One Good Turn

by Judith Arnold

  At least this would work out, he vowed to himself. At least he and Jenny would have each other. He would keep in close touch with her, and they would date long-distance during their final year of college, and then, wherever she decided to go to graduate school, he’d go there, too. Perhaps he would also go to graduate school—not law school but a decent Ph.D. program. He would devote himself this year to his studies instead of preparing for the law boards, and then he would earn himself a doctorate. He and Jenny would move into a married-students dorm. They could graduate as Mr. and Mrs. Benning—or Dr. and Mrs., or—why not?—Dr. and Dr.

  Or else he’d take a job. With a degree from Princeton he ought to be able to find some sort of reputable employment, something that paid well enough to cover his new bride’s education loans. Once he was with Jenny, the particulars would fall into place.

  They continued to walk, passing joggers and tourists and other young couples out for the evening. Jenny’s pony-tail began to unravel, leaking wavy tendrils that softened the angles of her face. “I think it’s a good thing that you’re going,” she remarked. “Not that I want you to leave, Luke—I’m going to miss you. But it’s good for you to go and get things settled.”

  The sun was sinking toward the Virginia horizon, glazing the sky with gold.

  “Your father will have had a little time to cool off and think about things, too,” she went on. “He’ll probably feel more comfortable hearing you out when he’s at home. A public dining room isn’t the right place to sort out a family disagreement.”

  Luke didn’t bother to point out that James Benning was used to doing the bulk of his wheeling and dealing in public places, or that he considered the City Tavern one of his homes away from home. Jenny’s pep-talk encouraged him. He wouldn’t interrupt.

  “Under all his bluff and bluster, Luke, your father is a good man. I’m sure of it. I know he doesn’t like me—he’s coming from a different place than I am. But I think he’s basically good inside.”

  I love you, Luke whispered into her hair. After his father had browbeaten and insulted her, after he’d behaved so rudely to her, she still saw the good in him. More than anything, more even than the splendors they had shared in her bed last night, Luke loved her for her unshakable faith in others.

  “Look at the sunset,” she said, halting on the grass and gazing toward the west. The Washington Monument rose in a proud silhouette against the sky, which was streaked with pink and dark blue and gold. “It’s so beautiful. There’s so much beauty in this world, Luke.”

  Any world that had Jenny in it had to be beautiful, he thought. Whatever the outcome of his showdown with his father, Luke knew he would survive, even triumph. His world had Jenny in it; he needed nothing else.

  * * *

  HE HAD NEVER guessed that merely returning to Princeton to finish his undergraduate work would constitute a major victory. His homecoming had gone much worse than he’d anticipated. At times he’d found it almost impossible to hang on to the optimism Jenny had instilled in him.

  By the time he pulled onto the broad circular driveway in front of his parents’ stately home in Larchmont, some forty-eight hours after he’d stormed out of the City Tavern with Jenny, his father had all but declared him dead. “After everything I’ve done to you, you turned your back on me!” he shouted. “You’re a selfish ingrate. You’re as bad as your brother. Even worse. Get the hell out of my sight. I don’t want to see you again.”

  Perhaps all the old man needed was a longer cooling-off period, but in the meantime the bill for Luke’s senior-year tuition had come due. James refused to pay it. “Not another cent,” his father railed. Luke took refuge in his bedroom, but even there he was unable to escape his father’s raging, which reached his ears through the closed door, through the walls and floorboards. After a couple of days he moved out, accepting his grandfather’s reluctant offer of hospitality.

  His mother snuck him some money from a household account, and his grandfather, who believed Luke had made the wrong choice but admired his nerve, gave him twice the amount his mother had come up with. He sold the BMW for a bargain-basement price, applied for a loan, and took the bus down to Princeton two weeks before the fall term began so he could find himself a part-time job near campus. Upon hearing what Luke had done, Elliott sent him a check for six-hundred seventy two dollars. “It’s all I can spare,” he wrote. “You’ve got more guts than me, kid. Go for it.”

