desk.

At the first meeting, Mr. Brisk asked Aaron in a general way about his mother, and Aaron said that running the café had made her tired, though she had never said such a thing, at least not the way he made it sound to Mr. Brisk, like she had fled out of sheer exhaustion. The second time they met, Mr. Brisk asked him how he felt about his mother running away with the pastor, but he did not know whether Mr. Brisk was putting emphasis on the running away part or the pastor part.

Aaron did not believe that his mother and Pastor Gronseth had run away because they were in love. He had sat with them all those nights in the café, listening to them talk while he did homework, and he knew that they had come together out of loneliness, both of them incapable of forging friendships with the people around them because these people were their customers. Pastor Gronseth’s customers, his congregants, came to him because they needed his reassurance about their children and marriages and jobs, believing that his reassurance meant something. They brought him maple syrup and freshly slaughtered chickens, but they came with their own needs in mind. What they did not want, could not bear, was to know any details of their pastor’s personal life in return.

Many nights, the two of them talked about forgiveness, which Pastor Gronseth said people were keen on, though his opinion was that forgiveness should be difficult to earn. Otherwise, people were too easy on themselves: they acted without considering the consequences, knowing that they could simply request forgiveness later. He likened it to declaring bankruptcy, which allowed you all the fun of spending while other people dealt with the fallout. He had once been that sort of man, he told Aaron’s mother, a man who left his first wife and their three children because he was tired of the way things were, bored, if you wanted to get right down to it. He had explained all about his past to the church board before he took the job in Mortonville. The three first children visited on holidays and sat in the front pew beside his second wife and their half brother, a loud boy whom none of them liked. Pastor Gronseth had been forgiven by everyone, but he was not sure that he had learned his lesson.

Aaron looked at the two filing cabinets against the wall of Mr. Brisk’s office, cabinets that contained notes on everyone in the school, and then he looked back at Mr. Brisk. “I think Pastor Gronseth needed a ride, and my mother had a car. Pastor Gronseth didn’t want to steal the car from his wife and son.”

After Pastor Gronseth left, there was nothing for the wife and son in Mortonville. They lived in the parsonage, which meant that with him gone, their right to occupy the house was also gone, and though the matter had been handled with delicacy, the church trustees had nonetheless been dispatched to the parsonage to clarify the matter. The wife and son continued to attend church, sitting in the front row each Sunday as pastors from nearby parishes stepped in to give the weekly sermon. All of this Aaron knew from Mrs. Hagedorn, who was Catholic but knew what the Lutherans were up to.

Aaron made a point to avoid the son at school as well as the part of town where the parsonage was located, but one day when he was out taking a walk, the wife and son pulled up beside him and the two of them stared at him through the closed car window. Finally, the wife said something to the son, who rolled down his window.

“Where did they go?” she called across her son to Aaron.

Aaron crouched beside the son’s window in order to see both of them. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Well, they’ll end up in hell eventually,” Pastor Gronseth’s wife said, and his son nodded. They raised the window and drove off. The next day they too were gone.

* * *

On the morning of Tuesday, March 13, his forty-second birthday and his first alone, Aaron awakened early to the rare and disorienting sound of his telephone ringing. His first thought was to wonder not who was calling but why he had even installed a telephone. “The human voice carries entirely too far as it is,” Mark Twain had said upon the invention of the telephone, words Aaron had repeated to Walter frequently in trying to explain the hostility that a ringing telephone invoked in him.

The origin of his phone antipathy lay in two incidents that had occurred twenty years earlier, when they were still living in Minnesota, the first while he was in college. As he spoke on the telephone to a classmate from his humanities class about a project on which they had been paired, he heard the distinct sound of a toilet flushing on the other end, a sound that, in retrospect, gave meaning to a series of grunts he had discerned earlier in the conversation. It had shocked him to know that while he and this stranger, Franklin (after the president), discussed a mediocre book about an environmental utopia, Franklin had been defecating. It was as if he had been in the bathroom with Franklin.

