A Thousand Pardons

3



NO ONE COULD TELL YOU MORE about narcissism than an addict, recovering or otherwise; and during Ben’s first two weeks inside Stages, even though he wasn’t technically addicted to anything, in all the talk about narcissism he’d recognized enough of himself not to feel like too much of an impostor there. True, when his turn came around to talk (that’s all they did there was talk, in various configurations, over and over again until dinner), he had initially felt the need to amp it up a bit, in terms of the details of his drinking, his sexual compulsions, the destructive misbehavior that had left his life, and others, a ruin. And they could tell he was lying—they were expert at spotting it—but the funny thing was they read it as denial, they thought he was lying out of cowardice rather than fear of mockery or scorn for the relative luxuriousness of his problems. So he amped it up even further, until after a few weeks of group he had gotten quite good at it, so good even he couldn’t always distinguish the manufactured shame from the real. By the end of a month he felt like a lifer there, with an inmate’s sense of propriety and a protective attitude toward all the place’s earnest rituals and customs. He was as shocked as could be on the Monday after Thanksgiving when at the end of a one-on-one his counselor, Paul, tapped him on the knee and said, “Benjamin, I believe your work here is done.”

And the odd thing was that he had never felt more like an addict than he did on the day of his discharge: the world beyond that leafy, unmanned gate was suddenly a pretty scary prospect. His car was still in the lot. He let the engine run for a few minutes and tried to think what, of a practical nature, he should do. The first thing was to call the lawyer, Bonifacio, and tell him to close the escrow account they’d set aside for his treatment. He left a voice mail. The second thing was maybe to alert Helen that he was out? But then he recalled that that tie was no longer there, that they had severed it, legally and otherwise. He didn’t know what he would say to her anyway—or to Sara, at least not yet. He hadn’t spoken to his daughter in almost three months; the counselors had forbidden it for the first two, and even after that any phone call would have had to have been monitored, a condition Ben could not accept. In any case Sara would be in school with her phone turned off for another six or seven hours. Still, he had nowhere else even to point himself toward, no place of employment, no other home, and all his possessions outside of one suitcase were still in the house on Meadow Close, unless she’d stored them, or sold them, or burned them. He imagined he could feel the eyes of Paul on his idling car. Without coming to any conclusion about anything, he backed out of the lot and began the drive of forty minutes or so back to Rensselaer Valley.

As before, he made it most but not all of the way. A few exits east of his turnoff on 684, he had to pull over into the half-empty lot beside an office park because he thought he might be hyperventilating. Ten minutes later he got back on the highway; this time he made it all the way to the hill at the top of Meadow Close before stopping again. The house seemed almost to change its contours, to shrink or tighten against the bare trees and the cold, gray overcast. The yard looked like hell. A light was on in the bedroom window. He recalled that, in a fit of righteous remorse brought on by therapy, he had signed the house over to Helen while sitting on his bed one night in rehab; it was highly unlikely that she could have sold the place as quickly as that, but still, for all he knew some stranger might be lying under that light. He had no real right to go in there anyway, no reason sounder than whimsy to go anywhere. The fear whose physical symptoms he marveled at was not unmixed with other sorts of feelings, for in a way, he had to admit as he sat staring through the windshield with his hands in his lap, he now had exactly what he had wanted. He was a new man. Whatever step he took next would not be one he had taken many times, or even once, before. All that survived of his old life was the disgrace of its end, and there was something almost comfortable about that disgrace, about the burden of it; it seemed to be what he’d been courting all along, and now it was his. That was what had first begun to exasperate him about Helen, way back when: she believed in him too blindly, she refused to see how he bore the weight of what he was capable of. Out of nowhere, an amplified horn blasted right behind him and nearly put his head through the roof; a huge yellow Hummer drifted to a stop on his left, smack in the middle of the road, and the tinted passenger-side window, two feet above his head, rolled down.

“Is that Ben Armstead?” Dr. Parnell said.

The two of them turned off their engines and spoke through their windows. That Parnell was a boor and a prick and a windbag was something Ben had known for years, but never had he felt as repulsed by his old neighbor as he did now, when with a raised eyebrow and a puerile smirk he kept trying to convey to Ben that they were hypermasculine birds of a feather, that boys, whether driving obnoxious monster cars or nailing hot underlings in hotel rooms, would be boys. But he did at least invite Ben inside his home, and serve him a cup of coffee. And he did seem to understand something about the limbo in which Ben found himself, because out of nowhere he offered the use of a cottage he kept on Candlewood Lake, for fishing, he said. No one used it this time of year. Ben thanked him and took down the directions, and when he had finished his coffee he drove straight there.

The presence of candles and old wine bottles and a king-size bed cast suspicion on Parnell’s claim that he used the cottage only for fishing. It was winterized, thank God. None of the few other cabins visible from its tiny back porch were occupied, even on weekends. Maybe in another month or so, Ben thought, when the lake iced over. In the meantime, the days crept safely by. He spent Christmas there, with the relief of a secret, cordial, but uneventful hour with Sara the day before to sustain him. He made no contact with his ex-wife but assumed that she knew he was out of Stages, that either Sara or Bonifacio would have found occasion to mention it to her. He’d had Bonifacio send her the rest of the escrow money, labeled as back child support. No response. Then, a few days after New Year’s, when he broached with Sara the idea of arranging another meeting, she texted him peremptorily that they were moving—in fact had already moved, the previous weekend—to Manhattan. He was left to contemplate that during a raw, muddy January in which the lake ice never thickened to more than an inch or two. Even if it weren’t his inclination, he wouldn’t have had much choice but to wait: his future, in a legal sense at least, was still being negotiated elsewhere, without his direct involvement, and until that process was over, there wasn’t much to plan for.

