A Thousand Pardons

2



THE FOREMAN ON HIS RANCH had called a meeting, just to grab the opportunity to update him on a few things while he was actually there: fencing problems, impending visits from the state D of A and from Immigration, a boundary dispute with the rancher to their south which was complete bullshit but would require hiring a surveyor to make go away. Nothing too far out of the ordinary, just himself and the foreman and two hands whose names he didn’t know, and it had all taken place very informally right there on the hacienda after breakfast. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than forty minutes. Still, it left a bad feeling in him, a rebellious or claustrophobic feeling, which only seemed to tighten its hold inside him as the otherwise empty day went on; he could tell it was the kind of upset that wasn’t going to go away on its own, that he was going to have to take some step to snuff it out. A meeting! On the ranch! What had he bought this place for, if not to get away from the world of meetings? He tried some yoga, and he tried reading some Basho translations his new small press was going to publish, but his concentration was shot, and when the afternoon was half done he got in the truck and raised some dust driving down the long, straight road to the front gate. Something mutinous rose up in him at the thought of the security cameras whose lenses took him in as he approached that gate, even though at some earlier meeting he had signed off on their installation. Near the fencing along the berm, he passed the foreman, whose name, impossibly, was Colt; tall and straight in the saddle, Colt looked down at the truck and touched his hat, and it was possible to be contemptuous and jealous of him at the same time.

Five hundred yards beyond the gate was the crossroads; instead of turning left, toward town and the airstrip, he turned right, where he never went, where he imagined it was all but unmapped and a man could be alone with himself and clear his head. And it was like a moonscape for a while, just the cracked road and the scrub and the mountains, but after about ten miles he saw a sign for a bar; frowning, he decelerated onto the gravel and parked. As it turned out, it was truly a great bar—dark, no TV, nothing but ranch hands and day workers, silent except for the pool table—and he might have settled in for longer, but he hadn’t gotten halfway through the beer that followed his third shot before somebody recognized him. The dumb f*cking hick leaned one elbow on the bar and stared right at his face like he was staring at a face on a billboard. “Holy shit,” the hick said. He gave the guy a smile that was like slapping a book shut, threw a twenty on the bar, and got into the truck again. There was still a ways to drive, apparently, in order to get outside of where he was.

With the windows down, the noise and the heat were tremendous, but still he saw and felt his cellphone convulsing across the front seat beside him. He hadn’t even realized he’d brought it along. He thought for a moment about throwing it out the window, but then somebody would find it and figure out who it belonged to, and then that was a shitstorm of a whole other sort. He tucked the phone in his shirt pocket so he wouldn’t have to see it anymore.

In the next bar it started vibrating again, right over his heart. He took it out and flipped it open and looked at the text on the screen: Hamilton? Where R U? It was from someone named Katie, which didn’t ring a bell. He asked the bartender to pour another shot and leave the bottle. They actually still did that out here. They did it in L.A. too, but then at the end of the night some guy came up to you and handed you a bill for a thousand dollars. When the phone went off again—the bar was so quiet you could hear it buzz in his pocket—he answered.

“Hamilton? This is Katie Marcus from Event Horizon—we’re handling the PR for A Time of Mourning? I don’t know if you remember, but we met on the set at one point?”

“Of course I remember,” Hamilton said. Hollywood was carpeted with young, borderline-attractive, overeager, callow young women like he imagined this Katie to be—on the set, at the studio, in your agent’s office, working at the club or in the restaurant or any other business of any description that you might have reason to go into—and he could not tell one of them from another. But that didn’t mean you shouldn’t conduct yourself like a gentleman.

“Really?” Katie said. “Wow. Well, I’m calling just to remind you that you have that interview with The New York Times this afternoon. You got our reminders about that, right?”

She had such a young voice. They got younger and younger. “Remind me again?” Hamilton said.

“The Times wanted to talk to you for a profile they’re doing of Kevin.” Kevin Ortiz was the director of the last film Hamilton had shot. A movie was over, to him, on the day shooting wrapped and he could fly out to the ranch and slowly slip out of character; it was always a surprise to him when a few months or a year later the whole thing came back to life in the form of something strangers could buy tickets to see, and everyone wanted to talk about it all over again, expecting him to remember it, never knowing how much had gone into the effort to leave it behind in the first place. But Kevin he remembered. Kevin was a brilliant young artist, and a great running buddy. He would not have been at all out of place in this bar. “We told the Times they could have just five minutes on the phone with you, just to talk about what it was like to work with him. I don’t know if you remember, but we cleared this all with you, and you said it was okay, which we really appreciate. It should really help the film out a lot. But if you’ve changed your mind about it, we can—”

“No, Katie, that’s fine.” The bartender was walking toward him. “What time does it start?”