His distaste for the instrument deepened two years later, as he sat one afternoon in the Democratic headquarters in Moorhead, cold calling on behalf of a candidate whose virtues he could no longer recall. He spent a dull few hours reading from a script that encouraged others to join him in supporting Shirley Lund for state senate, and to amuse himself he invented stories about the people on the list: Marsha Norquist collected antique quilts; Jerold Harvey liked portly cats and bingo; Howard Hofbrau, plagued by a flamboyant name, had become increasingly retiring over the years.

As he dialed the final name on his list, Sadie Thompson, he could not move into the more liberating realm of fiction, for he had known a Sadie in Mortonville, Sadie Sandstrom, a woman in her eighties who painted customized landscapes, though what he remembered most was the way she dressed, in a tweed jacket and men’s dress shirt with a loosely knotted tie. The Sadie who answered his unsolicited call that day was also elderly, her voice like chalk, dry and constantly breaking. She was crying, he realized, sobbing to be specific, and he wanted to hang up, but instead he asked whether she was okay.

“Yes, I’m okay,” she said, “but my husband is dead.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that, Mrs. Thompson,” he said. “How did he die?”

“I can’t tell,” she said. “He was watching the set when I went out to the garden to pull up some weeds.”

It registered then that her husband had just died, was lying before her dead even as they spoke. “You need to call an ambulance,” he said, looking frantically at his script.

“I called them,” she said. At that very moment an ambulance passed by the campaign headquarters on Tenth Street where he sat making calls, and he felt overwhelmed by the small ways that his life was attaching itself to this stranger’s.

“What were you calling about, young man?” Sadie Thompson asked, and so he explained his mission, referring to the script as he spoke.

“Bob’s a Republican,” she said when he had finished, dropping her voice in deference to years of discussing her husband in muted tones. “I’m a Democrat, but we try not to fight about it. We just take turns voting. One year I go in, and the next year he goes, because otherwise what good is it? We’d just be canceling each other out.”

Aaron wanted to explain that that was the whole point of voting, that an election was nothing more than a grand process of canceling one another out, but he did not have the heart to point out that the system she and her husband had utilized all these years lacked logic. He stayed with her on the line until he heard the sirens outside her house, and then he said, “I’m very sorry about your husband, Mrs. Thompson” and hung up.

That night at dinner, he told Walter the story. “I’m a stranger,” he said at the end. “What right did I have to intrude like that when her husband was lying there dead?”

He was being intentionally dramatic, but Walter responded calmly. “Think of how she was feeling at that moment, sitting there with him. She was probably happy that you called. After all, she picked up the phone.”

“She didn’t pick it up thinking it was me,” said Aaron. “She probably answered because she always answers the phone. Or maybe she thought it was the hospital calling or the police or their children.”

“Or maybe she just needed to hear a voice,” Walter said, in the soothing voice that made students and friends turn to him for advice and comfort, the voice that had had that effect on Aaron also, until one day it no longer did.

* * *

Aaron picked up on the fifth ring. “Hello,” he said.

“Aaron?”

“Winnie?” He noted the time, 5:09, which meant 7:09 in Minnesota, far too early for Winnie to be up. “Is everything okay?” he asked. “You? The kids? Thomas?” and then, “Walter?”

She said his name again, sounding at once happy and sad. He had always loved her ability to evoke contrasting emotions and make them seem valid and compatible. “Everyone’s fine,” she said. “We’re fine. Walter’s fine.” She paused as though expecting him to respond, but when he did not, she said, “He misses you. We all do.”

“I miss you,” he said. “But I like it here,” and then, “I’m in San Francisco.”

“I know. Walter told me.” Winnie giggled. “My god, Aaron. All those gay people — it must be driving you crazy.” They both laughed. “Happy birthday,” she said and began to sing a raucous, operatic version of the song, attempting to conceal her terrible voice.

He pressed the telephone to his ear and covered the receiver with his hand because he did not want her to hear his sniffling. “Thank you,” he said when she was done. “And thank you for calling. It’s the best birthday present ever.” He was embarrassed by how trite this sounded, how inadequate, and so he said her name again, whinnying it like a horse, “W-w-winnie,” their old joke.

