T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

At some point — it might have been an hour in, two hours, I don’t know — I became aware of the intense gland-clenching aroma of vanilla chai, hot, spiced, blended, the very thing I wanted, caffeine to drive a stake into the boredom. Vanilla chai, available at the coffeehouse down the street, but a real indulgence because of the cost — usually I made do with the acidic black coffee and artificial creamer Radko provided on a stained cart set up against the back wall. I lifted my head to search out the aroma and there was Jeannie, the secretary from the front office, holding a paperboard Venti in one hand and a platter of what turned out to be homemade cannoli in the other. “What?” I said, thinking Radko had sent her to tell me he wanted to see me in his office. But she didn’t say anything for a long excruciating moment, her eyes full, her face white as a mask, and then she shoved the chai into my hand and set the tray down on the desk beside me. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said, and then I felt her hand on my shoulder and she was dipping forward in a typhoon of perfume to plant a lugubrious kiss just beneath my left ear.

What can I say? I felt bad about the whole business, felt low and despicable, but I cracked the plastic lid and sipped the chai, and as if I weren’t even conscious of what my fingers were doing, I started in on the cannoli, one by one, till the platter was bare. I was just sucking the last of the sugar from my fingertips when Steve Bartholomew, a guy of thirty or so who worked in special effects, a guy I barely knew, came up to me and without a word pressed a tin of butter cookies into my hand. “Hey,” I said, addressing his retreating shoulders, “thanks, man, thanks. It means a lot.” By noon my desk was piled high with foodstuffs — sandwiches, sweets, a dry salami as long as my forearm — and at least a dozen gray-jacketed sympathy cards inscribed by one co-worker or another. I wanted to hide. Wanted to quit. Wanted to go home, tear the phone out of the wall, get into bed and never leave. But I didn’t. I just sat there, trying to work, giving one person after another a zombie smile and my best impression of the thousand-yard stare.

Just before quitting time, Radko appeared, his face like an old paper bag left out in the rain. He was flanked by Joel Chinowski. I glanced up at them out of wary eyes and in a flash of intuition I realized how much I hated them both, how much I wanted only to jump to my feet like a cornered animal and punch them out, both of them. Radko said nothing. He just stood there gazing down at me and then, after a moment, he pressed one hand to my shoulder in Slavic commiseration, turned and walked away. “Listen, man,” Joel said, shifting his eyes away from mine, “we all wanted to … Well, we got together, me and some of the others, and I know it isn’t much, but—”

I saw now that he was holding a plastic grocery sack in one hand. I knew what was in the sack. I tried to wave it away, but he thrust it at me and I had no choice but to take it. Later, when I got home and the baby was in her high chair smearing her face with Cream of Wheat and I’d slipped the microwave pizza out of its box, I sat down and emptied the contents of the bag on the kitchen table. It was mainly cash, but there were maybe half a dozen checks too. I saw one for twenty-five dollars, another for fifty. The baby made one of those expressions of baby joy, sharp and sudden, as if the impulse had seized her before she could process it. It was five-thirty and the sinking sun was pasted over the windows. I sifted the bills through my hands, tens and twenties, fives — a lot of fives — and surprisingly few singles, thinking how generous my co-workers were, how good and real and giving, but I was grieving all the same, grieving beyond any measure I could ever have imagined or contained. I was in the process of counting the money, thinking I’d give it back — or donate it to some charity — when I heard Clover’s key in the lock and I swept it all back into the bag and tucked that bag in the deep recess under the sink where the water persistently dripped from the crusted-over pipe and the old sponge there smelled of mold.

……

The minute my wife left the next morning I called Radko and told him I wasn’t coming in. He didn’t ask for an excuse, but I gave him one anyway. “The funeral,” I said. “It’s at eleven a.m., just family, very private. My wife’s taking it hard.” He made some sort of noise on the other end of the line — a sigh, a belch, the faintest cracking of his knuckles. “Tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll be in tomorrow without fail.”

And then the day began, but it wasn’t like that first day, not at all. I didn’t feel giddy, didn’t feel liberated or even relieved — all I felt was regret and the cold drop of doom. I deposited the baby at Violeta’s and went straight home to bed, wanting only to clear some space for myself and think things out. There was no way I could return the money — I wasn’t that good an actor — and I couldn’t spend it either, even to make up for the loss of pay. That would have been low, lower than anything I’d ever done in my life. I thought of Clover then, how furious she’d be when she found out my pay had been docked. If it had been docked. There was still a chance Radko would let it slide, given the magnitude of my tragedy, a chance that he was human after all. A good chance.

No, the only thing to do was bury the money someplace. I’d burn the checks first — I couldn’t run the risk of anybody uncovering them; that would really be a disaster, magnitude 10. Nobody could explain that, though various scenarios were already suggesting themselves — a thief had stolen the bag from the glove box of my car; it had blown out the window on the freeway while I was on my way to the mortuary; the neighbor’s pet macaque had come in through the open bathroom window and made off with it, wadding the checks and chewing up the money till it was just monkey feces now.

Monkey feces. I found myself repeating the phrase, over and over, as if it were a prayer. It was a little past nine when I had my first beer.

And for the rest of the day, till I had to pick up the baby, I never moved from the couch.

I tried to gauge Clover’s mood when she came in the door, dressed like a lawyer in her gray herringbone jacket and matching skirt, her hair pinned up and her eyes in traffic mode. The place was a mess. I hadn’t picked up. Hadn’t put on anything for dinner. The baby, asleep in her molded plastic carrier, gave off a stink you could smell all the way across the room. I looked up from my beer. “I thought we’d go out tonight,” I told her. “My treat.” And then, because I couldn’t help myself, I added: “I’m just trashed from work.”

She wasn’t happy about it, I could see that, lawyerly calculations transfiguring her face as she weighed the hassle of running up the boulevard with her husband and baby in tow before leaving for her eight o’clock class. I watched her reach back to remove the clip from her hair and shake it loose. “I guess,” she said. “But no Italian.” She’d set down her briefcase in the entry hall, where the phone was, and she put a thumb in her mouth a moment — a habit of hers; she was a fingernail chewer — before she said, “What about Chinese?” She shrugged before I could. “As long as it’s quick, I don’t really care.”

I was about to agree with her, about to rise up out of the grip of the couch and do my best to minister to the baby and get us out the door, en famille, when the phone rang. Clover answered. “Hello?

Uh-huh, this is she.”

My right knee cracked as I stood, a reminder of the torn ACL I’d suffered in high school when I’d made the slightest miscalculation regarding the drop off the backside of a boulder while snowboarding at Mammoth.