Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

“In the front row, right by the teacher?”

“Right down front and center. Guess the two of them, they must have hit it off. I thought maybe it could happen, boy might find his way to you sooner or later.”

“You mean you knew?”

“Not for sure.”

“But, I mean, Mr. Jones, how come you didn’t just tell me?”

Mr. Jones squirmed at the question. “Figured I already played my part. Might be y’all’s turn next. You and him.”

“Wow,” Archy said. “Huh. You are a cryptic old motherfucker sometimes, Mr. Jones.”

“I can’t disagree.”

“You move in mysterious ways. Did you tell them ?”

Maybe that was when Mr. Jones began to realize that he felt offended. “Think I would say something to them, not you?”

“Must of taken some serious figuring between them, find their way to my doorstep.”

“That where Titus is now, your doorstep?”

“Figurative doorstep.”

“Not living with you?”

“From, like, one day to the next? Uh, yeah, ‘Hi, I’m your son,’ ‘Great, okay, you can move in’?”

Mr. Jones tried to find the flaw in this scenario. He loved Archy Stallings and had always tried to see the best in him. He was struggling to understand what would keep a man from taking hold of the unexpected blessing of a live boy, good-looking and correct, with commendable taste in film directors.

“I don’t move that fast, Mr. Jones, you know that. And like I told you, I didn’t say nothing about it yet to Gwen. I’m already number one on her shit parade due to certain lapses in judgment.”

“But you didn’t leave him with Mrs. Wiggins?”

“Nah, he’s staying with Nat and them for right now. Figured, make Julie happy. Have himself a little slumber party up in the attic.”

“That ain’t what you figured,” Mr. Jones said.

“No,” Archy agreed. “No, you’re right. It’s just, with the baby coming, and the Dogpile thing…”

“Distractions.”

“Yeah.”

“Getting you off your main focus.”

“That’s right.”

“Which is what, again?”

“Huh,” Archy said. “Hey, Mr. Jones? What’s wrong?”

Mr. Jones was up and out of his chair. He reached out a hand to Fifty-Eight, and the bird sidled up the gangplank to its inveterate perch.

“Mr. Jones, what did I say? Why you leaving? I’m not quite done, but I’m almost.”

“Just bring it to the gig,” Mr. Jones said. “It don’t work, fuck it.”

He started toward the back of the van, wanting—or feeling that at the very least he ought—to tell Archy about Lasalle, born and died April 14, 1966. Tell him about the two hours and seventeen minutes’ worth of the pride and the joy that Archy had been squandering for fourteen years. He went to the Econoline, slammed the doors on the empty cargo bay. Mr. Jones helped the bird onto the headrest of the driver’s seat, where he liked to ride, clutching the shoulder belt with one claw to keep its balance.

“Maybe you need to start trying to focus on the distractions instead,” Mr. Jones said. “Maybe then they wouldn’t be so distracting.”

“Mr. Jones! Hey, come on, now. What’d I say?”

Mr. Jones got into the van, started the engine. Even over the slobbering of its three-hundred-horsepower V8 Windsor, he could hear Archy repeating uselessly, “Mr. Jones, I’m sorry.”

“Pulling a Band-Aid,” Gwen said.

“Not even,” Aviva said.

“You promise?”

“I promise. Be brave.”

Aviva was flying the bravery flag. Feet planted side by side, flat on the gray Berber wall-to-wall. New sandals with straps that crisscrossed in epic-movie-style up past her ankles, toenails freshly painted plum. Suntanned legs shaved, shins shining like bells in a horn section. Gray linen skirt and white linen blouse, not new but tailored with severity and maintained with care. Blouse buttoned to a professional altitude and yet at the collar managing to betray a fetching freckled wedge of clavicle and suprasternal notch. On her lap, an abstruse tome entitled Acupuncture: Points and Meridians .

“‘Be brave,’” Gwen said. She tugged at the hem of the overworked black maternity skirt she had pressed into service for this exercise in ritual humiliation. Her shirt, though crisp and clean, was originally her husband’s and Hawaiian. But her hair was looking all right. Clean, springy, baby locks freshly twisted. Her hair was definitely equal to this morning’s ordeal, and in that Gwen found a modicum of comfort if not, perhaps dangerously, defiance. She cleared her throat. “If I was brave, Aviva, I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

“I mean long-term brave,” Aviva said. “Big-picture brave.”

“The cowardly kind of brave.”

“Right,” Aviva said. “As opposed to the stupid kind.”

This distinction accorded with Gwen’s experience and, to a lesser extent, her beliefs; and yet making it did not comfort her at all. “You swear,” she said, seeking this guarantee for the third time that morning. “Aviva, you swear to me.”

“It does not mean a thing,” Aviva said.

“Because, I have to tell you, it feels so meaningful that I kind of want to vomit.”

“You going to be sick?” said the Saturday receptionist, looking over from her monitor to study Gwen, her tone saying, Don’t you throw up in my office. She had a vibrant head of sister curls, and Gwen recognized her as a fellow disciple of Tyneece at Glama. They had crossed paths a few times, pilgrims to the shrine. Something about the woman had always bothered Gwen, and now she knew what it was: an invisible, pervasive miasma of Lazar.

“You know, I might?” Gwen said. She lowered her voice to the peculiarly audible whisper common among the women of her family; peculiar not in its audibleness but in the disingenuous way that, like God handing down His commandments to a bunch of folks He knew perfectly well were going to break all of them repeatedly for all time, it bothered to be a whisper at all. A Shanks woman with a practiced embouchure could not only modulate the dynamics of her whisper but send it through closed doors, around corners, across time itself to echo everlastingly, for example, in the reprobate ears of a granddaughter married to a no-account man. “Having to eat you-know-what will do that to you.”

Aviva lowered her face to her textbook, not quite in time to conceal a smile. The receptionist, for her part, did not appear to find Gwen amusing. Her long fingernails resumed their furious clacking against the keys of her computer, a sound that had been annoying Gwen, she realized, since they sat down. Gwen shifted in one of the vinyl-upholstered steel chairs that furnished the waiting room, tipping herself first onto her left buttock and then onto the right. Whenever she leaned one way or the other, her thighs peeled away from each other with a sigh, like lovers reluctant to part. The muscles at the small of her back had gathered themselves into an aggrieved fist. Baby’s head was jammed up against the left side of her rib cage, just under her heart, right at the spot where Gwen ordinarily felt premonitions of disaster.

“What I need,” she said, in the same Shanks whisper, audible to the dermatologist in the office next door, “is something to wash it down with.” Thinking of a cup of creamy white suff , which she would never again permit herself to enjoy. “Something to get rid of the taste of—”

“Shush,” Aviva said. She reached down for her handbag, unzipped an inner pocket, and took out a miniature airplane bottle of Tabasco sauce. “Put a few drops of that on it.”

Gwen took the bottle and shook it a few times, thinking, Squeeze a few drops into Lazar’s bathroom soap dispenser. Massage the stuff right into his stubbly pink head. Work it right on down to the pores.