“He’s miserable,” Winnie said quietly.

“I’m sorry,” Aaron said.

“Don’t be sorry. He’s difficult, my brother. Nobody knows that except us because he’s only difficult with the people he loves, and we’re it, Aaron. We are the only two people in the world he truly loves. You know that, right?”

He did know, though did not know how to respond to having it stated.

“Are you teaching?” Winnie asked.

“Of course,” he said. “You know I love teaching. Besides, I have no other skills.”

“That is not true,” Winnie said sternly. “You’re logical and well read, and, most important, you’re the kindest person I know.”

Aaron hid his pleasure with a laugh. “You’ve just hit on the most sought-after qualities in any job market. In fact, I was just reading a job description when you called.” He cleared his throat. “Wanted: logical, well-read, kind person for six-figure position.” She laughed, and he said, “Anyway, enough about me. How’s business?”

“I just got back from my spring trip to Korea. That’s why I’m up at this ridiculous hour — jet lag.” Most mornings, Winnie rose at 8:52, which allowed her just enough time to drink one cup of coffee, shower, and drive across town in order to open at ten o’clock. “I’ve been awake since four,” she said. “You know what I was thinking about? That time the three of us stopped in Hong Kong on our way back from Bali, and we stayed in that little hotel with the poster taped up in the foyer: Seeking hairy Caucasian men. Remember?”

“How could I possibly forget?” he said. “I spent half our stay trying to talk Walter into responding.”

“Because you couldn’t bear not knowing what they needed hairy white men for. Also, that was a rhetorical ‘remember,’ ” she said. “Oh, and remember — rhetorical again — that short couple from San Francisco we kept ending up on the elevator with? Every time we got on, there they were, dressed in matching outfits and grinning.”

“Panama hats. White linen shirts with khaki pants.”

“You forgot the matching fanny packs,” Winnie said. “The first thing they said to us was ‘you might want to exchange those purses and wallets for fanny packs. We’re not in Kansas anymore.’ They laughed hysterically, and when we didn’t laugh back, they said, ‘That’s from The Wizard of Oz,’ as though we weren’t laughing because we’d missed the allusion, to which you replied, lying earnestly, ‘I’ve never seen the film. My mother forbade all sorcery-themed cinema.’ ”

“Walter was so mad at me.”

“At both of us,” Winnie said. “He always thought I encouraged you.”

“Which you did. Remember how he walked way ahead of us all the way to breakfast, and then he refused to eat anything? I don’t know why he always thought that he was somehow punishing us by refusing to eat.”

“That place had the best congee,” Winnie said. “Oh, and when we got back to the hotel that afternoon, they were on the elevator again. ‘I’m afraid we didn’t introduce ourselves this morning,’ the woman said. ‘This is Robert.’ And he said, ‘This is Roberta,’ and in unison they said, ‘We’re from San Francisco, the city by the bay.’ Then Walter introduced the three of us, and when they pieced together that I was his sister, not his wife, and that you and Walter lived in Albuquerque, together, the husband said, ‘We just love gay people, being from Frisco and all.’ And you said—”

Aaron groaned. “I said, ‘Yes, they’re adorable, aren’t they?’ You know I only say things like that when you’re around. I felt awful about it later because they were nice people, Robert and Roberta. They meant well, and I’d much rather deal with people who’re maybe a little awkward about their good intentions than with those who lack good intentions altogether.”

Winnie was still laughing — except, he realized, she was not. She was sobbing, the two sounds so similar that, on the telephone, there was almost no way to tell them apart, but he could because he knew Winnie, knew that when she laughed, she gave herself up to it completely, but when she cried, she was always fighting to stop.

“I’m sorry, Winnie,” he said, which could mean sorry he had left Walter or sorry he had not told her he was going or sorry he had made her cry; he meant all three. They had always ended telephone conversations the same way, with one of them saying, “Chow mein,” a small joke at the expense of Walter, who ended all conversations with ciao. Aaron waited for Winnie to say it, but the line was dead.

