A Thousand Pardons (10 page)

Some of the redness drained from his face as she spoke; she could feel, as she’d felt before, the power her words gave her over him. “You really think that’s the play?” he said.

“That is the only play. To ask forgiveness. If you hold back in any way, the story lives. Let me ask you this: presumably you are a man with ambitions. What do you want to happen now? What is the outcome that will put those ambitions back on the track that your own mistakes threw them off of?”

He tipped back noiselessly in his chair. “I want to stay in office,” he said. “I want to be reelected. This was a stupid thing for me to have done, but it does not define me. It was a one-time thing, and I want to get away from it.”

“You will never get away from it,” Helen said. “But you can incorporate it into the narrative. You have to be sincere. You have to be completely abject, and not attempt to defend yourself or your behavior in any way. No ‘I was drunk,’ no ‘she hit me first.’ You have to take, and answer, every question. You have to hold your temper when people try to get you to lose it. Do you think you can do that?”

“Should my wife be there?” he said.

Helen considered it. She was sure just from talking to him that, for
better or worse, he could make it happen. “Depends,” she said. “Depends on the look on her face.”

His eyes drifted off to one side for a few seconds. “Okay, probably not, then,” he said. “Listen, don’t take this the wrong way, but this had better work. It’s not really my nature to get up in front of a bunch of cameras and show my ass like that.”

“It’s not about your nature, it’s about everybody else’s. And it will work. This way and no other.”

He stood and lifted Helen’s coat off the chair beside her, holding it as she turned her back to him and inserted her shaking hands. “You know,” he said, “for what it’s worth, this was the first time I ever raised my hand to her.”

“That,” she said, “is exactly the kind of thing I don’t ever want you to say to anybody but me.”

IT WORKED; she knew it would work, even without completely understanding why. In her faith in the tactic of total submission she felt herself delivering a kind of common-sense rebuke not just to her ex-husband and his lawyer but to legal minds everywhere. She stood shivering behind the councilman, out of camera range, on the front stoop of his Elmhurst row house for an hour and forty minutes, and he was so good she found it hard to doubt how sincere he was. Even with a unanimous motion to censure him in the city council, it was out of the news in four days.

Mona looked over Helen’s shoulder as she typed up the invoice to send to Bratkowski’s office. “Are you crazy?” she said. “This is government money we’re talking about. Double it.” Helen couldn’t quite get herself to do that, but she did bump it up another few thousand, and they paid it without a word. A week later, Helen went through the day’s office mail and found a Christmas card from Doug and Jane Bratkowski, with a photo of the whole family wearing matching sweaters. You couldn’t really tell anything from a photo. Still, she stood it on her desk.

Can it really be this simple? she thought. As with the Peking Grill
job, word of the agency’s success seemed to filter out quickly and to generate an aura in which other jobs came their way, jobs that had nothing at all to do with the sort of apology wrangling she was starting to think of as her vocation, her accidental specialty. The aura seemed to magnetize even her life outside the office, and to bring other good news: Sara’s dentist told them that she was the rare child who would not need orthodontia, for instance, and then at the end of the soccer season she was named all-county, the only Rensselaer Valley girl so honored. And then Helen got a call at home on a Saturday morning from Joe Bonifacio. While the various lawsuits were still far from settled, there had been one breakthrough, which was that Cornelia Hewitt’s lawyers had agreed, for the sake of the child involved, to exempt the house itself from the list of court-frozen assets, on the condition that the deed be transferred to Helen’s name alone.

“What does that mean?” Helen said softly; it was ten-thirty, but Sara wasn’t up yet.

“It means that the house now belongs entirely to you, and that you are free to sell it and to profit by its sale.”

“Isn’t this something Ben would have to agree to?”

“He’s agreed to it,” Bonifacio said. “Done.”

