Spoonbenders

by Daryl Gregory

  “Like a glove,” Graciella said quietly. She swallowed the rest of her drink.

  “I’m sorry I had to tell you that,” Teddy said. “But when I think of you, and your boys…”

  “No. It’s all right,” she said. She looked into the glass as if it was about to magically refill. “My husband didn’t kill Rick Mazzione,” she said.

  “I didn’t say he did.”

  “He’s an idiot, and an asshole, and he may have done plenty of other things—but not that one.”

  She reached into her big purse, pulled out a green bag, a soft-shell, insulated lunch box with cartoon characters on the front. “I’d like to show you something.” She unzipped the bag. Inside were a blue plastic freezer pack and a clear plastic sandwich container. She pushed the container over to him.

  He opened the lid, and inside were half a dozen gray pebbles. No, not pebbles.

  “Rick Mazzione’s teeth,” she said. “Nick Senior would very much like them.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a long story,” she said, and called for another bourbon.

  8

  Irene

  She waited fifty feet from Gate C31, half hidden by a column, as the passengers from Flight 1606 disembarked. She felt like a grocery store dog, one of those jittery creatures tied up outside the glass doors, desperately scanning each human face for its master: Are you the one I love? Are you?

  Then she thought: Oh God. The word “love” is in my head.

  She was not in love. How could you fall in love with an AOL icon, or a few hundred screenfuls of text? The thrill she felt every time a computer informed her that she did, indeed, have mail was as palpable as a lover’s touch.

  People kept pouring down the Jetway. It was an early morning flight, and many of the passengers were mussed and sluggish, as if they’d woken up to a fire alarm; they reached the main corridor and peered left and right and left again, trying to get their bearings, before lurching off. The business travelers, however, were all business, from their business jackets to their business skirts and their shiny business shoes. They sliced through the crowd of civilians like business sharks.

  Last Dad Standing—aka Joshua Lee—was one of those business types, a man who traveled across the country all the time in, yes, business class. She was terrified, though, that she wouldn’t recognize him. He’d sent a picture of himself standing in the shade of a palm tree, but her black-and-white ink-jet printer had turned it all into a low-contrast smear, so she’d left the printout at home. The harder she tried to keep the picture in mind, however, the more she doubted her memory.

  But there was another reason failing to recognize him terrified her. After they’d been talking online for more than a week, they’d had this exchange:

  LAST DAD STANDING: I have something I need to tell you. Two things, actually.

  IRENE T: Sounds serious.

  LAST DAD STANDING: First—my daughter is Chinese.

  IRENE T: That’s great! I didn’t know you’d adopted.

  LAST DAD STANDING: Not exactly.

  And she’d thought: Not exactly? What did that mean? They’d stolen her?

  LAST DAD STANDING: That brings us to the second thing. Her parents are Chinese, too.

  She almost typed back, “Of course her parents are Chinese.” Then the penny dropped. Joshua Lee.

  She felt a rush of embarrassment: retroactive, conditional embarrassment. Had she ever said something bad about Chinese people? Or Asians in general? She mentally scrolled back through the messages they’d exchanged. But of course a racist wouldn’t even remember if she’d said something off-color.

  Then she became doubly embarrassed when she realized he must be waiting for her to respond. And probably laughing. What a jerk, to tell her this way! Quickly she’d typed back:

  IRENE T: Have you told your daughter yet that her parents are Asians?

  LAST DAD STANDING: Heh. We’re waiting for the right time to break it to her.

  IRENE T: And me, too, evidently.

  LAST DAD STANDING: Are you mad I waited?

  IRENE T: No. I don’t care what you are.

  LAST DAD STANDING: That’s a relief. Because I’m actually an 80 yr old grandmother in Flagstaff.

  IRENE T: Then stop typing and knit me something.

  They exchanged biographical details like trading cards. He was third-generation Chinese, she was third-generation on the Irish side and who-knows-how-many generations on the Greek side (Dad was hazy on his family history). Culturally, the widest gulf between them was southwestern versus mid-. (They ignored Male versus Female and White Collar versus Working Poor, and she didn’t bring up Sane versus Psionic.)

  She tried to tell him his race didn’t matter, that he didn’t even need to mention it, but he said of course he did; it would have been the first thing she noticed if they’d met face-to-face…

  …which was what they were about to do.

  The flow of exiting passengers slowed to a trickle, then stopped. Half a minute later, a pair of flight attendants came out, wheeling their micro bags behind them. Where was he? Did he slip past without her noticing? Or was he not on the flight?

  “Irene?” a voice said.

  She turned, and looked up into Joshua Lee’s smiling face. Of course she recognized him. He was exactly himself.

  She lifted her arm as if to shake his hand, then realized that was ridiculous. She leaned forward and hugged him. His chest was solid. And his hand against her back, so real. The thereness of him shocked her.

  “So this is you,” he said.

  “It’s me,” she said.

  “It’s so good to—”

  “No!” she said. “You promised.”

  “Right,” he said. “The rules. No pleasantries.”

  “And no emotion words.” She winced apologetically. “I know it’s weird.”