* * *

By six fifteen, Aaron stood in the driveway, finger on the garage door opener, watching the door make its slow, stubborn descent. It took nineteen seconds — he had timed it — which meant that he spent an hour each month waiting for the door to open and close. Once, when he was already running late, it had rolled off its tracks. He’d considered leaving it like that, halfway down, and going off to work. He would have, but he knew that the Ngs would terminate his lease, so he knocked on their door, and Mrs. Ng, whom he rarely saw but whose angry voice he knew well, came out with a hammer and screwdriver and expertly maneuvered it back on track.

It had rained throughout the night. He heard the thwomp of sneakers on wet pavement behind him and turned with his finger still on the control, expecting the elderly Chinese woman who walked her portly Pekingese in her robe, but it was a white woman with a Saran Wrap — like scarf binding her hair.

“I found you,” the woman called out cheerfully as she stepped toward him and raised a gun. She looked just like his mother, or rather, what he imagined his mother must look like now. Behind him, the garage door jerked up and down like a beast in its death throes, but he could not let go of the button, could not stop thinking, My mother hates guns, as if a person could disappear for twenty-four years yet stay the same.

“I’ve been waiting all night, you rascal,” she said, her finger moving against the trigger.

A stream of water hit his tie, the tie Walter had given him, and splashed his neck. It was cold, and he was alive, and the woman was not his mother. He gasped.

“I got you,” she cried out as the garage door bounced once more before the opener slipped from his hand and broke open on the pavement. Aaron fell to his knees. “Are you okay?” she asked.

He looked up at the woman towering over him who had stepped out of the mist and shot him with a water pistol — a deadly looking water pistol — on his birthday. He saw now that she resembled his mother in only the most superficial of ways, a fleeting impression suggested by height and age and big bones. Her name, he learned later, was Agnes Nyquist. She was sixty-six, his mother’s age, and had moved to San Francisco from Council Bluffs, Iowa, when she was thirty-four. But before he knew any of this, she was a woman offering him her hand, saying, “Dustin, let me help you up.”

“My name is Aaron,” he said. “Aaron Englund.”

“No,” she said, insisting. “You’re Dustin. It took me two days to find you. You’re my next target.” She reached into her purse and brought out a photo of a man who was tall and thin. His hair was blond, and he was holding a small dog.

“That’s not me,” said Aaron. “I don’t even like dogs.”

“Oh dear,” said the woman. She compared Aaron to the man in the photograph and seemed to accept that it was not him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m trying to win the prize.”

“What prize?” he asked gently.

“I’m competing in StreetWars,” she said. “I’m one of the last assassins alive, but this really puts me behind.”

“Perhaps you can explain StreetWars to me,” he said. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s simple,” she said. “Everyone’s an assassin. We’re given the name and photo of another assassin, and we need to hunt him down and shoot him with one of these.” She held up her water pistol. “The problem is that someone else is trying to get us at the same time.” She looked over her shoulder and back at him. “Actually, we’re not part of the official StreetWars. We’re a renegade group. A lot of us are retired or don’t work regular jobs, so we’ve got all day to track each other. We don’t give out addresses, so there’s more research involved. And we make our own pot.”

“Pot?” He pictured a band of unemployed and elderly stoners running amok in the city with squirt guns, but he found the image hard to reconcile with this woman standing in front of him, her Saran Wrap — like scarf still snugly in place.

“Winner takes all,” she said.

“Ah. That kind of pot. How much are you playing for?”

She lowered her voice. “There were a hundred of us when we started, and we each put in $500, so that’s—”

“That’s $50,000,” Aaron said.

“Yup,” Agnes said. “And there are just eight of us left.” She turned and looked behind her again, checking to see that she was not being followed. “I don’t suppose I could use your facilities?” she said.

“What? My bathroom?” he said. “I guess that’s fine. I don’t usually have guests.”

“I’m not really a guest,” she said.