What had he done? It was a question he asked himself more in wonder than in regret. He couldn’t even bring himself to regret the manner in which it had happened, the damage done to others, because the damage itself defined him now, defined even his flickering relationship to Sara, in that he had something to prove to her, though he wasn’t yet sure what, or how. He had renounced himself: that was as far as it went. But that was pretty far.

It was a ten-mile drive to town, and there was nothing in town anyway, so Ben had little to do all day but think—not that different from rehab, really, save for the atmosphere of relentless silence. The cabin resembled Stages too in its technological isolation from the wider world, for it was socked in by hills and Ben’s phone got no reception whatsoever. It wasn’t wired for cable either. Once a day, sometimes twice, Ben would drive into town, park around the side of the Mobil station where he couldn’t be seen from its front windows, and check for messages from his few remaining contacts in the world. In truth, if you left out all those emails that still came to him robotically for one reason or another, like bank statements and unchanging frequent-flier account updates, he was down to two correspondents. In the gray late afternoon when he was likeliest to catch her on her way home from school, he sat in the driver’s seat with the heater on high and texted his daughter. This was both satisfying and frustrating, for Sara was a stingy texter, and he was left unsure whether this was a generational thing, or a measure of her own impatience and lack of thumb-typing skills, or whether she was trying to forget about him but lacked the fortitude to come right out and tell him so.

Hows ur new school?

Ok.

Hows ur new apt?

Sux.

She had an entirely new life, but you wouldn’t know it from her lack of affect, if it even made any sense to criticize text messages for a lack of affect. At least she hadn’t blocked him. After ten or fifteen minutes of this sort of exchange—she didn’t know where on earth he was; she didn’t seem to need to know—he’d walk into the Mobil station for a poisonous cup of six-hour-old coffee and a New York Times, and then he’d go back out to the car and call his lawyer.

That guy had turned out to be a find. If Ben still had a job himself, he would have hired Bonifacio in a heartbeat. Like most good litigators Ben had known, Bonifacio was a killer, a misanthrope, with the vengeful air of a man whose embarrassing delusions about the goodness of people had long ago been destroyed. Or maybe it was just that he knew how to hire a good PI, but in any event he had managed to turn up so much dirt about Cornelia Hewitt—including, delightfully, an affidavit that down at Duke she had slept with one of her professors—that they were able to settle the suit for what amounted, when compared to the nightmare scenarios of just a few months earlier, to pennies on the dollar. So Ben would still have some money left after all. The real financial winner in the end, though, was Bonifacio himself, who had even let slip to Ben, with a provocatory slyness, that he and his wife had briefly looked into buying Ben’s old house when Helen first put it on the market.

But the criminal case, though manipulable, wasn’t so easily closed. The sexual assault charge was, as Bonifacio had predicted, dropped before it could be dismissed, which indicated mercifully that there would be no trial, but also that there was some bargaining going on. Ben had little idea from day to day where things stood, or when the resolution might come. When the first of February passed—when he had been at Parnell’s cabin on the lake, with nothing to do, for two full months, and the lake was finally frozen over, and he had read every ridiculous Tom Clancy and James Patterson book in the place, and it was dark and bone-cold even inside his car during the half hours he spent texting back and forth with Sara while she sat watching TV in her new apartment, before abruptly signing off mom here gotta go—he returned a call from Bonifacio and learned that even the best plea deal his lawyer could negotiate was going to have to include some token jail time.

“Twenty-eight days,” Bonifacio said. “The DA says he can’t go any lower. It’s a high-profile case, and DWI is just such a political thing these days. Frankly, if you think about the position we were in three or four months ago, it isn’t half bad.”

Ben, though he felt oddly calm, was shaking. He turned the heat up another notch with his free hand. “It’s a good deal, I know,” he said. “Nice work on your part.”

“Well, I went to high school with the guy,” Bonifacio said.

“I assume you’ll let Helen know?”

“Don’t assume it,” Bonifacio said coolly. “I represent you separately now, at least until you revisit the custody issue, which nobody seems quite ready to do yet. Apart from that, the only mandatory disclosures are financial. The money left over from escrow covers child support until, I don’t know, the summer I think. I’ll tell her where you are if she asks me where you are. Otherwise, it’s not my place.”

“Has she ever asked you where I am?”

“Not to date. She knows you’re out there somewhere.”

Wow, Ben thought. Good for her. “Does she know I’ve been in touch with Sara?”

“Ooh,” said Bonifacio. “Not smart. In fact I think I’m going to have to pretend you didn’t tell me that. Anyway, I haven’t actually seen Helen in months. Of course, I haven’t seen you in even longer. My biggest clients! We’re all just voices in each other’s ears now.”

Ben would do his time at a minimum-security facility in a town called Mineville, north of Albany; Bonifacio had never been there himself, but he’d been assured it was the cushiest prison in the eastern part of the state. In ten days Ben would drive himself to the courthouse in Poughkeepsie, where he would surrender, make a brief court appearance to accept the plea formally and to allocute to his crimes, and then a couple of sheriff’s deputies would drive him about four hours north to jail. Ben knew full well how all of this worked, but he let his lawyer go on explaining it anyway. Then he went inside, bought a shrink-wrapped roast beef sandwich and a can of beer, and drove back out to the cabin.

