The Broken Teaglass (23 page)

I nodded. He was right about us taking our time. Mona and I had agreed—the last time we hung out—to split the remainder of the 1951 list.

“I was curious. Trying to help. Nothing to worry about. It makes Needham nervous when I come around, but there’s not much he can do about it. I might be retired, but I’m just as much a part of the family as him. Been there longer.”

“But you don’t work there anymore,” I pointed out.

“When you were at a place forty years, that hardly matters. I trained most of the definers. I trained Dan.”

“Really?”

“Yep. Guess that makes me your grandfather.”

“Actually, speaking of Dan—”

“Yeah?”

“That girl who we think wrote the cits—” I stopped. I’d been thinking about how familiar her boyfriend seemed, with his height and awkward sincerity. Each time Dan lumbered past my desk, I grew more certain of it. “Any chance she was, you know, seeing Dan?”

“Seeing Dan? You mean dating Dan?”

“Yeah.”

“Yep. It seemed like they saw each other quite a little bit, those two. Seemed like they were steadies. But they never acknowledged it. Around Samuelson, some people tend to be a little private. Maybe you’ve noticed?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Yeah, Dan’s no exception,” Mr. Phillips continued. “Nice fellow, but no exception.”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

“Nope. Anyway, he never said much about it. To me, anyway. I trained Mary Anne too, by the way. Neither of them said anything about it to me, but you could tell they had something going on. Why do you ask? Something must’ve come up in the cits.”

“Sort of,” I admitted.

“You care to educate me?”

“I’ll show you next time. I’m pretty sure he’s the one she’s calling Scout. Just the way she describes him seems … familiar.”

“So are you gonna show the cits to Dan, then?” Mr. Phillips wanted to know.

“I don’t know … should I? You implied I should keep them to myself.”

“Well, I wasn’t thinking of Dan when I said that. Dan’s got quite a sense of humor, believe it or not. And maybe he could tell you a thing or two about them.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe sometime. Maybe later on.”

Mr. Phillips and I each ordered a second beer, but he started to drowse into his after a few sips. When I suggested heading home, he didn’t object.

Back in my apartment, I threw
a blanket on the futon, climbed beneath it, and ripped into Mr. Phillips’s envelope. He had photocopied three citations onto a sheet of paper:

I put the photocopy down and called Mona.

As the phone rang, I wondered if she’d be offended at my assumption that she’d be home and unoccupied.

“Hey,” I said when she picked up. “It’s Billy.”

“Hi. How was it boozing up with Phillips?”

“Informative. I mean, at this point, I’m pretty sure we can trust him. He’s not keeping anything from me. He’s really curious about the whole thing, and he wants to help.”

“I don’t know if I can believe that.”

“Maybe you ought to hang out with us next time. See for yourself.”

“Yeah. I’m starting to think that myself, actually. I want a chance at him.”

“You’re going to need to promise me you’ll be gentle with him. He’s trying to help. He even dug up some more cits for us. From 1953.”

“Really? Anything good?”

“Yeah. I was thinking we could meet for breakfast and you could take a look.”

“Sounds good.”

After we’d made our plans and hung up, I read the cits again.

What is here? The time and place that nearly finished me? The setting of the story that could swallow up everything that might be mine?

These words stuck with me after I’d gone to bed. I wasn’t sure why they nettled me. They didn’t say anything new. It wasn’t the first time the narration referred to the danger and the power of
the story. A
story, not a confession. Seemed to me there was a big difference between the two.

Just when I’d almost fallen asleep, my brain jerked me awake, dreaming that I was choking on a butterscotch candy. I seem to have this dream often. I’m hanging out in my old bedroom at my parents’ house, lying on the bed, killing time reading a
Sports Illustrated
or tossing a Koosh ball around, sucking on a candy. The next thing I know, I’m choking on it. Then I wake up.

“It’s the
letter
that interests you?”
Mona said. “Quite frankly, I find the decapitation fantasy the more striking element of these cits.”

“But a letter shows they had a connection. It shows she knew him.”

Mona started to sip her coffee, but then put her cup down. “Ohmigod.”

“What?”

“Maybe
not
. Maybe she didn’t know him at all. The cit implies she was writing at work. The voice of the cits is someone narrating inside the office.”

“So what?”

“She wrote Brownlow a
letter
.” She looked at me and said sharply, “From
work
.”

I saw where she was going with this.

“Correspondence,” I said.

“Yup.”

“That makes sense except … what could letters about grammar and usage have to do with anything?”

“Maybe they started out corresponding about word stuff, and the relationship deepened.”

“And she kept it from Scout?” I suggested. I hadn’t yet decided how I’d present Mona with my Scout theory. I didn’t know how she would take it. With her schoolgirl weakness for Dan, it was a dicey subject.

“It’s as plausible as anything else, I guess,” Mona said.

“So are we gonna go down this path now?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are we gonna ransack the correspondence files?”

“How do you propose that?” she demanded. “Aren’t they all filed away in Mr. Needham’s office?”

“And you’re going to let that stop you?”

She looked thoughtful. “The office doors don’t lock, do they?”

“Nope. I don’t think so.”

“But we can’t consider … I mean … how could we?”

“You’re probably right.” I shrugged. “There’s probably no way. And we probably wouldn’t find anything anyway.”