  He landed a job working the graveyard shift three nights a week at a convenience store a few blocks from the campus. Never before had he had to budget every penny—and every minute—but he didn’t mind. Sometimes he would cheer himself with the thought that hard work built character. At one-thirty in the morning, when the convenience store was empty of customers but still open, Luke could get a great deal of studying done while getting paid. If he was chronically exhausted, if he was a little ragged at the edges, so be it. He was going to get his damned degree—with honors, if he could manage it—and thumb his nose at his father.

  He had two secret weapons. One was his best friend Taylor, who sent him to his night shift behind the counter with portable gourmet feasts—overstuffed sandwiches, reheatable meat pies, slices of mocha cheesecake. “Hey, man, if you’ve got to stay awake till two in the morning, you may as well have some Fettucini Alfredo to keep you company,” Taylor would say as he packed various concoctions in microwavable containers for his friend.

  Luke’s other secret weapon was Jenny. He would have liked to talk to her every night, but he couldn’t afford to run up exorbitant phone bills. So he called her every Saturday morning, and she called him every Tuesday evening. “I miss you,” he’d tell her. “If only I hadn’t had to sell my car, I could come up and visit you.”

  “I could come down to Princeton,” she would offer.

  “It’s two buses. You have to change at Port Authority in New York. It would probably take seven or eight hours—”

  “Maybe I can find someone else who’s driving down,” she’d suggest. “I’ll put a sign on the ride board.”

  But no one ever responded to her sign requesting a ride to Princeton. As September slipped away, Luke began to give serious consideration to taking the two buses north to visit Jenny. Unfortunately, that would mean sacrificing eight hours he might have spent working at the convenience store—earning the money to pay for the bus ticket and the long-distance phone calls. Being poor was a drag.

  Still, they did have their phone calls. A long-distance connection with Jenny wasn’t the same as holding her, caressing her small, perfect breasts, driving his tongue against hers and feeling her so warm around him, so responsive. But he would take what he could get: her husky, sexy voice and her bubbly words. She described to him the seminar she was taking at the UMass School of Education, and her progress on her honors thesis on Jane Austen, and the goings-on at Chapin House, her campus dormitory. She shared her telephone with two other girls on her hall, but they had learned not to answer it when it rang on Saturday morning at ten, nor to tie it up on Tuesday evening at seven-thirty. The telephone belonged to Jenny at those two times, Jenny and Luke.

  One Monday evening in October, while Luke was manning the cash register at the convenience store, Taylor sauntered in. Luke’s mouth began to water on cue, and he suffered a keen disappointment when Taylor emerged from behind a magazine rack to reveal that his hands were empty.

  “Where’s my dinner?” Luke demanded.

  Taylor lifted a bag of taco chips from one of the racks and tossed it at him. “Here—a buck-twenty-five. I’ll treat you.”

  “Don’t do me any favors,” Luke grunted. His first week on the job, he’d consumed enough junk food to last him the rest of his life.

  Taylor feigned indignation. “And here I came with the express purpose of offering to do you a favor,” he complained.

  “What favor?”

  “I just broke up with Nancy,” Taylor announced.

  “Oh, yeah? Too bad.” Nancy was not the
first girl Taylor had courted since the fall term began. Taylor had dated her for all of two weeks. Luke didn’t think the occasion called for black crepe and tears.

  Neither, apparently, did Taylor. He considerately stepped aside so Luke could ring up a customer’s purchase. Once the customer left the store, Taylor sidled back to the counter. “Anyway, I suddenly discover I’m free this weekend, and I was thinking, hey, I bet the leaves look great in western Massachusetts at this time of year.”

  Luke stopped straightening out the candy bar display and looked at Taylor.

  “The deal goes like this,” Taylor explained. “You fill my gas tank with premium unleaded, you pay the tolls, and you tell this Smithie sweetheart of yours to set me up with a friend of hers for the weekend, okay? Just someone to keep me company. I’m not asking for a hot romance, but I’m not going sit all by myself for the weekend while you and Jenny lock yourselves into her room and make up for lost time.”