He was a pariah, a dead soul, and he was unsure how any of the various purgatories he was living through was ultimately going to return him to the world. He had gone from a life dominated by routine and obligation to a life wherein each day was almost perfectly vacant, and yet, when those pointless days began to count down from five, he felt the onset of panic at their ending. It kept him from sleeping more than about an hour at a time. He wasn’t scared of prison, exactly. From what he knew of these places, this one wouldn’t be that much different from Stages, only with plainer food and fewer meetings. The last days in the cabin came and went, seeming unfairly short, even though he had no way to pass them but to sit inside with his feet near the baseboard heater and stare out at the empty lake. He thought about making a run for it. He thought about trying to get some Ambien prescribed to him, but he did not know a doctor or even a single soul in this area beyond the fat kid behind the Mobil counter. Something kept him from calling Parnell and asking for this second, negligible favor. He did call Bonifacio to ask if the prison in Mineville allowed inmates the use of their phones: the answer was no, but they were allowed limited access to the Internet each day via the prison’s own server. So he could still email Sara. The emails would be coming from a different IP address now; maybe she’d wonder about that, or maybe she wouldn’t even notice it.

He decided that his fear was a function of simple instinct and that there was nothing to be done about it. On his last morning in the cabin he was awake at dawn, stripping the bed and sweeping up with a broom he’d found. Through the window, as the light slid over the frozen lake, he could see that there was someone out there, maybe a hundred yards offshore, sitting in front of a hole in the ice. The thermometer on the porch read nine degrees. Man, Ben thought. For what? He drank a cup of instant coffee while staring at the guy, who did not move; then he rinsed out the cup, put the key to the cabin on the lintel over the front door, and drove off to meet the authorities.



CRISIS MANAGEMENT was what she had learned to call it, but Helen’s sense of her own particular niche in the world of public relations—in the realm, as Harvey had taught her to think of it, of public storytelling—didn’t get much more sophisticated than that. She had no idea how to draw attention to her own achievements, or how to leverage the exposure (such as when the Times mentioned her in a sidebar after Bratkowski was censured by the city council) that sometimes came her way as an accidental but still natural consequence of her success. She didn’t know how to find new clients—she just said yes or no to those who approached her, and in fact she didn’t yet feel she had the luxury of saying no to anyone. She didn’t know how, or else just lacked the aggression, to be the first one to cold-call whenever something went publicly wrong: a schoolteacher who was dating a student, a hair salon that burned a client’s skin, a charity whose books were cooked. Her business model, and Mona’s, was basically to pick up the phone when it rang. It was no way to get rich, that was for sure. It was a formula for getting by, and that’s what they were all doing, with no sort of plan or even provision for the future, and with no one in her life who might offer her advice.

She did have some sense of what her skills were, even if they seemed less like skills than like instincts. She got powerful men to apologize. Maybe women too, though she was a bit curious about that one herself since she’d never yet taken on a female client. The thing was, she seemed able to do it without even trying that hard. She got them to confess because they didn’t seem to want to lie to her. Once this threshold had been crossed, it was a relatively simple matter to stand nearby while they confessed to the world at large via a TV camera or a microphone, though Helen frequently had the sensation that even in that broadcast moment the camera and the mike were still somehow basically surrogates or fetishes, material symbols of herself.

Of course she worried too that this talent for inducing apology was maybe more of a lucrative quality than a personally attractive one. In the interest of avoiding hypocrisy, she took time to reflect that she was far from guilt-free herself. Her ex-husband may have had a lot to answer for over the last year or two, but the larger fact was he had turned from one sort of man in his twenties to a very different sort in his forties, and the only X factor to point to there, the only new element, was her. She had implicitly promised her daughter a warm, stable home—had taken her from the land of her birth and spirited her around the world on the basis of that promise—and now, when Sara wasn’t in a gigantic and socially imposing public middle school where she knew no one, she was in a cramped one-bedroom apartment with her exhausted mother, ordering out for dinner, trying to remember to fold out the couch before falling asleep. (Helen had offered her the bedroom, but it was much smaller than the living room and had no TV in it.) And then there was Harvey’s death, which groundless pride had kept her from preventing and which had changed numerous lives for the worse. Who was she to tell other people to confront their sins and move on?

Still, they kept coming, if not exactly in droves. In March she got her first corporate call, even if only a local one: Amalgamated Supermarkets, a low-end grocery chain that hung on as a stubbornly sane alternative to the efflorescence of Whole Foods and Gourmet Garages, had a PR nightmare when some young mother bought a bunch of bananas with razors stuck in them. She found this out by feeding them to her children, one of whom almost died. Helen read the story over someone’s shoulder on the bus to the office, and for once her first thought was, I wonder if they’ll call us. In fact they had left a voice mail already. She headed right back uptown to Amalgamated’s corporate office, and, after a few minutes with the alarmingly young borough manager who had phoned her, she was fully if not pleasantly engaged.

“I hate it that you’re here,” he said. “It’s like a visit from the Grim Reaper. And the thing is, we didn’t do anything wrong. This is all so f*cking unfair.”

“What’s unfair?” Helen asked him. He seemed young enough to be her son; he was somebody’s son, more than likely, or he wouldn’t have had an executive’s job at his age.

“Ever tried to get a razor into a banana?” he said, a little louder than necessary. “You can’t do it! It can’t be done! I sat here at my desk last night and tried!” He held up his hands; three of his fingertips had bandages on them. “It is obvious that this broad did it herself, to try to work up a bogus lawsuit, because that’s easier than getting a job and working, a lawsuit that we’ll settle to make it go away, regardless of its transparent f*cking bogusness, pardon my French, which is why I hate meetings with PR people, because PR people are always telling you to roll over and stick your ass in the air and settle, when every bone in my body is telling me we should fight this.”

