Another ironic little coded conversation in quotation marks. What were the hints she’d been given here? This was, she knew, the way Nables had of working with his people. It was possibly one of the reasons why he seemed to spend his days steeped in disappointment, although the basic problem probably was systemic: Nables wanted to be the conductor of soaring symphonies and he’d been given a marching kazoo band. He wanted to send people out to find injustice and they brought him county fairs, puppies, and guns. Old men who carved Civil War figurines out of soap. It was the perfect exile for someone like him. Only a very few were born to love the status quo, at least insofar as they were certain that it contained a privileged place for them. Everyone else, accommodating it in all of its arbitrary contradictions, effaced to a certain extent what they’d been branded with at birth. But Nables couldn’t erase the rubbed ebony skin, the full lips, the broad nose with the flaring nostrils, and he was even less capable of erasing the stroke of indignation connecting his every decision to a central motivation. So he messed with his staff. It was a way of actively not waiting for the chimerical story that would force the world to apologize for being itself. He knew Saltino wasn’t a shit story; he knew that his budget was devised to accommodate some travel since the small regional bureaus had been shut down; he knew that overseeing a real story — any real story — had to beat the maddening job of compiling a gazette of AP stuff each day, setting some beery old reporter to the task of making the wire copy conform to the paper’s style sheet. And of course he’d heard all the same rumors everyone else had about plans for folding the Midwest section as a standalone and consolidating it into the main news section. Kat had looked around the little sheet-metal box that held them. No sign of the Pulitzer, either. Maybe you had to surrender it to the publisher, or maybe it was just too shaming to have Ben Franklin’s face smirking down on you in your tuna can cubicle. He’d given her two weeks.
SHE CALLED BECKY from home that evening while Justin was out. The phone rang and rang, and just as she was about to hang up, a kid answered, too young to be bored by the chore of answering the phone, old enough to be vigilantly territorial.
“Who is it, again?”
“An old friend of your mom’s. Becky’s your mom?”
“Yeah, she’s my mom. I mean what’s your name again?”
“Kat, again. Is Becky there?”
“I’m not sure. You want to talk to her?”
“Yes. Please.”
“Are you from Citicorp Credit?”
“No, I’m a friend.”
“Well, I don’t know you.”
“No,” said Kat. “No, you don’t. I knew your mother before you were born. There in Nebising. Can you check if she’s there for me please?”
Finally the kid put the phone down and went to look for his mother. Put the phone down: was Becky still making do with a phone that had a cord? Maybe even a rotary dial. But don’t be a jerk. She has e-mail, after all. Maybe the kid just liked making everybody take a couple of extra steps.
Oh how well she’d avoided Becky Chasse for ten years. Just didn’t want to go wherever that might lead. People bobbed up all the time, more often than you’d ever dream; she pictured a billion souls spread out across the night, each tapping the names of the lost into a search engine by the light of a single lamp. But happy reunions were for Facebook, a nice smooth interface between you and all the bad habits and ancient disharmonies. Who was waiting for you in the vast digital undertow there? Kat had avoided it.
Calls once in a blue moon. Those stopped because Kat never returned them. A very tense and uncomfortable lunch in Lansing. It kind of would have been that way anyway, but what made it memorably so was that a man had come in and waited for Becky at the bar while they ate, glancing over his shoulder at them from time to time. Becky tried to ignore him but Kat knew that he was keeping tabs on her. Ypsitucky trash, he looked like. Whatever — as long as he didn’t come over to say hello, even though that would have been the humanly normal thing to do. Unconsciously, she shook her head in frustrated disgust, and Becky caught it. “What?” she’d challenged. “What?”
Once, she’d known everything about her. Becky was afraid of ghosts. Becky started smoking cigarettes when she was eleven. Becky and she had cut class one day, after they’d started going to the public school in Leatonville, and Becky had gotten into a car with two town boys and driven away while Kat stood there and watched. Becky loved the Narnia books. Becky’s father sat outside the trailer where he lived, and belched — he did it like you might blow smoke rings, or play a harmonica. An activity. He always kept two beer cans nestled just so in the gravel beneath his chair. One he drank from. One he spat in. Becky’s mother worked as a clerk-typist at the State Farm bureau and started drinking a jug of Gallo chablis as soon as she walked in the door at six thirty. By the end of the night it would always be gone. Becky was lousy at math but she could draw anything. Becky and she had gone wading in a shallow lake and then they’d both gotten some kind of skin infection. Becky was the best baker she’d ever known. Becky figured out how to ride a bike and to tie her shoes before Kat had. Becky also showed her how to masturbate using a pillow between her thighs, but Kat never got the hang of that one. Becky had bet her a hundred dollars that she wouldn’t leave for Ann Arbor. Kat had never collected.
“Yeah?” When she came to the phone, Becky sounded out of breath. Kat wondered if she’d finally put on all the weight her mother and grandmother had carried around.
“Hey. Me.”
“Well Jesus H. Christ.”
“I got your e-mail.”
“So you did. Jesus, it’s weird to hear your voice.”
“It’s good to hear yours,” said Kat.
“What I meant.”
“That’s your kid, huh?”
“Oh yeah. Ten going on thirty-five, that’s Brandon. You met his dad that time.” Neither of them spoke for a moment. “We ain’t together no more.”
So there it was. Kept tabs until the field was sown.
“And you’re back there, huh?”
“Been back five years. Mom’s emphysema got real bad.”
“I’m sorry. Is it under control?”
“Well, in a ways. She got lung cancer and died a couple years ago, ennit.”
“Geezum.”
“Yeah, I’ll say. By the end it was like looking after a puddle. That’s all there was of her. And you know what? She still wanted to drink.”
“Your dad?”
“That fucker a while back got squashed by his van when he was underneath it.”
“Was he working on it?”
“Nah, sleeping it off, I think.” She laughed, and Kat did too. “So, Mrs. Danhoff.”
“I ain’t Mrs. Danhoff no more.” Kat put her hand to her mouth in surprise.
“What’d he, die?”
“No, we split up.”
“Guess I can’t say I’m surprised. Old guy like that. Gave you what you needed though, huh?”