Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

Cutter shook his head. “Don’t you see what this is really about?” he said. “Your parents feel guilty every time they look at you and so they try to get rid of their guilt by buying you things. You see that, right? The guilt?”

Though she didn’t quite see it, Sara nodded soberly anyway, not wanting to agitate him any further. “Guilt over the divorce?” she said softly.

“No!” Cutter said. “Because you’re Chinese!”

“What?” she said in a harsh whisper, conscious that they were now under the probationary stare of the old Chinese guy who worked the register.

“It’s the American story in miniature,” Cutter said. “They came into your home and took you away from who you were, from everything you knew, and then, in order to have it both ways, they spend your life trying to buy you off to get you to forgive them for what they’ve done. They’ve deracinated you, and they can’t stand that you know that, and confront them with it, just by being. Just your face is a reminder of their crimes.”

Sara hadn’t heard the word “deracinated” before, but she got the picture. “I need to get back,” she said. “My mother could wake up and then I’m screwed.”

“Screwed how? What are you afraid of? What can they do to you they haven’t already done? She’d probably just feel guilty. All parents feel guilty. Because they are.”

She shrugged. He grabbed her wrist.

“You want to feel screwed,” he said, “come out to the Island with me.”

She shook him off and stood up. “Please go home,” she said tearily. “I’m worried about you. I don’t like being the only person who knows where you are.”

He folded his arms. “Whatever,” he said. “Go. I’m thinking about ordering dessert.”

The next morning there was no sign of him, and Sara’s chem teacher asked her to stay after class; her mind raced through all the different types of trouble she might be in, but it turned out that Ms. Markell wanted to nominate her for a scholarship to this summer chem-bio program at Columbia, a program designed to offer research opportunities to minority students. It was, she said, very prestigious, and down the road would put Sara on the radar of some very prestigious universities. “I guess I’ll talk to my mother about it,” Sara said, and Ms. Markell said of course, though she had already taken the liberty of emailing her mother with the great news. Sure enough, when Sara left school she had a text from her mom with three exclamation points and a suggestion that they meet at Hunan Garden for dinner.

“I hope you won’t be mad,” Helen said as Sara picked at some dumplings with her head down so that her hair concealed her face from the waiters, “but I called Nightingale and scheduled a tour for next Thursday. I know it’s supposed to be hard to get in there after ninth grade, not a lot of spaces open up, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible, especially not when you’ve got a credential like this in your pocket that very few other people have. Anyway, don’t worry, a tour doesn’t commit us to anything. It just seems worth a shot, especially now.”

“Mom, there’s something—”

“It’s all girls at Nightingale, as you probably know, which may seem strange to you at this point, but all the studies say it’s a good thing, at least in the classroom. Funny it isn’t all that common anymore. Anyway, it’s not like you’ll never have the opportunity to, I don’t know, date or whatever it is you—”

“Mom?” Sara said. “Shut up a second. I have to tell you about something.”

Helen’s BlackBerry made a whirring noise and started to squirm across the Formica, but she ignored it. “Okay,” she said cautiously. “What is it?”

“I talked to Dad,” Sara said. The whole restaurant seemed to fall silent. “I’ve been in touch with him almost all along. I even saw him once, back in Rensselaer Valley, before we moved. I want to go see him this weekend. I have a right to do that, and he has a right too.”

“Do you even know where he is?” Helen said, the color draining from her face.

Try as she might, Sara couldn’t completely suppress a smile. “Hold on to your hat,” she said.

SHE HADN’T DRIVEN ANYWHERE in a while — another old-life routine she didn’t miss a bit — but the next morning Helen walked to the Hertz three blocks from their apartment and returned behind the wheel of a clean, strange car. It wasn’t even nine in the morning but there was nowhere to park on their block; her plan had been to go back upstairs, but instead she had to call Sara on her cell and let her know she’d be idling in the car outside. Sara, of course, reacted as if the inability to find a parking spot was purely a failure of intelligence. Helen hung up — she knew it would be a while now, that Sara would make a point of taking her time — adjusted the strange seat, which had a really disconcerting internal heating element she could not figure out how to control, turned the radio on and then off again, and then just sat there and grew furious.

She’d been made a fool of. What the hell could her ex-husband, the parolee, be trying to pull? Why buy back the house that was not only the scene of his disintegration but the reason for it as well, the house that had supposedly revealed itself to him over time as spiritually toxic and soul-snuffing and redolent of death? There had to be something. He did not play around where money was concerned. She tried to think what his angle was, but each idea made as little sense to her as the one before. Was it some sort of long con she was too dumb to understand? Though their divorce was technically final, they had agreed in principle to a future court date at which the judge would revisit questions of custody, alimony, etc., once Ben was done being sued and his financial picture was clearer. She had always assumed that the purpose of this hearing was to make sure she and Sara were sufficiently provided for, but why should she assume that? Was Ben somehow laying the groundwork to take all the money back from her, so that he would once again have everything? But that didn’t explain why he was actually living there. Surely it was enough, for whatever cryptic legal purposes, just to own the house. He hadn’t expressed anything but disgust toward it for as long as Helen could remember.

It crossed her mind, of course, while everything else was crossing it, that he wanted to reconcile with her. But even if such a thing was imaginable, this was a pretty antagonistic way to go about it. Their one phone conversation last night had been angry on her end and perversely calm on his. She’d threatened, with no sense of how realistic she was being, to have him arrested, for communicating with their daughter without her knowledge. His refusal to raise his own voice just made her crazier. He wanted to see his daughter again. That’s all he said.

What really frustrated her, though, was that no matter how fearful and protective all this made her feel on behalf of Sara — this poor girl whose life had been flipped upside down by the father who had rejected and embarrassed her, and was now summoning her back to a parody of her old home as if none of that had happened — she couldn’t find any pretext for expressing it because Sara herself was as happy as a clam. Every time Helen undertook some speech about how Sara didn’t need to be scared or about how it was okay to be angry, her daughter would just laugh at her. Literally. Here she came now, waving charmingly to their weekend doorman, through the glass doors and practically skipping into the passenger seat.

“Look at you,” Sara said in a tone of condescending gaiety. “Ten and two. What a good girl. Even when you’re not moving.”

“Did you lock the door?” Helen said, but Sara’s earphones were in, which meant conversation, such as it was, would be one-way only.