“It actually was scheduled for an hour ago? But we can work around whatever you want to do.”

“I’m sorry about that, Katie,” Hamilton said. The bartender stopped in front of him. “Just have the guy call me any time.”

“Well, we don’t do it that way, because we try hard not to give out your cell number. So we left it that you would call him. Do you have a pen?”

“Do you have a pen?” Hamilton asked the scowling bartender, who handed him a pencil. He wrote down the New York phone number on his shirtsleeve, hung up, and smiled apologetically as he handed the pencil back.

“We don’t allow those conversations in here,” the bartender said, pointing to Hamilton’s phone. The man’s ring finger was bent at a bizarre angle; Hamilton had seen an injury like that on a football player once. His skin was cracked like leather. Beautiful, Hamilton thought. To wear your life like that.

“I’m very sorry,” he said. “I didn’t see the sign.”

“Ain’t no sign,” said the bartender.

So Hamilton decided he’d better do the interview itself in the truck. Two more shots first: just to show there were no hard feelings, he shared a third one with the bartender, who drank it solemnly and did not so much as touch his hat. Hamilton could feel himself imitating the man’s slow gait as he squinted against the brutal sunlight in the parking lot. He got the truck up to speed, looked down at his sleeve, and dialed the number.

“Hamilton!” the nasal East Coast voice said. “So glad to catch you. Thank you so much for taking the time. First of all, I loved the film, I thought you were amazing in it. Where are you right now?”

Hamilton looked out the window. He didn’t really know. He’d never driven this far north of the ranch; also, that last drink with the bartender had opened a door, and he felt his mood shifting. Suddenly he had an idea. “I’m in upstate New York,” he said. “Visiting family.”

“Really? That’s cool. Are you—can I ask you—are you in a car right now? Because I’m having a little trouble hearing you.”

“Oh, right,” Hamilton said. “Hold on a second.” He rolled up the driver’s-side window, then leaned across the cab to roll up the other one, which didn’t quite necessitate letting go of the wheel but did mean that there were a few seconds when he was stretched too low across the seat to see over the dashboard. He felt and then heard the tires drift off the macadam, but he straightened up and steered back onto the road. Nothing out here but scrub anyway. No other cars. You might drift off the road and go for half a mile before you hit anything tall enough to break your axle. “Better?” Hamilton said. His voice sounded way too loud, now that the cab was quiet.

“Much,” said the voice. “So I don’t actually need to take up a lot of your time—I just wanted to ask a question or two about what it was like working with Kevin Ortiz. It’s his first film, he’s a good deal younger than you. Did you ever sense any—”

“Kevin is a f*cking genius,” Hamilton said.

The voice laughed. “No doubt,” it said. “But in the beginning, were there maybe—”

“Why did you laugh, man?” Hamilton said.

“Sorry?”

“When I said he was a genius. Why did you laugh at that?”

Sometimes Hamilton hated who he was to other people, but other times there was a kind of mercenary advantage in it; and he could tell that the change in the tone of his own voice had put the fear into this pasty, smug f*ck from The New York Times, who had never taken a risk, who had never put himself on the line to try to birth something true into this world. “I apologize,” the voice said quietly. “I—well, truth be told, I laughed because I guess I thought you were kidding. I misunderstood.”

“Why would I kid about something like that? About genius. About art. Do you think these things are a joke to me?” The sun was just singeing the top of the range; light pooled all along the uneven horizon. In another few minutes it would start to get dark and the temperature would fall faster than a stranger to this landscape might think possible.

“No, Hamilton, I don’t. That’s certainly not your reputation. Again, I apologize. It was nervous laughter, really, because I was nervous about getting to talk to you at all. What do you say we just hit reset, so to speak, and start over?”

“Maybe these things are a joke to you,” Hamilton said. There were no lights out here, no cars coming in either direction. On some level he’d known all along—ever since that meeting with the ranch foreman, anyway—that today would end like this; still, he was bathed in shame, so much so that he heard a little catch in his own voice. “Kevin is a rare soul, man. An old soul. Still, he’s just a kid, and it kills me to think of what’s going to happen to him, people like you, all the pressure on him, pressure if the movie is a flop but even more pressure if it’s a hit, you know? He is totally faithful to the moment, to the process, he gave me everything, every single thing I needed to be who I needed to be when I was in that particular space. You follow what I’m saying?”

