He kept mostly to the back of the shop, and whenever a customer entered he would say hello with warmth but then discreetly vanish to the tiny back workroom or the basement. The customers would invariably comment on what an attractive, well-mannered boy he was, and June could then engage in a conversation about children or parenting that would elide nicely into a talk of objects for the home. She was not a natural saleswoman or a person given to charming others, but she could sense an opening instantly and couldn’t help but lodge herself in any breach. She was dogged and opportunistic, and commerce was mere play compared to what she could resolve herself to do. Perhaps it was pure coincidence that the shop did well on the days Nicholas chose to hang out, but she knew for certain that his presence helped her, that it was a necessary preface to a story she could never begin telling on her own, and for this reason she was always slightly cruel and tried to compel him to be elsewhere, not wanting to feel guilty about using him to good advantage, which she often did.
But Nicholas had not appeared to mind-he certainly never said so-though June now thought that through those early years of her shop on Lexington he must have learned something about the unhappy patterns a son and mother could fall into. When the last customer had departed and she shut off the lights of the display window, Nicholas would emerge from wherever he was working and she would say, “The mole-boy appears,” sweetly enough but with an edge more aptly directed at a peer or friend than a reticent boy of nine. He would answer her with his eyes closed and a wide, exaggerated smile, freeze in his position as if stricken with palsy, and then fitfully hop away. They played at it together, but it was a strained comedy. Back at the apartment he would do his homework or make drawings while she fixed dinner (always something simple, something basic enough that it was hardly real cooking, like rice and steamed fish, or elbow macaroni with jarred sauce) and nothing would be off, but sometimes in the middle of the night she awoke to the sounds of gasping coming from his room; the first time she nearly tripped while getting up too fast, afraid that he was choking, but it turned out, then and other times, that he was crying in his sleep. He wasn’t deeply distressed-it was the softest crying, self-muffled, if that was possible-and although it would have been the simplest thing to wake and comfort him, she inexplicably stood over him in the dark, staring at his racked mouth and the tight, quivering shrug of his shoulders, and it took everything in her to renounce the thought that here was a boy she would have to carry about forever.
How very different things had come to be.
“I must advise you again, Mrs. Singer,” Clines said to her now, not looking at her in the mirror. He had put on glasses for driving. “You should not be bothering anymore with this man Brennan.”
“Yes.”
“We should be in Rome by now, looking for your son instead.”
“We will fly out tomorrow night. There won’t be any more changes.”
“I’m sorry to be so frank, Mrs. Singer, but you’re in no condition to delay.”
“Then you can always drive a little faster, Mr. Clines.”
She could see his lips tightening in the rearview mirror. He didn’t want to drive back over to New Jersey, saying it was a waste of time, but in fact she could see it was because he was also fearful of Hector. But he did as she acidly suggested, accelerating slightly for a stretch before eventually easing back to his unusually slow driving style; he was indeed an older man than he wished to let on, and she could see him straining in the twilight to see the road. He had asked that she sit in the back because of a chest cold that he said he didn’t want to transmit to her. But this was primarily an excuse. Clines, she had come to see, was a terribly formal sort; he was someone who liked the comfort of having a designated station for himself, a place. This was fine by her, for she knew exactly where she stood with him without much discussion. Discussion for her had become a hardship. She had a purpose and Clines was aiding her and there was little else to talk about.
Nicholas, of course, had always been especially subject to her commands; even as a teen he couldn’t help but follow her wishes without argument. At some point she would find herself being particularly unreasonable, sometimes squarely merciless, hoping he would argue or talk back sharply to her, but he never did, merely assenting or else drifting off to another room of the apartment. Was it his character to be so compliant, or had she also formed him with those trenchant comments at the shop? Like any mother she sometimes found herself furious with him, for nothing other than his being a child. Later on the reasons would be different. In any case, she couldn’t help herself and probably Nicholas couldn’t either and after he left home and had been gone for months and neither written nor telephoned she wondered whether an objective observer would determine that on balance she had been the most damaging presence in his life.
That he had gone on so readily to a career of larceny seemed confirmation enough of the notion. Clines reminded her several times that these were still alleged crimes, but she knew the truth had already been long determined. For Nicholas had a history of stealing. It was not a problem before, though in truth only because he was never caught. From the time he was seven he filched candies and gum from the news shop and playing cards and felt markers from Woolworth’s, and later on, when he was in middle school, he stole record albums and books from the public libraries, expensive clothes from department stores. She periodically discovered a cache tucked deep in his closet or between the mattress and box spring of his bed, once finding three brand-new pairs of designer blue jeans, another time two ski parkas, none in his size. She supposed he sold them, or gave them away to his friends. It didn’t surprise her that he was never caught: he was a smart, charming, gentle-faced boy who walked easefully into rooms and could still look you in the eye and say hello while fitted with whatever goods he’d tucked beneath his shirt.
What was remarkable was that June never confronted him. Not a reprimand, not even an innocent question or comment about the loot. She would put the stuff back in its place, as if she’d found a pornographic magazine. But why? It wasn’t as if stealing were a typical boyhood stage to be outgrown. She could have spanked him the very first time, on finding a dozen packs of various gums stuffed into a sock, harshly punished or scared him into never doing such a thing again. But it seemed that each time she found a new stash she’d somehow discount the previous instances, see them as isolated, even accidental, cases in which Nicholas simply forgot to pay; she’d done that herself a couple of times, once resulting in an embarrassing frisking at a store entrance by the security guard. Nicholas was naturally preoccupied, yes, that was a problem, but the truth of the matter was that June began to look almost expectantly to the stealing. She would go into his room whenever he wasn’t there, half-hoping to find something. Of course whenever she did she felt frustration and bewilderment, but then a kind of dreadful curiosity about the moment itself took hold of her such that the larger, more disturbing picture dissipated and she focused too discreetly on the act; she would wonder about the particular circumstances of its moment, the part of the store he was in, if he had been nearly caught and his heart had raced terribly, and then what he was thinking, or not thinking, the faces of his compulsion.