Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

“Okay, I’ll do it,” Sara said. “On one condition.”

Helen was shocked. “Thank you, honey,” she said. “What condition?”

“I want to go to the movies before. Like that afternoon. A little of your idea of Christmas Eve, a little of mine. Okay?”

Helen beamed. “Sure. That sounds like fun. We could go see that movie A Time of Mourning that’s just opened, I know it’s at the Triplex, that’s the new Hamilton Barth movie—”

“Uh, Mom? Did I say ‘we’?”

“Oh. Well, okay. I just thought maybe you’d want to see A Time of Mourning and I know I would too—”

“Like I would pay eleven dollars to see some skeezy old guy you once made out with fifty years ago. Though I would gladly pay eleven dollars if someone could just scrub that image out of my head forever.”

“So you’d rather go see something on your own?”

“Yes,” said Sara, and something in her face, some studious attempt at expressionlessness, made Helen realize what was really going on here — oh my God, she thought, there’s a boy. Someone she was going to have to say goodbye to.

“Fine,” said Helen, coloring. “Just be back home no later than four, to change. No sweats in church.”

After lunch on Christmas Eve, Sara rode her bike up the hill to the top of Meadow Close, and by the time she got out to the main road she didn’t feel the cold anymore. She rode along the thin shoulder to the traffic light, across the five-way intersection where she always got honked at, over the highway bridge, and into town. There was very little parking for cars along the narrow main street, especially at this time of year, so behind the row of storefronts on the north side of the street it was all municipal parking lots, as if the town itself was just a façade built like a movie set. Sara cut behind the hardware store and rode through the silent lots all the way across town, even though she sometimes had to get off the bike to cross a guardrail or to thread her way between empty cars, because doing so reduced the chances of seeing anyone she knew. She passed the emergency exit behind the movie theater and kept going, past the blank rear walls of the jeweler and the Starbucks and the pharmacy, until she got to the lot at the back of a little family-owned Polish grocery all the way at the far end of Main Street, a mysteriously durable place where no one ever seemed to shop, with two small tables in the back in case someone wanted to sit and have a cup of Polish coffee. Sara leaned her bike against the concrete wall behind the recycling bins and walked through the back door, blowing on her hands, and there, standing up from one of the two little tables, was her father.

“Hi, sweetheart,” he said. He must have just gotten there himself, because his overcoat, though open, was still on; he held out his arms and took her inside it, and the sensation of being warmed in that way struck something too deep in her, so that she stepped back out of his embrace almost right away.

He stood there grinning stiffly. “You look great,” he said.

“Thanks,” said Sara, and remained standing.

After a few silent seconds he laughed and asked, “And? How do I look?”

She considered it. “Less tired,” she said.

“Thank you for coming,” he said, which was such a weird thing for your father to say to you. They took off their coats and sat; the owner brought him a coffee and her a hot chocolate, which irritated her because coffee was what she wanted, but then he brought over these two amazing hot rolls with some kind of cream inside. She ate hers and started in on his. He brought out a tiny giftwrapped present and said, “Merry Christmas.” She licked her fingers before taking it from him and put it straight into her pocket.

“Fine,” he said, “but just be careful where you open it. I don’t think you want your mom to find out it’s from me. It’s why I didn’t get you something bigger.”

“Are you coming home?” Sara said abruptly. “I mean just for Christmas Day or whatever?”

Ben flushed. “I don’t think so. I don’t see that happening. Not this year, anyway.”

“Did you even ask her?” He shook his head no. “Why not? Afraid she’d say no?”

“Too soon,” he said simply. “Too soon to ask her for anything, after what I did.” He watched her eat. “Why,” he said, “do you think she would have said no?”

“Probably, yeah,” Sara said. “But anyway, not this year pretty much equals never, because Mom’s selling the house. She says we’re moving to the city.” He didn’t look as surprised by that as she expected him to.

“The thing I was really afraid she’d say no to,” he said, “was this. Seeing you. Which is why I texted you directly, which I probably should not have done. But I don’t want to talk about me anymore. We don’t have a ton of time. I want to hear you talk. Tell me everything I’ve missed.”

She told him about school, and about soccer, and about her new routine as a latchkey kid while Mom was at work, which Sara had to admit she sort of liked — a couple of hours with the house all to herself. She asked him where he was living now, and he just looked embarrassed and said, “Nearby.” She didn’t know if he expected to be asked anything about how he’d spent the last few months in rehab, but she figured he’d talk about that if he wanted to. Maybe he wasn’t allowed. One thing he never said to her was “I’m sorry,” but in a way she was glad he didn’t, because it would have been too unlike him, and right now she just needed him to be as much like himself as possible.

Outside the front windows the streetlights started to come on. No one had come into the grocery the whole time they were there, but the owner was making no move toward closing the place. Ben paid the check and then pulled something out of his pocket and slid it across the table toward her: it was a movie ticket. “I stopped and bought it on my way here,” he said. “It’s for the one-forty show.”

She looked blankly at him.

“So you have the stub,” he said, almost proudly. “That’s where she thinks you are right now, right? So now you have your alibi. In case she gets suspicious.”

“Please,” Sara said, standing up to put her coat on, leaving the ticket where it lay. “It’s Mom.”

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.”