  “This weekend?”

  Taylor gave a cocky shrug. “By next weekend I expect to have a new local girlfriend. This is your window of opportunity, guy. Don’t let it slip away.”

  “I won’t. Man! I can’t believe you’d do this for me.”

  “Wait ‘til you realize how much it costs to fill my gas tank,” Taylor muttered ominously. “You won’t be so grateful then.”

  Luke telephoned Jenny from the store. He shoved coin after coin into the pay phone only to get a busy signal the first three times he tried. Finally, at ten o’clock, he heard the phone ringing on the other end.

  “Hello?” said an unfamiliar voice.

  “Is Jenny Perrin there?”

  “I think she’s asleep,” the woman said.

  “Wake her up,” Luke pleaded. “This is Luke.”

  “Oh, of course. Luke,” she said in a tone of voice that implied she had heard Luke’s name mentioned enough times to be bored by it. It was similar to the tone of voice Taylor frequently used when Luke mentioned Jenny.

  After a minute—and another quarter in the slot—Luke heard Jenny, her voice hoarse with drowsiness: “Luke?”

  “I’ve got a ride up to Smith this weekend,” he told her.

  “Oh, Luke! That’s great!”

  They talked briefly, and Luke promised to call her again on Thursday evening, once he knew what was going on. Then he started to make plans. He rearranged his schedule at the store so he’d have Friday and Saturday nights off. He pored over maps, plotting the shortest route to Northampton. He raided his dwindling bank account for cash. He organized his schoolwork so he’d have only some reading to do on the weekend. He washed three loads of dirty laundry.

  He dreamed. He dreamed of sleeping with Jenny and talking with Jenny. He dreamed of receiving her generous love. He dreamed of reassuring her that he hadn’t been kidding around when he’d broached the subject of marriage last summer, that while she’d been correct in pointing out that marriage would have to wait until they were done with their schooling, he was prepared to wait. He dreamed of running his fingers through her glorious red hair, and gazing into her glorious hazel eyes, and knowing, for the first time since he’d said good-bye to her in Washington, the immeasurable joy of trusting a person in heart and soul and having that trust returned.

  As promised, on Thursday evening he telephoned her from his dorm to confirm the arrangements for the visit. Taylor hovered in the background, shouting, “Find out who she’s setting me up with. Make sure it’s someone pretty. I’ve heard rumors about these Smithies—”

  “If Jenny is representative, you have nothing to worry about,” Luke responded as he dialed her number. “She’s gorgeous.”

  “Well, of course she’s gorgeous,” Taylor scoffed sarcastically. “She’s freaking perfect, isn’t she?”

  Luke waved at him to shut up, then hunched over the phone, listening to it ring. It was answered by the same woman who’d answered the last time Luke called.

  “Hi,” he said, trying to picture the woman, the room in which the phone was kept, the hallway leading to Jenny’s room. Tomorrow night he would finally see it all. This was his last chance to imagine it. “May I speak to Jenny Perrin, please?”

  There was a long silence, and then, “Jenny isn’t here.”

  Luke scowled. Jenny was always in her dorm when she expected him to call. In fact, he was surprised she hadn’t answered the phone herself. She always answered on the first ring when he telephoned her at the appointed time on Saturday mornings. “I told her I’d call her tonight,” he said. “Where is she?”

  “Who is this?” the woman asked.

  His scowl intensified. He decided he loathed the woman on the other end. “This is Luke Benning,” he said with forced patience. “Please put Jenny on.”

  Another, longer silence. “She’s not here.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s gone.”

  His heart began to race. His throat went dry. It must be a joke. That was it—a bad joke. Jenny was much too sincere to resort to a tasteless practical joke like this, but maybe her friends in the dorm had cooked it up. Maybe Jenny was as much a butt of it as Luke was.

  His loathing expanded to include anyone who was a part of this sick gag. “Look, it isn’t funny,” he said angrily. “Would you just—”

  “She’s gone, Luke,” the woman said. Abruptly his anger faded, his resentment vanished. He had heard the quiver in her voice, the frightened, frightening hush. He had heard the way she’d spoken his name—not as an enemy but as someone sad and upset. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Jenny’s gone.”