  He started to say something, then stopped himself. “Is hunger an emotion?”

  “Edge case,” she said.

  “Can I ask if you’re hungry? Would you like something to eat?”

  “I’ll allow it,” she said.

  “Because I’ve got three and a half hours before my flight, and I want to try that sandwich you were talking about—the combo.”

  “Oh, you can’t handle the combo. Besides, it’ll take us a half hour to get to my car, another twenty minutes to drive to the restaurant—”

  “That’s plenty of time.”

  They walked toward the exit, her skin inches from his. She’d been so wrong. Hunger was no edge case.

  —

  One night in the chat room, he’d mentioned that he frequently came through Chicago on the way to New York and sat through long layovers. She ignored the hint. He brought it up a couple more times, and then finally came out and said that he was flying through O’Hare next week and wanted to see her. She tried to explain that this was impossible, and that led to a long discussion of what he called her “trust issues” and she called her “reality issues.”

  LAST DAD STANDING: Why are you so afraid I’ll lie to you?

  IRENE T: Everybody lies. I’m not saying you’re a bad person. I lie all the time. I’ll lie to you!

  LAST DAD STANDING: You can see how I might have trouble with this.

  IRENE T: That’s why it won’t work for us to meet. I just can’t take it in person. Not with someone I care about.

  LAST DAD STANDING: See? You care about me! I win.

  IRENE T: Unless I’m lying. But I’m not. You see how nice it is to believe me?

  But he wouldn’t give up. He wore her down, and eventually she agreed to meet him at that airport, but only if he followed certain rules.

  IRENE T: You can’t say, It’s so nice to meet you. You can’t say, You look nice.

  LAST DAD STANDING: What if you DO look nice?

  IRENE T: Doesn’t matter. If you say it once, then you’d feel you have to say it every time.

  LAST DAD STANDING: I don’t see the problem if I’m telling the truth. If I�
��m happy to see you, I want to tell you.

  IRENE T: Tell me here, if you have to. But not out there.

  LAST DAD STANDING: Where you can see my big lying liar’s face?

  IRENE T: I’m sorry. I can’t do this any other way.

  LAST DAD STANDING: Then that’s the way we’ll do it. I’m happy to try total honesty. No lie.

  As they drove out to Johnny’s Red Hots, trying to fill the silence without tripping over her conversational rules, she realized she’d made a terrible mistake. “Total honesty” was not what she was asking for; that was what they already had, when they were online together, talking in the dark through their keyboards. She was asking for something impossible: earmuffs that filtered out untruths yet let the rest of his voice through.

  Johnny’s had just opened for lunch. She wasn’t hungry, but she ordered fries to be sociable. He ordered the combo and carried it back to the table in wonder.

  “I can’t believe this is allowed by state law. You can’t just put a pile of shaved beef—”

  “Italian beef,” she said.

  “Italian beef on top of a sausage—”

  “Italian sausage.”

  “Right, and then they just let you eat it?”

  “In Chicago,” she said, “meat is a condiment.”

  Food was a safe topic. As were weather, traffic, air travel, and everything else they didn’t want to talk about. She wanted to ask him if he’d spent as much time picking out his clothes this morning as she did; if she looked like, sounded like what he expected; if he was as nervous and giddy as she was. But all that was off the table, by her own decree. When Joshua finished the combo (and he did finish it, sopping up the juice with the last of the soggy bun and popping it into his mouth like a born Southsider), she realized that even with the drive back and the walk through security, they had an hour to fill and nothing to fill it with.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done this.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m glad—” He stopped himself. No feeling words.

  “See?” she said. “I’m a basket case.”

  He thought for a moment. Then he reached across the table and put his hand over hers.

  “No talking, then,” he said. “Let’s just look at each other. And later—”

  “Later we can say everything online,” she said.

  “Like good online Americans,” he said, and she laughed.

  “You can keep holding my hand, though,” she said.

  “I should really go wash off the grease.” And that was the truth.

  They drove back in a silence that was thoroughly drowned out by the roar of blood rushing through her. There was something she needed to tell him before he went, something that could end the relationship before it started. After shuffling through the metal detectors, they walked hand in hand through the terminal to his next gate.

  “I have to tell you about who I am,” she said. “About my family.”

  “I know all about the Amazing Telemachus Family,” he said.

  She stopped, let go of his hand. “You do?”

  “I asked around, and a friend of mine knew all about you. I figured you were waiting for me to look you up. When you finally told me your last name, you made it sound notorious.”

  “I did not.”

  He gave her an amused look. “Am I lying?”

  He wasn’t. She felt a hot dread, nine-year-old Irene stepping before the cameras.

  “So what do you think?” she asked.

  “Without using feeling words?” His voice was amused, his eyes kind. She couldn’t see a hint of the disdain she’d imagined.

  “Right,” she said. “Rules.” She put her arm through his, and they resumed walking.

  “I do have a lot of questions, though,” he said.

  “Let’s talk about it later,” she said. Everything was easy in front of the screen, their words zipping effortlessly between the satellites. They’d talked about his divorce, her near-marriage to Lev, his stressful job and her mind-numbing one. Mostly they’d talked about their children. He had joint custody of his ten-year-old daughter, Jun, and worried about the effects of the divorce on her. Irene fretted about Matty, master of sulking and secrecy, who was spending an inordinate amount of time alone in his room.