He bent and gathered the parts of the opener, snapped it back together, and was relieved to find that it worked. They did not speak during the nineteen seconds it took for the door to open. When they entered his studio, he showed her the bathroom and then banged around in the kitchen because he did not like to hear people urinating. She came out humming and thanked him. She had removed the scarf.

“I don’t suppose you have any tea handy,” she said.

“Handy?” he said. “No. I was actually on my way to work when you shot me.”

“Coffee?” she asked hopefully. “It’s a little hard on my stomach, but I’m usually fine if I mix it with lots of milk.”

He looked at his watch. Assuming he took the bus and there were no delays, he had forty-five minutes before he had to leave. He began grinding coffee. While it brewed he prepared a plate of toast because it was the only thing he had that felt breakfastlike, but when he turned back around, Agnes Nyquist was asleep on his bed. He sat down on his only chair and thought about how exhausted she must be to fall asleep in a stranger’s home. Then he thought about how he was forty-two years old, an age he had never seen his mother reach because she had left at forty-one. He did not even know whether she had reached forty-two, but he did not want to think about that on his birthday.

Instead, he called Marla to say that he would be late. He did not tell her why because he did not want her gossiping about it and because already the events in the driveway seemed absurd, almost slapstick, an effect that Agnes Nyquist’s snoring presence underscored. As they were hanging up, Marla called out, “Wait. Will you be here by lunch?” and he said he thought so. He knew what her question was about. Marla had all their birthdays on file and was planning a lunch “surprise” party, at which he would be given a melting ice cream cake with blue and yellow frosting. He disliked both ice cream and frosting and always passed on the cakes, though he doubted that Marla noticed. She was fulfilling her notion of being a good boss and her love of ice cream. She was having her cake and eating it too.

21

“We were worried,” said Katya when he finally arrived, which Aaron knew was their way of asking why he was late, but he said only, “No need to worry about me.” What had happened in his driveway was not the sort of thing one told students. The fact of him alive in front of them, the victim of nothing more than a shot of cold water, would not alter the more compelling revelation of there having been a gun. Already, they believed that Americans carried guns as casually as everyone else carried cell phones. A week earlier, Bolor had quit her cleaning job after she found a pistol lying on the foyer table next to a stack of outgoing mail. The students had been shocked by her story, but Aaron said nothing, not knowing how to explain that it struck him as at once startling and mundane.

In Mortonville, nearly everyone had owned a gun. The guns were mainly for hunting, which meant that the men at the café talked about gun legislation as though the government wished to control their very right to eat. Occasionally, one of the young couples from the Twin Cities who kept a summer lake cabin nearby would get involved in the discussion, inserting statistics about gun violence or gangs, these arguments laying bare the divide between urban and rural. Most of the farmers would stir their coffee and keep quiet because they did not like to argue, but Harold Bildt would turn to the city folks and say something about his right to protect himself from the dangers that they had created in the city. Harold sold rifles at the hardware store, and sometimes, when Aaron’s mother set his food in front of him, he would say, “I got new stock in. You should come over and pick one out.”

“I appreciate the concern, Harold,” his mother would reply, “but I wouldn’t know what to do with a gun.”

His mother always walked away when the conversation turned to guns because she said it made no sense to argue with Harold about them. “He’s not going to change his mind, and I’m not going to change mine. In the meantime, we’ve got to keep being neighbors.” Aaron knew his mother was right. There was a fine balance involved in living peacefully with people with whom you did not agree, and nothing changed the fact that Harold Bildt had been a good neighbor. If an appliance was acting up, he came over and fixed it right away. He let them run a tab, and early on when they could not make payments every month, he did not constantly bring it up as a way of keeping them grateful.

“You don’t need to do anything with it,” Harold called after her. “You just have it around in case someone gets funny ideas about how much money a place like this keeps in the till overnight.”

“If someone wants the little I’ve got in the till that bad that they’d break in here for it, then they can have it. I’m not coming down to stop them.”

* * *

That afternoon at the hippie café, Aaron told Bill what had happened in his driveway because he knew that Bill would not get so focused on the gun that he would be unable to listen to the rest of the story. When he got to the part about how he had turned around to find Agnes Nyquist asleep on his bed, Bill laughed. “What did you do?” he asked.