Helen’s mouth still hung open after she got off the phone. Ben had to have worked all this out to his advantage, she told herself; he always had an angle, in any transaction involving money, at least—money and the law. In his fallen state he was paying no alimony anyway, though the court had vowed to revisit that, once the litigation against him was resolved and he was discharged from rehab. Belatedly she realized that she had neglected to ask Bonifacio if there was any new word on when Ben would be getting out—if indeed he wasn’t out already; invoices from Stages went straight to the lawyer’s office, so if no one thought to tell her, she supposed, she’d have no way of knowing. Broken or ashamed as he may have been, could he really be back in the world and not have made any attempt to contact, or even check on, his child? Not that she especially wanted him to, at least not yet. She almost called Bonifacio back to ask, but then Sara’s bedroom door groaned open, and Helen dropped the phone on the couch.

The next night at dinner, which they ate in front of the TV, Helen hit Mute and said, “Sara, remember a few months ago, we talked about moving?”

“We did?” Sara said.

“We did. We talked about moving to the city. Not seriously, at that point, which I guess is why you don’t remember, but anyway you allowed as how that was something you might actually like to do. Do you still feel that way?”

Sara’s eyes were very wide. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess.”

“Okay, then,” Helen said, “good to know,” and she relaxed back into the couch and put the sound on again, trying not to smile.

All of a sudden it seemed that this Christmas might well be their last in that house, the only home Sara had ever known. When Helen called Mark Byrne at Rensselaer Valley Realty, the same agent who had sold the house to them fourteen years earlier, to let him know that she wanted to see about putting it back on the market—tentatively, discreetly, exploratorily—it was like he was over there pounding a For Sale sign into their lawn before she’d hung up the phone. There were offers right away—not great ones, but Helen resolved, without a word to Mark Byrne or anyone else, that she would accept the best offer they had in hand before New Year’s, no matter what it was. Time to move on.

So in addition to her modest Christmas preparations—gifts for Sara, and a decent meal, and a clean house, and a little something for Mona and for Michael—Helen would have to scramble to find a halfway affordable apartment in Manhattan (two bedrooms, please God let them be able to afford two bedrooms, or Sara’s wrath would be ferocious) and a decent nearby public school. Exciting as it was to be able to think of a future that extended further than their next heating-oil bill, Helen felt oddly guilty as well—more nostalgic than guilty, actually, but in some ways it amounted to the same thing. For all that had gone sour within it over the last few months and years, this was their home, and the faith in the future required to walk away from it risked seeming arrogant, even reckless. What was behind you had, for better or worse, a substantiality that what was still in front of you could not exhibit. It was a big moment, and Helen found herself wanting to mark
it somehow rather than just slip from one season into another like an animal; and then she recalled that there was something she’d long wanted to do at Christmas to which Ben had always firmly said no.

“Church?” Sara said. “Are you nuts?”

“Just the Christmas Eve service,” Helen said soothingly. “For a lot of people that’s the only one they go to all year. Not the midnight mass. It starts at five, and we’ll be home for dinner. Very mellow, lots of singing. Nothing too churchy.”

“Why?”

“It’s something I used to do as a kid. I’d like to do it again, maybe just to remind me of that. That’s all. I’m not born again or anything. Please? For me?”

“Okay, I’ll do it,” Sara said. “On one condition.”

Helen was shocked. “Thank you, honey,” she said. “What condition?”

“I want to go to the movies before. Like that afternoon. A little of your idea of Christmas Eve, a little of mine. Okay?”

Helen beamed. “Sure. That sounds like fun. We could go see that movie
A Time of Mourning
that’s just opened, I know it’s at the Triplex, that’s the new Hamilton Barth movie—”

“Uh, Mom? Did I say ‘we’?”

“Oh. Well, okay. I just thought maybe you’d want to see
A Time of Mourning
and I know I would too—”

“Like I would pay eleven dollars to see some skeezy old guy you once made out with fifty years ago. Though I would gladly pay eleven dollars if someone could just scrub that image out of my head forever.”

“So you’d rather go see something on your own?”

“Yes,” said Sara, and something in her face, some studious attempt at expressionlessness, made Helen realize what was really going on here—oh my God, she thought, there’s a boy. Someone she was going to have to say goodbye to.

“Fine,” said Helen, coloring. “Just be back home no later than four, to change. No sweats in church.”

