Habit makes Ernie glance up at the mirror. Big mistake.
“Jesus H.,” he says. “Why’re you telling me all this, kid?”
“So you’ll give it back to me,” the kid says, his voice quivering. His whole face is red and wet; his eyes are bloodshot. “So I won’t have to call the cops,” he says. “So I can get the device back without having to admit I lost it. So I can go back to screwing up my life, I guess.”
He starts crying again.
“Jesus,” says Ernie.
* * *
They get to Ernie’s place. “That’ll be fifty-eight fifty,” he says. The kid looks up at Ernie and laughs. At least he can take a joke.
Ernie asks him what his name is. “Ernest,” the kid says.
“You gotta be kidding,” Ernie says with a laugh. “That’s my name! My folks named me after Hemingway.”
“Mine too,” says Ernest. His voice is real quiet. “They wanted me to go into literature.”
“Hell,” says Ernie, “I don’t know what they wanted for me, but it sure as hell wasn’t driving cabs. Wait here.”
He goes inside, gets the Samsonite carry-on from the basement and crams the suit in it. It’s not a hard decision.
It might have been if they’d started their conversation on Ernie’s front porch, but they were driving all the way from Cambridge and Ernie had plenty of time to think. Plenty of places to turn off, places he could’ve dropped the kid and kept driving. This time of night, the wrong neighborhood, maybe skinny little Ernest never comes back.
Maybe. Or maybe Ernie just drives him someplace secluded, lets him out, breaks both his knees with the front bumper. Pick a dark place and turn the lights off and no one could get a good look at his plates. He could’ve made skinny little Ernest a speed bump, even backed over him to make sure, and the only description the cops would’ve had is “a taxi cab.”
Ernie could have done it but he didn’t. He can’t exactly explain why, either. Maybe it’s because he wasn’t sure he could have gotten away with it. Maybe it’s because he got away with everything so far and he didn’t want to push his luck. Or maybe getting away with it isn’t as easy as it sounds. Ernie’s not sure. He just knows this one wasn’t the hard decision.
Ernie gets behind the wheel, passes the case back to Ernest, and pulls a U-turn to take the kid back to the Yard.
“This isn’t my suitcase,” says Ernest.
“Yeah, well, the suit’s in it,” says Ernie. “Don’t get picky on me.”
“No,” the kid says. “You don’t understand.” Ernie can hear him futzing with zippers. “There was a journal,” he says. “It had a log of the time I’ve borrowed. I need it back or I won’t know where to start borrowing from again.”
Maybe you ought to lay off the borrowing, Ernie wants to say. Maybe it’ll help you quit the pills. But Ernie figures it’s not for him to get all high and mighty on this kid. “My wife’s got it,” he says.
“I need it back,” says Ernest.
Ernie looks at him through the mirror. “Kid,” he says, “you don’t know what you’re asking.”
All the kid says is, “I need it back.”
* * *
Ernie pulls up in front of Janine’s sister’s place and the living-room drapes are thin enough that he can see they’ve still got the kitchen lights on. He sighs and says, “Give me the damn suitcase.”
He rings the doorbell and her sister peeks out between the drapes. Janine comes down after a minute. Ernie takes a deep breath. “I need to tell you something,” he says, “and I’m gonna tell it to you straight.”
* * *
It’s a month later when Ernie gets a call. It’s seven PM and Ernie’s been driving since seven that morning. That’s become a regular thing for him. He knocks off for half an hour once or twice to grab a bite and read, but otherwise he’s running Logan and Brigham and Massachusetts General like clockwork. He does it for Janine, he says, but when he takes the time to think about it he knows it’s more than just that.
He’s got another regular thing going these days: he tends to take lunch at a particular Seven-Eleven. The old guy behind the counter there probably thinks Ernie’s a scatterbrain, what with him always forgetting his change on the counter when he leaves. Ernie would do the same at a particular gas station too, only the girl they used to have got fired. It wasn’t even over Ernie robbing the place. The poor kid was too honest to keep the change he kept leaving on the counter, and her boss canned her for being over whenever she closed out her register.
Ernie talked Roberta at dispatch into getting her a job but the kid hasn’t taken to it. Ernie’ll tell you it just goes to show how hard it is to do right by somebody after you did them wrong.
He’s at home on the sofa reading Sherman Alexie when the phone rings. It’s Ernest; he recognizes the voice right away.
He doesn’t know how the kid got his number, but then the kid is wicked smart. “I just wanted to thank you,” he says.
“For what?” says Ernie.
“Returning the device,” says Ernest. “And the suitcase and the journal.”
Ernie laughs. He ended up driving that kid all the way back to the Yard for free that night, but does he get thanks for that? “You don’t have to thank a guy for returning what he stole from you,” he says.
“Yeah, well, thanks anyway.”
“How you doing with those pills?” says Ernie.
“How are you doing with that wife?” says Ernest.
Ernie laughs again, but for once he’s pretty happy on that front. Janine spent the night. They both had a few drinks in them the night before and in the morning Janine said it was probably a mistake, but Ernie liked the sound of the word probably. She let him give her a kiss on his way out the door, and that’s not bad.
The night he came to get the kid’s carry-on he told her the whole shebang. She didn’t believe him. Called him a lying sack of shit, actually, but he was surprised to learn he really didn’t care whether she believed him or not. The big thing was that he told her the truth. It was the hardest decision he’d made in a long time. He still can’t say it felt good, but it felt right.
That’s not much comfort, by the way, and he’ll be the first to say so. He’ll say, You know that satisfaction people talk about? The one you get from doing the right thing? Well, that and a buck’ll get you a cup of coffee.
On the phone he says, “Let me tell you this, kid: it’s not easy to make things right with someone when she don’t believe you. It’s even harder when the true story is the most cockamamie thing you ever heard of. So thanks for inventing that suit, huh? And for leaving it in my cab. You damn Harvard types.”
Now the kid laughs. He says, “You’re the one who put it on. I suppose you’re going to blame me for that too?”
A memory comes back to Ernie: the image of a skinny drunk in his back seat on the drive back to the Yard, folding that suit over and over in his hands. He looked like he was thinking pretty hard about it. Ernie doesn’t know the kid well or anything, but for some reason he’s got hope for him.
“Hey, you’re not going to believe what happened to me today,” Ernie says. “I’m dropping off a couple of Frenchmen at their hotel and they don’t understand tipping. Fifty bucks they left me. I tell you what, me and Janine are eating steak tonight.”
“That’s great, Ernie.”
The kid’s tone is flat and Ernie knows their conversation is over. “Listen,” he says, “you take care of your girls, kid. Keep ’em close.”
“You too, Ernie,” says the kid, his tone still flat, and Ernie’s not sure he’ll ever hear from him again.