“I waited for her to wake up. What else could I do?”

Bill snorted. “Well, to state the obvious, you could have woken her up, maybe given her a squirt of ice water with her own gun.”

“I don’t know how to explain it, but she looked vulnerable lying there, like it was the first time she’d rested in days. Then, I went into the bathroom, and she’d made everything so neat, the towel folded perfectly, the bar of soap dried off.”

“At least you didn’t leave her there sleeping and go off to work,” said Bill.

“Actually, I thought about it.”

“Because she reminded you of your mother?” Bill said. Two days earlier, he had told Bill about his mother’s disappearance and Bill had simply nodded, accustomed to stories like this. Aaron thought that maybe he had told him precisely because he would regard it as ordinary. “I can find her,” Bill said. “Aren’t you at all curious about where she got to, what she’s doing, whether she’s even alive?”

“I am not,” Aaron said. He wondered whether this sounded like the truth. He wondered whether it was the truth. He knew that it was possible to push a thought so far away for so long that you did not even know whether you were lying to yourself. They drank in silence for a bit, and then Aaron said, “I have a picture.” He realized that this made it sound like he was agreeing, which was not his intention. He was just talking.

“A picture’s good,” Bill said. “I need her name, her full name, date and place of birth, even better a Social Security number, and anything else you’ve got.” Bill picked up his beer again, and just before he put it to his mouth, he said, “No charge, of course. Since we’re, you know, friends.” He drank loudly, as if embarrassed to have made this declaration, but they were friends, unlikely friends, but perhaps that was what friendship always was: two people met and, despite themselves, despite their own fears and oddness and bad traits, somehow liked each other.

“It’s my birthday,” Aaron announced. He meant to acknowledge the friendship also through this admission, but he realized that it sounded as though he were accepting the offer as his birthday due.

“Happy birthday,” said Bill. They knocked glasses and drank. Normally, Aaron drank two beers while Bill consumed twice as many, but that afternoon Aaron drank four also. It was his birthday.

The next morning, as Bill stood smoking on the doorless balcony, Aaron handed him a piece of paper with the information he had requested, everything but his mother’s Social Security number, which he did not know. During the night he had awakened with his stomach in knots and gone into the bathroom, where he stood over the toilet trying to vomit. When he lay back down, he finally acknowledged the truth: what he feared was learning that his mother had been living all these years in a town just like Mortonville, working at a place just like the Trout Café, which would prove what he had believed all along, that the reason she left was to be away from him.

“At the bottom I wrote two questions,” he told Bill. “It’s all I want to know — nothing else. I don’t want addresses or telephone numbers or photos.”

Bill unfolded the paper, his lips moving as he read through the information. Aaron could tell when he got to the two questions:

1. Is she alive?

2. Is she happy?

Bill looked up. “Happy?” he said. “How the hell am I going to know if she’s happy?”

* * *

When Aaron was ten — almost ten — he fell into a coma that lasted two days, a coma that the doctors were never able to explain. It started on a Wednesday, after school. He went upstairs to do his homework in their apartment above the café, and when he did not come back down at four to eat a quick meal before helping his mother prepare for the supper crowd, she came upstairs and found him on his bed. When he awoke Friday evening, he did not remember arriving home from school Wednesday afternoon and drinking a glass of milk before climbing the stairs to his room, did not remember sitting at his desk and working out ten math problems (correctly) before going over to his bed to lie down. When his mother could not awaken him, she had run downstairs and across the street to Bildt Hardware, returning with Harold, who carried Aaron, wrapped in a blanket, down the back stairs to the Oldsmobile. Harold had offered to drive so that his mother could sit in the backseat with Aaron, but she had said no, so firmly that Harold turned without saying another word and went back to his store.

Aaron knew these details, the blow-by-blow account of what had happened, because his mother, hoping to force his memory, had described it all for him later, starting with the moment she entered his bedroom and called his name, shaking him harder and harder. As she spoke, he had closed his eyes and tried to visualize it, but he knew that the images in his head were not memories. “Finally I lifted your shirt,” she said, “and put my finger inside your belly button.”