Helen felt the sort of counterintuitive calm blooming in her that she had learned to expect in these situations. “You think this woman fed her son a razor blade,” she said, “to try to get grounds for a lawsuit?”

In reply the young executive—who was wearing one of those striped dress shirts with a white collar; Lord, Helen hated those shirts, they were like sandwich boards for a*sholes—reached into his top drawer, pulled out a file folder, and dropped it theatrically on the desk between them. “Her psychiatric file,” he said. “I had a PI pull it yesterday, and he’s got this much already. Would you like to have a look?”

“No,” Helen said. “Here’s what you do with that. You give it to your lawyer, and if you have already made another copy of it, you run that copy through the shredder. I don’t want anyone here to refer to it in public, not even by accident, and the easiest way to ensure that is for no one to have seen it in the first place.”

The man in the a*shole shirt leaned forward, red-faced. Clearly it was going to take a little extra work to convert this guy. “I don’t understand you people,” he said. “You are giving this crazy bitch a license to steal from us. Where is this Harvey guy, anyway? I think a man might understand my point of view a little better.”

You people? Whom did he think she was there representing? “No one is going to steal from you,” she said. “That’s what you pay lawyers to make sure of. They will go behind closed doors and they will probably take this poor, sick woman apart, but it is important that that happens where no one else can see it. I work in the realm of the seen.”

“Okay,” he said.

“What I’m doing for you has nothing to do with money.”

“It doesn’t?”

“Well, okay, it does,” Helen said. “But only indirectly. That is, if you act correctly now, even against what you may think of as your interest, the reward will come to you and to Amalgamated later, down the road, as a result.”

He had begun to smile obnoxiously. “I have a cousin,” he said, “who’s in a church like this.”

Helen had no idea what he was talking about; she closed her eyes and shook her head once, to get herself back on track. “We have to think of it in terms of storytelling,” she said. “Imagine how you want the customers to think of Amalgamated, say, two months from now. Then we begin to tell the story that leads them to that place. If it’s a story of our guilt, of our desire to make amends, if that’s how it begins, then so be it. You have to take the long view, even if it means making some sacrifices now in the service of that greater truth.”

He tipped back in his chair. She could see he was coming around, just like they always did. “See, though, I keep coming back,” he said, “to the fact that we very probably, very likely, didn’t do anything wrong here.”

“But you don’t know. You don’t know, I don’t know, nobody knows. People want to believe you did something wrong, though. And if you keep denying what they believe, that just strengthens their suspicion. You’re already guilty in their minds. But if you take it upon yourself, if you just agree to own it, then they’re yours, then you’re the one making the choices that drive the story from that point forward. If it helps you, you can think of it as a way of making up for other things you really did do, other more legitimate grievances people might have against you—a way to atone for sins you aren’t even necessarily aware of.”

He grinned, and shook his head. “Okay, Sister,” he said. “You’re hired. Now what do we do next?”

She raised her fee again, and they paid it without a peep; but she and Sara were still just scraping by, not in debt or wanting for anything but not setting any money aside either. Everything was so overpriced here. She’d been stupid to sign the lease on this Upper East Side one-bedroom, but it was in the district zoned for a public middle school everyone said was excellent, and so she’d grabbed it, even though Sara had only about four months of eighth grade left anyway and then the whole good-school panic would begin all over again. She’d told herself that if there ever came a day when the agency had paid all its debts and made its payroll and still had twenty thousand dollars in the bank, she would shut the place down and give the money to the seemingly resourceless Michael: she’d since lowered that hypothetical figure to fifteen thousand, but in any case it was nowhere in sight. Expenses were few yet still managed, every month, to take her by embarrassing surprise. As for the sale of the Rensselaer Valley house, she’d accepted an offer back in December, but since then the process had slowed to a crawl, and though she checked in with Bonifacio once a week or so, they didn’t even have a closing date yet.

Her great fear was always how her ongoing failure to restabilize their lives might be delaying Sara’s recovery from all the trauma of the fall; but Sara, even if she didn’t care to give her mother the satisfaction of admitting it, felt she was coping with uncertainty just fine. School, which under normal circumstances was pretty much your whole life at that age, now felt strangely and sort of exhilaratingly meaningless to her. She would be there for only one semester anyway, before everyone dispersed for the summer and then to high school. And it wasn’t like Rensselaer Valley, where there was pretty much only one high school to go to, so that all the cliques basically just relocated to a new building. You overheard some kids talking about the SHS test, or about private school, and a few delusional girls who thought they were talented enough to get into LaGuardia or Sinatra. But the vast majority would scatter in June and head off in September to one of three sort-of-nearby high schools, each of them, from what Sara overheard, even more vast and unsightly and perfunctory and treacherous than whatever middle school you had just graduated from. Wherever Sara wound up next year, she’d be starting over, socially and academically, yet again. She’d moved to New York too late to take the SHS exam anyway, not that she would have passed it, even though everyone seemed to think Asians passed it automatically. She hadn’t met anyone who’d passed it.

Unexpectedly, all of these aspects of her new life that should have depressed her—no friends, no sense of her own near-term future, everything and everyone brand new and a total cipher—made her feel pretty bullish instead. It was like getting a cosmic do-over in terms of who you even were. It wasn’t just that no one seemed to know or care who her father was. That was the kind of story that would have bored an eighth grader to death anyway: it was more of an old-people scandal, the type of scandal that would have been on somebody’s parents’ radar, maybe, if she’d ever been invited to meet anybody else’s parents, which she had not. But it was fantastic, in a way, not knowing anyone or, rather, being unknown to everyone. She wasn’t really engaged in reinventing herself, not yet, but she had a strong and pleasing sense of being dormant, like a one-girl sleeper cell, until she got the lay of the land and figured out where and how she wanted the next few years to go.

