Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

“It’s Sara,” Helen lied shamelessly. “She’s waiting. Gotta go. Patty, it was so great to see you, please give our love to Sophia and to”—she couldn’t summon the husband’s name—“to your whole family,” and she started the car and backed away. In truth she still had almost four hours to kill. She couldn’t return to Main Street now, though. She drove slowly through the familiar lanes. Across the train tracks, past the high school, and toward the fancier end of town there was a small pool club, to which the Armsteads had belonged when Sara was younger. Even on a Saturday, it seemed bound to be unpatronized this early in the season, and two minutes later Helen pulled into its empty parking lot and switched the car off again. Then, with the branches waving in-audibly in front of her windshield, she began to cry. She kept telling herself to stop. She didn’t have a good enough excuse for it, she felt. Everything in her life, if you took a step away from it, was going pretty successfully.

STILL, SHE’D BARELY COLLECTED HERSELF by the time she picked up her daughter at the foot of their old driveway. “So how did it go?” she asked, expecting cruelty, in the form either of silence or of a diatribe about what a relief it was to have at least one parent who knew how to mind his own business, but what she got was even worse than that: six hours in her father’s company had left Sara calm and expansive. “I’m sorry, Mom,” she said. “I’m sure that was a bummer for you, being stuck all afternoon with nothing to do but worry. But there’s nothing to worry about. He’s great. I wouldn’t say ‘same old Dad,’ exactly. He does seem a little different, but in a good way, to be honest. We just sat and talked. I think it would be good for me to spend more time with him. It didn’t really seem that weird at all. The weirdest thing about it, actually, was being back in our old house. It shouldn’t have seemed weird, but it did. It’s like a cave. There is seriously almost no furniture in there.”

Helen drove on, listening, more murderous than relieved. And she didn’t feel much better even by Monday morning, when she arrived at work to find six messages already on her desk, left by the weekend switchboard: four were from London, but the other two had a U.S. area code, one she didn’t recognize. No name, though, so she ignored them. She was supposed to get ready for a hastily scheduled meeting with someone who currently played in the NBA. Nobody seemed to know exactly when he was coming in. His name meant nothing to her, but she could tell he was a big deal from the way the male employees on her floor kept popping their heads in her office door, pretending to look for one another. It was something about a paternity suit filed by a teammate’s wife, or maybe child support, but whatever it was apparently didn’t constitute enough of an emergency to get him out of bed in time to meet before ten-thirty, so Helen went off to the morning meeting, where she hoped she wouldn’t be expected to speak knowledgeably on the current state of mind of the dithering Polish executive.

At least she wasn’t the only one feeling besieged. Arturo had new assignments for all of them — a rebranding in the wake of a mine collapse, a newspaper caught plagiarizing a blog — and affected to be unmoved by their complaints of being overworked already.

“I have to be able to service my existing clients,” Ashok said hotly.

“Your clients might be just as happy to see a little less of you,” said Arturo. “Everyone, these things go in spurts, as you know very well. So you have too much work and not enough time? It’s a crisis. Manage it. See you tomorrow, unless you fuck something up between now and then.”

Helen, having caught Shelley yawning three or four times, squeezed in next to her as they were filing out of the Fishtank. “You’re buried too?” she said. “Anything I can help with?”

Shelley smiled and pantomimed embarrassment. “It’s not work, actually,” she said in a low voice. “Had a date last night. It went well, yada yada yada, I should maybe go down to the caf for a Red Bull. Want to come with me and hear the tabloid details?”

Helen begged off and walked back to her office alone. A date on a Sunday night? Well, why should that seem odd? There were ways to live other than the one she knew. She could be leading some other life herself. She could have gone out Saturday night: at one point on the drive up to Rensselaer Valley, Sara had taken her earphones out and asked about staying the night with Ben in their old house, and Helen had said no, but why? Why hadn’t she just said yes? Then she could have driven alone back to the city — a single woman on a Saturday night in Manhattan, the most decadent place in America — and picked up some guy and brought him back home and screwed him and kicked him out and then picked up her daughter at the train the next day like a spy or a con artist, as if the two sides of herself didn’t even care to know each other. But it was too late for that. Not just in terms of the weekend, but in terms of her ever becoming the kind of woman who knew how to do that kind of thing, without exposing herself as deluded or pathetic or ridiculous.

“You didn’t bring any books. Don’t you have homework?” Helen had asked instead.

Sara had closed her eyes. “Obviously,” she’d said. “Obviously I have homework. It’s the weekend, and I am not five years old. Did you seriously just ask me that?”

Her own office did not of course have glass walls, so Helen shrieked a little in surprise when she entered and saw a statuesque young woman, whom she had never seen before, standing calmly beside her desk.

“Helen?” the woman said. “I’m Angela. I work for Mr. Malloy. If you have a few minutes, he’d like to speak to you upstairs.”

“Of course,” Helen said, trying to recover. “I mean, it’s very nice of you to come escort me, but the phone would have been fine too.”

Angela smiled and held up a small silver key chain, with just one key dangling from it. “Special elevator,” she said.

Though she knew full well that Mr. Malloy’s office was only on six, somehow Helen had expected it to be higher, and the view to be better. When she entered, Malloy was looking out his broad picture window, through the rain, at the office building directly across the street. His hands were in his pockets, and he was smiling. Angela withdrew and pulled the door closed. He caught the reflection in the glass and turned around. “Ah!” he said. “The elusive one!”

“I’m sorry?”

“Never mind. I brought a visitor around to meet you earlier. I would have warned you, but I didn’t receive any warning myself.”

Helen sat down without waiting for an invitation, and crossed her legs and folded her arms. “The team meets every morning at ten-thirty,” she said hoarsely.

“Yes, of course it does. Unfortunately I only remembered that when we got to your empty office, but I didn’t want to go down the hall and scare everybody. So how are you doing, Helen? Of course I know you’re doing very well, I hear good things, but I mean how do you like it here? Are you happy?”

If he’d left off that last bit, she could have given the reflexive answer one was supposed to give one’s boss; instead, she just smiled and gamely nodded. She wondered what he had been hearing about her, and from whom.

“Good good good,” Malloy said. “And your family?”

It was likely that he knew all about her family, just because he seemed to make it his business to know such things, but the question had a generic enough sound that she felt comfortable answering just by putting one thumb up in the air. “So you mentioned bringing someone to visit me,” she said. “A client?”

His glasses rose a little higher on his cheeks as he refreshed his smile. “Yes, in fact. A man of the cloth. I have to say this is a new one in my experience. He works for the New York Archdiocese of the Catholic Church, if you please, and he comes here as the personal representative of the archbishop, who naturally can’t be seen skulking around in places of ill repute like this one. They are in need of our services — specifically of the world’s best crisis management advisers. I took the liberty of scheduling a meeting between the two of you tomorrow morning, at their place this time, and that meeting, my dear, you will not miss.”