“Not all of it,” the voice said, “but you know what? Really all I needed was one usable quote, and I’m sure I’ve got that, so—”

“Nobody understands a guy like Kevin. Nobody understands what’s required. You are so vulnerable when you put yourself in the hands of a director. You never know what you’re buying into. You have this place you need to get to, like I was talking about, a place that’s both inside yourself and somewhere far away from yourself, and you need his help to do it, but he could be anybody, you know? You hold hands and jump off this cliff together, and only after you’ve jumped, only when you’re plummeting through the air, do you get to turn and look at this guy you’re holding hands with and say, ‘Hey, not for nothing, but who the f*ck are you?’ ”

The truck had slowed way down, so much so that he thought maybe he was out of gas, but no, there was still a quarter of a tank. He had to close one eye to read the gauge. That last shot with the bartender—he thought it was one; he remembered one—that was the Eticket shot, the one there was no coming back from until probably tomorrow. That bartender hated him. It was right there on his face. Maybe Hamilton should have punched him in that face instead of buying him a drink, even if it meant getting his ass kicked. Sometimes it was worth it to get your ass kicked. Ain’t no sign. Didn’t that hayseed, Marlboro Man–looking motherf*cker even know who he was?

He drifted to a stop on the side of the road. His foot just wasn’t applying any pressure anymore. He cut the engine but left the headlights on; he couldn’t see one foot past them. He lowered his window and listened to the dark desert. It sounded like a riot.

“Hamilton?” the voice was saying. “Hamilton? You still there?”

And just then—it was as perfect as if he’d scripted it—a coyote split the darkness wide open with a long, soulful howl.

“Jesus Christ!” said the voice. “Are you okay? I thought you said you were in upstate New York!”

Hamilton smiled and snapped the phone shut. His consciousness was separating like the stages of a rocket, and he saw that he was probably not going to remember any of this tomorrow, not how lucid and how reborn he felt right now, not even how he got here; he often blacked out when he drank like this. What a shame. Not being able to recall it meant he would only have to go off in search of it again. He lay down across the front seat; it was cold now, but the air was so amazing there was no question of rolling up the windows. Besides, somebody would come looking for him. They were probably out looking for him already.

SHE’D LAID EYES ON MICHAEL AARON for the first time four days ago, at Harvey’s funeral: scruff-bearded, balding, a little doughier than a young man his age should have been—in most respects, she had to admit, a considerably less charismatic figure than his proud father had led her to expect—but her heart went out to him anyway because of the way he had to carry the burden of mourning all by himself. Harvey had no other family, save for a sister with Alzheimer’s who was in a home and had forgotten her brother’s face many years ago. And Michael had no wife, no girlfriend, no partner if he was gay, which he might have been for all Helen knew. He was the Aaron family. He shook every hand, accepted every kiss, listened to every story, and Helen’s stomach clenched whenever the crowd around him parted enough to let her see the panic in his face, the fear of making some religious or social gaffe or not recognizing some name the speaker would have expected him to know. All, presumably, while trying to make sense of the loss of his father, and of his own new status as an orphan. One day that will be Sara, Helen caught herself thinking; she had a kind of guilty oversensitivity to the lot of the only child. All that afternoon she had wanted to cross the synagogue, and then the reception room in the basement of the synagogue, to talk to him, to try to help him out in some unobtrusively kind way, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

Because she was the one who had killed Harvey. She knew it was ridiculous, which was why she’d never said it out loud to anyone, but the fact remained that he had offered himself to her and she had rejected him and patted him condescendingly on his drunken head and sent him off to his death. She’d watched through the Peking Grill window to make sure he got into a cab, it was true, but what consolation was it to know that you’d done the minimum, when there was something more that you might have done, only you didn’t do it? She could have called his cellphone to make sure he’d checked in to the Roosevelt, or she could have called the hotel itself. She could, for that matter, just have had sex with him, and then waited thirty seconds until he fell asleep and taken the train back to Rensselaer Valley an hour late and told Sara some lie to explain it and Harvey would still be alive now. Was she too good for that, did she imagine? It would have been the first sex she’d had in at least a year, probably longer. Maybe it was the last such proposition she’d ever get. If so, it would serve her right. With her haughtiness and her rectitude and her timidity, she had sent that sweet man on the road to die. She was too afraid even to tell his son that she was sorry for his loss, for fear that he would see right through her civilities to all she knew.