She was unused to so much time alone, not least at home, where her mom, even without her former commute, was so tired at night that there was zero supervision in terms of homework. But the homework was easily handled anyway. It was such a relief after eighth grade in Rensselaer Valley, where everyone stressed out constantly and bragged about how little sleep they got. She couldn’t believe how little everyone here seemed to care about standing out in that way. It was really liberating. The school didn’t have any sort of team sports program—even the nominal playground was now filled with trailers brought in to provide extra classroom space. Her mom did get it sufficiently together to sign her up for an after-school basketball league on the West Side. Tuesday and Friday she rode the bus back and forth to Broadway with her uniform on under her clothes. And that too was just unbelievably low-key compared to what she was used to: no tryouts, no screaming coaches, no practices even, just games. Just playing.

They ordered out for dinner almost every night—it was so easy in the city, and so much better than home cooking, that not ordering out seemed borderline perverse—and after the first several weeks that duty too became Sara’s. They’d eat in front of the TV, and sometime between eight and nine she would peripherally watch her mother’s chin sink down toward her chest, snap up suddenly, and then sink again for good. It was awkward and sad, but, at the same time, Sara had little desire for things to revert too far in the direction of how they used to be, because she liked being in charge of herself, of what she ate, when she went to bed, where she spent her time. One day she went to the movies right after school let out, by herself, and still got back home before her mom did; when asked how she’d spent the afternoon, Sara replied that she’d gone to a friend’s apartment to study for a test. It was a totally pointless lie—her mother probably would have been pleased, if anything, to know she’d been to see a movie—but in another way it demonstrated perfectly the point that her time was now her own. So many things that used to define her just didn’t signify that much anymore: New York City was full of only children, New York City was full of Asians, New York City was full of adoptees who wore their status on their faces, in their features’ unlikeness to those of their mothers and fathers. There was a Facebook group for her school, and one for her grade as well, but she stayed off of them. She was pretty sure no one was talking about her on there anyway. She was neither hot enough nor weird enough, basically, to spark much social interest from either boys or girls, and on that score too she felt oddly but definitely relieved.

Even to her dad she seemed both there and not there at the same time. He emailed a lot but, for some reason, hadn’t called or even texted for weeks. Maybe he still felt guilty about what he’d done, which, as she understood it, involved him trying to get over on some much younger woman who worked for him, getting his ass kicked by that woman’s boyfriend, and then driving around drunk and bleeding afterward like some kind of maniac. It was pretty embarrassing and disgusting, to be sure, whatever this chick’s age, which Sara didn’t quite see the point of being shocked by—they were both adults. But to her the disappointing thing was that her father seemed to have done this not because he’d fallen in love or for any other logical reason but simply because he had freaked out—his life had seemed intolerable to him—and parents just were not supposed to do that. Apart from the sexual element of it, she felt she understood his state of mind easily enough—this cannot be my life; this cannot be my family; my real life and family must have been left behind somewhere else—because everybody felt that way sometimes, but you were not supposed to give in to that feeling at his age, at least not if you had agreed earlier on to become some girl’s father.

For a while she got an email from her dad at the same time every day. All he did was ask her questions, as if to make up for the period in which he’d had to feign interest in her, and no detail was too small to escape his anxious attention: if she mentioned playing a basketball game, he wanted to know what the score was, and if she told him it was 24–22, he wanted to know who’d scored the winning basket. Even when the names meant nothing to him. Sometimes she’d text him, but he would never reply. She still hadn’t mentioned any of it to her mom; she had a sense of the panic and fury that would lead to, and as weak as her connection to her father was now, she didn’t want to lose it again. Besides, if her parents could just decide on their own one day that their lives were now separate, who was anyone to tell her that her relationships with them couldn’t be kept separate as well? One night when her mom was out unusually late, Sara called him but just got his voice mail: she left a message, but his email the next day read very much as if he hadn’t heard it. “Did u lose yr phone?” she emailed him. No reply. Finally she sent him an email saying that she understood if he didn’t want to talk about himself because he felt guilty or whatever, but that it was starting to seem weird to her that he wouldn’t even tell her where he was, where he was living, where he was working, etc. Was she ever going to see him again? The next day, same hour as every day, she opened an email from him, this time with the subject line “confession time”:

“The reason I haven’t told you where I am is that I’m ashamed of it. I thought that losing my home and my family would be the price I paid for my behavior over the summer, but it turns out there was more of a price than I thought. I am an inmate in the Mineville minimum security prison, which is about two hours north of Albany. It’s not a rough or dangerous place at all, but we aren’t allowed phones, and I get access to the internet only at a certain time of day, i.e., now. It’s a 28 day sentence and I’ve already served 22 of them. I thought I could keep it from you for 6 more days; I should not have tried to keep it from you at all, but I hope you at least understand why I did. Please forgive me, for this and for everything else. You deserve much better from your father.”

That night there was no food in the apartment, so she met her mother for dinner at Hunan Garden, where the service was fast and they offered bad but complimentary white wine. When their plates were cleared away, and Helen tried unsuccessfully to stifle an expansive yawn, Sara said, “Mom, do you know where Dad is living right now?”

Helen was taken aback. “No,” she said. “Actually, I don’t. I know he’s out of that Stages place. The child support checks come via the lawyer’s office, which makes me think he doesn’t really want any contact with me at this point, which is fine. I don’t really want any with him either. We’re officially divorced, so as long as he fulfills his obligations to you, I’ve pretty much given up my right to keep tabs on where he is and what he does.”

