Tod Goldberg - The Reformed

It’s not that my mother had no concept of time-since I’d been there only fifteen minutes on the outside-it’s that she’d been saying the same thing to me and my brother, Nate, for so long that it was just second nature. Someone was always waiting for hours to give us hell.

Barry did as he was told and then sat down across from me at the kitchen table. He had bags under his eyes, and his normally sculpted facial hair had a bit more scruff than usual to it. “You look good,” I said.

“I haven’t been sleeping too well.”

“Conscience bothering you, Barry?”

“Before I make my confession, would it be possible to get something to eat?”

“Ma,” I said, “can you make Barry a sandwich?”

My mother came into the kitchen and gave Barry another once-over, as if she hadn’t seen him just a few seconds earlier. “You look like hell,” she said. “When was your last proper shower?”

“Two days,” Barry said. “I’ve been staying on a boat.”

“The Atlantic Ocean out of water now?” she said.

Barry looked at me for help, but I’d been on the blunt end of this weapon before and knew to stick out. “Could I get a grilled cheese?” he said.

“Could you?” she said.

“May I?”

“That’s better,” my mother said. “I’ve got two types of cheese: American and Velveeta. Which would you like?”

“Velveeta isn’t a kind of cheese,” Barry said. “It’s a brand. Right, Michael?”

“Popular misconception,” I said.

“Then I guess I’ll have both?” Barry said, more than a hint of hesitation in his voice. He’d finally caught the drift of my mother’s tough-love approach… which usually contained a lot more tough than love. “And could I get a glass of milk? You don’t happen to have any strawberry Quik, do you?”

“I think there’s some in the pantry,” she said. I was going to tell her that that strawberry Quik had been in the pantry since 1983, but opted not to. If a dying man wanted strawberry Quik, who was I to withhold his wish? It was just a good thing he didn’t ask for a Sanka, because she had a vacuum-sealed can of that, too, that hadn’t seen the light of day since Carter was in office.

While my mom prepared Barry his schoolboy lunch, I thought it might be prudent to figure out just what the hell he’d done.

“I haven’t seen you in a while,” I said.

“That’s a good thing, right? Means both of us have been able to live our lives without need for too much trouble.”

“Sam tells me you’re in the consulting business now.”

“I thought I’d try to diversify my interests. Make sure I’ve always got a good revenue stream. It’s just smart business. Like how sometimes for you, you’re helping little old ladies or sick kids, or other times it’s someone who’s got pimp problems or just escaped a Russian prison. Same kind of thing.”

“Right,” I said. “I see that. Exactly the same thing.” I got distracted for a moment by the smell of burning paper. I turned and looked, and my mother had started a small fire on the counter where she was making Barry’s grilled cheese. She’d gone for the old-fashioned touch and was cooking the sandwich using a clothes iron. The problem was that she had the sandwich on top of a stack of newspapers. And now there were flames.

“Uh, Ma,” I said. “You maybe want to shove that in the sink.”

“You think I don’t know how to put out a kitchen fire, Michael? You’re not the only one with some training around here.” My mom slid the sandwich and the newspapers and was just about to drop the iron into the sink, but fortunately, the power cord wasn’t long enough and so she opted to leave it on the counter so she could electrocute herself at a later date. Barry and I both stared in stunned silence until she finally realized the near-fatal error of her ways. “What?” she said. “I didn’t do it.”

“Do you have peanut butter?” Barry asked.

“I have a jar of Peter Pan in the pantry,” she said.

“Crunchy or creamy?”

“Barry,” my mother said, “you’ll eat it either way. What does it matter? And once it’s in your mouth, it’s all creamy.” A few moments later, my mother set down a sandwich-minus the crusts-and a glass of strawberry Quik in front of Barry. “Eat,” she said, and Barry did.

When he finished, he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Now, this really did feel like therapy. “You ever ask yourself, Mike, what is simpler than just being at home?”

“No,” I said. “Street fighting in Tikrit was simpler than being at home.”

“Simple pleasures,” Barry said, ignoring me. “Peanut butter and jelly. Strawberry-flavored milk. Why’d I ever leave home in the first place?”

“I’m going to guess it was to go into juvenile hall,” I said.

“It even smells like home here, Mike,” Barry said.

I reached across the table and grabbed Barry by his shirt collar and yanked him back to real life. “Welcome home,” I said. “Time to start talking, or my mother will give you a spanking.”

Barry straightened himself out, emptied the remnants of the strawberry Quik and then leaned forward on his elbows. “Truth? I wasn’t made for the consulting business. I’m a hands-on, do-it-yourself kind of guy. Independent contractor.”

“What did you tell Junior Gonzalez?”

“Look, he came to me, said he had some questions, could I give him some advice. And I said, ‘Sure,’ named a price; he came back and offered double, and we were in business.”

“And let me guess-he paid you double by giving you a bag of skank bills up front.”

Barry raised his eyebrows, but he wasn’t really shocked. He couldn’t be. If he was sitting here with me, he knew I probably had a fair idea of what had already happened. I was looking for the more salient details.

“Not just skank bills,” Barry said. “‘Skank’ implies some basic ability. No, this was like Monopoly money.”

“How long ago did he first contact you?”

“Six weeks, maybe.”

“And he just came to ask you about making money?”

“Not exactly,” Barry said. “You know, I’ve diversified my portfolio since you got back into town and began using my services. So I’ve been letting people know that if they have needs regarding certain government rules and regulations, well, I now have a bit more expertise and can negotiate sensitive areas.”

“Barry,” I said.

“So I might have told Junior about how best to avoid wiretaps, a couple of things I’ve picked up regarding the Patriot Act from that credit card thing we did with that terrorist bank in Myanmar, and may have navigated him toward ways he might avoid using his identity. The guy had been in prison practically since disco, so he wasn’t exactly up on a lot of the new technology. And his guys-well, more like henchmen, really-weren’t exactly top of their class at MIT, so, well, I might have intimated to him that I could provide additional services outside the consulting I was providing.”

“Barry,” I said, “there’s no ‘might have’ involved here, is there?”

My mother came by and picked up Barry’s plate, then surveyed the damage and went back into the kitchen to make him another one. That she’d managed not to sit down with us and pound questions into Barry was a sign of major growth on her part. That she was clearly listening to every word, however, and showed herself in time for Barry to come up with a suitable answer was a kind of charity I frankly wasn’t familiar with.

“It’s like this, Mike,” Barry began, but I reached over and grabbed his collar again, which stopped him.

“Barry,” I said, “we’re friends. I like you. I’m happy to help you. I’m happy to get your help. But if you dance around the truth any longer, I might hurt you. So just tell me something definitive.”