Dog Bless You Read Free Page A

freedom. But Santos was determined to ensure I
wouldn’t be tempted to do anything that might send me back to prison. He
worried that if I didn’t have a solid income I’d be tempted to return to
hacking – this time for profit. Suppose he saw this job loss as a setback he
needed to monitor further? And if he did, would he be able to convince a judge
to extend my parole?
    I had some advantages I hadn’t had when I first
returned to town. I had reconnected with an old high school acquaintance who
became my best friend. I met my neighbors and got to know a lot of employees at
Eastern. And I met Liliana Weinstock. At forty-five, it was silly to think of Lili
as my girlfriend, but the English language hasn’t caught up to twenty-first
century mating practices yet.
    But how long would that network hang together if I was
unemployed and running low on money? Clouds gathered overhead as we drove up to
Leighville along the River Road, and by the time we reached the college the sky
was gray and gloomy. I had to park at the outer edge of the parking lot and
then hustle Rochester out of the car before it began to pour.
    He was still moving slowly as I shepherded him past the
deep pools of water at the edge of the parking lot and the marshy patches of
lawn between there and Fields Hall, the 19 th -century gothic mansion
that had been converted to college offices. We passed a young female student
reading on one of the wrought-iron benches, seemingly oblivious to the coming
storm. Her T-shirt read “Girls Just Want to Have Funds.”
    Boys, too, I thought. My first-floor office was small,
tucked away in a corner of the building that had once been part of the formal
dining room, but it had French doors looking out at the garden, and I left Rochester
there with a chew bone and a plea not to get sick on anything. I was worried
that Dr. Horz hadn’t been able to diagnose him more specifically and I hated
having to leave him alone, even for what I was sure would be a very quick exit
interview with President Babson. At least when I finished with that I could
clean out my office and then take Rochester home.
    Fields Hall was a warren of small offices carved out of
larger rooms, and I had to navigate past a copier in the middle of the narrow
hallway to get to the small alcove where Babson’s secretary sat.
    She waved me into his office, where the great man was
finishing a phone call. He was tall and rawboned, an urbane, well-dressed John
Wayne. But instead of being taciturn he bubbled over with enthusiasm, no matter
what the subject or his knowledge of it. He had deep green eyes and dark curly
hair that he styled with the kind of greasy kid stuff I had abandoned when I
reached puberty.
    “Steve, come on in,” he said, waving me to a spindle-backed
chair embellished with the Eastern College logo, across from his desk.
    I sat down and he said, “You grew up in this area. Ever
heard of Friar Lake?”
    That threw me for a loop. I was expecting some kind of
termination speech, to end with me and Rochester being escorted out of the
building by security guards. Sure, Eastern had a human resources department,
but Babson was such a micro-manager I was sure he liked to handle hiring and
firing himself.
    My brain was a jumble. “It sounds familiar, but I can’t
quite place it.”
    “About a hundred years ago, the Benedictine Order built
a monastery on about twenty acres of land a mile inland from the Delaware
River. The building overlooks a lake, and down by the water’s edge they built a
cabin for the use of mendicant friars. Eventually the local people started
calling the area Friar Lake.”
    “Mendicant friars?” Those weren’t covered in my dozen
years in Sunday School at Har Sinai Temple in Trenton, or in the three years of
weekday afternoons I spent studying Hebrew in preparation for my bar mitzvah.
    “Both monks and friars are men devoted to religious
service,” Babson said. “The difference is that monks live in cloisters,