Past Perfect Read Free Page B

haven’t had anything to do with anyone doing work of national importance for … whatever.” Not for the fifteen years since the CIA fired me without an explanation.
    “Oh, Katie, please.”
    “All right,” I told Lisa Golding, “I’ll be glad to listen to whatever you say, but honestly, if it truly is of national importance, I’m not your girl.”
    “Look, I know you think I tend to be frivolous — ”
    “Not at all,” I assured her. Shallow, yes. Amusing on occasion. Not trustworthy.
    “ — and that, to be perfectly honest, you think I have a tendency to embellish the truth. And I do, or at least I did, to make for a more fun story. Believe me, I was dreading calling you because of the boy who cried wolf syndrome. But I’ve grown, Katie. And I swear to you, this is urgent. I need you to listen and I need you to help.” Unfortunately, even if I’d thought of her as an honorable and contemplative person, Lisa had one of those top-of-the-treble-clef voices that, had she been discussing Being and Nothingness, would have sounded like she was talking about hair gel.
    I think that was the moment Nicky strolled into my bedroom with a handful of dried apricots. He extracted the piece he was chewing on from his mouth with such delicacy I had a two-second flash about what a good surgeon he’d make. “Mom, what if … Oh.” His voice fell to a whisper. “I didn’t see you’re talking.”
    I held up my hand in a wait-a-minute gesture. “Lisa …” I said into the phone. What was making me feel even worse was that Nicky wasn’t fat. I studied him. A warm, smile-filled face. Okay, he was overly solid, and big for his ten years, five feet tall already, so his size seemed magnified alongside of his smaller classmates. But he wasn’t flabby. And he didn’t have the starchy pallor of a kid who was a couch potato. His ample cheeks were like peaches, warm gold tinged with red. Admittedly, his waist spread rather than tapered, but —
    “Lisa, can I get back to you? I have to drive my son up to camp and I’m already an hour behind schedule.”
    “Katie, didn’t you hear what I said? I swear, this is so huge …” Her high voice thinned, as if someone had taken the up and down line of an ERG and stretched it out until it was flat. “Please.”
    Okay, Lisa Golding did sound stressed. And my natural tendency has always been to offer an outstretched hand or comforting pat on the head to someone in need. However, my years in TV, an industry made up entirely of overwrought people, had taught me it was not necessarily my obligation to be the primary easer of angst, especially for those like Lisa who were given to overdramatizing and under-veracity, who popped up after a decade and a half of silence. So I met her halfway: “I’m taking my cell phone,” I told her. “I could talk to you tomorrow afternoon, after the camp’s opening day activities.”
    “Listen,” Lisa said, “besides the urgency … Things have happened. …” I was shaking my head in a she’s-hopeless gesture and Nicky responded with a grin of understanding, when she added, “Things are completely different now. I feel I don’t owe anybody anything anymore.” She took a deep and dramatic breath. “I feel absolutely free to tell you why the CIA fired you.”
    My body began to tremble from the inside out. I recalled the expression: shaken to the core. Well, my core was definitely shaking. Here was Lisa, offering an answer to the question I’d come to accept as unanswerable, except I couldn’t really have accepted it—could I? — because at that instant all there was in the world was the woman on the phone who had the information I so desperately needed. My son had vanished from my consciousness as though he’d never walked into the room.
    Truthfully, as though he’d never been born. My years as a mother dissolved and I was back in Personnel, thinking I’d been called in because I was going to get a promotion, given the title of