But now a second chance had come her way to speak to Michael, and if she thought the first one was potentially awkward, it had little on what awaited her this afternoon. Harvey didn’t have a regular accountant, it seemed, but he did have a lawyer, and she and Michael had been summoned to the lawyer’s office at 2:30. Helen had spoken on the phone to this charmless gentleman, whose last name was Scapelli, for a couple of hours already, and so she knew what to expect from this meeting, though Michael did not. Scapelli’s office had no waiting room or reception area, so Helen sat and waited in a chair about two feet from his desk as he unself-consciously took phone calls about other matters. The recessed shelves above and behind him, where she might have expected to see diplomas or family photos, were given over to a large collection of mounted, autographed baseballs. When Michael got off the elevator at about 2:45, though she remembered him vividly she was astonished to see him as he apparently dressed every day, even for a meeting such as this: a short-sleeved Roots t-shirt worn over a long-sleeved one, torn jeans, and black Converse sneakers of the type (if not the color) that was popular when Helen herself was a kid. Michael, she had reason to know, was thirty-two years old. He was a musician and a DJ, which, Harvey had once explained to her, were really the same thing in this day and age. Harvey had left him everything, which consisted of the house in New Paltz, the now-totaled car, and the business.

“Have a seat, Michael,” Scapelli said absently, even though Michael had not waited for the invitation. He slumped in the tattered armchair beside Helen’s and nodded to her, a little hesitantly, as if he wasn’t sure the two of them were there for the same meeting.

“Helen Armstead,” she said to him. “I worked for your dad.”

“What’s up,” Michael said.

“So we are technically here for the reading of your father’s will,” Scapelli said, “though it’s kind of a formality in this case because you both already know what’s in it and it’s only about five lines long anyway. We’ve already talked about the house—have you changed your mind about any of that?”

“Nope,” Michael said. “Sell that puppy.”

Neither man’s face betrayed a hint of the surprise Helen felt at this bit of unsentimentality. What business of hers was it, though? Still, she couldn’t help feeling a kind of empathetic sting on behalf of the young man’s mother. Michael glanced at her, suddenly embarrassed.

“I mean, lots of good memories there and whatnot,” he said. “But New Paltz? Professionally it’s just not possible for me. Plus the fact is I really need the money.”

“Of course,” Helen said. “I mean, it’s entirely up to you.”

“Plus who wants to be that guy? The guy living in his dead parents’ house?”

“Which brings us to the business at hand,” Scapelli said. “Your father didn’t keep the most meticulous records, but we’ve spent the last few days doing some forensic work—”

“Say what?” Michael said.

“Some forensic accounting work, that’s just the term for it, and, in a nutshell, your father’s estate right now consists mostly of debt. The big issue is income tax, on which he was apparently a little behind. Now don’t worry, you’re not legally responsible for that debt just because he willed his estate to you. We can just declare Harvey Aaron Public Relations a bankrupt entity and shut it down, and, from your point of view, that’s that. But there are other ways to go as well, which is why Ms. Armstead is here with us today.” He nodded meaningfully at Helen to let her know, as if they had rehearsed all this, that here was her cue.

Helen looked at Michael’s boyish face—his boyish expression, actually; the face itself was no longer in that range—as he struggled to overcome his own seeming fatigue enough not to lose the thread of what was going on. “I don’t know how much you and your dad talked about his agency,” she said, “but the tragic—one of the tragic things about his death was that it came just at the time when, after a long slump, it was really starting to turn around again. He had that great, very public success with Peking Grill, I’m sure he told you about that—”

Michael raised his eyebrows as if she were speaking some other language.

“And in the wake of that,” she went on desperately, “a number of new clients signed on, more than he’d had in many years.” She was just improvising that last flourish, in an effort to say something that would cause some emotion to register on Harvey’s son’s face; but she assumed it was true, and Scapelli didn’t say or do anything to contradict her. “He was such a decent man, your father, and everyone feels so terrible that just when people were recognizing his basic, his basic—”

“So what we are proposing,” Scapelli prompted her, with a kind of gentlemanly impatience.

“So what we are proposing, is that we keep the business open for a while, indefinitely really, because if we just finish up the work we’ve already been hired to do, the fees due on those existing contracts will cancel out the debt that your father was in, and if things keep going the way they’ve been going, after let’s say nine months or a year there should even be a little bit of a legacy for you, an inheritance, not a ton of money but definitely, definitely the way your father would have wanted it. I know he loved you very, very much.” How she knew that, she could not have said, but she felt the truth of it, and anyway he didn’t seem to disagree.

Michael lowered his eyes for a few seconds, then looked back at her. “You’re not asking me to take over the business?” he said.