  “Where did she go?” he asked carefully, swallowing again and again in an effort to keep his voice from breaking.

  “She’s gone, okay?”

  “How can I reach her?”

  “You can’t,” the woman said.

  “What happened? Oh, God. Did something happen to her?”

  The woman took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Luke, okay? She doesn’t want to talk to you. She doesn’t want to hear from you. She’s gone, and that’s it.”

  “She said that?” He was going to choke. He was going to curse. He was going to explode. “She said that? She doesn’t want to hear from me?”

  “Yes.”

  “When? When did she say that?”

  “I’m trying to be straight with you, Luke, okay? She doesn’t want to see you. She doesn’t want anything to do with you. So do everyone a favor and stay away.”

  The phone went dead.

  Luke stared at the receiver in his hand. She doesn’t want anything to do with you.

  He felt dizzy.

  “What happened?” Taylor asked quietly.

  Ignoring him, Luke hung up and dialed Jenny’s number again. This time it was answered at once—by the same woman who’d just hung up on him. “I want to speak to Jenny,” he demanded.

  “She’s gone,” the woman retorted. “Get it through your head, okay? She’s gone, and she wants you out of her life. Don’t call again.”

  He heard the click of the connection being severed.

  Taylor approached him from behind. “Luke? What’s going on?”

  He dropped the receiver, spun around, and stormed past Taylor and out of the room. Later, when he calmed down enough to think, he’d figure out what to do. He’d work out a strategy. He’d make sense of it.

  Maybe it was just a horrible joke, and Jenny was right this minute returning from the library to await his call. Maybe her friend had confused this message with another one; maybe the woman was supposed to say those cold-hearted words to someone else’s boyfriend. Maybe it was all a nightmare and he’d wake up.

  But even as he told himself such things he knew they weren’t true. He knew that if he ever tried to call Jenny again, he’d speak to the same woman, and she’d tell him the same thing.

  She doesn’t want anything to do with you. She wants you out of her life. Don’t call again. She’s gone.

  It wasn’t a joke. A nightmare, yes—but one from which he wo
uld never escape.

  He tore down the dorm stairs, through the door and out into the crisp autumn night. He raced across the leaf-strewn grass, inhaling the brisk, apple-scented air, avoiding the pools of light thrown down upon the lawn by the street lamps. He ran to the shadows, let the darkness swallow him, and understood that trust and love were empty promises and nothing more.

  Wandering into the night, alone and bereft, he felt his faith slip away.

  PART TWO

  * * *

  Seven years later

  Chapter Seven

  * * *

  AT ELEVEN-THIRTY on Wednesday morning, with only five jurors picked, the judge called a recess so that Stewart Shaw, the defense attorney, could get his tooth filled.

  Jenny didn’t mind the early adjournment; jury selection could be finished quickly the following morning, leaving plenty of time for opening arguments. She liked the way the panel was shaping up: two young single women who were bound to know what life was like out there in the real world of dating; a middle-aged man who had two daughters in high school; a prim-looking grandmother; a social worker. Jenny had had to use only one of her peremptory challenges so far.

  She shifted her gaze from the prospective jurors to the defense table, where Matthew Sullivan sat beside his attorney, brooding. In his suit and tie Sullivan looked like a kid who’d raided his father’s closet. His face was youthful, his cheeks smooth, his dark hair neatly barbered, his eyes glistening with feigned innocence and indignation. Hey, I’m just a guy, he seemed to be saying. I was only doing what comes naturally. Give me a break.

  She would love to give him a break. She would love to break his nose, his jaw, his neck, his ribs, his back, and then, working her way down...

  Never mind. She was a prosecutor; she’d break him with the best weapon available to her—the law. She would try him, convict him and send him to jail. She wouldn’t dwell on the fact that this was her first major trial, and a tough one at that. She’d asked for it, all but begged for it, and now it was hers.