The Best Thing for You

by Annabel Lyon

  Her eyes filled with tears and she permitted herself a single low, aching sound from the back of the throat in assent. Her father glanced up sharply, then returned to his papers.

  Wordlessly, the agent pulled a clean handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit and offered it to her across the desk. When she touched it to her cheeks and nose, it smelled faintly of laundering. In that moment she would have liked for him to understand.

  I don’t care about the money, she said.

  Quiet, Anna, her father said. We know what’s best for you.

  She watched the agent’s dislike for her father give way before the urge to live up to the unexpected thrill of that we. She saw he couldn’t help it. He was an animal just like her father, with young of his own.

  Usually no payments can be made prior to the conclusion of the police investigation, the agent said. But in this case – with Mrs. Pass being so young – well, I’m going to see what I can do.

  Thank you, her father said.

  The agent walked out into the waiting room with them. My son, John, he said to Anna.

  You see, she thought. The boy shook hands like a proper puppet.

  It’s time for a new photograph, she said, eliciting the same frail, sweet smile from both father and son. The boy looked at his enormous feet.

  He won’t let me, the agent said.

  What are you working on? she asked, for she saw he had swapped the magazine for a notebook, hastily slapped shut when they appeared.

  Outrageous question, apparently! The boy flushed.

  It’s an opera, isn’t it, John? the agent said encouragingly.

  Anna.

  Her father stood by the elevator, frowning. There were references in this conversation he didn’t understand. Clearly, Anna knew, he believed his position was being undermined by some prior familiarity with the agent that she had not seen fit to reveal to him.

  I’m sorry, the agent said softly, frowning. She thought perhaps he was embarrassed to be standing before her at such a time, a man with a child, when she had neither.

  It’s very nice to have met you, she told the boy.

  It is an opera, he said urgently.

  Stephen, that was who he reminded her of. Well, sure. She supposed any boy would do for that. This one was younger by a year or two, but the intensity was there. Perhaps they were all like that, perhaps it was all just puberty ripping through. As she readjusted her veil in the elevator, as the mechanism of winches and pulleys engaged, as they sank past the second floor and came to rest on the ground, she decided she had better check on Stephen just in case.

  Twenty-nine!

  A pinch-faced woman stepped up to the counter, pinched out a smile, and pointed to a particular piece of fish. Like to like. The butcher held it out on a piece of brown paper, cropped tail limply dangling, for her inspection. She nodded.

  Thirty!

  A woman Anna’s age – a sapped, milky blonde far gone with child – wanted sausage rolls.

  A dozen, did you say?

  Two dozen, she whispered, obviously mortified by her own appetites.

  Two dozen, the butcher repeated loudly, busying himself. The woman’s maternity dress looked home-sewn, a jersey sack with a poorly finished neck facing, complete with unintentional pleat where the machine had nipped a little extra fabric and she had not known what to do, Anna thought, and so had made the bunny-bright decision to ignore it, to believe it wouldn’t show. She would be the kind who could make a decision about a belief. Obviously the whole wide world was new to this girl and she was coping as best she could.

  Two dozen, the butcher said, placing the package on the counter. Thirty-one!

  He was brusque but he at least did not slap the food around the way his son did. Usually when there were this many people waiting the son would appear but today the butcher simply worked a little faster. Though of course he was a delivery boy now, no longer his father’s boy.

  Thirty-two!

  But then she could phone for a delivery, not to her mother’s house of course, but to her own. She went there days now to clean, as she had once cleaned Cora’s house, though nights she still spent in her parents’ house, and would for the foreseeable future, into the fall at least. There was no way around that. The twenty-first of June it was, only. The butcher severed a portion of ground beef with a paddle and scooped it into the scale. The silver finger on the scale’s clock face swung round and stopped, trembling, then snapped back as the butcher removed the meat and swung an increasingly lazy pendulum arc back and forth across the zero.

  Thirty-three!

  Thirty-three, Anna said, placing her ticket on the counter.

  The eyes and voice, those were the easy conduits. You might have said, indeed, that the son stood clothed in the father, costumed in the older man’s heavier flesh, peering out through his eyes, the particular tenor of his voice warped only slightly deeper by the thicker configuration of mouth, tongue, and throat. He was recognizably there.

  As she watched him count and clip off her sausage links she said, You’re busy today.

  No rest for the wicked, he replied, not bothering to look up from his work. Thirty-four!

  At the bungalow she placed her mesh bag in the icebox without unpacking it and immediately called the grocery store. While she waited she dusted. After about forty minutes came the knock at the front door.

  Delivery, Stephen said.

  Won’t you come in? Just while I find my purse.

  Seven twenty-nine.

  He closed the door behind him and stood with a bag in each arm. Baking goods, she had ordered – flour, yeast, vanilla essence. It would all keep. So much for the neighbours.

  In the kitchen he began unloading the bags on the table, checking each item off against his list. When she said his name he repeated, Seven twenty-nine. Or I could put it to your account. You’d have to sign here. Do you have an account with us?

  Stephen.

  You’d have to sign here.

