The Best American Short Stories 2012

by Tom Perrotta

  “I don’t know about shock,” Calvin said. “I mean, she can talk normally enough. Shock is a real condition. With real symptoms.”

  “I know what shock is,” Jill said.

  “Pat should give the kid a break. Some space.”

  “Space,” Jill said, her breath an explosion in his ear. “You don’t give a troubled kid too much space. Did you see that chipped tooth?” Jill glanced toward Pat and Jennifer in the front row to make sure she couldn’t be heard. “Pat found her eating raw macaroni for a snack. Right out of the box. Hard as rocks. And this even before Dave died.”

  Calvin nodded at a man and woman they knew casually from church, who lowered themselves into chairs in the row in front of him. Jill smiled at them too and grasped their hands. Then she turned back to Calvin and frowned. “Don’t you think that’s kind of strange?”

  “Sure,” Calvin said.

  “Pat asked her why, and she said she liked the way it sounded in her ears. The crunching. She said she liked how sharp it was against her tongue.”

  “It’s strange, but it doesn’t seem like a huge thing.”

  “Pat worries,” Jill said. “And now she has to deal with Dora on top of everything else. That’s a hurt that’s still fresh.”

  “She keeps it that way,” Calvin said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I heard you,” Jill hissed in his ear. “Pat didn’t ask for any of this, you know.”

  “What?” said Calvin, as the organ playing picked up pace and volume.

  “You can’t even muster up the generosity to be nice. Don’t think I don’t see it.”

  “What?” said Calvin, touching his ear. He knew it was childish. “What? What?”

  Jill shook her head and set her teeth.

  The hymn was one Calvin recognized, “In the Sweet By-and-By,” and its message was that everything would be okay after everyone was dead. In the front row, Pat’s shoulders started to shake, and she reached for Jennifer’s hands, clutching them to her chest. This pulled the girl’s far arm awkwardly across her body, though she remained facing straight ahead, in the direction of the coffin. This and everything else seemed to Calvin to boil down to resistance—to giving in or not giving in, even when you couldn’t say exactly what there was to be resisted or what made you want to.

  After the funeral there was a confrontation in the parking lot. Calvin saw it coming. The second wife moving up behind Pat, Calvin’s own nod to her, a woman he’d met only once, causing Pat to turn around on her heel. The second wife was already hugging Jennifer, and when the woman handed her a pocket-sized book of collected love poems, explaining that they had belonged to Dave Lott’s mother, Calvin saw the girl’s chin trembling.

  “How thoughtful,” Pat said crisply, stepping in between them, extending her hand to the woman. “Thank you.”

  The second wife untangled her fingers from Pat’s and passed a hand over her brown bobbed hair, as if it needed smoothing. “I loved him,” she said, not very nicely.

  “Fine,” Pat said.

  “I loved him,” said the woman again. She turned to Jennifer. “You should know that.”

  Jennifer nodded. She looked nervously at her mother, who had begun to nod too.

  “You loved him,” Pat said, nodding, “and you want my daughter to know that.”

  “That’s right,” said the woman.

  “Let’s all take it easy,” said Calvin.

  “Pat,” said Jill, “let’s go.”

  “You loved him,” Pat said again.

  “You wouldn’t know the first thing about that,” the woman said.

  “Don’t tell me—” Pat started to say, but the second wife turned away. “He had a family,” Pat called after her. “So don’t tell me.” The woman kept walking, and Pat began to shake. Calvin thought she might be about to collapse, which wouldn’t help anyone. As he helped her to her rental car, her upper arm felt so soft and old that he found himself compelled to handle her tenderly. This made him cross.

  “I’m sorry,” Pat said to no one in particular.

  “You were nice to even try to speak with her,” said Jill. “Considering.”

  Jennifer stood to the side, trying to fit the book into her small blue purse. Pat sat heavily in the passenger seat but kept her feet on the pavement.

  “Put your head between your knees,” Jill said, and helped Pat flop forward.

  When she raised herself, Calvin placed his hands on her stockinged calves and folded her legs into the car.

