The Ax

17

For some reason, I seem to do all these things on Thursdays. I didn't plan it this way, but with Marjorie working Mondays and Wednesdays, and only one car in the family, this is the way it's been happening. I dealt with the first three resumes on Thursdays, and now here it is Thursday again, and I'm on my way back to Dyer's Eddy.

Will I deal with KBA today? I hope so. Get it over with. Now that the car is anonymous again.

It wasn't possible before this. Monday, after I took Marjorie to Dr. Carney's office (I kept the radio on in the car, tuned to WQXR, the New York Times's classical music station, to hide the silence in there with us), I went to the dealer where I'd bought the Voyager, five years ago, back when I was replacing my cars every three years, and I talked with Jerry in the service department. I've had the car serviced there every time since I bought it, because I have to keep it going for who knows how long, so Jerry and I know one another, and he has some idea of my financial situation. He looked at the car, and he looked at me, and he said, "Your insurance covers this?" This is the first time we've dealt with damage.

I'd brought along my policy, which I handed to him, saying, "Two-hundred-fifty-dollar deductible."

He frowned over the policy. When he handed it back, he said, "Uh huh." Giving nothing away.

"Jerry," I said, "you know my situation. I can't afford two hundred and fifty dollars."

"This is a rough time, Mr. Devore," he said, and he sounded sympathetic. "They just let my wife go at the hospital."

I didn't follow. I said, "What? She was in the hospital?"

"She worked at the hospital. X-ray technician. She was there eleven years."

"Oh."

"Some big health care company from Ohio bought them up," he said, "and they're cutting back. All the problems about health costs, you know?"

Funny; I don't think of hospitals as being commercial institutions, bought and sold, belonging to corporations. But of course they are. I think of them as being like churches or firehouses, but they're just stores, after all. I said, "So they let her go? After eleven years?"

"Boom, like that," he said, and poked at his thick moustache with a knuckle. "They had nine X-ray technicians, now they'll get along with six. To do the job nine did before."

"Still," I said, "that's a skill, isn't it? X-ray technician?"

He shook his head. "They're all cutting back," he said. "She thought it'd be easy, find another job, but the placement people told her they got more people with her training than they know what to do with."

"Jesus, Jerry," I said. "I am sorry. Believe me, I know how rough it can get."

"I know you do, Mr. Devore," he said, and looked around. "For all I know," he said, "in some office somewhere, right this minute, they're deciding this place only needs two service managers, not three."

"They won't let you go, Jerry," I said, though of course they might. They might do anything.

He knew it, too. "Nobody's safe, Mr. Devore," he said. Then he lowered his voice and said, "We know each other, I can take a chance with you, help you out a little. There's likely to be two different estimates, you know? One for you, one for the insurance company."

"God, that'd be a help, Jerry," I said.

"Take a seat in the waiting room," he told me, "I'll see what I can do here."

I thanked him, and forty-five minutes later he gave me the two estimates, and grinned and said, "Make sure you send the right one."

"Oh, I will," I promised, and on the drive home I thought, I could have returned that favor by telling Jerry how to keep his job, if the crunch ever came. Just kill one of the other service managers. And if his wife had chopped three X-ray technicians before she got the chop, she'd still be working at that hospital. But that's not a thing you could say to anybody.

An hour after I got home, the mail arrived. I can't help feeling a little queasy these days, every time I go out to the mailbox. I can't help looking around for parked cars. I know it's silly.

The mail included the accident report from the state police; very good. I phoned Bill Martin, my insurance guy, and he said to bring my paperwork right over, and I did, and we met in the office that used to be part of the built-in garage in his home. I gave him the police report and the estimate, the one for the insurance company, and he whistled and said, "Boy, you really banged it up, huh?"

"It wasn't fun," I told him.

"I'm sure it wasn't." He peered at me. "How are you, Burke? You okay? You didn't get hurt?"

I laughed and said, "Should I claim whiplash, Bill?"

"No, for God's sake," he said, in mock terror. "They're cracking down on fraud these days," he told me, "and looking for it harder, too. Everybody's squeezing a dollar."

"I know it."

"Where is the car? At the shop?"

"It's the only car I've got, Bill," I said. "It's right outside."

"Let's look at it."

"Okay."

We went out, and he looked at it, and looked at the estimate again, and then he looked at me, and casually he said, "You get a new position yet?"

"Not yet," I said.

He nodded, and we went back inside, and he said, "I'll fax these things off to the company today. There shouldn't be any problem."

"Great," I said. "When will it be okay to get it fixed? It looks kind of ugly now."

"Tomorrow, I hope," he said. "I'll give you a call, when they fax the approval."

"Thanks, Bill."

We shook hands, and I left, and drove home.

It's a wide-ranging conspiracy.

