by Daniel Pyne
“I’m paid well for what I do,” she insists.
“For all those long hours, the busted holidays and missed birthdays? Disney World, Grand Canyon. Texas and Grandpa, twice. Paid well for your incredible doglike dedication to the firm?”
She says, “Now you’re just being mean.”
Jeremy chews and nods. Part of him regrets playing this broken record again. He’s no longer interested in the salad. His phone chimes with another text message, probably from Jenny, but he doesn’t bother to look at it. “You’re not that old. Lots of experience. International sales. You could hire on with some K Street lobbying outfit selling almonds to the Chinese or Stingers to the Saudis. Pull down serious money; solid up your retirement.”
Frowning, his mother says, offhand, “Nobody should be selling the House of Saud anything.”
“Mom.”
“Joke.” But her unamused look suggests it wasn’t. “And ‘not that old’ sounds like damning with faint praise. Compared to what? Flight attendants?”
He puts down his spoon and wipes his mouth with his napkin, frustrated. “Never mind.”
“So”—she studies him for a moment—“would we even be having this conversation if your father had been the one who wasn’t always around when you wanted him?”
Now he feels like he’s nine years old, complaining about her missing his star turn as one of Fagin’s orphans in a local high school musical production of Oliver! But he can’t stop himself. “I’m just saying. Well paid? Mom, even an entry-level credit-swap trader’s half-year bonus last year on Wall Street was probably more than you’ve made in your whole fucking career.”
His mother stares at him, her eyes opaque, unreadable, but unspeakably sad, the way he remembers them looking down at him when, in the middle of the night, she was called away and woke him up to say goodbye. Suddenly he feels unsettled, his mouth dry, his hands tingling, the sounds of the restaurant rattling around them as if somebody turned up the treble. Sometimes, when he’s with her, the old anxiety and resentment just boil up and over.
“You wanted me to study philosophy, as an undergrad,” he mumbles, meaning it to be sarcastic, but she takes him literally.
“I was seventeen when you were born. I never got to go to college. I wanted you to have opportunities that I didn’t.”
Same old complaints, same old rationales, the broken record. Things that cannot be undone, words that cannot be unsaid.
“I know,” he mumbles.
For a moment, she doesn’t respond, and whatever emotion lurks behind his mother’s temperate, unwavering gaze is too well disguised for him to gauge it. “Why don’t you try this: whenever you look at me, tell yourself, I am not going to bend over every day, like my mom, and let the world kick my butt.”
Jeremy shakes his head, his face hot. “I would never say that.” He doesn’t want to meet her steady gaze.
“We did the best we could,” she insists. More than a flicker of hurt in her eyes. “I’d like to think I played a part.”
“I never said you didn’t.” It’s all he can think to say. He loves her, he resents her, he’s scared about what might be going on with her slips and misremembering, but right now he just wants to escape to the safe refuge of his campus apartment and clear his head.
“You don’t need to take care of me,” his mother says, still reading his mind. “Or worry.”
“I won’t. I don’t.”
“You’re lying,” she says. “It’s sweet. I’m sorry if I ruined your life.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Okay.” Her smile of surrender lifts his mood like clouds clearing on a windy day. He can’t help it. The power of Mom. Making it okay when he dropped out of T-ball and his dad looked so disappointed; letting him pretend a cold was lingering long after it was gone so that he could stay home with her and the new baby Jenny until she had to go away on another months-long sales trip on the other side of the world. He’s nine years old, flustered, frustrated, self-conscious, wanting that mom all the other kids have, who bakes cookies and cries at the end of movies. But not willing to give up the mom he has.
“You still tutor downtown?” he asks her.
“The little kids, yeah. I’m glad you and Jenny talked me into it.”
“Once a week?”
“More or less. I’ve cut back.”
“And the other nights?”