“But maybe we could come up with some excuse why we needed to look in there.”

“Like what?”

“Good question,” Mona admitted. “Nothing legitimate comes to mind.”

Our waitress brought our orders. I dove into my eggs Benedict while Mona contemplated her Belgian waffles.

“Have you ever read that kids’ book
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler?”
she asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“No? Well, it’s about these kids who decide they want to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They manage to stay in the building past closing by standing on the toilets in the museum bathrooms.”

“I’m perfectly willing to stand on a men’s room toilet. It sounds more spontaneous and fun than anything else I’ll ever do at Samuelson. But how will that get us into Mr. Needham’s office?”

“Nobody will stand on any toilets. But one of us will drive the other to work one day. Say you drive me to work. I’ll stay after hours and hide in the bathroom. You’ll drive home. The parking lot will be empty. The last person to leave won’t see any car in the lot. When everybody’s good and gone, I come out of the bathroom and go straight to Needham’s office. You come by a little later and pick me up. The getaway car.”

I stared at her. “Are you serious?”

“Good question,” she said. She twisted a lock of hair tightly around her index finger. “Sometimes I look at what
we’re doing, and think,
What happened to my life?
Is the problem that I never had a life to begin with? And that’s what makes me want to start doing shit like this?”

I thought of our conversation on the park bench, when she’d fretted about getting “in deeper.” She’d been holding out on me. I really couldn’t have come up with a foolhardier plan myself.

“Well, don’t look too hard at what we’re doing, then. Don’t overthink it. It’s a pretty insane idea. I’m not denying that. I’m just asking if you’re serious.”

Mona cocked her head. “I suppose I am.”

“Good. How soon can we do it?”

When I arrived at my desk
on Monday, Dan was standing over it, scratching his head. I looked around him, into my cubicle. A custodian was on his hands and knees under my desk, pulling a cord down through a freshly drilled hole in the fake wood. On top of the desk was a shiny new white phone.

Dan gave me a guilty smile. It was the same smile that elementary school teachers always gave me when they changed my seat so I could be by the new kid, or the newly mainstreamed Special Ed
kid. Just show him around
, they’d say.
Or just be his friend
. I always got these dubious honors—honors that had more to do with my dunderheaded good nature than any perceived smarts. Dan’s new role for me had an uncomfortably similar feel.

“I guess phones aren’t a seniority thing around here,” I said.

“No,” Dan said. “Not exactly. We thought you might like to try to field some phone calls from the public.”

Cliff was already at his desk. I heard him shift and start clip-clopping away at his computer keys.

“We thought you would be good at it,” Dan said.

“We’ll see, I guess.”

“You’ll learn a lot,” Dan assured me.

“Terrific,” I said.

“Not about lexicography, perhaps, but about humanity.”

A snort escaped Cliff’s cubicle.

Dan gave my cubicle a friendly tap before walking away.

Mr. Phillips seemed uncomfortable
on Tuesday evening, when we all met for coffee.

“This is a real treat,” he said heartily. “I’m glad you’re joining us here today, Mona.”

“Thanks for having me along,” was her reply.

“Good to have some female intuition on this little project,” he continued.

“Oh, yeah. I should think.” I sensed a little sarcasm in her words. “Considering that female intuition’s what started it. Or maybe just lexicographer’s intuition?”

“You think there’s such a thing?” he asked.

“Certainly. Thanks for doing all that work to find those first 1953 cits, by the way,” she said. “That’ll save us a lot of time.”

“Did you dig up the rest?” Mr. Phillips wanted to know.

“Of 1953? No,” Mona answered. “We’re about halfway done with 1951.”

She reached into her leather bag and pulled out a few photocopied sheets. She’d made copies for each of us.

Mr. Phillips put on his glasses and held one of the pages out in front of his face. He let out a couple of grunts of interest as he read.

“Poor girl,” he muttered a couple of times.

Something about the way he said it made me ask:

“You ever been married, Mr. Phillips?”

“Yeah,” he muttered. “For a few years. Long time ago. Didn’t work out.”

“Can I ask … What happened?”

“Sure. She left in ’78. Left the country. Went to Europe with the feminists.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Mona sputtered into her latte.

“Just what I said,” Mr. Phillips said irritably.

“Went to Europe with the
feminists?”
Mona repeated. “What, just like that? Like they were a traveling band of gypsies or something?”

“You got it, sister,” Mr. Phillips muttered. “Your comparison is an apt one, I’m afraid.”

Mona gave me a look that clearly said,
I’ll let you take this one
.

“Mr. Phillips—” I began.

“You think you’ll ever get married, Billy?” he interrupted.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You seem like the marrying type,” Mr. Phillips persisted. “I can see it. I can just see you on your sit-down mower, earning points so you can have your afternoon off to watch a little baseball.”

“Hey,” said Mona. “That’s kinda harsh, don’t you think?”

“Oh, wait,” Mr. Phillips said, scratching his head vigorously. “Not his sit-down mower. I forgot. His
motorcycle.”

“Motorcycle?” Mona said. “Now, that doesn’t fit at all.”

Mr. Phillips nodded at me knowingly. “See?”

“See what?”

“There will be naysayers. Have you told your parents about the motorcycle, son?”