  “I’m sorry,” Pat said again. She clutched Calvin’s forearm and closed her eyes, leaning her head back against the headrest.

  “Okay,” Calvin said, his hand on the door. “We’re all done here.”

  “I’ll drive her,” Jill said to Calvin, still angry and not looking at him.

  “I’ll go with you,” Jennifer said to Calvin. It was the first thing she’d said to him, and her voice seemed light—too agreeable, like she anticipated being told she couldn’t.

  “Take Jennifer,” Jill said, as if Jennifer hadn’t suggested it. The girl was already moving toward Calvin’s car.

  Once they were on the road, it began to rain. The windshield clouded over and Calvin turned on the fan. Jennifer stared out the passenger window. She rolled it down several inches, moving her face toward the cool air. They drove in silence for a few blocks. Calvin was trying to decide whether it was a comfortable or uncomfortable silence. He wondered if it could be a different thing for each person or if perceptions about silence were mutual, like an odor in the room no one could ignore.

  “I’m sorry about your dad,” he said, finally. “I liked him.”

  Jennifer was still looking out the window. They passed a storage facility. Low, putty-colored buildings stretched back from the road for a good two acres. The thought of all that stuff, just sitting there, made Calvin feel heavy.

  “You know how he died, right? Basically, he was eaten alive.”

  “He was very sick,” Calvin said.

  “I didn’t think his job was even dangerous.”

  “No, no,” Calvin said. “That’s not it. It’s not dangerous. This was just a freak thing. Hardly ever happens. He could have picked this up at the laundromat or in his own garage. Bacteria are everywhere. All kinds of bacteria.”

  “So then everywhere’s dangerous,” said the girl. She shrugged at the revised perspective, rolled down her window all the way, and stuck her face fully into the air. Calvin wondered if she was going to throw up. He wondered if he should pull over. Her long bangs lifted straight off her forehead, standing vertically in the wind. He watched her observing herself in the passenger side mirror for a block. Then she jerked her head back into the car and let it fall against the headrest. Her lips moved, and she said something way in the back of her throat. “I hate her.”

  “Who?”

  Jennifer smiled up at the roof of the car, exposing the chipped tooth. “I do hate her,” she said. The girl’s chest, with her two small beginning breasts, pulsed with what could have been laughing or crying, but she was still just smiling up at the ceiling. “What are we going to do when we get back to your house anyway,” the girl said. “Just stand around?”

  That was exactly what would happen. Calvin thought for a moment. “We could stop by the office, first, if you want. Your dad kept a picture of you on his desk.”

  The girl closed her eyes. It had been the right thing to suggest or the wrong thing, but it was out there now, and he headed in the direction of work. The rain was coming down hard, and the girl felt for the knob to roll up the window. Calvin adjusted the wipers to medium. Their motion and the rain outside made everything in the car seem more still. He turned off the defogger.

  “My mother said that instead of telling her I hated her, I should have taken a dagger and stabbed her in the heart. She said I should have dissolved a bottle of sleeping pills into her coffee.”

  “Your mother’s having a hard time.”

&n
bsp; “She’s a drama queen,” said Jennifer. “She’s always having a hard time.”

  This sounded about right to Calvin, but it also seemed an inappropriate thing for him to confirm. He slowed for a light. The window had begun to fog again, and he switched on the blower.

  “If it makes you feel any better,” he said, “everyone hates their parents once in a while. I hated my parents. My kids are going to hate me, probably.”

  Jennifer looked at him balefully. Calvin felt old. And depressed. He remembered something he hadn’t thought about in years. “What I used to do? I would pretend my parents had been in a car accident. Not that they were seriously hurt, or anything, just one of those fender-benders. I’d be waiting at home, and maybe it would be raining out, like today, and I’d imagine that they slid off the road going really slow, and maybe hit a tree, or a fence. Just hard enough to bump their heads good. Not even any blood.”

  The girl was looking toward the window again, following the staggered water drops in their descending horizontal.

