“What about protecting Brid and your daughter?”
“Nobody was shooting at them.” With his head tilted, he stares at her. “I didn’t realize you and Brid were such good friends.” She looks away and sights a hawk describing circles high above them.
“I think the idea of this place,” she says, “is that we should all become good friends.” She shoves her hands deep into the pockets of her overalls.
“How do I get to be your friend, Maggie?”
“Oh, I’m easy to get along with.”
“Sure you are. Just don’t look at you, right?”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it? I’m not sure. Want to hear what I think?”
“You don’t even know me,” she says.
“I think maybe for you, being looked at is like being on the bottom.”
Before she can reply, Brid’s voice calls to them. “What are you two doing out here?” She’s crossing the lawn in their direction.
Quickly, Maggie takes a step back from him. When Brid gets nearer, she flashes Maggie a frown of disapproval before extending her hand to Wale, smiling at him in a way that seems carnivorous and worn out at the same time. “Get back inside, will you, lover boy? I want another go at it.”
Brid and Wale entered Maggie’s life in December, not long after Fletcher did. On the way to meeting them for the first time, Fletcher explained that he’d been friends with Brid since his freshman year, and that Wale was the father of her kid, though he’d been out of the picture until recently. The guy had served in the army, he’d killed people doing it, and he wasn’t much of a talker, but Brid was crazy about him.
Maggie took in this information distractedly. She had just gotten off the phone with her father, who had called with the news that in the spring he was going to leave his job and join a mission in Laos. When Maggie had asked what Gran thought of the idea, he’d replied that she was delighted. Maggie shouldn’t have been surprised. Gran had been waiting twenty-three years for her widowed son to do something with his life.
“It will save money for me to live over there,” Maggie’s father had told her. Then he’d admitted what she already knew from Gran: bad gambles on the stock market had put him on the edge of bankruptcy.
“So you’re going over there to save money?” Maggie had asked him.
“No,” he’d replied. “To save lives.”
At the bar, she only half listened as the others talked. For the most part the conversation was about politics, Brid arguing with Fletcher while leaning against Wale and reaching beneath the table every few minutes to clasp his knee. It was as if Brid’s body had split completely from her brain, and each was given over to a different man. As for Wale, each time Maggie glanced toward him, he was staring at her, smiling like they were sharing a private joke, and each time she looked away.
When Brid went off to the bathroom, Wale asked Maggie about teaching. It was the last thing she wanted to discuss, and Fletcher must have sensed it because he came to her rescue, jumping in to ask Wale in turn whether he’d found a job yet. Wale shrugged, then asked Maggie where she was from. Maggie tapped Fletcher on the leg to signal that it was all right and started talking about Syracuse.
Eventually, because there wasn’t really a way to avoid it, she came around to her father. It was easy enough to speak about the man she remembered from her childhood. Gliding through the story of her adolescence, though, she found herself running headlong toward describing his return to the Church. Instead of breaking off, she crashed right into it.
“In college, I lost my faith,” she said. A funny expression, she thought, as if her faith were something she’d misplaced somewhere, when the experience was more like a wave rolling over a sandcastle. “I took a course in World Religions, and that was enough, just learning about all those creeds with their different gods. Suddenly it seemed arrogant to believe in one true Church.” She saw Fletcher nodding and realized it was her first time talking about this with him. “I didn’t tell my dad, though. He wasn’t a churchgoer, but I thought he’d take it hard. When I’d gone away to college—”
She broke off, not wanting to tell Wale that her father had seemed lonely, that to make him feel better she’d often said how homesick and out of place she felt in Boston, even though in fact she’d liked her classes, liked the city, was happy knowing she could go out whenever she wanted without letting anyone down.
“Then last year, while I was at teachers’ college,” she went on, “he called me to say he’d started going to Mass. At first I thought he was joking, but he wasn’t. I felt so bad, I finally told him about the World Religions class.”
“How did he take it?” asked Fletcher.
Maggie shook her head, still dismayed. “He wanted to have a theological debate. This guy who hadn’t gone to Mass since he was a boy, suddenly he was trying to argue me back into believing. He went on about Vatican II and all the reforms, the liturgies in English, the Masses at people’s houses. He even felt obliged to tell me they have Eucharists of milk and cookies now, because milk and cookies are more relevant.”
By the time Brid returned to the table, Maggie was explaining about her father’s plans for Laos. Fletcher squeezed her hand in sympathy, while Brid said missionaries were just another kind of soldier. Wale wanted to know if Maggie was familiar with Laos, and she admitted she’d never even seen it on a map. He said it was a squiggly turd of territory between Vietnam and Thailand with its own special brand of Communists, the Pathet Lao, fighting against the royalists. He said officially it was a civil war, but everybody had their fingers in it. The North Vietnamese were backing the Pathet Lao; the Thais and U.S. were helping out the royalists. There weren’t any American troops on the ground, though. Instead, they had CIA agents train the local mountain people, the Hmong, to fight the bad guys. It hadn’t been going so well for the Hmong. Nowadays their typical soldier was a twelve-year-old with a machine gun. Wale said the only upside of Laos was that they’d legalized the opium trade, so you could make a lot of money if you didn’t mind being shot at.
“Not that you’d know anything about it,” said Fletcher with a laugh, but Wale looked at him with a blank expression, and Brid seemed less than pleased by the comment too, because a second later she steered the conversation toward how well Wale was getting along with Pauline.
The next evening after work, when Maggie stepped through the front doors of her school, Wale was waiting for her. At first she didn’t register him, because she was still suffering her daily wave of post-class recrimination, remembering the inanities she’d uttered, the moments when one second-grade delinquent or another had spoken back, refused to follow directions, or in some other way reduced her to a wheedler and a nag. The Christmas break was a week away and she still hadn’t wept in front of the students. It was her only success as a teacher.
The prospect of a stiff drink was beckoning when she noticed Wale ahead of her. Though it was ten degrees, he had nothing on his head or hands, and he was stamping his feet to stay warm.
“Thought I’d surprise you,” he called out.
“Well, you did,” she said, trying to sound unflustered. She almost asked how he knew where she worked until she remembered telling him at the bar. It had just been small talk. Now she considered making some excuse and turning back into the school, but no, he was just an odd duck. She was grown-up enough to handle him.
“Got time for a beer?” he asked. When she told him she was late to meet Fletcher downtown, he seemed undaunted and said he’d ride there with her. On the way to the subway station he asked about her day, as if the two of them walking along together were an ordinary thing. At the station he offered to pay her fare and she told him not to be silly, thinking it best to give no sign of encouragement.