Hit Me

Twenty-One

It’s Dot.”

He looked up. It was remarkable how stamps took him into another dimension. He hadn’t been aware that Julia had left the room, hadn’t heard the phone ring, hadn’t heard her return, and here she was, handing him the phone.

“Well, congratulations,” Dot said. “Your horse came in and paid a good price.”

“Oh?”

“There’s an online news feed that keeps you up to the minute,” she said, “and the story’s breaking right now. Respected religious leader, blah blah blah, extreme stress, blah blah blah, expected to provide invaluable testimony, blah blah blah.”

“Sounds as though it’s mostly blah blah blah.”

“Well, isn’t that always the way, Keller? Everything is mostly blah blah blah. What it boils down to, evidently the poor fellow got this special bottle of whiskey and it was so good he drank more than his usual amount.”

“His usual amount,” Keller said, “was enough to float a battleship.”

“Oh, this is interesting. Preliminary examination suggests that the alcoholic intake was exacerbated by barbiturates. The man washed down sleeping pills with booze, and that’s never a good idea, is it?”

“No.”

“Death by misadventure,” she said. “Now I have to wonder how you got him to take the pills. And if I had to guess, I’d say you dissolved them in the whiskey. Which would be good.”

“Why?”

“Because once the lab works its magic on the leftover booze, they’ll know what really happened. And that’ll keep the client from whining that he doesn’t want to pay us for something that happened all by itself. Not that I’d let him get away with that, but who needs the hassle?”

“Not us.”

“You betcha. So I don’t have to give the money back, and they have to send us some more. You happy?”

“Very.”

“And New York was all right?”

“New York was fine.”

“And I’ll bet you brought home some stamps. Well, you must want to go play with them, so I’ll let you go now. Now put Jenny on the phone so Aunt Dot can give her a big kiss.”

“See?” Keller said. “I told you it wasn’t exciting.”

“It was a problem,” Julia said, “and a complicated one, and you tried different things, and in the end you found the solution. How could that fail to be exciting?”

“Well…”

“Oh, because there was no action? No slam-bang adventure? The life of the mind is exciting enough, at least for those of us who have one.”

It was evening, and Jenny had gone to bed, clutching her new rabbit. Julia and Keller were at the kitchen table, drinking coffee with chicory.

“I wasn’t sure it would work,” he said.

“But you came home anyway.”

“Well, if it didn’t work, what was I going to do about it? I didn’t have anything else to try.” He thought for a moment. “Besides, I was ready to come home. I had you and Jenny to come home to.”

“Otherwise you’d have stayed there.”

“Probably. But there wouldn’t have been any real point to it.”

“More coffee?”

“No, I’m good. Does it bother you that he was a priest?”

“No, why should it?”

“Well, it’s your church.”

“Only in the most tenuous way. I’m the child of lapsed Catholics. I was baptized, that was their sole concession to their own upbringing, but it was pretty much the extent of my own involvement with the Church.”

“I never asked you if you wanted Jenny baptized.”

“Don’t you think I’d have said something? Do you even know what baptism is for?”

“Isn’t it to make you a Catholic?”

“No, darling, guilt is what makes you a Catholic. What baptism does is rid you of original sin. Do you suppose our daughter is greatly weighed down by the burden of original sin?”

“I don’t even know how you could go about finding an original sin these days.”

“I suppose selling somebody else’s kidney might qualify. And no, what do I care about some fat drunken priest whose greatest boast was that all his sins were strictly heterosexual? You want to know what’s exciting?”

“What?”

“That you can tell me all this. That we can sit here drinking coffee—”

“Damn good coffee, too.”

“—and either of us can tell the other anything about anything, and how many people have anything like that? God, though, I have to say I’m glad you’re home.”

“Me, too,” Keller said.