  “Then I’d imagine them walking in the door, looking just like they always did. My father looks a little like Don Knotts. But when they greeted me, it would be different, more polite, like they were talking to someone else’s kid. My mother would ask me what grade I was in. My father would ask me who I liked for the Super Bowl that year. And I didn’t mind telling them. Then I’d ask them if they had any kids, and they’d look at each other and smile and say no, they hadn’t been blessed with children, and I’d know that the accident had taken me right out of their memory, and it felt great. I even kind of liked them.”

  “How old were you?”

  “What?” Calvin said, pulling into his parking spot. “I don’t know. Fifteen, maybe.”

  “I’m fifteen,” she said.

  The girl wore no coat, he realized halfway between the parking lot and the door. The rain was not heavy just now, but they had no umbrella, and by the time they reached the entrance, Jennifer’s hair was damp, and the fuzzy wool of her dress showed rain spots.

  Inside, in the green fluorescent light, the air was chilly. The office had emptied out for the funeral. It felt like coming in to work on a Sunday. Or like Calvin remembered feeling on the days he’d stayed home sick from school, as a child. Like he’d stepped right out of time.

  Jennifer shivered, but shook her head when Calvin offered his coat. She trailed him down the plastic runner toward his cube. One-quarter of a ceiling panel had grown soggy with rain, and water gathered into a drop and fell heavily into a puddle on the plastic. When Calvin’s hard-soled dress shoes hit the spot, his feet slipped out from under him, and he slapped at the floor in a kind of undignified tap dance, grabbing the side of a cubicle to regain his balance. He looked back at Jennifer, but she was reading the name tags on each cubicle they passed.

  Calvin tapped on Dave Lott’s name tag when they reached it. “Want to sit here for a minute? Take some time?”

  “Okay,” said the girl. She lowered herself into her father’s desk chair. She opened one of his drawers and took out an enormous ball made of rubber bands. Then she put the ball back in the drawer and closed it.

  “I’m just going to be right here,” Calvin said, gesturing to his own cube, but the girl didn’t look up. She was moving her hands along the top of Dave Lott’s desk, picking things up and putting them back down.

  Calvin went through some papers. He looked at the calendar on his computer and pulled files for the week’s inspections. Then he saw that his voicemail light was on, so he listened to his messages. One was an announcement from the secretary about the funeral, closing the office for the day. Another message announced the reception at Calvin’s house. When he hung up the phone, he stood and peered over the top of the cube to check on Jennifer, but she wasn’t there.

  He stepped out and looked down the aisle. Empty. He called, “Jennifer?” but the only sound was the dripping ceiling and the buzzing of the fluorescent lights.

  At the other end of the hall, he knocked on the bathroom door, but it was empty. He stepped up onto Rex Hickman’s chair, keeping a precarious balance over the wheels as he scanned the tops of all the cubes. Nothing. He called her name again, but the room gave off no resonance, the sound dead as soon as he closed his mouth, as if there had always been only the fluorescent hum of the lights and the rain worrying the flat roof. As if the girl had never been there.

  He checked the secretary’s office, next to the bathroom. Locked. He crossed to the other aisle, with its identical row of cubicles, and peered into each one, but they were all empty. As if everyone had died, not just Dave Lott, as if bacteria had invaded the world and he was the only, lonely one with immunity. She wasn’t in their supply closet, and she wasn’t in the equipment room. He left the office and stepped out into the rain to check the car, but she wasn’t there either. Back in the office he checked every cubicle again. He called her name over and over. This time, when he poked his head back into the supply closet, he switched on the light and found her wedged between the wall and a stack of boxes filled with printer paper.

  “What’s the idea?” Calvin said. “I didn’t know where you were.”

  Tears formed in the girl’s eyes, and she wrapped her arms around her middle. The closet was on the outside wall, and it was chilly. The ceiling in here dripped too, into a large plastic bucket that sat on an empty pallet. The girl looked miserable and cold.