Sara searched her face. There was no way she was lying. She really didn’t know. Her mother had always been a poor liar.

“Do you think there’s any way,” Sara said, “that the two of you would ever get back together?”

Helen’s mouth fell open. It wasn’t an unusual question for a child to ask, of course, but through all the drama and upheaval of the last seven or eight months, Sara had never once asked it. Still, it was a rebuke to Helen that this moment should have caught her with her guard down so completely. Of course, of course she wanted Ben’s and Sara’s relationship to be repaired, but only when the time was right, only when she could feel confident that he was sane enough not to hurt her again: as it stood, she had no idea how much of an unfiltered, impulsive wreck he might still be. She’d resolved never to badmouth him in front of Sara, but that had wound up meaning that she never mentioned him at all. Just be honest, she told herself now: she knows when you’re lying anyway. “No,” Helen said, not harshly. “The way he treated us is something I can’t really forgive. But there’s no law that says it has to be the same for you as for me. Do you want to see him? It’s totally natural that you should. I’ve sort of been waiting for him to make the first move there, but you’re right, I’ve let it go way too long, I can call the lawyer tomorrow and—”

“No,” Sara said quickly. “I mean no thank you. Maybe soon. I was just wondering.”

That Friday she took the crosstown bus to get to basketball, but they were detoured all the way to Ninety-sixth Street just because one block of Amsterdam was cordoned off for what looked like some sort of religious festival. Passengers were swearing and rolling their eyes. The air smelled great, though—like meat, basically—and Sara, on a whim, got off the bus and watched it roll away. She spent the next hour or so wandering by herself on the fringes of the festival, watching a short and inscrutable parade, checking out what was for sale. For a dollar she bought a huge empanada out of a cart; it was so good she went back for another one, but by then the cart was gone and traffic was starting to flow again. She made her way back down to Eighty-sixth and got on the eastbound bus for home, where she changed out of her uniform and then checked her mother’s email every few minutes until a message came in from her coach, not mad at her for ditching, just making sure she was okay. She deleted it. An hour or so later, Helen came home from the office. “How was your game?” she said. Sara told her that her team had won a thriller, 30–29, and that she’d hit the winning shot.

CLIENTS NEVER CAME TO THEIR PLACE, which was just as well, since it was a gloomy, underpopulated setting: just the two women, working side by side in the outer room, while Harvey’s office sat there empty like a particularly dusty shrine, except on the days when his son came in. Those days had grown more frequent as the winter went on, even though the website on which he was nominally working was nowhere in evidence, or even mentioned much anymore. He was clearly a creature of habit, and he seemed to have nowhere else in particular to go. In the afternoons he would walk through the unlocked door, nod uncomfortably to Helen and Mona, go into his father’s office, and close that door behind him. One Monday before he arrived (he never made it there more than an hour or two before the end of business), Mona stood up from her desk and marched purposefully into Harvey’s office to boot up the computer and check its Internet history: a while later she came out looking more confounded than sheepish and reported that he seemed to spend most of his time posting comments on a variety of music blogs, something he could just as easily have done from his home in Brooklyn. “No porn, at least,” she said with equal parts relief and bemusement.

So other than Michael at three o’clock or so, and the mail delivery about an hour before that, the door to Harvey Aaron Public Relations seldom swung open during business hours, which did at least lower their level of self-consciousness during stretches of the workday in which there was no real work to do. Helen could, for instance, at her desk on a Friday morning at 9:30, allow herself to finish the Vanity Fair profile of Hamilton Barth she had started reading on the train. She always read anything about Hamilton that she came across, hoping mostly for some reference to their old school or their old hometown. But he never seemed to want to talk about it, or maybe they just never asked him. He usually had loftier things on his mind.

“Barth, in town for the film festival, had asked to be moved from his hotel because the windows didn’t open,” Helen read. “He wound up instead at an efficiency motel a few miles away, where the windows were indeed open, though the curtains had to be kept closed because of all the photographers in the parking lot. Clearly restless, he suggested we decamp to the Art Gallery of Ontario, where there was an exhibition of Motherwell drawings. I asked him what time he needed to be back for that night’s premiere; ‘I was hoping you knew that,’ he grinned.”

Mona picked up the office phone, as she sometimes did when she was bored, just to see if it was working.

“ ‘I’m not afraid of death,’ he said—apropos of the Motherwell we were looking at, or perhaps apropos of nothing—‘but I resent it. I think it’s unfair and irritating. I know I’m not going to get to all the beautiful places I want to go, I’m not going to read all the books I want to read, or revisit all the beautiful paintings I want to see. There’s a limit.’ He paused. ‘I mean, I understand limits are good for character and all that, but I would rather live forever.’ ”

A soft knock on the office door caused both women to jump in their seats. Helen dropped the Vanity Fair facedown on her desk and reflexively pretended to be typing something.

“Come in?” she called out, shrugging at Mona.

In walked a white-haired man in an excellent suit, with fashionably tiny glasses held up by large cheeks. Actually, what enlarged the cheeks was his smile, which was constant, even as he took in, without having to so much as crane his neck, the entirety of the operation—the two women at mismatched, perpendicular desks in the outer office, the inner room, at this hour, open but unoccupied.

“This is Harvey Aaron Public Relations?” he said. Helen nodded. He looked a bit like Harvey, actually, or maybe just of Harvey’s vintage, like someone Harvey would have avoided at his own high school reunion because of the man’s conspicuous aura of success.