“Not at all. Just to delay shutting it down, via bankruptcy or any other way.”

“Then who is taking over the business?”

Helen colored. “His staff,” she said. “All of us. I mean, you could also look at it as a good deed in that you wouldn’t be putting people out of work.”

“And—no disrespect or anything, it’s just I don’t know—who are you? I mean were you his assistant or something?”

She swallowed. “I’m the junior vice president,” she said.

Scapelli had begun discreetly looking at his watch. He was no older than she was, and there had to be some story behind his ending up in this one-man practice with its water-stained ceiling and mismatched furniture, but she didn’t imagine she’d ever learn it. “In a nutshell, you’re being asked to do nothing,” he said to Michael. “Do you have any problem with that?”

“Nosirree,” said Michael.

“Terrific. On my end I will basically be going into stall mode with the IRS and the agency’s other creditors, which is a lot easier to do now that your father, so to speak, has the ultimate waiver. Anything that helps them collect, they’ll be open to. As for you, you’re not at any personal risk if things don’t go as well as Helen here seems to think they will, not for several months anyway. At the first whiff of trouble, we can just file Chapter Eleven and case closed. Any further questions, Michael?”

“No,” Michael said gratefully; like Scapelli, he seemed in a hurry to be done with this meeting, in fact to be done thinking about it, despite the momentous nature, to Helen’s mind, of everything that was being discussed. It would have been easy to read Michael’s almost panicky dismissal of his father’s life’s work as ungrateful or unfeeling, she thought, but she saw in it nothing worse than a desire to get used to his new circumstances as quickly as possible, to look only forward, the way you were advised to stare, on a tightrope or a bridge or some other precariously high place, straight ahead rather than down.

The two men were standing and shaking hands, and then Scapelli was putting his lifeless hand in hers to signal that their appointment was over. “I imagine there will be some paperwork to fill out?” Helen said genially, not entirely sure what she was talking about.

“Not really,” Scapelli said.

There was only one elevator, and so Helen and Michael rode down together in uncomfortable silence. There wasn’t even an attendant in the lobby, if it was fair to describe the half-lit rectangle between the elevator and the front door as a lobby in the first place. The building’s main security system seemed to be its own essential undesirability, which left it all but invisible. Helen felt a sudden affinity for buildings like this one and the tentative, marginal enterprises they housed, much like the building that housed Harvey Aaron Public Relations, the marginal enterprise of which she had apparently just put herself in charge. Still, she did not feel as scared as she figured common sense would probably dictate. On the street it was unseasonably warm for the beginning of November. “Which way are you going?” she said to Michael.

“Which way are you going?” was his answer.

She pointed north with her thumb. “I think I’ll walk back,” she said. “Take the air.”

“I’m getting on the F,” he said in a relieved tone that suggested the F was in the opposite direction. But then he did not move in that direction right away. “So,” he said. “I mean, is there any reason for us to be in touch?”

She felt as if she was going to cry. “I think it would be a good idea,” she said. “Just from time to time. Of course you have the number there. And you could come by, too, any time. I mean, you’re the boss. Literally.”

He laughed at that, a little. “You know,” he said, “I have to admit, all these years I never really got what it was my dad did all day.”

“I didn’t at first either,” she said. “That was what we talked about the very first time we met. His explanation was lovely, actually. I’ve used it myself many times since then.”

But Michael wasn’t listening closely enough to take the bait. “I mean I used to Google him, for God’s sake, and nothing came up. Do you even know how impossible that is?” He frowned. “Not to mention that you guys don’t even have a website, which is like insane in this day and age.”

“That’s right, we don’t,” Helen said. “We really should. Is that something you’d know how to set up?”

He rolled his eyes to indicate the childish level of expertise required. But she could see the smile he was trying to suppress too. Really, even though he may have been too old to pull off the look and accompanying career path that he seemed determined to pull off, emotionally he still read as a little boy.

“Why don’t you come by in the next day or two,” she said, feeling triumphant, “and help us out with that? Whenever is good for you. Just come by.”

He nodded, and they shook hands and set off in opposite directions, Michael to the F, Helen to the forlorn little office to tell Mona and Nevaeh that they still had jobs. That was a moment to look forward to. Neither woman seemed to have much love for the work itself, but a job was a job, and insurance was insurance, and they were all mothers.