He opened his eyes. “Why?” His mother knew that he could not bear to have his navel touched.

“I just wanted to be sure,” she said.

“Sure of what?”

“That you weren’t playing a game,” she said, which made no sense because his mother knew he was not a boy who played games. “Now concentrate.” He closed his eyes again and willed himself to recall the swaying of the car and the blanket like a cocoon around him, but he could not remember any of it. His mother always ended the story at the moment that she sent Harold Bildt back to his hardware store, which meant that he would never know what she had done as she drove the eleven miles to the hospital in Florence, whether she had spoken to him soothingly or even sternly—“I want you to stop the foolishness this minute, Aaron”—or whether she had not spoken at all.

The café had stayed closed while his mother sat beside his bed, waiting for the doctors to know something, waiting for him to open his eyes. When he finally did open them and took in his surroundings, she was there, sitting at the window, her head turned away from him so that she did not even know at first that he was awake. For several minutes, he had watched her stare out into the darkness as he tried to recall what had happened. He remembered walking down the alley to the café, stopping to feed the stray cat he called Clary that waited for him after school because Aaron always brought the cat leftovers from his lunch. The smell of tuna casserole and Clary rubbing himself against his legs — these were the last things Aaron remembered. Over his bed the nurses had stretched a length of string, on which cards were slung like tiny saddles. They were from his classmates, but when he read through them later, he could not reconcile the sentiments expressed—“Get well soon. We miss you!”—with the names printed after them, for these were the same children who rarely spoke to him and chose him last for their teams, even their spelling teams, though he was clearly the best speller in the class. On the table sat a pitcher of water, a vase with flowers, and a stack of books, his books. He turned back toward his mother, who was still staring out into the darkness, and whispered, “Mom,” and then, “Mother.” Neither sounded right, but she turned from the window, slowly, as though she had forgotten where she was, forgotten that he lay in a coma behind her.

Three doctors came in and stood around his bed, unsure what to say about the coma or his sudden recovery from it. “Welcome back, young man,” said one of them finally, as though he had been on a trip. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Clary,” he said. “I was feeding Clary.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” his mother said, not to him but to the doctors. “Clary is a family friend, but Aaron hasn’t seen him in nearly three years. He’s a dwarf,” she added, as though it might be relevant.

“It’s nothing to worry about,” said the doctor who had asked Aaron what he remembered. “There’s bound to be some confusion.” He leaned in close and looked into Aaron’s eyes with a small flashlight, then wrote something on a chart while one of the other doctors, a tonsured man named Dr. McFarley, fiddled with the water pitcher beside the bed before suggesting that the coma might have been anxiety induced.

All three doctors seized on this. “Is he under stress at school?” they asked. “At home? Anywhere?” Aaron lay in the hospital bed listening.

“His birthday’s coming up,” his mother said finally. “I told him he could invite only four friends. He looked upset. Maybe he feels bad about not inviting the others.”

It was true that he had been upset, upset because he understood that four was not a restriction but a quota, even though his mother knew that he did not have four friends to invite. She glanced at Aaron, giving him the look that they had used to signal collusion against his father, a look that meant that his job was to play along. Later, when he was back home, she told him that the coma was a mystery and would always be a mystery and that sitting in the hospital talking about it would not have solved the mystery, that she had just wanted to get him out of there.

In the end, the three doctors agreed that the coma was probably anxiety induced. They told his mother that she needed to find a way to accommodate all of his classmates, so the afternoon of his birthday, she closed the café and the party was held there, amid the booths and tables. All of his classmates came, though Aaron did not know whether they came because their parents had made them or because the coma had temporarily elevated his status or simply because they were attracted by the novelty of having the café to themselves. He received twenty-eight presents, most of them reflecting the tastes and interests of the givers — rubber snakes and magic tricks, various wheeled objects, and lots of bubblegum — but only one book, from Vickie, the messy girl who loved reading almost as much as he did. He knew that she had read the book before giving it to him because there was a thumbprint on each page, although the smudges stopped twenty pages before the end. He wondered whether she had grown bored with the book or run out of time. It did not occur to him that she might have washed her hands.