  LAST DAD STANDING: You can’t worry about it. Kids are like that.

  IRENE T: You have a daughter who tells you everything.

  LAST DAD STANDING: Matty’s a teenage boy. I never told my parents anything, and look how I turned out. Divorced, in therapy…Oh wait. You should worry.

  IRENE T: You’re in therapy?

  LAST DAD STANDING: Was. I’ve kind of slacked off lately.

  IRENE T: Maybe I should get Matty a therapist. When I talk to him, I feel like it’s a cross-examination.

  LAST DAD STANDING: Permission to treat teenager as a hostile witness, your honor.

  IRENE T: Exactly!

  Her family’s history in the psi business had been the only topic she hadn’t had the courage to bring up, and now that he’d hauled it into the light she couldn’t believe she’d held on to the secret so long. The thing about skeletons was, you never knew how much space they were taking up in the closet until you got rid of them.

  Right now she needed to walk without words, arm in arm with a handsome man who was inexplicably willing to put up with her insane demands, who was not freaked out by her history as a pint-size mind reader.

  A man who was about to leave her.

  She and Joshua stood without speaking, and as the time to board approached she leaned into him. He put his arm around her.

  There you are, she thought. The scent of him touched off something in her back brain that made her think of sunlight and wood and salt.

  The PA blared. “That’s me,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. She did not want to let go of his arm. But she did it. That was the Irene thing to do.

  “Thank you for coming out here,” he said. “Taking time off.”

  “I figured the grocery store could get along without me,” she said.

  “I’m coming back through again on Thursday,” he said. “Maybe we could do this again? It’ll be in the afternoon, so maybe we could, I don’t know, have a drink. Go someplace nice?”

  “I’m sorry this was so weird,” she said.

  “It wasn’t weird at all.”

  The PA called his section again. He looked over his shoulder, and when he turned back he saw the change in her. She couldn’t hide it.

  “Oh, Irene.” He thought she was sorry to see him go. She was, but that wasn’t why she was holding back tears.

  Then she saw him understand. “Fuck,” he said quietly.

  The first lie hung in the air between them. It had been weird. Crazy weird. And he’d been too afraid to tell the crazy weird woman who’d driven out here to meet him.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean—”

  He stopped himself in another lie. Because he did mean it, and he knew that she knew that he meant it. Both lies were too small to worry about. It was that they were the first in an unstoppable cascade of untruths and half-truths and polite lies and outright deceptions that would pile up around her until she couldn’t see him anymore. She’d been caught in this avalanche before. She didn’t think she could dig her way out a second time.

  When she was young, she thought she’d gotten the best talent in the family. No one could take advantage of her. No one could pull the wool over her eyes. While everyone else meandered through life as prey for hucksters and con artists and cads, she was fully armed with x-ray specs and a shoulder-mounted bullshit detector. She was the girl who could not be fooled.

  God, what a fool she was.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “Irene, please, I don’t want to leave like this.”

  “It’s okay,” she lied. “It’s okay. I just can’t—”

  Can’t what? she asked herself. Can’t do this again. Can’
t even start this.

  “I just can’t.” And then she walked away before more words, his or hers, could trip her up.

  —

  She drove home slowly, for safety reasons. The state of her soul was not fit for Chicago traffic. When she finally pulled into the driveway, she sat for a long time, staring blankly over the steering wheel. Then Buddy stepped out of the front door wearing an apron and oven mitts. He waved for her to come in.

  “Well, fuck,” she said.

  Inside the house, the air was thick with the smell of warm cookies—white chocolate macadamia nut cookies. A dozen were already on the cooling rack, and Buddy was pulling another pan from the oven.

  “I need all of these,” she said. He nodded.

  Mom had directed her cooking lessons at Irene, but it was Buddy who’d memorized her recipes. He would make them, but only on his schedule. You couldn’t ask him to make Mom’s pepper steak, or the bean and bacon soup, or the macadamia nut cookies. You had to wait for the whim to strike, then hope you were around to reap the benefits.

  Mail sat on the counter. She shuffled through the stack, dreading a bill addressed to her, but the only thing of interest was a fat envelope for Teddy, from ATI—Advanced Telemetry Inc. He’d gotten these envelopes for years, on a monthly basis. He never opened them in front of her, and she thought she knew the reason why.

  Matty appeared in the kitchen door, still wearing the yellow Bumblebee shirt Frankie had gotten him. “What is that?” he asked.

  Buddy shut off the oven, grabbed three semi-cooled cookies, and walked out the back door. That was the other thing about his impromptu cooking events: cleanup was on you.

  On the table was a note in her father’s wobbly scrawl: “Irene—Dinner Wednesday Palmer’s. Dress nice.”

  “What’s this about?” Irene asked. Matty shrugged, reached for a cookie. His hair was mussed, and a pair of zits decorated his chin, but his father’s bone structure hid beneath the baby fat. The kid had no idea how handsome he was going to be.