BACK AT THE AGENCY the three women whooped and threw up their hands and even exchanged hugs, something that would have been unthinkable not that many weeks ago; and Helen was full of optimism for the business, based, as she readily admitted to herself later on the train home, less on any sort of practical sense of how to run things or plan for the future than on the loud, unembarrassed, supportive sororal energy that now suffused the small office, where before there had been mostly sullen time marking and an excessive emphasis on personal privacy. Mona and Nevaeh thanked her tearfully for saving their jobs, held her hand, and told her sentimentally that this was just how Harvey would have wanted it and that he would be proud of her. Then, two weeks later, Nevaeh stood up calmly from her desk on a Friday afternoon and announced to Helen that today would be her last day.

Helen could not believe her ears. It was plain from the studiously passive look on Mona’s face that she had known this was in the works for some time and had shown where her loyalties lay by choosing not to mention it.

“But I thought—” Helen said and then couldn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t know anymore what she’d thought. Nevaeh, standing in front of her desk, looked down at her with a kind of curtailed pity.

“My aunt got me a job down at the Department of Housing,” she said. “I wish the best for y’all here, but that’s a city job, and city jobs ain’t going anywhere. This here, I can’t live with the uncertainty.”

Helen was very sensitive to any assumption that she was the boss of this place; true, her title had been senior to theirs (even if titles had always had an element of whimsical inflation around there), and from the day of Harvey’s death they had looked expectantly to her not because they thought she knew better but because they just didn’t have the interest or commitment to it that she did. But race, she often felt, made the whole dynamic too complicated. She felt that way right now. The three of them were still crowded into the one outer room: no one would have stopped her if she’d moved her few things onto Harvey’s desk, but she still hadn’t done it.

“Isn’t it customary to give two weeks’ notice?” Helen said.

Nevaeh shrugged genially.

Helen must have looked especially discouraged after Nevaeh walked out, because Mona actually broke character and tried to cheer her up. “One less salary to come up with every week,” she said, cocking her head. “That keeps us going that much longer. There wasn’t that much for her to do anyway.”

“You’re right,” Helen said, her eyes stinging. “Of course you’re right. Why can’t I just think of it that way?”

“Course, I’m looking around myself,” Mona said, turning back to her computer screen. Maybe she meant she was looking right now, Helen thought. “You should be, too. I mean it’s fine to hope, but when you’re responsible for others, you got to make sure they’re covered by something besides just hope, you know what I’m talking about?” Helen actually thought for a moment that Mona was talking about herself, that she meant to say that Helen was now responsible for her; but no, of course not, she was referring to Sara, who in Mona’s eyes, even though the two women spent eight hours a day together, was the single most real thing about her.

They were not overly taxed by the amount of work they had left to do. It was simple stuff, even though Mona had to explain to Helen a lot of the nuts and bolts of it: how to get out a press release for a nightclub that was applying for a license on a residential block in the West Village and needed some positive coverage; how to gratify a Korean merchants’ association out in Flushing that wanted some publicity for its modest charity work; how to talk patiently to a man in Floral Park who had bought up the trademarks for various boomer junk foods, such as Screaming Yellow Zonkers, and was convinced he could make a killing by reviving them. Mona and Helen took the train all the way out to Queens to meet that guy, at his pompous insistence, and then it turned out he was living and working in his married sister’s basement. But somehow, miraculously, his checks kept clearing. That contract had another four months to run. Each of these little short-term contracts expired in the same way: with a handshake from the client, a rueful “So tragic about Harvey,” and then done. No talk of renewal. Helen split each fee between payroll and the skeletal office expenses and Scapelli the lawyer, who emailed irregular updates on Harvey’s shrinking posthumous debt. That was satisfying, as was the thought of actually handing Michael a check when all was said and done. Still, there was something inescapably gloomy about winding the business down like this. It was like Harvey’s death all over again, only with a bedside vigil this time. Helen would have lowered her own salary for Michael’s sake, but there was just no way she could afford it. Mona spent about a third of every workday looking at online listings for other jobs; Helen knew she should be doing the same but somehow couldn’t rouse herself, those days, to think more than one step ahead.

At around four o’clock one Thursday afternoon, Michael showed up at the office, unannounced. He seemed shaken by the look of surprise on Helen’s face. “I thought maybe that website idea we talked about,” he said waveringly. “Of course,” Helen said, ignoring Mona’s indiscreetly raised eyebrows, and she showed him to the computer terminal on his father’s desk.

“He’s designing a webpage for the agency,” she whispered to Mona as she sat down again. “It’s something we really should have.”

“Why?” Mona said and then waved her hands in front of her as if to erase her own question. “What does he expect to be paid for his time?”

Helen made a zero with her thumb and forefinger.

“Like father, like son,” Mona said. “Well, I am leaving here at five either way.”

