“Thanks,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“About the other day. I gave you a hard time.” She’d taken another step closer to me. I could smell her perfume.
“Yeah, well, I guess you do what you have to do,” I said.
“You know how it goes. They’re leaning on me, too. At the end of the day, it’s all about numbers. I’ll bet, when you had your dealership, you had to ride people hard.”
That was part of the problem. I didn’t. I was always the nice guy, the one who understood, the one who said, hey, you need some time, take some time. Used to drive Susanne crazy.
“Sure,” I said.
“Maybe,” Laura said, “when you get back, and bring Cindy home with you, we should have a drink or something.”
I couldn’t be bothered to correct her this time. “Sounds great, Laura,” I said. “I’ve got to get going.”
I headed for my desk. Andy was scouring the used-car classifieds in the New Haven Register, circling numbers.
“Morning,” I said. Andy glanced up, grunted a greeting. He looked stressed.
My phone was flashing. I had a message from a couple who’d bought a van from me four years ago. Their kids were older now and they were thinking of getting into an Accord or a Pilot. I scribbled down their phone number, tore off the sheet, and handed it to Andy.
“Probably an easy sale. Good people. Tell them I had business that took me out of town, that I asked you, personally, to look after them.”
“Jesus, Tim, thanks.”
“No problem.”
“I owe you.”
“No kidding.”
He asked where I was going and I told him. Said I’d be gone at least a couple of days.
“I hope she’s okay,” he said.
*
SYDNEY, ELEVEN YEARS OLD:
A boy named Jeffrey Wilshire walks her home from school. It’s the second time he has done this. His attentions do not go unnoticed by Susanne or me.
I am driving her to an evening dance class. This was just before she gave up ballet. The whole prancing-about-in-tights thing no longer appealed to her. It hadn’t for some time, but her mother kept pressing her to take it. “If you drop it, you’ll be sorry.”
Finally, Syd did, and she was not.
So I am driving her to her lesson and say casually, “So this Jeffrey fellow, he seems to be taking an interest in you.”
“Please,” Syd says.
“What’s that mean?”
“He’s always waiting for me to come out at the end of the day so he can walk with me. I keep hoping Mrs. Whattley will give us a detention so maybe he’ll get tired and go home.”
“Oh,” I say.
We drive a bit farther, and Syd says, “He likes to blow up frogs.”
“What? Who likes to blow up frogs?”
“Jeffrey. He and this other boy—you know Michael Dingley?”
“No.”
“Anyway, Mom does, because Mom and his mother used to be volunteer drivers when we did that trip to the fire station last year.”
“Okay. Tell me about Jeffrey.”
“So they catch frogs, and then they stick firecrackers into their mouths and then they light the firecrackers and blow the frogs up.”
“That’s sick,” I say. Detonating animals was not, at least in my case, a rite of passage on the way to adulthood.
“They think it’s really funny,” Syd says.
“It’s not funny.”
“I mean, I know we eat animals and everything,” she says. “Didn’t Mom used to be a vegetarian?”
“For a while.”
“Why’d she stop?”
I shrug. “Cheeseburgers. She felt life wasn’t worth living without cheeseburgers. But it’s one thing to kill an animal for food, and another to take pleasure in its suffering.”
She thinks about that a minute. “Why would someone do that?”
“What?”
“Kill something for fun?”
“Some people are wired wrong.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I mean, some people think it’s fun to make others suffer.”
Syd looks out her window. “I’m always thinking about what the other person is feeling.” A pause. “Or animal.”
“That’s what makes you a good person.”
“Doesn’t Jeffrey know that the frog feels pain?”
“If he does, he doesn’t care.”
“Does that make Jeffrey evil?”
“Evil?” The question throws me. “Yeah, maybe.”
“He said, one time, he put a live hamster in a microwave and turned it on.”
“Don’t let him walk you home from school anymore,” I say. “How about, for the next couple of days, your mother or I will pick you up?”