  Slowly understanding, she took the pen and signed where he pointed.

  We have special delivery rates on Wednesdays, he said. Wednesday is always a good day to shop at Farrell’s Fine Foods.

  I’ll remember that, she said gently.

  There was a knock at the front door.

  Why go out? the boy said.

  She glanced from him to the door and back.

  Why go out when you can stay and shop from the comfort of your own home?

  Won’t you excuse me?

  We’re open Monday through Saturday, the boy said.

  She opened the front door.

  Here is Mrs. Pass, Peretti said. Hello, Mrs. Pass.

  He wore his camera case the way her husband had, slung across his back with a broad strap. They stepped together into the house, he forwards, she back, a dance step gone wrong.

  You know you’ve left your bicycle in the yard, son? Peretti said to the boy. You should get a chain. You’re asking to have it stolen the way you leave it lying around.

  We’re open Monday through Saturday, the boy said. Bakery specials on Saturdays.

  You ought to be more careful, Peretti said.

  Are you following me? Anna asked.

  May I have a cup of tea?

  She held her palm out in the direction of the kitchen, an automatic and absurdly polite gesture, as though to say she would offer it from her own hand on a silver salver momentarily. Then she walked Stephen back to the front door.

  My Stephen, she said softly.

  He walked down into the yard, picked up his bike, and rode away. She trailed a few steps after him.

  Mrs. Pass, Peretti called behind her, from the doorway. Would you offer me that cup of tea, Mrs. Pass?

  He sat at the table while she opened and closed cupboards, pulling out the tea things.

  Is she planning to do some baking? he asked.

  Christmas is coming.

  Peretti laughed. Christmas is always coming, he agreed.

  They sipped the
ir tea from her best china like dowagers.

  They found stains in the bed, Peretti said. Stains in the bed and a note in your handwriting, Mrs. Pass. On the bedside table. The police are waiting for you, at your parents’ house. I got the call about an hour ago. An old friend at the station – I scratch his, he scratches mine –

  A note? Anna said, honestly perplexed.

  In French.

  She held up the pretty pot and he pushed his cup toward her. There was no point behaving like a ferret.

  I didn’t help them, Peretti said. I just watched.

  They keep you pretty well informed.

  I keep myself informed. I’ve been tailing you for a while now, just waiting to see how this would play out. I suppose that boy has a name?

  Bruce, she said promptly, and he laughed again.

  I can’t say I understand you, Mrs. Pass, he said. But I admire you like hell.

  I can’t imagine what happens next, she said.

  He lay in bed, listening. Birds: birds stuttered and bubbled in the trees, fell off the branches, caught themselves in the air with a parachute snap of wings. Crows in their ratcheting language worried scraps. Gulls called out in misery. With a meaty thud the newspaper landed on the step. Cars sighed down First Avenue, two blocks over, down and away into the city, while directly below him his mother’s slippers tapped the kitchen linoleum. Through the vent he could hear bacon and eggs hissing, hell in a pan. If you were Catholic you couldn’t help thinking in pictures that way. He was not Catholic but many of the neighbourhood boys were Italian, and with little prompting they would explain volubly about hell. They had scared him once when he was a child, told him he would fry like bacon. He could still think of it sometimes and give himself a shiver. Bring home the bacon: that was what his father did. Every morning there was bacon in the pan, or ham, or sausages. They were fortunate to have meat when so many were doing without, in London, for instance. He saw the newsreels every Saturday afternoon at the cinema, and they had also discussed it at school, of course. In Latin class even they had discussed it, using a vocabulary gleaned from Caesar. Now Europe was relaxing from her recent convulsions, and though the Pacific theatre was still lively – he could not help imagining it in miniature, toy planes zooming over a bathtub sea studded with white knee-islands – it seemed unlikely he or his classmates would be needed by the time they were senior boys. That was a mixed blessing.

  Now, John, his mother called. She had called him several times already.

  A mixed blessing because he would have liked to heft a gun, to march with a loaded pack and uncover in himself some valour, rescue some comrade or girl and vanish back into the French mist before his name could be ascertained, or suggest some strategy to a superior officer that would save ten men in the face of two hundred. He would be taken before the general, he still in his muddy boots and with a cut above one eye, shown into some high gilt room in a commandeered Italian villa retrofitted for the administration of war. The great general sat behind a curly Duke’s desk and in a voice like the purr of a Bentley said, I see from your strategy, Private Foster, you are acquainted with Caesar’s exploits in Gaul – Yes, sir. – Well it’s a rare pleasure to meet an educated man out here, you, Colonel, get this soldier a bandage, cigarette? – No, thank you, sir. – Very wise, that shows will. He would refuse as many honours as he decently could, though he could not decently forbid a dinner, a feast, for his unit, where the ten men would be feted and fed with boar and cranberries and champagne and small chocolates and brandy and tobacco; but he himself would melt away, as he always did, at the most reeling hour of hilarity, to walk through certain cold streets to a tall shuttered house of fantasmic repute, where a beautiful girl worked in rags as a maid, singing strange bewailing, bewitching melodies, a girl with a defect, some lisp or limp, that caused her to be overlooked by all but him. He would sit and sip some sweet burning nutty liquor and watch the girls and their customers, the drinking and singing and ongoing accumulating undress, and at some crucial point retire alone to his room, to an ascetic narrow bed. No one could understand –

  John!