“I won’t ask for Harvey himself, because I know he’s sadly no longer with us,” the man said. “I take the liberty of calling him Harvey because we actually met once, probably twenty years ago. More than twenty.” His smile seemed to refresh itself. Helen and Mona were still seated with their fingers over their keyboards. “But may I ask, which of you ladies is Ms. Armstead?”

Helen, absurdly, raised her hand. The white-haired man looked again at Harvey’s empty office, as if he had not noticed it before, and said, “I wonder, if you’re not too busy, if I might have a few moments of your time. That is,” he said, turning his gaze graciously upon Mona, “if you don’t mind.”

Skepticism had flared Mona’s nostrils. “You from the government?” she said. “Because you seem a little bit like somebody from the government.”

Helen shot her a stricken look, even though she too had an instinct that this man was not some prospective client. Too untroubled, maybe. He seemed like he was pretty happy with the public image he was projecting already.

“Not at all,” he said. “My name is Teddy Malloy.” The way he said it, he clearly expected it to make some impression; Helen felt at fault for having no idea who he was. He extended his hand toward Harvey’s office door, graciously and presumptuously at the same time. “Shall we?” he said to Helen.

At least he let her take the seat behind Harvey’s desk, she thought as he closed the door after them, though he couldn’t have been smart enough to know how wrong and off-balance it made her feel to sit in Harvey’s old swivel chair. “Well!” he said pleasantly as he sat, folding his hands over his stomach. “So you are Helen Armstead.”

Helen smiled weakly. “What can I do for you?” she said.

“You’re the woman who handled Peking Grill, yes? And Amalgamated Supermarkets? We’ve been watching your work for some time now, with greater and greater admiration.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Helen said politely.

His smile widened a bit whenever she spoke, but then he just resumed what he was saying as if she hadn’t spoken. “Crisis management is, as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, the fastest-growing sector of our business by far. I’m old enough to remember the days when influencing the public discourse was just a matter of taking gossip columnists out for lunch and getting them drunk. But now of course with the Internet—”

“You’re in the public relations business too?” Helen said.

This time his eyes met hers. The smile, she was beginning to understand, was a sort of catch basin, or surge protector, for emotions of any kind; wide as it was already, it seemed almost to flash a bit when he realized his name had meant nothing to her. “Yes,” he said. “Forgive me. I am the chairman of Malloy Worldwide, which is, for lack of a better term, a PR agency, the sixth largest PR agency in the world. We have offices in Los Angeles and London and Tokyo and Rome, as well as here in New York. We have about twelve hundred employees, including eight full-time members of a crisis management team at our main office, which is about twenty blocks north of here. It’s a company that was started by my uncle, actually, but I’ve been chairman since 1979, which is when he passed away.”

A silence ensued. “It’s funny,” Helen said, “just because Malloy is actually the name of the town where I grew up.”

“How about that,” Malloy said.

“Listen,” Helen said abruptly, “can I get you anything? I really should have asked that before we sat down. I guess we’re a little rusty. We don’t get that many visitors here.”

“You’re very kind,” Malloy said, “but no thank you. You’ve probably already figured out why I’m here. We follow the trades, of course—we’re not so arrogant as to think we can’t learn from our competitors, however small—and it’s clear that when it comes to the art, if I can call it that, of public-image repair, you have an extraordinary gift. I have come here to try to hire you.”

Now was the time for her to say something. He waited patiently. “Well,” she finally managed to produce, “it’s a complicated situation here.”

“So I see. In fact, now that I’m here, it’s unclear to me whom I’d be competing with for your services. Who owns this place, now that Harvey is no longer with us? Who pays the rent?”

“No one, really,” Helen said, cursing the blush she could feel coming on. “I mean, technically it’s Harvey’s son. But when Harvey died, there was actually some outstanding debt that we hadn’t known about, and my colleague, Mona, and I decided to work off, and collect on, the existing contracts, so there’d be something more than just legal headaches for Michael to inherit. He doesn’t work here himself, though he does come in from time to time. Fairly often, actually. He’s a little bit of a lost soul.”

Malloy pursed his lips. “Remarkable of you,” he said. “So then the plan was really to wind the business down all along.”

“Well, yes, that’s the plan. It’s just—it’s taken a bit longer to climb out of the hole, to be honest, than I’d first calculated. The pure business end of things—it’s not my strong suit.”

“No, it wouldn’t be,” Malloy said.

“Excuse me?”

He lifted his eyes to hers. “I only meant that you have a gift,” he said gently, “and that gift has nothing at all to do, strictly speaking, with business. This is why I wanted to come to talk with you in person.” He tapped his fingertips together, thinking. “Would you know how much the debt consists of, right at this moment?”

She would have been embarrassed to tell him how small an amount it was, how shallow the hole they were laboring to get out of. “It isn’t just a matter of getting back to zero, at this point,” she said. “I have responsibilities, to the others here, to existing clients—”

“I see that,” he said indulgently. “What if, then, rather than hire you, we simply bought out the agency, from Harvey’s son? And then, what’s the right word, absorbed it? That would take care of the debt and then some, I should think.”

Helen’s heart started to pound. She was afraid to ask him what he thought the whole operation might be worth. It was part of her lack of business acumen that she wouldn’t have considered it worth a cent to anybody but her.

“And what about Mona?” she said, surprising herself. “I couldn’t just put her out of work. She has a family.”

“We would offer her a job,” Malloy said calmly, “though at this point of course I’m unacquainted with her particular skills. As an alternative, we could offer her a very fair severance package.”