After lunch on Christmas Eve, Sara rode her bike up the hill to the top of Meadow Close, and by the time she got out to the main road she
didn’t feel the cold anymore. She rode along the thin shoulder to the traffic light, across the five-way intersection where she always got honked at, over the highway bridge, and into town. There was very little parking for cars along the narrow main street, especially at this time of year, so behind the row of storefronts on the north side of the street it was all municipal parking lots, as if the town itself was just a façade built like a movie set. Sara cut behind the hardware store and rode through the silent lots all the way across town, even though she sometimes had to get off the bike to cross a guardrail or to thread her way between empty cars, because doing so reduced the chances of seeing anyone she knew. She passed the emergency exit behind the movie theater and kept going, past the blank rear walls of the jeweler and the Starbucks and the pharmacy, until she got to the lot at the back of a little family-owned Polish grocery all the way at the far end of Main Street, a mysteriously durable place where no one ever seemed to shop, with two small tables in the back in case someone wanted to sit and have a cup of Polish coffee. Sara leaned her bike against the concrete wall behind the recycling bins and walked through the back door, blowing on her hands, and there, standing up from one of the two little tables, was her father.

“Hi, sweetheart,” he said. He must have just gotten there himself, because his overcoat, though open, was still on; he held out his arms and took her inside it, and the sensation of being warmed in that way struck something too deep in her, so that she stepped back out of his embrace almost right away.

He stood there grinning stiffly. “You look great,” he said.

“Thanks,” said Sara, and remained standing.

After a few silent seconds he laughed and asked, “And? How do I look?”

She considered it. “Less tired,” she said.

“Thank you for coming,” he said, which was such a weird thing for your father to say to you. They took off their coats and sat; the owner brought him a coffee and her a hot chocolate, which irritated her because coffee was what she wanted, but then he brought over these two amazing hot rolls with some kind of cream inside. She ate hers and
started in on his. He brought out a tiny giftwrapped present and said, “Merry Christmas.” She licked her fingers before taking it from him and put it straight into her pocket.

“Fine,” he said, “but just be careful where you open it. I don’t think you want your mom to find out it’s from me. It’s why I didn’t get you something bigger.”

“Are you coming home?” Sara said abruptly. “I mean just for Christmas Day or whatever?”

Ben flushed. “I don’t think so. I don’t see that happening. Not this year, anyway.”

“Did you even ask her?” He shook his head no. “Why not? Afraid she’d say no?”

“Too soon,” he said simply. “Too soon to ask her for anything, after what I did.” He watched her eat. “Why,” he said, “do you think she would have said no?”

“Probably, yeah,” Sara said. “But anyway, not this year pretty much equals never, because Mom’s selling the house. She says we’re moving to the city.” He didn’t look as surprised by that as she expected him to.

“The thing I was really afraid she’d say no to,” he said, “was this. Seeing you. Which is why I texted you directly, which I probably should not have done. But I don’t want to talk about me anymore. We don’t have a ton of time. I want to hear you talk. Tell me everything I’ve missed.”

She told him about school, and about soccer, and about her new routine as a latchkey kid while Mom was at work, which Sara had to admit she sort of liked—a couple of hours with the house all to herself. She asked him where he was living now, and he just looked embarrassed and said, “Nearby.” She didn’t know if he expected to be asked anything about how he’d spent the last few months in rehab, but she figured he’d talk about that if he wanted to. Maybe he wasn’t allowed. One thing he never said to her was “I’m sorry,” but in a way she was glad he didn’t, because it would have been too unlike him, and right now she just needed him to be as much like himself as possible.

Outside the front windows the streetlights started to come on. No one had come into the grocery the whole time they were there, but the
owner was making no move toward closing the place. Ben paid the check and then pulled something out of his pocket and slid it across the table toward her: it was a movie ticket. “I stopped and bought it on my way here,” he said. “It’s for the one-forty show.”

She looked blankly at him.

“So you have the stub,” he said, almost proudly. “That’s where she thinks you are right now, right? So now you have your alibi. In case she gets suspicious.”