Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

“I hope your lawyer is better at their job than you are,” he said, easing his foot off the brake, punctuating the remark and the interview with an exclamation mark. The part of the exclamation mark was played with aplomb by Garth’s middle finger.

“Nice,” she said to the rear end of Garth’s Prius as he rolled down the ramp to the underground garage. Then, because it seemed to hold out the promise of expressing everything that she had been feeling that morning—toward her practice, toward her life, toward the world—she gave the finger to Garth, held it up so he could see it in his rearview as he drove away.

“Nice,” Aviva agreed, pulling up in front of their building in rattletrap old Hecate. “Like the Bob’s Big Boy sign, only hostile.”

“Ten years I’ve known you,” Aviva said, down on her haunches, poking around the cabinet beside the sink in examination room 2. The office was closed for lunch; the partners had suite 202 to themselves. “Never once had to give you first aid. Suddenly, it’s, like, our little thing we do.”

“Uh.”

“It’s like some kind of not-good date you keep asking me on.”

“I’m under stress, Aviva,” Gwen said, sounding peevish even to herself. She struggled ankle-deep through a wrack of regret, an unfamiliar ebb-tide stink of remorse. She had badly mishandled the situation with Garth Newgrange, and she knew it. It was time to confess, to acknowledge failure, to submit once again to Aviva’s crusty but goodhearted discourse of reproach. “I’m pregnant .”

“I know that, honey. It’s okay. You don’t have to explain.”

Gwen instructed herself to ease up on the woman, who had made no mistakes, ruined nothing. “That AC Transit had hit me?” she tried. “I would have owed Alameda County a new bus.”

“Funny,” said Aviva. “Aha.” She pivoted from the supply drawer and stood up, holding in each hand a small cardboard box containing an elastic support bandage. She had on an April Cornell dress patterned with morning glories, bought secondhand at Crossroads, knee-length, with a V collar and quarter-length drawstring sleeves. On anyone but Aviva, it would have looked matronly, but Aviva had those wiry arms. The whole woman was like a wire, all 104 pounds of her. She coiled and uncoiled. The flowered dress was trying to keep up, a bright but inadequate container for her movements. “Which look you want to go with? Caucasian or leper?”

“The beige. I don’t know, I guess… I guess I was just so excited to see a brown face.”

“I guess you must have been.”

“It’s so pathetic. Chasing after the child. You should have seen me taking those stairs.” She laughed, low and rueful. “Don’t laugh.”

Aviva stopped laughing. “I know why you went after her,” she said.

Gwen kept her legs dangling over the edge of the table, the crinkling paper offering its running commentary on her shifting behind as Aviva wrapped her right foot from arch to ankle. It didn’t appear to be serious, but Gwen had been on it all morning, and now whenever she put her weight on it, her bones thrummed like wire. The abrasion on her shin Aviva had already cleaned and taped with a Band-Aid. She bound Gwen’s ankle with the implacable tenderness of a practiced swaddler. She had that way of not talking; Gwen was powerless against it.

“It was Garth,” Gwen said. “That you saw me flipping off when you drove up.”

“Huh? You mean Garth Newgrange?”

“Right after the kid on the bike crashed into me, Garth pulled up. Going to see a lawyer next door.”

“A lawyer.”

“Talking about suing us. Seeing if they have a case.”

Aviva rocked back, letting go of Gwen’s foot. “Oh, fuck,” she said. She pressed the close-trimmed tips of her long fingers against the orbits of her eyes. “What?”

“That’s what he told me.”

“So you flipped him the bird ?”

“He flipped me off first.”

“Yeah, but see, Gwen, you…” She shook off whatever she had been about to say. “Never mind.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You think it’s my fault that he flipped me off. That he’s suing us. You think he’s in the right. Because we screwed up so bad.”

“I— No. No, I don’t. Honestly. But I can’t help thinking that if we just, you know, went to him.”

“No.”

“And, you know.”

“Don’t say it.”

“Apologized.”

“We are not going to do that, Aviva. No. We have nothing to apologize for. We did nothing wrong.”

“Yes, okay, I agree with you, Gwen, but he’s fucking lawyering up. ”

The door opened; it was Kai, chewing something leafy rolled in a lavash. “In case you wanted to know, can your one o’clock appointment, who showed up early, can she hear it, out in the waiting room, when you guys are having a fight in room two? I have your answer: yes.”

“We’re fine,” Aviva said.

“Really?” Chewing, acting unconcerned, tugging at the collar of her embroidered cowboy shirt.

“Sure, whatever. I’m fine. Gwen’s fine. Gwen will be fine for at least another…” Aviva looked at her watch, a man’s Timex with the face worn on the inside of the right wrist, as if she had everything timed, down to this pending revelation, and was committed to staying on schedule. She frowned, looking disappointed by what her watch told her. “Like, call it five minutes.”

Kai frowned, eyebrows knitting Sal Mineo–style, and closed the door behind her softly, as if in reproach.

“What’s happening in five minutes?” Gwen said.

“Gwen,” Aviva said. Then there was another long Aviva pause, profound and charged. “Gwen, have you talked to Archy?”

Archy has cancer and is hiding it from you, his wife ; that was what Aviva’s grave expression implied.

Gwen ripped a fistful of sanitary paper away from the sheet beneath her. “What’s wrong?” she said, and once again she felt herself caught up in a cyclone of metal and pavement.

“So he didn’t say anything.”

“What would he say? Is he sick?”

“Oh, God. No. No, he’s fine. He, too, is totally fine. For the moment.”

“For the next five minutes.”

“Call it four now.”

“Aviva, what is this?”

“Shit. Okay. You’re sitting down. That’s good.”

“Just a minute,” Gwen said. “Hold on. I feel like maybe I want to be standing up.”

“Gwen, no, I think you should—”

“Let me put a little weight on it, Aviva.”

Aviva fussed at the bandage, found it acceptable, then released the ankle to Gwen.

“Much better,” Gwen said. “Thank you so much. Now, what the heck?”

There was a soft knock on the examining room door. Aviva looked at her watch again.

“Aviva, what is this?”

The door swung open, and Gwen saw Julie walk in with the kid who had shoved her out of the path of the bus. The kid pushed back the hood of his sweatshirt. He was like a smaller, skinnier edition of Archy’s dad, a 45 to Luther’s LP. It took less than a second for her to formulate that first wild guess.

“Oh, dear Lord,” Gwen said.

The boys stared each in his own all-consuming way at his shoes, at Gwen’s ankle, at the floor.

“Titus,” Aviva said. “Meet Gwen.”

“Hey,” said the boy. He looked to be about the same age as Julie, fourteen, fifteen. Gwen undertook the biographical math, syllogized a couple of stray remarks separated by years, guessed at the rest.

“Your last name Joyner?”

The kid looked up sharply but got his playful Luther Stallings smile in place just before meeting her gaze. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Okay,” Gwen said. And then somebody turned over the record, and Archy’s Cheatin’ came back on, and the first track on side B was called “Jamila.” Gwen had never met Jamila Joyner, which, as always, made it so much easier for her to sketch the woman in her mind, with all her wicked contours. “Is she in town?”