Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

The young man, for his part, seemed to have taken little notice of her administrative assistant, or of much else for that matter, notwithstanding the coffee, and when at last he lowered the mug, setting it back on her desk, it was half empty, and Mrs. Freeman wondered how he had managed to drink it so quickly without flaying the delicate skin at the roof of his mouth.

“Perhaps,” Mrs. Freeman said, “we’ll be more comfortable over there.” And she rose and led the young man to the sofa against the far wall. When they were both seated, she leaned toward him, and in a voice just above a whisper, she said, “You know, she tried to talk me out of meeting with you. Tiphany doesn’t believe I should be talking directly to the press.”

“But you’re—” He lowered his eyes into his hands, as if the answer were written there. “Aren’t you the director? Director of corporate communications?”

“I suspect she had the board meeting moved up on purpose,” Mrs. Freeman said, “just to limit our time here together.”

“Your secretary?”

“Every time she comes in, I can see her rearranging the furniture in her head.”

“Why don’t you fire her?”

“Her greatest fear,” Mrs. Freeman said, “a fear she shares with a great many of my colleagues here, is the truth. Tiphany believes the truth is something dirty, that honesty is a sign of weakness and capitulation, that one cannot speak from the heart without losing some advantage.”

“You don’t agree?”

In that moment, Mrs. Freeman’s own greatest fear was that she had overestimated this young man, that he might not be, after all, the sort of man she thought he was, and Mrs. Freeman found herself confronting the fact that the majority of the people in the world, at least those she had met, especially those she worked with — and not excluding those she had married — never turned out to be the sort of people she hoped they would be. Mrs. Freeman wondered if she hoped for too much, or simply for the wrong things.

“Have you heard of Carl Norden?”

The young man shook his head.

“He invented the bombsight,” Mrs. Freeman said. “He figured out how to make one that worked.”

With some effort, the young man reached down and popped the clasps to his briefcase — a task with which he seemed almost entirely unfamiliar — and pulled out a small spiral notebook, which Mrs. Freeman could see in a glance had never been opened beyond the first page.

“Does he work here at HSI?”

“Carl Norden,” Mrs. Freeman said, “thought he was doing God’s will.”

The young man bent over his pad, taking notes.

“They were using his sight,” she said, “when they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.”

The young man’s pencil abruptly stopped.

“Can you imagine the bombardier,” she said, “punching in altitude, velocity, wind speed, coordinates? As if any of it mattered.”

Mrs. Freeman pushed herself back a bit on the sofa, allowing more air to come between them. “But I won’t bore you with any more of my prattling.”

The young man appeared about to object, but Mrs. Freeman didn’t give him a chance. “There were some questions you wanted to ask?”

The young man looked at her nervously.

“And which paper,” Mrs. Freeman asked, “did you say you write for?”

The young man swallowed deeply. “Well—” He tried again to flash one of his expensive smiles, but it was thinner this time.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, and the color returned to his cheeks in a rush of gratitude. “I will tell you,” she said, folding her hands atop her knee, “whatever you want to know.”

And yet her declaration strangely seemed to have the opposite effect of what she’d intended, peeling away even further at the young man’s confidence. He was fumbling again with his spiral pad, turning back to the very first page, upon which it appeared something had already been written, and in blue pen, not pencil. Even with the pad upside down from where she sat, Mrs. Freeman noted something strikingly feminine about the penmanship.

“I want to ask you about these protests,” he repeated, but stiffly this time, reading from the page.

“I must say, I’ve grown to admire their persistence.”

The young man’s pencil remained poised above the pad, quivering slightly in his hand. At her words, his clear blue eyes seemed to focus in on her face, and Mrs. Freeman wondered whether she had interrupted his thoughts, or whether he’d been listening to her abstractly, from a distance. And then her own thoughts returned to a cigar box and a granite-faced man with a moustache offering her her first job.

Finally the uncertain movement of the young man’s lips resulted in words. “You don’t, uh, dispute the facts? The drone … that is, I mean the school—”

At that, the tent of Mrs. Freeman’s folded fingers collapsed. “It’s the nature of facts, Mr. Fitch, to be correct, and there is nothing I could say to make them less so.”

In Mrs. Freeman’s mind flashed thirty years of meetings like these, all the petty conspiring about things that didn’t really matter, all the silly memos, the secret dealings, the strategic planning. Over the years, all that changed was the quality of her chair. And it occurred to her that had her first husband respected her just a little more, she might have spared herself all this and found aggravation domestically instead. But to say she would not have missed it would have been disingenuous. She was not sorry. Not even a bit. To get here she had needed to work ten times harder than Arthur or any of the other men around her. And after all that, even with Tiphany’s attempts to undermine her, what fun it was, at sixty-eight, to see her orders dutifully executed, not out of sentimental reverence for the aged but because after all this time she had become something like a sun, the center of gravity within her own universe.

“So you don’t deny you blew up a school?”

Gazing down again upon the young man’s hands, she saw a streak of sweat upon the pad. “How could I?”

“How long have you known about the problems with the drones?” He looked up from the page. “Or is it this bombsight you were talking about?” He seemed more comfortable going off script.

“No one has ever blown up anything,” Mrs. Freeman said, “except in desperation.”

“There must have been tests?” The young man sounded hesitant, almost apologetic. “You must have known there were … glitches?”

“Do you know what happens,” Mrs. Freeman said, “when you try to bang in one those tiny, skinny nails — those finishing nails — with a full-size hammer?”

“I’ve never tried.”

With a glance at his hands, she could tell it was true.

“You smash your thumb,” she said. “And you bend the nail.”

“I see,” he said.

But she wasn’t convinced he did. “If we really were in control,” she said, “we wouldn’t need bombs to make such an unholy mess.”

“Maybe you’d prefer to speak off the record,” the young man offered, reading once again from the page. “If there’s information that’s … sensitive …”

Mrs. Freeman felt an urge to reach out and pat his knee.

“For years there’ve been allegations against your company. Environmental abuses, reneging on labor contracts, outsourcing.” The young man had found his voice. “The city gives you tax breaks, and in return it loses jobs and gets left with cleanup bills—”

“I have nothing to hide,” Mrs. Freeman said, and he seemed disappointed, or maybe just confused. Suddenly he was looking over her shoulder.

Mrs. Freeman realized her telephone was ringing.

Straightening her pants and blouse, Mrs. Freeman stood up from the sofa, and with what she knew to be the grace and dignity of the old woman she had become, she walked over to the desk. And even she did not know what she planned to do until the moment she pressed her fingernail against the tab of the cord, detaching it from her phone.