  “Hey,” Calvin said. “Forget it. It’s no big deal.” He reached for her shoulder and patted her awkwardly. When she didn’t resist, he placed both hands on her shoulders and brought her close to him. The girl was shivering. She sobbed three times into his coat and then quieted, like she was forcing herself to stop. “It’s okay,” Calvin said. He moved his hand over her back and then let go, thinking of the handkerchief he kept in his suit coat pocket, a habit his father had instilled in him. But his overcoat was unbuttoned, and the girl reached her arms inside and around him, holding him at the waist. She pressed the side of her face very hard against his shirt. It was as if she were much younger, he thought, a child, or maybe much older. He moved his hand to the back of her hair, where his fingers found and followed the texture of the damp braid. The girl shivered against him, and he wrapped his raincoat around her with his arms. Against the roof, the rain came down steadily, like it was never going to stop. It rained forty days and forty nights once, Calvin’s grandfather used to say when conversation lagged. Calvin was thinking of using the line himself when the girl’s legs parted on either side of his thigh. He thought it might have been an awkward accident, and he shifted, attempting to reposition her hips to the side of him. Beside his face the top box on a stack had gotten wet from another leak in the ceiling. As he tilted his head back to locate the leaky panel, the girl realigned her hips frontally against him. She began moving. First almost imperceptibly, then steadily, then with more and more urgency. It was a seeking need, intense and confused.

  Calvin stepped backward and felt another wall of boxes solid behind him. The girl stepped with him, into him, though he’d turned his lower body to the left, attempting to hold her and prevent her at the same time. She dropped her face to his chest again. He was only semi-erect, but she found this with the outside of one of her thin legs. He pushed her away and tried to look her in the eye, but her eyes seemed to go straight through to the back of her head. There was something vacant about her face too, like nothing you tried to do for her would make any difference. He rested his chin on top of her hair and kept her hips away from him, with his hands. She pushed her face against his shirt, rubbing it there like a cat and making wounded, wanting noises in the back of her throat. When he brought her body close, finally, it seemed like a kindness. It seemed like the only possible help. She went up and down on her tiptoes against him. After a time, still under the cover of his coat, he reached down to her knees, lifted her skirt, slipped his hand between her legs, and stroked her through her cotton panties to the rhythm of the rain until she shuddered, bleating,
“I, I, I,” into his shirt.

  He held her for a moment more. Then he removed his coat and wrapped it around her shoulders. He tried not to think. He steered her, silently, back into the main room of the office, down the aisle of cubicles, and out the door to the parking lot. In the car, he turned on the heat. He started to speak, meaning to impress upon her how important it would be to say nothing. But the girl was blinking sleepily out the side window, the rain streaking subtle shadows across her face in the dying light, and he closed his mouth and did not disturb her.

  The first guests had already arrived by the time Calvin pulled into the driveway.

  “You okay?” he asked the girl before they got out of the car.

  “Yeah.” With the tip of her tongue, she touched the edge of her broken tooth.

  Jill appeared at the door, and the memory of the storage room flipped off like a switch in his head. “Where have you been?” she asked, and when he told her, she nodded, and the tough set of her face dissolved. She was moved, and this moved him—his heart—toward her in an old way.

  Jennifer entered the house ahead of him. When her mother rose, crying, from the couch to pull her close, the girl went stiff again.

  “I’ll get you some Kleenex,” she said to her mother, and disappeared down the hall.

  Calvin poured punch and made small talk with Robin and her hippie husband. When the nut bowls needed refilling, he did that. He said the same things about Dave Lott over and over. Nice things, about his sense of humor. And he shook his head with everyone else about the way he’d died. He did not picture the man in his head. The boys returned from the sitter’s, and Trent stuck close to Calvin, closed-mouthed and shy around so many new adults. When Robin’s husband tousled his hair, the boy drew back and leaned heavily against Calvin’s legs, a neediness of the body that brought back the moments in the supply closet with the dread remembering of a bad dream. Calvin passed a hand over his own forehead. He felt Jill watching him from across the room, and when he met her tired eyes, she smiled. Calvin forced himself to smile back. He saw Jennifer approaching her mother on the couch.