Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

He talked a lot about adoption, actually, and about race, with passion but with no sense that these were subjects about which she might know something he didn’t. He claimed that a lot of people assumed he was adopted, since he was black and had money. Sara had never seen any instance of this assumption, though, and she decided that it was probably something that had happened to him one time but had become such a big deal in his mind that his recollection of it had swelled. It was true that no one knew why his family had him in public school when they had the resources to send him anywhere they wanted. Liberal guilt, Cutter said: it isn’t just for white folks. Though in the next breath he’d insist that he wouldn’t go to one of those elitist private banker-factories if you paid him to. Not many of his friends had actually seen where Cutter lived, but those who had, or said they had, all agreed solemnly that it was enormous.

“I have everything,” Cutter said to her, “but people are afraid of me because they think I feel entitled to what they have. Because I’m black.” They were sitting on a stoop just off Park Avenue, near Ninetieth Street, having cut last period; now other schools were letting out left and right, and sometimes they’d watch a pack of younger kids go by wearing uniforms and texting on their phones. Cutter and Sara were passing a pint bottle of warm cranberry vodka in a paper bag, though Sara had stopped after two revolting sips; now she just took it from him and then passed it back a minute later, while he was talking.

“White people are afraid of us, because they project their guilt onto us. They assume that we spend our lives thinking about them, measuring ourselves in terms of them. That’s what gives life to their guilt. It’s guilt over racism, but the guilt itself is racist, right?”

This wasn’t a side of him Sara particularly enjoyed, though she was impressed that he thought about this conceptual stuff at all. She wished there was a way to get rid of the vodka, because that seemed to draw it out of him. The only way to get him to drink less of it was to drink more of it herself. She had another small swig and passed the bag back to him.

“I don’t really see people reacting to us like that, though,” she said, in a near whisper she hoped would induce him to lower his own voice.

“Well, not so much to you, because you’re Asian,” he said. “That’s a whole other set of prejudices.”

“Okay,” she said, a little irritated, “thank you for the deep insight into my Asianness, but I meant I don’t see people reacting like that to you, either.”

Another group of middle school boys in blazers made their way down Ninetieth Street; one, who looked about ten, stopped right in front of them to tie his shoe. He had an iPod in his ears and showed no awareness that Sara and Cutter were looking down on him from just a few feet away.

“You don’t,” Cutter said, with a muttered, throaty laugh. The boy in the blazer straightened up and moved on. Cutter stood and hopped down the steps.

“Hey,” Sara said weakly. She thought he was angry and ditching her. Instead, when he caught up to the boy in the blazer, who’d fallen behind his friends, Cutter tapped him on the shoulder and started talking to him. They were only about thirty feet from the intersection, in front of a townhouse whose courtyard was filled with manicured bushes. Whatever they were doing or saying, Sara couldn’t make it out — Cutter’s back screened her from seeing much more than the loafers on the boy’s feet. Then the feet turned and ran toward Park Avenue, and Cutter spun and walked leisurely back to the stoop, a grin on his face so wide it opened his whole mouth in wonder, and in his hands the boy’s iPod, as well as what looked like forty or fifty dollars in cash.

“I didn’t even ask him for the money,” Cutter said, shaking his head delightedly. “How fucked up is that ?”

JAIL, FOR ALL HIS FEAR OF IT, had proved mostly just another iteration of the limbo in which Ben had been living for six months now. It even, like Stages, housed one or two minor celebrities who might brush by you on their way to the cafeteria or the gym, acknowledging with a rueful smile that they were who you thought they were. And on the day it was over, Ben once again was released into the bright sunshine with his car keys, less than a hundred dollars cash — though to be fair he still had access to much more money, in accounts in various places — no home, and nowhere special to go. To those who knew him, he was defined by his transgressions now, by the things for which he would not be forgiven, and, as rough as that was, it seemed pathetic to think about going to some random town or city just to start all over again — to pretend, at his age, to be anyone else. Not to mention that, in order to get at his money, he would have to make at least one trip to Bonifacio’s office and sign a few instruments he might well wind up drafting himself. Half out of spite for himself, therefore, and half out of the absence of other pressing business of any sort, he took the bus to Poughkeepsie, where his car was still parked, crossed the thruway, and ended up back in Rensselaer Valley. First he stopped and checked in to a motel just off the Saw Mill, a motel he had driven past ten times a week for the last fifteen years but had never been curious enough to see the inside of. Everything he owned fit in one bag now — well, maybe not everything, but having no idea where your belongings were was pretty damn close to not owning them anymore. Storage, if that’s where they were, was where they would stay. Offhand, he couldn’t remember what, other than a whole lot of suits and shirts and neckties, was even in there.

He was starving, but when the route to town took him past Meadow Close, he couldn’t resist turning in for a quick look. A few months of neglect weren’t really enough to change the appearance of a house; still, he inhaled sharply when he saw it, dark and clearly uninhabited, sitting in a chaotic brown yard that must have been giving Parnell and their other neighbors fits. The paint job was holding up, and the shutters were open and hung fine, and yet it still managed to look like a place where a disaster had happened. Kids would be daring each other to hit the windows with rocks before long. He had an urge to get out of the car and walk around the back to check on the screened porch. But it was the middle of the day. He pulled into Parnell’s driveway, backed out again facing the other way, and continued into town.

He parked his car on Main Street and walked up and down, peering into familiar shop windows, absorbing the looks of surprise and even horror on the faces of those who still recognized him, which happened maybe half a dozen times. He stopped in to the Polish grocery where he and his daughter had met back in December, and he ordered another one of those cream-filled rolls; hungry as he was, after a month of prison food it was so rich he couldn’t finish it. Then, on his trip down the opposite side of Main Street, in the shade of late afternoon and the corresponding chill, for which he was not appropriately dressed, he passed the hardware store, and the shingle that hung by the stairs running up the side of the two-story building, leading to the Offices (the “s” was a hilarious touch, Ben thought) of Joseph Bonifacio, Attorney at Law.

“Jacob Marley’s ghost!” Bonifacio said when Ben walked in. It took him a surprisingly long time to stand — he’d had his feet on his desk and was watching something on his computer. “I should have marked my calendar. But honestly I was pretty sure I’d never see you again. Certainly not here in the Valley. Returning to the scene of the crime, eh what?”

“Something like that,” Ben said.