“Busy.” Her eyes narrow; he can see that she’s probably gun shy about where he might be going with this. “Nap. Knit. Cook. You know. Reality TV.” Jeremy recalls that she and his father rarely watched television when he was growing up, and his mother was notorious for her calamities in the kitchen. “I unwind; is that okay?”
“Did you really see the doctor?”
She squares her shoulders and puts her knife and fork across her plate. “Why would I lie to you about it?”
He doesn’t know. That’s another thing that worries him, but he’s not willing to push it any further today. “Jenny and I think you should start dating.”
“What?”
He grins, enjoying putting her on her heels for once. “Swipe right on some desperate widower and, you know, have a social life, find some release.”
“Release?”
“You’re the one who brought the subject up. Dad’s been gone for, what, almost a decade? And now you’re geezing out. YOLO, Mom. Pop that female Viagra, and you go, girl.” Her spontaneous laugh is infectious. “Why not?”
“Tinder?” His mother approximates a scandalized grimace. “Be a sex fiend?” The latest of her sundry smiles spreads; this one he knows is genuine. “You’re funny.” She reaches out, touches his arm again, and leaves her small hand on it. “You want to go, don’t let me keep you.”
“No,” he lies, again. “All good.” He pushes his salad plate back, done. They can order coffee. No harm in his staying a little longer; the seminar starts at four.
“I love our lunches,” she says absently, looking around the restaurant with her restless curiosity.
Even at his father’s funeral, he’s never seen his mother cry.
CHAPTER FOUR
Pregnant at seventeen.
In love with a hard body: hot, dreamy, her forever boy, Dennis Troon, and his blue bedroom eyes, who too late she came to understand would do anything for her—anything, that is, except be something her father had warned from the get-go Dennis was not nor would ever be: employable.
A minor detail that Jeremy needn’t ever know.
Silty Bethesda sunshine glints off windshield trim and resurrects her dull headache. Low-slung stone-and-glass buildings rise like oversize tombstones from an undulating terrain of well-fed bluegrass under the standard well-pruned arboreal canopy. The term industrial park is, Sentro thinks, such a free-market fuck-you.
She slips her Audi wagon through a guard gate into the fresh inky asphalt of the Solomon Systems parking lot. Her cell phone hums. Text: Where are you? Here. I’m here, she thinks. Always here. She texts back: Walking in. The engine ticks with heat as she gets out, and like an earworm, the rhythm hounds her all the way inside.
Baby Jeremy was not even six months old when she enlisted. She did it mostly to secure health care but also with eyes on the GI Bill to pay for her college afterward, because Dennis was getting his AA from the University of Phoenix and the high-paying medical lab job they’d practically guaranteed in their brochures. The plan was for her to work until he finished, then let him support her while she went back to school. Jenny arrived four years later, a happy consequence of Sentro’s reconciliation with Dennis in the wake of the troubled Berlin posting that had estranged them. Not exactly an accident, but the second child guaranteed Sentro would re-up, since by that time army intelligence had found her, used her, and, by way of apology, fast-tracked her into a West Point program with a covert detour through Langley. It meant Pentagon pay and silver bars on her collar and sundry other officer’s entitlements no family of four (carrying the sizable student debt Denni
s had, while she was overseas, racked up in successive well-intentioned but unrealized for-profit-college career moves like his AA in political psychology or the bogus certificate program in elevator repair) could walk away from.
Regret never figured into it. Life unspooled, and they gathered it as best they could. It was only from the outside looking in that a more conventional world would, now and then, intrude and pass judgment. She didn’t care what the world thought. The reverse-role thing that her son is so curious about? No, Dennis never felt emasculated, never ceased to find the softness in her, loved her unconditionally, called her by her maiden name because he rejected the notion that anyone should have to lose themselves in a marriage, and she steadfastly believed, more and more as she drifted deeper into the darkness of the shadow wars and became addicted to it, that he was by far the better one to raise their kids.
What would he have said to Jeremy at lunch?
Her husband.
Has it really been nine years?
