“That would be bad,” Matty said.
“Not only that, these foreign powers might decide that they can’t afford to have us hire these people, either. They might decide to neutralize the psychic.”
“You mean, like, kill—?”
He shook his head. “I’m sure that won’t happen,” he said, in a way that suggested that was exactly what could happen. “But there are other ways to neutralize the psychic. There are devices that can simply remove those abilities.” He snapped his fingers. “Like turning off a light switch.”
Oh God, Matty thought. He’d neutralize me.
Smalls reached inside his jacket, and Matty gripped the arms of the chair. The agent’s hand came out holding a business card. “I’m on your side, Matt. I want to protect your family. I want to help them. Your grandfather doesn’t want me talking to any of you, because he thinks you’re too young to understand how important this is. Another Telemachus could step into your grandmother’s shoes. The nation would breathe a sigh of relief.”
Matty looked at the card, then put it in his jeans pocket.
“If there’s anything I can do, reach out to me,” Smalls said.
Matty emerged from the van with the feeling that much time had passed, though it had only been minutes. The sun shone at a more oblique angle. The trees whispered together conspiratorially. Even the milk jug seemed heavier, weighted now with hidden significance.
Cliff shook his hand again. “Great to meet you, Matty.”
“I…yeah.”
“Someday I want to tell you about something your grandmother did for me once. She took me along on one of her long-distance journeys, way beyond what I could do on my own. It was one of the most profound experiences of my life.”
“That would be great,” Matty said. Unless Destin Smalls turns me off like a light switch.
He walked home and into the house. He was sure his family would see all this new knowledge cooking his insides like radiation, but no: Grandpa Teddy barely looked up from the newspaper, while across the table from him, behind a fence of empty beer bottles, Uncle Frankie explained something about the Van Allen belt. “Sure, robots could get past the belt to the moon, but human beings?” Mom was busy at the stove. Only Uncle Buddy, chopping onions and green peppers at the counter, looked him in the eye. Matty, suddenly embarrassed, tucked the milk into the fridge. But before he could escape to his room, Mom told him to set the big table.
He was forced to ferry plates and glasses from the cupboards to the dining room, walking back and forth like a duck in a shooting gallery.
Matty went to his mother and said in a low voice, “Is Uncle Frankie staying for dinner?”
“I don’t know. Ask him.”
“Can you do it?”
Mom frowned at Matty as if to ask, What’s your problem? Then she said over her shoulder, “Frankie, you eating or not?”
“You don’t have to make more on my account,” Frankie said.
“Jesus, there’s enough pasta to go around. Yes or no?”
He sighed elaborately. “Wish I could. But Loretta and the girls are waiting.” He stood up, drained the last of his current bottle, and set it on the table.
“You’re welcome,” Grandpa Teddy said.
Frankie raised a hand in salute. “Hey, Matty, help me get something out of the van.”
Matty froze.
“Come on,” Frankie said, already in motion. “The rest of you, enjoy your fine repast. It’ll probably be mac and cheese at my house.”
Matty hesitated, then finally followed his uncle out to the driveway.
“So anything happen today?” Frankie asked.
“Nothing happened,” Matty said.
“No trips? No visits to the tavern?” He was so eager. So desperate. “We really need that combination.”
“I can’t do it,” Matty said.
“What? What’s the matter? Is your mom getting in the way?”
“No, it’s not that, I just don’t think—”
“Self-confidence. I knew it.” He put his hand on Matty’s shoulder and leaned close. “I’ve been there. I know what it’s like to doubt yourself. You just have to push through.”
“I mean I can’t do it, ever.” He struggled to make eye contact with Frankie, and couldn’t pull it off. His uncle’s right ear became his focus. “I’m out. I quit.”
“Quit?” His voice was so loud. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
Matty didn’t know what more to say. The government is on to me? They can track me? They can erase me? Frankie would argue him out of every point.
“You can’t quit,” Frankie said. “You’re a Telemachus. We don’t quit!”
“I know, I know.” But wasn’t quitting what they were most known for? The Amazing Telemachus Family had walked offstage and into mediocrity. Frankie gave the benediction years ago at the Thanksgiving table: We could have been kings.
“I’m sorry,” Matty said. He was tearing up. He didn’t want to cry in front of his uncle. “I’m sorry.”
Frankie kept talking, cajoling and shaming and pleading in fast-paced combinations, like a bantamweight working the heavy bag. Matty weathered the blows, unable to speak, unable to move. He wanted to disappear. He wanted to fly out of the top of his head and let his body flop onto the driveway like a bag of wet grass. But that was exactly what he could never do again.
12 Teddy
Love was waiting for him in the mailbox, coiled like a rattlesnake. A plain white envelope. He knew what it was even before he saw his name in Maureen’s razor-sharp cursive, and in a trice the old, sweet poison raced to his heart.
Oh, my love, he thought. You knock me out, even from the grave.
The letters were coming more frequently now, and he had no idea why. There’d been a flurry after she died, then a tapering off, so that for years at a time he’d thought they’d finally stopped. But this was the second one this summer. Was it a sign of the end-times? He was getting old. The obituaries were full of hardier men, younger men, struck down by strokes and prostate cancer and heart attacks. The stress of these letters was enough to do him in. Mo was going to kill him at the mailbox.
“Are you all right?” Irene asked. She was twenty feet away, standing by the car. Too far away to see the handwriting on the envelope.
“Paper bullets,” he said. He tucked the envelope into his jacket pocket. There’d be time to look at it later. “Straight to the brain.”
“How are you getting mail on a Sunday?”
With anyone else he would claim that it was misdelivered and a neighbor must have put it there—but this was Irene. His only choice was to dodge the question entirely. “Let’s go,” he said. “Graciella’s waiting.”
Irene made no move to get in the car. “We have a deal, right? If I go with you, no matter what happens, you’re watching Matty for me.”
“Yes, yes.”
“Four days, next Thursday through Sunday.” He’d made the mistake of giving her the keys so she could get the air-conditioning going, and now she was holding them ransom. She stood by the driver’s-side door, one hand drumming the roof. He winced to think of her rings scratching the paint. She said, “And you will watch him this time.”
She would not let him forget about the time he babysat Matty when he was two. “He’s a teenager now, not a toddler,” he said. “This time if he drinks a glass of gin it will be on purpose.”
Irene groaned, but surrendered the keys.
She managed to sit in silence until the third stoplight. It was more than he could have hoped for.