In the year following the coma, his mother took him in twice for checkups. Both times the doctor said he seemed fine, that there was nothing to worry about. Still, he thought his mother did worry, and he took to making noise as he studied after school — dropping a book, stepping heavily from desk to bed — but later he decided that he had imagined her concern. There was no proof other than the comments from customers about how frightening the whole thing must have been for her, but their comments were not evidence of what his mother actually felt, and beyond taking him in for checkups, she said nothing. Over the years, when he thought about the coma, he thought about waking up in the hospital and looking around for his mother, how that had been his first response, and about seeing her there at the window, how he had wondered — but would never know — whether she was watching something outside in the darkness or just studying her own reflection.

* * *

The Ngs’ arguments were intensifying, in frequency and in volume. Aaron did not have the courage to address the situation directly, to go upstairs, knock on their door, and stand there explaining that he could hear them, that he had been listening to them scream for three months now. He could not get by on so little sleep, which meant he would need to move soon. This was what he was contemplating as he and Bill sat in the café ten days after his birthday, having a beer though it was not yet two o’clock because classes had been dismissed early, after a jackhammer started up in the street outside the school.

“I found her,” Bill said. He was actually well into his second pint.

Aaron did not reply. All around them people were writing essays, eating sandwiches, and talking loudly into their cell phones even though the café had a policy. Bill took an envelope from his coat pocket and set it beside Aaron’s beer. It was small, like the envelopes his mother had put Mr. Rehnquist’s rent checks in. Aaron recalled how she had placed the envelopes under Mr. Rehnquist’s coffee cup instead of handing them to him directly.

“There was nothing in public records,” Bill went on. “No tax documents or DMV trail. She doesn’t vote or own property. I found a tax bill from 1983, unpaid. That was it. It was like she left that night and ceased to exist.”

The envelope remained on the table. Bill finished his second beer, his face, which was always florid, becoming even more so. Three days later, on Monday morning, Aaron would arrive at school, where Marla would be waiting with poorly concealed excitement to announce that Bill was dead, that as he sat in his car Saturday night, conducting surveillance on a man who was cheating on his wife, he had suffered a massive stroke, his body eventually discovered by the very man whom he had been following, who would in this way learn that he was the focus of an investigation. “Can you believe it?” Marla would say, referring not to the fact that Bill was dead but to this strange final twist. Aaron would be one of five people at the funeral, and after the service, he would go home and open the envelope Bill had given him one week earlier, the envelope that currently sat, untouched, beside his beer.

Aaron pointed at Bill’s empty glass. “Another?”

Bill nodded and pushed his glass toward Aaron, and Aaron got up and stood in line, ordered Bill’s third beer, and brought it back to the table.

“I found the Gronseth guy easy enough through public records,” Bill said, “so I called him. Said he hadn’t heard from her in years, but he was pretty sure he knew where she was. He’s a chatty guy.”

They were both drinking fast. When you were drinking, you didn’t need to talk. “Did you speak with her?” Aaron asked at last.

“No,” Bill said. “That’s not my business. I called and pretended to be working for the census bureau, just confirmed that she lived there.” He reached over and tapped the envelope. “It’s all here,” he said. “Telephone numbers and addresses. I know you think you don’t want it, but it’s here. You can decide what to do with it.”

“Okay,” Aaron said. “Can I buy you another? Or maybe something to eat?”

Bill’s glass was still half full, and Aaron could not imagine him eating beetloaf or quinoa fried rice. Bill looked at his watch and stood up. “I’ve got a guy I’m keeping an eye on. His wife’s suspicious. He gets off work in a few, so I better get going.”

“Bill?” Aaron called after him. Bill turned. “Thank you.”

Bill nodded. “See you Monday.”

“See you Monday,” Aaron agreed, because there was no reason to think that he would not, and he picked up the envelope and put it in his pocket.