Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

Helen hated the angry network of New York City highways, even on a Saturday morning, when they would presumably be less choked, so despite the extra time it took, she crossed all the way over to the West Side; from there it was a straight shot to Rensselaer Valley. It was a beautiful morning, and a pleasant enough trip up the Saw Mill, and if Sara wasn’t talking to her, at least that meant she wasn’t mocking or insulting her. But somewhere around Chappaqua, when things outside the car began looking familiar to her, Helen started to feel so nauseous that she thought she might have to pull over. She hadn’t expected to react so strongly. It wasn’t as though she’d hated it while she lived there. They took the Rensselaer Valley exit, and Sara immediately perked up, like a dog, Helen thought uncharitably. There was the train station; there was the elementary school Sara had gone to, back when Helen was stupid enough to think that all was right in their world. That was it: she hated this place because she believed that some earlier, embarrassing version of herself still lived here. A kind of muscle memory took over once she passed the school, and in another moment, almost as if she were only a passenger in the car herself, they were at the top of the hill that led down to Meadow Close. There didn’t appear to be any curtains or shades on any of the windows, but apart from that the house, from the outside, looked haughtily, insultingly unchanged, as if it could not have cared less what had gone on inside it. Helen turned in to the driveway and coasted to a stop.

“Are you coming in?” Sara asked.

“Absolutely not,” Helen said. Sara shrugged and opened her door. Helen watched her walk up the flagstones and then push through the front door just as if she still lived there. Then there was nothing to see, nothing to hear. The wind came up and blew some of last fall’s dry leaves around the brown, brittle, shameful yard.

Was she just going to sit there in the car for — she checked her watch — six hours, until the agreed time came for the end of Sara’s visit? Maybe. There didn’t seem anything particularly wrong with that plan right now. She certainly didn’t feel like moving a muscle. But then it occurred to her that Sara and Ben might not plan to just sit and talk inside the house for six hours. They might want to go into town for some reason — to eat, for instance, since she doubted Ben had picked up any cooking skills in the joint — and if the garage door opened to expose Helen still sitting there in her rental car like a zombie, well, the looks on their faces would be a humiliation that didn’t bear thinking about. Her face reddening as if they were already staring at her from behind the nonexistent curtains, she started up the car, backed out of the driveway, and headed into town.

There wasn’t much to do in Rensselaer Valley on a Saturday, or any other day for that matter. There were two restaurants, three if you counted that little Polish bakery where no one ever went. Having had just a glass of cranberry juice for breakfast, she was tempted; but wherever she might go, the chances were too great that Ben and Sara would walk into the same establishment and find her sitting there alone. No version of what would ensue was acceptable to her. She thought about texting Sara to ask her to please stay out of the deli, but if a request like that sounded a little crazy to Helen’s own ear, it would sound ten times as crazy to her daughter and she would never hear the end of it. At length she went to the newsstand across Main Street from the train station, bought a cup of foul coffee and a bag of peanut M&M’s, and went back to the lot behind the storefronts to sit in the front seat of her car, which she still had trouble recognizing. The newsstand guy, a put-upon old Arab gentleman, was someone she had spoken to perhaps two hundred times before, but her face provoked not a glimmer of recognition in his. Good. She did not want to be recognized.

She hadn’t brought any work with her — she hadn’t given a thought, it seemed, to how she would spend this first-ever afternoon in which she had ceded custody of her daughter — but she was able at least to open up her email, and there was plenty there to keep her occupied. The board of supervisors in a town in California that was seeking bankruptcy protection apparently still had money in its budget to hire Malloy to burnish its image enough to get its members reelected. The head of a charity that had collected millions of dollars to build schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan was combating news reports that the schools themselves did not actually exist. A corporate client in Poland, of all places, had been personally referred to Helen by the London office; the client was a natural-gas extraction outfit that had secretly released several tons of toxic chemicals into the Danube River, not just destroying livelihoods and threatening industries but actually killing people — eight or eleven, depending whose count you accepted. Strategy here was not the problem: the problem was the chairman of the company, who was a hoary veteran of the old Communist days and who magnificently resisted all efforts to squeeze out of him any sort of admission, public or private, of wrongdoing. The London team had grown so frustrated that they were trying to punt the case all the way across the Atlantic to Helen, just because they knew, or at any rate had been told about, her particular specialty. It was hard to tell whether they admired her or considered her a convenient sap.

She remembered her coffee, and took a sip, and just then a pair of gloved knuckles rapped softly on her driver’s-side window and caused her to lose half the mouthful down her chin. The tapping startled her worse than a shout would have done. Holding the BlackBerry at arm’s length to protect it, she turned to her left and saw Patty Crane, the mother of Sara’s former best friend, Sophia, hunched over and staring at her through the glass as if Helen were Amelia Earhart. She made a ridiculous motion with her hand that Helen finally recognized as a plea to roll down her window. Sighing, she worked up a smile and obliged.

“Helen?” Patty said theatrically. She was one of those local women whom Helen had never really liked and yet with whom she had somehow spent, over the years, an awful lot of time. “I feel like I’m seeing things!”

“Nope,” Helen said, laughing gamely, but not opening the door. “It’s really me.”

“Are you back in town? I drove by your house a week or so ago and saw lights on, but I just thought it had finally sold. It is so good to see you!”

No reference was going to be made to the past, to the source of her and her family’s disgrace. More than that: it dawned on Helen that Patty knew exactly who was living in the old Armstead place, that every vicious gossip in town must have known about it within a day of Ben moving in there, but she was going to go on pretending that she didn’t. Why? Why must it all be so ritualized? The mechanics of sparing Helen humiliation and actually humiliating her were so indistinguishable that surely even Patty didn’t know which of the two she was doing, or why.

“I’m just here for the day,” Helen said. “I’m waiting to pick up Sara.” She waved the BlackBerry. “Doing a little work while I’m waiting.”

“Oh, you’re working? How exciting. What are you doing?”

“Public relations,” Helen said. “Crisis management.”

“How exciting,” Patty said.

“How is Sophia doing?” Helen said, just to get the focus off of her; but then she failed to listen to the answer, which, unsurprisingly, went on for some time. She was thinking instead about Patty, with her bobbed hair and her down vest and the jeans stretched over her wide, field-hockey hips, and how if you took all that off her and put her in a bonnet and a gingham dress she might have been cheerfully handing out rocks with which to stone Helen and her whole family, or spitting on her in the stockade. Just then her BlackBerry buzzed; she glanced at it and saw an automated text from the IT department at work, informing her that the office servers would be down overnight, as if anyone would be sending business emails at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday anyway.