Hushed cubicles and shared work spaces squared in by a perimeter of glass-walled private offices, airy, bright, plants in pots. Sentro hurries through. She has a pace she keeps, faster than the engine ticking, which began after that cataclysmic first posting in Berlin as the wall came down and the Cold War took a turn to something even colder; it comes from never wanting anything to overtake her again. When they were little, her children complained about it, falling behind her on errands, on walks to school, at museums or amusement parks during her time off, dragging their feet and whining. She’d slow for a moment, then, invariably, return to her natural pace again, and they’d have to skip-hop to keep up.
Coworkers greet her, office banter; she banters back reflexively. These are not friends so much as coconspirators, but she’s comfortable here, plays well with others; they all speak a common language. Click of keyboards. Scent of burned coffee. The familiar soft compression of sound and light, low trill of landlines ringing, and her feet on the carpet dull. It reassures her, speaks of safety and civilization.
Her space is in the corner, tidy and spare, big windows overlooking the river, light streaming in. Unless they paid close attention, a casual observer would take it for middle management digs, which is misdirection but also the goal. Clients expect a high level of invisibility. And Solomon wants to afford them the illusion of calm. Just another day at the office.
Hers has few personal touches. Hand cream she never uses. Old picture of the husband and kids. A bowling trophy someone gave her as a joke, unaware that it was one of the few activities she had shared with her father growing up. In a bottom drawer, sexy blue spike heel pumps she bought on impulse once for an embassy cocktail party and never wore again but loves to look at. Corkboard map of the world with pushpins of all the places she’s been. A generic abstract watercolor that matches the color scheme of the building. Bookshelf, binders with no labels. Her long career has led to this, and she’s content with it. But lost in tangled thoughts of concussions, consequences, Jeremy and Jenny, and what a suddenly seemingly uncertain future may bring.
“Where the hell have you been?” A colleague she’s known for years has poked his bristly head in. She has no intention of telling him. But for a moment she draws a blank on his name and feels a hollow panic. “Ready?”
“For what?”
“Peer review of your Cyprus thing.”
Reno. His name comes back to her with a rush of relief. Retro flattop that reminds her of the cut grass of the parkway; in fact, stubble encircles his head, crown to chin, like one of those head warmers you wear under a ski helmet. Sentro suspects his wife trims it with pet shears. Their little boys—there’re three of them, right?—have the identical haircut but nothing on their chins yet.
“Did you forget? I texted you. Ten o’clock.” Reno—someone nicknamed him “Lucky”—Elsayed. “Jeez Louise, Aubrey, where’s your head?”
Where indeed?
“Reno—” The trick to improving memory for names is to use them more often in casual conversation. She read this once, in an airline seat-back magazine.
“What?”
Wait, what was she going to say? Is it Reno Elsayed who has the annoying habit of compressing everyone’s name into a single-syllable hip-hop sobriquet? No, that can’t be right.
“Earth to Aubrey.”
Cyprus.
“You okay?”
“Much better now. It was mostly the jet lag.” Cyprus. She laughs. “Of course I haven’t forgotten the meeting; I was just . . .” She wasn’t “just” anything, so she lets the thought hang. “Never mind. Tell them I’ll be right in.”
He lingers, though, frowning, so Sentro quickly gathers papers together from the orderly disorder on her desk. Cyprus. The hotel hostage swap and exfiltration in Nicosia. She had forgotten about the debrief. Fuck. Into a stray empty folder she slips charts, surveys, cell intercepts, surveillance transcripts, and satellite imagery of the city, the Mesaoria plain, and the river Pedieos. Digital photographs of a blown-out building, dead bodies—definitely not your standard middle manager fare.
“You want me to have them push it back a half hour?”
“No.” She stands up. “Good to go.”
But he stays in the doorway. “What the heck happened over there?”
Sentro says, “Oh, you know.” Folder in hand, she’s squeezing past him. “The usual fuck the what.”