  – why he chose to rent a room here of all places –

  Let him sleep.

  – he with all his bravery and dignity and quiet honour –

  I already have let him sleep.

  – until the girl slipped into his room without knocking –

  Have you seen this? No, don’t, love. Let him be.

  – the whisper of skirts, the rasp of stockings, the pinpoint snap of hair clasps and other clasps –

  I know he’s awake. He’s just shamming.

  Knock first, at least.

  He heard his mother’s trudging step on the stairs, heard her open his door.

  Nonsense, she said. Knocking in my own house. I know you’re awake. Your breakfast is positively congealing.

  It’s holidays, Foster mumbled, flushed with sleep, hiding against the pillow.

  Downstairs his father had the newspaper all over the breakfast table, and some on the floor. Usually he would look up and smile and say, No rest for the wicked, knowing Foster was not wicked, but today he said only, Look.

  He went to stand at his father’s elbow. Who is she?

  Don’t you remember?

  A high-school yearbook photograph was blown up past sharpness on the front page of the paper, a photograph of a curly-haired girl with a precious, pushed-in face and an armful of roses, staring honestly and earnestly at nothing.

  Aunt Trudy?

  You met her in my office, don’t you remember? Last week. Cass, look.

  I already looked.

  But John thought it was Trudy.

  His mother did look then, and raised her eyebrows briefly in verdict. Trudy’s face isn’t so round, though, she said.

  Still.

  Yes.

  The three of them stood for a moment, admiring the resemblance to his mother’s younger sister. His eyes drifted up the page to the headline: GIRL, 22, AND BOY, 17, ARRESTED FOR MURDER. Beneath the girl’s photograph was a much smaller one of a boy with a dark flop of hair and a shy, squinting grin. His face was tragic with acne. Even a cursory glance at the layout showed the editors’ interest lay primarily with the girl.

  You shook hands with her, John.

  Ghoulish, his mother said. Stop it.

  Did I?

  The day of your recital.

  I remember, he said slowly. He tried hard not to look at his hand because his father was watching his face. He looked sad.

  Why was she in the office?

  His father looked away. Some people believe she killed her husband for his life insurance, he said.

  Don’t you?

  I didn’t.

  Eat your breakfasts now, both of you. Honestly, his mother said.

  His interest lapped away a little when she brought a plate of redolent fried meat and potato to the table and set it in front of him. Food was his other great need at the moment.

  Holidays, is it? his father said, folding the paper with care along its creases.

  First day.

  That’s a fine feeling. What will you do with it, this first day?

  He shrugged. Library.

  Don’t spend it all indoors. What are you working on?

  Dad!

  That reminds me, his mother said. I promised to phone Mrs. Agostino today and tell her if you wanted to continue your piano lessons for the summer. Do you?

  He nodded hugely, chewing, and both his parents smiled.

  Will you do some shopping for me on your way home?

  Foster and his father pointed at each other and each said: You. This was their game.

  John will do it, his mother said firmly.

  I’m late, his father said. He stood by the table, hesitating, slapping his leg with the refolded newspaper. His mother stood to give him her quick harsh kiss and then sat back down to her black coffee.

  I’m late, Cassie, his father said again.

  Go then, his mother
said.

  A look passed between them – he saw it.

  After his father left, he asked his mother what was wrong.

  He wouldn’t wait for the police, his mother said. He wanted to approve that girl’s claim. It was Jim Hammond who smelled the rat.

  He smiled at the slang term coming from her prim mother’s mouth.

  More coffee?

  He held his mug out. Coffee was a conspiracy between them. His father disapproved, said he was too young for habits, but his mother loved it and had shared it with him since he was a baby. Real coffee, sent by Aunt Trudy in Toronto. Aunt Trudy had a hush-hush job with access to all kinds of things. Coffee was the least of it, his father had said once, making his mother very angry, he didn’t know why. Packages arrived with coffee and tins and small chocolates and silk stockings. Feel, John, real silk, his mother would say, and he was always happy to feel, the way his smooth fingers became rough, catching on the even smoother fabric, and the feeling this gave him in his hands and his belly. His mother liked that he wanted his piano lessons and appreciated good silk. His father liked to lean with the other fathers against the low fence around the school track and cheer him on at Saturday meets. He was no trouble at all, a little shy but only he himself worried about that. A good boy.

  He could have left us the paper, he said. His mother began clearing the table.

  Hush, she said. He needs it today. Are you going to Carnegie?

  He nodded.

  You can renew my book for me.

  All right.

  She gave him a shopping list and said, Now don’t be late and don’t forget anything. We’re having the Hammonds to dinner tonight.

  At the foot of the stairs he turned back and said, I guess he believed her.

  What? his mother said. The girl in the paper? Yes, I suppose he did. Your father tends to believe people, she added dryly, more to herself than to him.