“Me too,” said Helen, “but he’ll be fine here, we’ll give him a key,” and then she had a brainstorm.

“Michael?” she said, leaning against the doorjamb between the offices. “I just had a thought. One of our last remaining clients is a nightclub that’s opening downtown. That’s a business I know absolutely nothing about. How would you feel about handling that account with me? Figuring out what past problems have been with license applications, how to avoid them, how to put the owners in the best possible light?”

Michael had been scowling at his father’s computer, which was less than state of the art, for most of this pitch. He blinked up at her. “What’s the name of the club?”

“Repentance,” Helen said.

He sighed. “That would be pretty awkward for me,” he said. “I know those guys. So no.” He began typing again, and Helen went back to her desk, more crestfallen than ever, not entirely sure what it was she’d been trying to make happen anyway.

She got home on time that night—there was nothing to keep her at work late, nor was there any real reason to take work home on the train—and when she rolled down the car window to pull the day’s mail out of the box at the top of the driveway, she found a plump, oversize manila envelope from the office of Joe Bonifacio. It had no stamp on it: he must have driven it over himself, to save the postage. Inside the dark garage she turned the engine off and opened the envelope, and there she found her divorce papers, ready for her signature.

“There is nothing to eat in this place” was how Sara greeted her when she walked into the vestibule. “And I did not think it was even possible to get sick of pizza but I cannot eat pizza again, like ever.”

Helen got back in the car and drove to the IGA for a chicken, thinking that they couldn’t really afford to be ordering out all the time anyway; on her way home she stopped at the liquor store and bought a bottle of Gewürztraminer, which she hadn’t had for years because Ben was a wine snob and couldn’t bear even the smell of it. She cooked dinner, and cleaned the broiler, and did the dishes, and then when Sara was in bed she took the Gewürztraminer out of the refrigerator and filled one of the big wineglasses to about a quarter inch from the top. She pulled the divorce papers out of her purse and told herself that she would set aside for reminiscence only the time it took her to get to the end of that glass of wine: when it was empty, she would sign and be done with it. At this point looking at her own past felt to her like standing with your heels on the edge of a subway platform: losing your balance was obviously a bad idea, but if you thought about it too hard you’d go over anyway.

She knew she’d fallen for all the wrong things in Ben—his confidence, his ease in social situations, the way she’d catch him staring at her, the life free from want that seemed like a lock in the company of the kind of man who knew exactly where he was headed. He was so smart. His mind was always going. He treated her more gently than any man, in her admittedly thin experience, had ever treated her. She used to ask him to tell her what to read, what to wear, what to order; if, later in life, she found this same sort of input from him invasive or condescending, that wasn’t really his fault—the change was in her. She had come to the city after college with the money left to her by her father when he passed away her senior year, money that would not last long, no matter how frugal she was with it. He was in his third year of law school, with a job offer already in hand, and she was working for Ralph Lauren. It seemed as decent a job as any other. She was not a shallow person by any means, but she had no sense of a calling. He was in the city for the weekend, and a friend of Helen’s fixed them up. The friend had been out with Ben once herself. “You will love him,” she said. “Personally I like them a little more malleable.” Helen did love him, and he found her worth loving too, and as clear and shameful as it seemed in retrospect that what had drawn them together was his self-regard and her naïveté, still, even on that foundation, they had been happy for many years.

They had even stayed happy, and boundlessly supportive, through the sad struggle to conceive a child, the three miscarriages, the last of which changed the tone of her doctor’s voice dramatically. She had never been told that she was barren—no woman under sixty was ever told that nowadays, it seemed—but faced with the obstacles involved, the drugs and the nine months lying in bed and the long odds against ending up anywhere other than where they had ended up three times already, they decided to adopt. That way they could still be parents at what seemed like a reasonable age. Thirteen months and two trips to China and a move to the suburbs and a lot of Ben’s money later, they brought home Sara, eleven months old, the best day of all their lives. One child seemed like such a blessing at that point that two was something they had never even discussed.

She stopped working, while Ben of course still put in long days in the city, and somewhere in those years, static though they seemed in every respect other than the growth of Sara herself, the great drift took place. His life and her life were shaped like parentheses that came closest to touching at the very beginning and the very end of every day. Sex, when they had it, became for Helen a form of denial, the way some couples will point to their children’s good report cards as evidence that everything at home is actually okay. They didn’t fight about anything—it wasn’t really their nature; instead she just watched her husband’s face turn slowly blank, and decided to attribute it to the demands of his job. He made partner, and Sara grew into a child with no hidden developmental surprises other than an extraordinary gift for sports, and Helen, at some point, forgot to find anything else to want from life, and this had turned her into a boring person, a burden, a part of the upkeep, and she might have floated along mindlessly like that forever, or at least until Sara went off to college, were it not for the fact that her lack of inner resources had driven her husband insane. She drank off the last of her wine, signed her name to the divorce papers, stuffed them back into her purse, and walked unsteadily down the hall to bed.