CHAPTER FIVE
There’s this throw rug of crushed cigarette butts back by the garbage bin, which Jenny doesn’t understand, because how hard is it to put your cancer stick out and take two steps and flick what’s left into the trash? Hundreds of flat cellulose cylinders with their ragged charred ends, like spent bullet casings, which, she muses as she takes another deep, unpleasant drag on her last Spirit, is totally apropos.
No, she’s not trying to quit. Yes, she knows it’s a disgusting habit that doesn’t even give her pleasure anymore.
What’s your fucking point?
A dolphin-gray Amazon Prime delivery van bounces down the alley that flanks the minimall, stirring up a miasma of Baltimore urban decay. The driver’s rosacea and aspirational neck beard are familiar to her from all his chummy banter across the barista bar: his name is Chet or maybe Chuck, skinny decaf butterscotch macchiato, no foam, no tip. Now he leers at her from the open side window as he drives past. Last week she complained to her manager about Chet’s relentless attempts to ask her out and got a lecture on customer primacy and a how-to on using her wit and charm to defuse uncomfortable interactions “before they start,” and while doing so perhaps she should upsell to the man the apricot scones that are always piling up because they arrive from the bakery rock hard. The manager concluded with a suggestion that Jenny not wear so much makeup. And a long-sleeve shirt would cover the dueling dragons that curl down around her upper arms.
He’s an asshole, sometimes.
She smokes, making the most of her illicit break to take out the garbage. Her phone chimes. Text from Jeremy. Her brother had his monthly lunch with their mom; no insight into the memory lapses. Because they both share the suspicion that she hasn’t actually seen a doctor, Jeremy was going to call the neurology clinic directly to find out if their mom made an appointment. Jenny was pretty sure it wasn’t going to get them anywhere. Her brother’s message confirms it: if they want to know about her private medical matters, the receptionist told him they should ask their mother directly.
Jenny sends a shrug emoji. Then the smiling pile of poo.
Texting her brother is so much better than talking to him, and this is why she invented the argument that she’s been able to string out for the past three months. Its catalyst was a typical Jeremy Troon harangue on how Jenny was pissing her life away on sybaritic indulgences in childish defiance of their mother’s stolid and cautious career path. This rapidly devolved into a shouting match in which Jenny accused her brother of feigning ADD in high school to buy more time for his SAT tests so he could get into Johns Hopkins, something she didn’t r
eally believe but had always been jealous about because her own test anxiety had resulted in mediocre scores and, by this same theory, doomed her to the third-rate state school she’d dropped out of junior year. Jeremy countered with a dig about weed stealing her ambition. She insisted weed helped her anxiety and accused him of only dating sociopaths, citing Kimmy, then kicked him out and cut him off except for texting, which didn’t count as real conversation but enabled her to keep tabs on him since that was one thing she had promised her father before he’d died.
With her mother, the communication blackout has been longer than three months, and Jenny didn’t need to invent anything. The last time they were together was Jenny’s birthday, just the three of them. Her mother has made a point of mustering “the family” on special occasions for the past few years; Jenny finds this super ironic, considering that they’re all adults now and that her mother missed so many important family milestones back when they were important. When they were kids. Her kids.
They were never close, Jenny has decided, never had the mother-daughter thing Jenny assumed all her friends had. The lunches, the intimate girl talks, shopping for prom dresses, and sharing little secrets. Her grandfather once told her, in his blunt, declarative style, that the reason she didn’t get along with her mom was because they were so much alike. “Coupla ornery warrior princesses,” he growled. “Two peeves in a pod.”
She doesn’t believe that for a minute.
Their relationship got worse after her father died, when, as irony would have it, her mother began spending more time at home. The mom phase lasted fourteen uncomfortable months, and then Jeremy moved back from the dorm to be Jenny’s adult surrogate for the remainder of her high school while their mother (the professional Aubrey Sentro) went back out into the world of commerce and crisis and did whatever it was she did there.
