Undercover Read Free Page B

failure to remember, this failure to act—and Dad would have to start all over again. “Working for pennies,” Dad would say. “Working for peanuts and a long, tall glass of pain.”
    “You’re supposed to be your own boss,” Mom would say to Dad on the telephone at night. “And the front doorknob is broken and the back sliding screen door is off its track, and isn’t that your job too? To be here with your family? To fix things? Whom do you love, Robert? What and whom? Make up your mind.” And then my mom would stop and say she was sorry. Yes, she would say. Yes, she understood. Dad would say something to make her laugh, and she’d tell him that she loved him, and then he’d make her blush.
    But the night before, the talk hadn’t ended withlove, and when Mom hung up, she was crying. There were clear streaks down her powdery foundation. Her lips had lost their painted color and were two thin, pale-blue lines. Jilly was sprawled across the family-room couch, a nighttime soap opera turned on. “Mom,” she said, offering up her ginger ale, “come here and watch,” for this was Jilly’s way, which was the way she’d learned from Mom: When bad things happen, grab a drink and an old worn blanket and lie yourself right down.
    I went to the pond to think. I went to the pond, and no one found me, and when I came home nobody wondered where I’d been, or at least nobody asked. Most of the leaves of autumn were already on the ground, except for a few yellow flags here and there. There was a raven in most every tree, but not a single hawk to be found, and the sky was poked to bits with the nakedness of trees. The color of the day was the color of a storm that had chosen not to come.
    You could think of the dock as one long ricketystair that perched above the pond. You could think of sitting there all afternoon with your feet hinged down, watching the changeless girl in her autumn world, bright fallen leaves paddling over her head. I thought of all the things she must have seen and all she could not say. About the mansions that once had been and the people who had lived in them, all gone now. About how nobody but me had laid claim to the pond, at least not that particular autumn.
    I thought about Dad. I thought about the hills he said he climbed every day and the famous people he saw in their everyday clothes and how trolleys supposedly went up and down with people hanging out their windows. I thought about the big granite wedge that was Stuart Small’s building. Dad said the granite had a copper sparkle to it, and that no matter where you went inside the place, you felt like you’d been gleamed. Stuart Small was a little man who wore elevating shoes, Dad said. He’d shaved his head to give himself stature. He’d beenbuying other companies as a way of getting big, and now everything was cracking at the seams. Dad was there because Small needed advice, and that was Dad’s forte—advising. Dad took thoughts that were messy and he made them neat. He drew out clear lines between choices. You could ask him what might happen and he’d paint a picture for you. You could tell him you were worried, and he’d listen.
    Which is why I wished that Dad were back—because he’d know what to do with Lila’s Theo, which was, by the way, what everyone now called him; he was that possessed. He was Lila’s Theo, and he was at her side morning, noon, and probably night—between classes and in the lunchroom and, whenever weather permitted, on the sloping turf of the school’s front yard, a place we all called Romance Hill. Romance Hill is where new lovers go to announce their loverhood. It’s like taking out an ad on The New York Times ’s front page.
    Except, in the quiet before school actually began, before Lila’s bus had turned up in the line, I hadTheo to myself, or he had me. All I ever had to do was show up at my locker, and there he’d be, sort of prowling around, wanting to talk but not wanting to talk, wanting my