Helen sat back in Harvey’s chair. An old line of the nuns’ kept sounding in her head: Close your mouth, they’d say, you look like a trout. Nothing like this scenario had ever even occurred to her, which made her reflexively search for reasons why it wouldn’t work. She couldn’t come up with any right away. Still, what she felt most was not excitement or relief, but fear.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked him.

He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “I’ll be honest,” he said. “I don’t care about these other people—though I understand why you do. But not many people, Helen, can do what you do. Nor can they be taught to do it, even though business schools make a fortune pretending otherwise. It’s a calling. This is why I came here myself today to try to persuade you, instead of just sending one of my managers to do it. Think of it this way. This place, it’s like your training ground. But there’s a whole world out there, where a lot of people need your help. It’s time to expand your mission.”

Fifteen minutes later, when Helen had seen him to the door, she turned to acknowledge Mona’s direct, skeptical stare with as much of a poker face as she could muster. She knew it wasn’t worth much, her poker face; people had told her so all her life. “What the hell was all that about?” Mona said.

Helen smiled nervously. “Turns out that man works at—”

“I know where he works. I Googled him while I was sitting out here by myself staring at that closed door. So what did he want?”

Helen walked to her desk but did not sit down; she put her hands on the back of her chair. “Do you want to go out and have lunch today?” she said.

Mona pulled her head back. “What,” she said softly, “you mean together?”

Helen nodded soberly.

Mona looked around the surface of her desk, picking things up and putting them down again. She looked at her watch: it was only about quarter past ten. “Listen,” she said, “if it’s bad news, just please give it to me now, I’m not good at waiting. I don’t know why people always think you need to be eating something when you get bad news.”

“It’s not bad news,” Helen said. “It’s … well, it’s either good news or no news.” By which she meant, though of course Mona could not have known it, that if Mona was not amenable to the offer, in any of its forms, they would turn it down, and things would go on as they had been.

“Okay, then,” Mona said, without much confidence. “I’m going to make you take me someplace nice, though, if you’re gonna torture me like this.”

“No problem,” Helen said, smiling.

Five minutes later, Mona grabbed her bag and said, “The hell with this. There’s a Hot and Crusty on the corner. Let’s go.”

When they were seated at a tiny Formica table for two with their coffees and a gigantic cranberry muffin cut in half, Helen told her that Teddy Malloy had come to buy out the business and to offer them both jobs at Malloy Worldwide, jobs whose salaries, she now realized, she had neglected to inquire about, though they seemed bound to be better than what the two of them were currently taking home.

“You mean you,” Mona said. “It’s you he wants, not both of us. He didn’t even talk to me. Why would they need me anyway? I’m good, but I’m sure they got people who can do what I do.”

“Well, he does,” Helen said. “He wants to hire us together.” She took a long sip of her coffee and watched Mona pick a hunk out of her half of the muffin. “Although he did present an alternative offer, for you. If you didn’t want to go work there, he would offer you a severance package.”

“A severance package?” Mona said combatively. “So I’d be fired, is what he means.”

“Well, sort of. It’s not your usual deal. He’d offer you a year’s salary.”

Mona stopped chewing for a long moment, then hurriedly resumed until she could repeat, “A year’s salary?”

Helen nodded. “Also COBRA benefits for up to a year if you needed them. So that’s pretty generous. But, Mona, I don’t want you to feel like you’re being—”

“Done,” Mona said, and she laughed. “Sold. Accepted. Let’s call this old dude right now before he regains his senses or dies or something.”

Helen felt stricken. “Just like that?” she said. “You don’t need to think about it? You’re not curious what this Malloy place would be like, or what it might be like to do what we do at a place with some resources?”

“Someone offers you a year’s salary,” Mona said, “you take it. That’s just basic sense.”

“But don’t you—don’t you want to keep working?”

“Who says I won’t keep working? I’ll get another job of some kind. There’s lots of them out there. I’m not the type to sit around and do nothing. But if I play it this way, then it’s like I have two salaries for one job. Why would I … What?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you crying?”

“No,” Helen said, though she was a little.

“Good Lord,” Mona said. She sat back in her undersize chair and stared at Helen less in sympathy than in puzzlement. “It’s just a job. For you, too, I mean. There’s lots of jobs out there a smart, hardworking person can do. Jobs are for making money, so you can take care of your own, and maybe give them something nice once in a while that you didn’t have. Isn’t that what it’s about? You’re a single mom, you must know what I’m talking about.”

Helen nodded, and wiped her eyes with a scratchy paper napkin. “Sure,” she said, “but we built something together. We kept something alive. You and me, just the two of us. Doesn’t that mean something to you, at least a little bit, besides just a paycheck and health insurance? I mean, I know we aren’t really friends, but I’m never going to see you again, am I?”

Mona reached across the tiny table and squeezed Helen’s fingers. “It don’t mean I don’t like you,” she said. “I do. But in my opinion? You have always gotten worked up about the wrong things.”

Helen nodded and squeezed Mona’s hand, eager for it to be over now. When they got back upstairs, she went straight into Harvey’s office and shut the door; she phoned Teddy Malloy to accept his offer, left a message for Scapelli the lawyer, and then she took a deep breath and called Harvey’s son. “Cool” was all Michael said, though in a cracked tone suggestive of shock; then he asked her how soon he could expect the check, not out of avarice or impatience, she could tell, but out of need. It wasn’t important that he be grateful. It was more that she was hoping that what she had just done for him had cemented a bond between them. But she was never going to see him again either. She could tell just from the quaver in his voice that it was too much money for him, that he knew he was going to blow it. He had no one to help guard him against himself. But she had to be able to let these relationships go. They were never all that real to begin with, she told herself, notwithstanding her sadness over their end. You couldn’t feel responsible for everybody.