Tuesday was our first meeting with the counselor. Marjorie had arranged it, not through any of the state agencies, after all, but through that church where we'd met Father Susten eleven years ago. "His name is Longus Quinlan," she told me, as we drove south toward Marshal, where the office was.

I was surprised to hear it was a man we were on our way to see, expected Marjorie to have preferred a woman, but I covered whatever surprise I might have showed by saying, "Longus. That's a weird name."

"Maybe it's a family name," she said.

Our appointment was in a newish redbrick building four stories high on the edge of Marshal, called Midway Medical Services Complex, midway between what two points I don't know. Life and death? Sanity and lunacy? Yesterday and tomorrow? Hope and despair?

Columbia Family Services was on the top floor. We rode up uncomfortably together in the elevator, and found a receptionist at the top, who took our names and asked us to wait in the reception area there, a simple pastel space with simple pastel furniture, clearly designed to keep everybody calm until we can get this trouble sorted out.

We only waited a minute or two in this well-meaning but very boring place before the receptionist said, "Mr. and Mrs. Devore?"

We were the only people waiting. We stood, and she pointed down the hall to our right and said, "Room four."

We thanked her, and walked down to room four, where the door stood open. We stepped in, and a heavyset black man of about forty, wearing white shirt and dark tie, got to his feet from behind his desk, smiled at us, and said, "Mr. and Mrs. Devore. Come on in. Why not close that door there."

Had Marjorie known he was black? I shot her a quick look as I shut the door, but her profile was blank, unreadable. She didn't look in my direction at all, but went straight over to sit in the chair Longus Quinlan gestured to. I came over, then, and took the remaining chair, and now we made a triangle.

It was a small office, with Venetian blinds over the wide window at the back. The desk faced the door from under that window, with the other two chairs angled to face it from the side walls, closer to the door, so that people in those chairs faced the person at the desk directly but still had a good clear view of each other.

Once we were all seated, he gave us an amiable smile and said, "I'm Longus Quinlan, as you probably guessed. Father Enver told me he didn't really know much about you two, your connection with the church was before his time. Father Susten, was it?"

We agreed it was, and he nodded and said, "Before my time, too, but I've heard good things about him." Drawing a printed form toward himself, picking up a pen, he said, "Let's just get the boilerplate out of the way to begin with, okay?"

Well, the boilerplate, as he called it, took the whole first hour. I was sitting there waiting to hear how Marjorie would describe her affair to this counselor — waiting also to hear if there would be any clues to the guy's identity — but we never got to that. We got to all the normal personal information, and we got as far as bringing up the fact that our difficulties — unstated difficulties, as yet — seemed to be caused by my having been out of work for almost two years.

Then the time was up, that fifty-minute hour, and he put his hands together on top of the form on his desk and smiled at us and said, "I'm glad you've come to me, not because it means you've got a problem, but because it means you've got the desire to solve that problem. And what I'm here for, as I guess you already know, is not to solve the problem for you, because I can't do that. It can only come from inside yourselves. A Band-Aid from me isn't gonna help. My job is to help you look inside yourselves and see what strengths are there, see what you really want from each other and from life, and help you find the way that's already there inside you to rise above your problems and make things come out right. But one thing."

He held up a hand and raised a finger and smiled past it at us. "We don't yet know what it is you want," he said. "You think you know what you want. What you probably think is, what you want is what you used to have. But it may turn out, that isn't what you want, after all. That's one of the things we'll have to discover along the way."

What he's saying, I realized, is that we may wind up ending the marriage when this is all over, and then that'll turn out to have been what we wanted all along, and he'll have turned out to have done his job. Pretty good. How do I get into this line of work?

It was agreed we'd come to see him every Tuesday at this same hour, and he'd bill the insurance company — we're still covered, for a while longer — and after he was paid by them we'd make up the difference, the twenty percent deductible that was our responsibility.

Then we left, shaking his hand and thanking him, and in the elevator going down, I said, "I've had a lot of job interviews went just like that."

"Oh, Burke," Marjorie said, and put her arms around me, and we kissed very warmly. But that was it, just that one instant. I pulled back, and so did she.

We listened to WQXR in the car again, going home. Along the way, I decided I didn't think much of Longus Quinlan, but I'd go along with the program, because maybe it could help after all, some, along the way. And eventually I'd find out who the man is.

And if these sessions are the price to keep Marjorie in the marriage, I'm more than willing to pay. After I've killed her boyfriend, and after I've got my new job, things will be all right again.

Then, on Wednesday, Bill Martin rang up in the morning to say I could go ahead and get the car fixed, and when I phoned Jerry at the dealer he said he'd expected the call and had the necessary parts waiting, so after I dropped Marjorie at Dr. Carney's office I drove on over to the dealership and they gave the Voyager its plastic surgery, to make it look like everybody else.

And now it's Thursday again, and I'm on my way to KBA.