“I appreciate it,” he said.
“Married too young,” Helen said. “I told you.”
“You did.” When he was missing class and showing up with forged excuses, she always told him: Nice girl, but don’t be in any hurry. Marriage doesn’t come with a get-your-life-back guarantee. “But what can you tell a kid?” Ben said.
“You can tell them the world,” she said. “But their ear canals haven’t made it to their brains yet.”
She glanced at the picture on the wall, just for a second, something habitual, as though to check that her son’s face was still there. Helen kept other kids out of trouble, but she couldn’t help her son. In high school, Paul hung out in the smoking section and spent his senior year stoned in a black van in the student parking lot, listening to M?tley Crüe with the metalheads. He was arrested three times, once by Ben. The boy missed graduation, earned his GED over the summer, and then signed up for the Few and the Proud and got blown to bits in his sleep in a cinder-block room in a foreign country.
“It’s too bad,” she said. “I like Rachel.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
“How’s Emma handling it?” she said.
“With sarcasm and disdain.”
“Be patient with her,” Helen said. “Some kids feel like it’s their fault.”
“I’ve told her it’s not,” he said.
“Tell her again,” she said. “She crossing over from the junior high school next year?”
“Yep, unless I can afford sending her to Mater Dei.”
He and Rachel had been saving money to send Emma to the private school before the divorce, a fund the legal fees cut into. Rachel had never been sold on the idea anyway, pointing out that people moved to Santa Elena because of the good public schools. Why shouldn’t they, he’d argued at the time, give her the best if they could? They were giving her the best, Rachel countered, by moving back to Santa Elena. Regardless, he’d prefer his daughter getting her reading, writing, and arithmetic elsewhere over the next three years, and he added to the savings account each month to that end.
“I’ll keep an eye on her,” Helen said. “She’s got a boyfriend, I’ve noticed.”
“Yep.”
“He’s a mess,” she said. “But a nice kid.”
“Be great if he wasn’t a mess and was a nice kid.”
“Would be, wouldn’t it?” she said, patting his hand. “Kids are a mess. That’s the only way to explain them.”
“Neil Cleffi?” she said now, settling onto her swivel chair and sliding it across the floor to get a file. Helen was overweight and rarely lifted her body from her chair, but she could race the wheels across the concrete floor with a single push of her left foot. “Freshman. Hasn’t hit puberty yet. Runs around rabbit-earing girls. Neil Peck. Junior. The perfect kid. Associated Student Body. Calculus Club. Long-distance track.” She started spinning her hand in the air. “Wears Top-Siders and pastel polo shirts. Never misses a day. Blah, blah, blah. He’ll probably be president one day.”
There was a knock on the door and Assistant Principal Bryce Rutledge stumbled in. “How many kids we have on this field trip to the tar p—” He stopped. “Ben, I didn’t know you were here. Someone park their bike illegally?” he said, with an I’m-a-funny-guy grin straining his face.
“Just visiting with Helen,” Ben said. He had never liked Rutledge, didn’t now.
“Catching up,” Helen said.
A half hour earlier, Ben had sat in his cruiser outside the admin office, listening to the dispatch scanner. A Mercedes keyed in the parking lot of an office complex. Expired registration on a landscaping truck. Then silence, the empty static of the perfect job. He knew teachers were looking out their windows while jotting formulas on chalkboards, watching his car with one eye while they read Shakespeare to sleeping kids. Why was he here? Who was he coming for? Had they paid their parking tickets? He saw his former teachers and friends around town—at the grocery, sitting in the waiting room at the car wash, throwing Frisbees in La Bonita Park. He could cite them for sipping beer in the park or for their illegally tinted side windows. He could pull over Brian Cappecci, a famous stoner in school and now a chemistry teacher, and search his glove compartment for a clip and some shake in a plastic bag. Ben knew it was there; people changed but not that much. He could set up a raid of the massage parlor Mr. Powers visited, but he was a lonely old man, had been a lonely middle-aged man when he taught Ben calculus, and that would only make him lonelier—and disgraced. Ben knew these things, and others, and people in town suspected he knew, too, and the fear that he knew their secrets earned Ben a disdainful respect. People’s guilt kept them in line. The fear of being exposed made them play it safe in other areas of their lives. In a way, a safe town owed its calm to the small immorality; it offered a taste of passion in a world that feared it.
“How’s your better half?” Ben said to Rutledge.
For instance, Ben knew Rutledge was cheating on his wife, Carol; had been for at least three years. Ben stumbled upon Rutledge and his mistress fogging up the windows of his six-year-old Mercedes, parked on a newly paved cul-de-sac of recently framed tract homes. A blonde, of course, radiating the forced sexual brightness of plastic surgery and makeup.
“Carol’s wonderful,” Rutledge said, patting Ben on the shoulder. “I’m a lucky man.”
“Nice to know happy marriages still exist.”
“Put a little weight on?” Rutledge said, gesturing toward Ben’s belt. “You still swimming?”
Rutledge had been the water polo coach when Ben was on the swim team and had since risen to AP by being a lousy political science teacher and a suck-up to the superintendent.
“I’m allergic to chlorine.”
Rutledge laughed, lines fissuring his tanned face.
“Sixty-two,” Helen said.
“What?”
“The field trip,” she said. “Sixty-two.” She handed Rutledge a printed list.
“Great,” he said. “Couldn’t survive without you, Helen.”
When Rutledge was gone, Helen laughed. “That man is proof cream doesn’t rise to the top.”
Rutledge was smarter than she gave him credit for. He knew when to ignore things that would cause trouble, especially trouble for him. Ignoring things was half the battle in this world, three-quarters of the battle when you rose to positions of power.
“Any of these kids have boyfriends?” Ben said.
“Of course not,” she said, smiling. “We don’t have those here.”
“Let’s pretend we’re in the real world.”
“Oh,” she said, turning the sheet around to him. “That place.”
She put her finger on the paper.
“Neil Wolfe. I don’t know about a boyfriend, but it would be him if it was anyone. He’s polite, stares at the ground a lot, dyed his hair to match his shoes once. Tries to disappear but wants to be seen, too.”
“A lot of six-period absences,” Ben said, noticing the A’s dotted beneath the dates.
“He doesn’t seem to like shop.”