The next morning she found a message on her office desk, left there the night before by Michael: “A Congressman called,” it said. That didn’t seem right, particularly when accompanied by a 718 phone number. Helen dialed it. “Councilman Bratkowski’s office,” a woman’s voice answered. Councilman, congressman, whatever, Helen laughed to herself as she sat on hold; but something about the name rang a bell. Holding the phone with her shoulder, she Googled his name and hit Return, and she saw what it was just at the moment the councilman’s voice boomed over the line.

“So you are still in business?” he said jovially. “The guy I talked to last night told me Harvey Aaron was dead, which my condolences. You’re the folks who handled the Peking Grill strike, right?”

An hour later, Helen was on the subway out to Elmhurst, a ride long enough to give her time to read through that day’s Post and Daily News, much of which was devoted to the reason she’d been called. Doug Bratkowski, a two-term councilman with a wife and three teenage children, had been caught on a building surveillance camera in the Bronx, beating a young woman purported to be his mistress. Helen had seen the silent, fifteen-second clip online as she pulled her coat on: first an empty hallway, then a large figure in an overcoat pulling a much smaller woman into the frame by her long hair; she pushes away from him, hits him weakly in the chest, and then he punches her in the face. Prodding her down the stairs ahead of him, he turns to scan the hallway behind them, and at that point his face, though bloated with anger, is clearly identifiable.

“Please have a seat,” the councilman said, closing the door behind them. His office might have belonged to a storefront lawyer, with fake white paneling and a breakfront that looked like it was made of particleboard. On his desk, facing outward, were framed photos of his family, and one of himself shaking hands with Mayor Bloomberg, both men facing the camera rather than each other.

“Will anyone else be joining us?” Helen asked.

Even his smile was like a hand on her shoulder. “Best to keep the loop as small as possible in times like these, I think. Here is where we stand. The young woman in question is not pressing any charges. She has been publicly named, though, and I’m sure the tabloids have all got their checkbooks out. At some point she may crack, I don’t know. So what I need is to figure out how to limit my exposure, not legally, but … well, you’re the pro, you must know what I’m talking about.”

He was a bear of a man, red-faced even when calm, with the tracks of a comb clearly visible in his hair. Helen fought down her fear of him. “Were you having an affair with this woman, Councilman?” she asked.

He affected surprise and smiled again. “Call me Doug,” he said. “Is that strictly relevant to what you need to do?”

She wasn’t sure it was. But she found herself needing to know it anyway. “Think of me as you would think of a lawyer,” Helen said. “I cannot be in a position where I am taken by surprise by information the other side has and I don’t.”

He nodded. “Well then, yes,” he said. “Assuming we have the seal of the confessional here, I was, and am, having an affair with the young woman on the tape. For about two years now. My wife, who is currently not speaking to me, did not know about it until the day before yesterday. There’s no love child or anything like that. I never spent any public money on her, I never hired her for any phony campaign job. She is,” he said, “just this smoking hot Latina chick I have been banging on the side, just like millions of people do all over the world every day. Does that give you everything you need to work with?”

She recrossed her legs and resmoothed her skirt, just to give herself a few seconds. Then, with great effort, she stared back right into his eyes. “The way I see it, there’s really only one way for you to go,” she said. “You tell the woman who answers the phone out there that all media inquiries are to be forwarded to me. I will announce that you’ll be delivering a statement tonight at, let’s say, eight-thirty, plenty of time for the late news and for tomorrow’s papers. I don’t know what your home looks like, but if the optics are right, we can do it there—outside, not inside—and if not, we can do it here, I suppose. Little cramped, though.”

“And what will I be saying?” the councilman asked evenly.

“You will admit to everything. You will apologize to this young woman, by name, for your violent behavior. You will not use any phrases like ‘moment of weakness’ or ‘regrettable incident.’ You will apologize to your wife, and to your children, and to your parents if they are still alive, and to your constituents whether they voted for you or not, and to women everywhere. Basically, you will get up in front of the cameras and make an offering of yourself.”

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.”

“Please,” Sara said, standing up to put her coat on, leaving the ticket where it lay. “It’s Mom.”