Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

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.