Naja Aidt - Rock, Paper, Scissors

Luke shrugs. Does he seem a little shy now, a little coy? What would she actually do, Alice asks more scrupulously. In her own assessment, she’d be good at helping customers, because she’s service-minded . She also thinks she could learn how to keep the books. “I’m awful at math, but I can count,” she says. Thomas thinks to himself: Now we’re playing store. He suggests she come in on Monday, so she can nose around . Just five or six hours a day. It’ll be a while yet before they open the other store.

“So I can keep my job at the same time,” she says, kicking a small, knotted branch.

“You have a job?”

“Yeah, but it’s only in the evenings.”

“You didn’t tell me that. What are you doing?”

“Telephone sales, sort of.” She pulls the hood of her windbreaker up.

Thomas eases his pace, so that Luke can pass him. He has a bad feeling about this. He lowers his voice. “What exactly do you do, Alice? What kind of job is it? Please tell me.”

She doesn’t respond.

“Tell me. You don’t need to hide it. Not from me you don’t.”

“You want me to be totally honest?”

“Yes. Totally.”

“It’s an escort service. I just answer the phone.” When Thomas doesn’t respond, she goes on. “That means I’m not an escort, if that’s what you’re thinking. Not at all.”

He stares at her.

“I’m not!”

“Who got you the job?”

“Does it even matter? I’ve only been there for a few days. I needed the money really bad.” She pauses. Then she looks at him from inside the hood. Her face is in shadow. She says, “Mom knows.”

“ Jenny knows?”

She nods. “Yeah. And she doesn’t care. I have to make a living somehow, right? It doesn’t bother me, it’s just a job. It’s better than cleaning houses.”

They reach Luke, who has stopped to wait for them. Conversation grinds to a halt. They stride down a steep hill, the forest floor dense and dark with lean, lofty spruces, redwood, arborvitae, and evergreens stretching toward the light. They come to a patch of birch forest. Sunlight filters through the leaves, shimmering onto them. Gravel crunches beneath their feet, and from time to time they smell rot, mushrooms, wet ground, and then suddenly the scent shifts to wood sorrel and elderberry. They walk in silence, side by side. Alice pushes back her hood again. Luke tells them about a camping trip he took when he was thirteen, not far from here. At night he and his friend were afraid of bears.

“This was in the fall, right before they hibernate — when they’re desperate and hungry. We lay in the tent clutching each other. The next morning we went home. Later I learned they don’t even have bears here.”

“Did you live up here as a boy?”

“No. We lived in the city until I was nine. Then my mother moved up here with the idiot, so I visited a few times. Mostly I lived with Fatso.”

Luke seems more relaxed now, even his body. He’s not being sneaky or calculated; his movements are freer, his face softer. Though Thomas’s mood briefly darkened at the thought of Alice working for an escort service, he nevertheless believes, at this moment, that things will work out, and even as Luke tells them how he loved visiting Jacques when he was a boy, Thomas can’t help but think of the new store, its interior design, its clientele — young people. He can picture it, and the images flit one after the other, coupled with the strong aroma of fresh paint and wood, so he only hears bits and pieces of Luke’s story.

“But what did you actually do when you weren’t fishing?” Alice asks.

“Oh, just about everything. Often we just sat in the living room watching TV. Sports. Usually. Sometimes he let me drink soda. Or he’d help me with my homework.”

Thomas can’t believe his own ears. “He did what ?”

“Mostly history and geography. And he’d tell me about his youth.”

Thomas looks at Luke’s profile in disbelief. Then he shakes his head.

“What did he say?” Alice squeezes her head between her hands, as if checking that it’s still there.

“How he’d carry on at the big dance halls, for one. He never went out without his hat and vest. I remember him saying that. Always his hat and vest. And a newly ironed shirt of Egyptian cotton. Polished, shiny shoes. He showed me a photograph of himself sitting at a long bar with a drink in his hand. Toasting the camera. I still remember his smile in that photo, a big, wide smile. He was very young then, and dark-haired. His hat lay on the bar. It was white. I used to think a lot about that Egyptian cotton, how exotic and strange it was. I’d never heard of Egyptian cotton before. And sometimes. .”

Luke stares deeply between the trees, as if he’s seen something interesting in the forest. “Sometimes there were others too. My uncle and Frank and many I didn’t know. I’d sit in the corner listening to the men talk. They’d forget I was there and it wasn’t until they were leaving that Jacques would see me and say, You’re still here, Kid. Go home, Kid. Then he’d put his big hand on my shoulder.”

“So that’s why they call you The Kid!” Alice smiles excitedly, as if she’s solved one of life’s great mysteries. “I didn’t understand why. But that’s why, isn’t it?”

“Yup. Jacques started that. But I was the only child there. Just me and. .”

“I remember that photograph,” Thomas interjects, sounding more curt than he’d intended. “But I’ve never heard anything about dance halls or Egyptian cotton. He probably just made that stuff up to entertain you. Or to make himself seem better than he was.”

“But back then he really was like that,” Alice says. “That’s what Mom told me. That when he met grandma he went to all these really fancy places and that he wouldn’t have met her otherwise, because she went to those places. Or something like that.”

“He met my mother at a costume party thrown by one of her fellow students. She studied art history at that point. Later she dropped out. But when they met each other she was a student. No more than twenty years old. Jacques lived in an apartment near the river, it had a great view, tall ceilings. He had a rich night life, knew everything about it, and she was enthralled by his bohemian lifestyle. They got married. My grandfather was furious.”

“What about your grandmother? Was she furious too?” Alice asks.

“She died young. Just like my mother.”

“Also breast cancer?”

“Yes.”

“What happened then?”

“They had me. Not long after that Jenny came along. He had money then, he worked a bit for his uncle — a goldsmith — but he also dabbled in seedier things. My mother didn’t know anything about that. But when Jenny was really little things changed. His uncle fired him after he stole money and gold from him, but he didn’t report him to the police — because he was ashamed that his own nephew had swindled him. That’s when Jacques began his career in crime. They moved out of the hip apartment by the river. And he started beating my mother.”

“How do you know?” Luke asks. He adjusts his backpack.

“From Kristin. I don’t remember it myself, of course. Not really. Just that one time. I must’ve been four years old.”

“But why?” Alice asks. “And why did he hit you? I asked Kristin yesterday, but my mom won’t talk about it. She always says that it wasn’t so bad. But I can tell she gets really nervous.”

Thomas sighs. “Listen, he wasn’t very smart. I’m sorry, Luke, I know you have a different image of him, but he just wasn’t. He was unscrupulous. Ruthless. My mother was obviously beside herself when she realized where the money was coming from, the money that put food on our table. She was probably hysterical, and so he smacked her. And it just got worse and worse.”