“It was supposed to be for your birthday,” she said. “But then I figured you could use it before then, and anyways, once I get a gift for someone, I pretty much want to give it to them right that second, so I guess you could say this is really a thanks-for-the-impatience-I-inherited-from- you gift.”
“From me?” Davis pretended to be offended as he lifted the tiny-bowed present and began picking at the wrapping. “Your mother’s the impatient one. Always was.”
She laughed. It was so easy to make her laugh. When she was small he could get her started, and the giggling recharged her like an alternator, until minutes had gone by and she became incapacitated by a delirious aerobic seizure. That would get Davis started, too. Countless times, Jackie discovered them together in the family room, turned on their backs like turtles inverted on their shells, at the mercy of spasms of laughter.
The tape unstuck and the paper unfolded to reveal a small, reflective disc in a black plastic case. “What’s this?”
“Newly uncovered birth and death records: Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Nevada. Eighteen hundred through 1833, although not all the states are complete.”
Davis turned it over. It had no label, or even printing. “Where did you buy this, exactly?”
“Buy?” AK fingered through a bowl of candy on his desk for something chocolate, no crunch. She pinched a tiny Hershey bar, unwrapped it in a manner that was unconsciously similar to the technique just used by her father to unwrap his gift (picking at the ends, first the left side and then the right). “No buy,” she said with candy in cheek. “Download. Copy. Burn.”
Davis reproached her with a severe stare.
“Yeah. So,” she said. “There was a certain amount of hacking involved.” A remorseless confession.
Davis shook his head.
“You can possess information, but no one can own information, Dad,” she said. “These are allegedly public records just sitting on a server in Dallas, and they weren’t going to release them for another two years. Even then they were going to charge an astronomical fee for the privilege. That’s fascism.”
“Uh-huh.”
“This isn’t just an early birthday gift, it’s an act of nonviolent protest.”
“Well, thanks,” he said, and he meant it.
“Speaking of violence” – in the bowl she found a peanut butter cup she had missed on her last pass – “heard anything from the religious wrong lately?”
Davis shrugged. “Eh. Letters. Notes. Barely literate stuff. A lot of quoting and misquoting from the New Testament.”
“Anything from the Hog?”
From the credenza behind him Davis pulled an inch-thick stack of erratically lettered envelopes, bound by a rubber band. The letters inside were all signed “HoG,” and accompanying each signature was a crude drawing of a hand with the index finger extended upward. Davis had once joked to Gregor, one of his partners at the clinic, that the person who sent them must be a University of Arkansas Razorbacks football fan. Go, Hogs! Davis joked. We’re number one!
“Threats?”
“Sure. Or warnings, anyway.”
“You’re so casual about it. I hate that.”
“Do you want me to look more nervous?”
“Yeah,” she said and then smiled. “I just think about it a lot. I don’t want anything to happen to my dad.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me, AK.” He knew this had been on her mind lately. “That… the incident last month with the clinic in Memphis, that was a freak thing. And they caught the guy. Or he’s dead, anyway.”
“He had an accomplice.”
That was probably true. Police suspected the bombing had been instigated by the infamous Byron Bonavita, and they might have blown their best chance yet of capturing him. An investigation of the dead conspirator had been little help so far. “Maybe. Maybe not. I won’t lie. There are a lot of insane, angry people and it’s going to happen again sometime. Somewhere. But you want to worry, worry about me when I’m driving up the Tri-State Tollway. I’m much more likely to get myself killed in merging traffic than I am in some explosion here at the office.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. We already had that talk in driver’s ed. A state trooper came and he had gory slides of car wrecks and everything. It was gross.”
“Besides, if you’re so certain something’s going to happen to the clinic, why are you here today?”
“Money.” Anna Kat turned her head sideways and dropped her hand, palm-up, on the desk. She wiggled her fingers. “Besides, I’m too young and pretty to die. Stick with me at all times, Dad, and you’ll be perfectly safe.”
God, Davis thought. How often since the day she was born had he silently expressed the same notion in reverse? If he could only be with her all the time, nothing could happen to her. To them. He pulled his wallet out of the desk and placed two twenty-dollar bills in her hand.
“Speaking of young and pretty, I saw Dr. Burton in the hall,” she said.
“Did you say hello?”
“I did,” she said, then, “Mom hates her.”
Davis froze his hand above the drawer as he was about to return the wallet there. “What are you talking about?”
“She says she doesn’t like having someone that pretty around you all day. She says Dr. Burton’s just your type.” Her voice was singsongy in the last few syllables, in imitation of her mother.
“She said that to you?”
AK shook her head. “To Aunt Patty. She was kidding. I think. Sort of. Little bit.”
“That’s crazy.”
“We don’t use that word, Dad. Remember?”
Davis frowned. Yes, he knew better. Jackie’s family had a history of mental illness and a tradition of suicide going back four generations that they knew about. She could be eccentric at times (a trait that he had found alluring once), and Davis and AK monitored her odd behavior for signs of true irrationality. Occasionally, father or daughter would worry when they caught Jackie talking to herself, or when she began one of her obsessive weeks of top-to-bottom housecleaning, but the other would usually counsel patience. The advice always proved to be sound when Jackie returned to normal.
And, AK might remind him, Davis had been through a stretch of odd behavior himself: an embarrassingly cliched midlife crisis in which he purchased an impractical performance car and even took seven weeks of skydiving lessons, although he quit before his first solo jump. Davis never cheated on Jackie, never even considered it, but over several late nights at the office he confided his concerns about Jackie’s health to Joan Burton, and that established an intimacy between them that his wife could no doubt sense. He wasn’t sleeping with Joan but they were keeping a different kind of secret.
“It would help Mom if you were around the house more. Heck, maybe I’d like it, too.” She stretched across his desk and punched him collegially in the arm. “Especially the weekends. Of course, I’m going to be working Saturdays soon, but you could still hang with Mom. Work with her in the garden.”
Davis’s hours at work had long been a point of contention with the Moore women. In one of her less subtle moments, Anna Kat had framed for him a New Yorker cartoon that labeled one of the caricatures a “Stay at Work Dad.”
Typically, Davis didn’t commit. “You looking forward to your job?”
“It’s just the Gap,” she said. “I spend half my time there, anyway. And now that Tina works there it’ll be like regular Saturdays, only with an employee discount.”
Davis laughed.
“Let’s do something,” Anna Kat proposed. “The three of us. This Saturday. Before I start. How about we go into the city? Eat at Berghoff’s. Maybe do the architecture tour.”
He had appointments on Saturday. Three of them. In his periphery, he could see them on his computer screen, highlighted in blue. Many of his patients couldn’t take time off during the week to see him. He’d explained it to Anna Kat a hundred times.
“All right,” he said. “That sounds like fun.”
“I’ll make the reservations.” AK jumped to the flat treads of her tennis shoes and walked around his desk and drew his cheek next to hers. When she pulled away Davis could see red scratches on her cheek, already fading, transferred from his half-day stubble. He was lucky to have a teenaged daughter who wanted to spend any time with him at all. “I’m gonna hit the Beast for an hour before Old Orchard. Then I’ll be at Libby’s. Don’t wait up.”