The boys, p.1
The Boys, page 1
SPIEGEL & GRAU
Copyright © 2022 by Katie Hafner
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. All characters, names, incidents, and places are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, New York
www.spiegelandgrau.com
Jacket design by Strick&Williams
Interior design by Meighan Cavanaugh
Cover illustrations have been printed with permission, as follows: Broken heart symbol © Fibonacci / Wikimedia Commons; Thunderstorm © Sou / Noun Project; Slip and fall vector icon © Arcady / Adobe Stock; Parent © Gregor Cresnar / Noun Project; Bike © Zaenal Abidin / Noun Project; Wet crumpled glued paper for banner background or texture © PaulPaladin / Alamy Stock Photo; Landscape in Tuscany © Petr Jilek / Dreamstime.com; 4 cypress trees isolated on white background © Wilm Ihlenfeld / Dreamstime.com; Light shining down on silver foil metallic wall with copy space, abstract texture background © Aitthiphong Khongthong / Dreamstime.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available Upon Request
ISBN number 978-1-954118-05-8 (HC)
ISBN number 978-1-954118-06-5 (eBook)
First edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Zoë, my inspiration for this story . . . and so much more.
Prologue
Mr. Ethan Fawcett
225 St. Marks Square
Philadelphia, PA 19104
10 August 2022
Dear Mr. Fawcett,
Thank you for joining Hill and Dale Adventures on our recent journey through Piedmont, Italy. At Hill and Dale we strive to accommodate our guests fully, and we pride ourselves in giving all Hill and Dalers peace of mind in order to enjoy the special joys of active travel. We consider our planning and support unparalleled.
However, in our 27 years of operation, we have not encountered a guest with requirements as unique as yours. Unfortunately, your unusual circumstances made it difficult for us to meet your needs, and those of your two boys. After careful consideration, we have concluded that Hill and Dale is not a good fit for your particular set of needs, and we have decided it would be best for you not to return for future excursions with our company.
All the very best to you.
Sincerely,
Roger Hill
President & CEO, Hill and Dale Adventures
Part One
Ethan and Barb
1.
I was standing in the front hallway sorting through a stack of mail and didn’t notice Barb on the other side of the screen door. Then came her little taps on the doorframe, the same cadence I’d heard hundreds of times at the dinner table. It was her you’re-beginning-to-bore-me-to-death signal. The telltale pattern of Barb’s long beautiful fingers was a single tap followed by three staccatos, then repeated half a dozen times—taaap tap tap tap. Irritating. But effective.
As soon as I turned my head in her general direction, Barb opened the door and stepped inside. In one hand she was holding a large Ziploc bag filled with cookies. In the other she held a piece of paper. At the sight of the paper in her hand, I felt my palms grow clammy.
“This came to my email by mistake,” she said. “I printed it out for you.” I was instantly relieved that she hadn’t come to present divorce papers. But I was also bewildered. Why had she bothered to print out and hand-deliver whatever this was? Then I recognized the unmistakable Hill and Dale logo.
Barb was talking while I read. “What did you do, Ethan? You went on the same trip? Why didn’t you tell me you were going? And you took the boys? To Italy? What were you thinking? And you hate traveling!”
I was still absorbing the contents of the letter. Unusual circumstances? Peace of mind? Whose peace of mind were they referring to?
“Ethan? Are you going to say anything to me?”
“I thought things went pretty well,” I said meekly.
I couldn’t bring myself to raise my head from the page I held and look at Barb. She forced the issue by waving the bag of cookies at me. She was looking straight at me, her mouth set in a perfect horizontal line. “They’re chocolate chip,” she announced solemnly. She pressed the Ziploc into my hand.
I held the bag up to the light to examine the cookies. Walnuts. Really? Could she be more clueless?
The boys’ health issues—particularly their food allergies—had never been much of a priority for Barb. Plus, she thought the whole allergy business was overblown. “You know,” she’d say, while I did laps around the living room with the vacuum, “research is starting to show that kids exposed to dirt and dust have lower rates of asthma when they’re older.” That was only one of our many little disagreements. They seemed small enough in isolation, though their cumulative effect led to relational drag, like ice accumulating on the wings of an airplane. Later she stopped commenting on this and that foible and started obsessing about the “large torn canvas” of our marriage. I pressed the Ziploc, checking for air leaks.
“I don’t know what to say.” Her thick hair was pulled back, but I could tell she’d cut it, maybe even to shoulder length. Her clothes sagged on her. She looked like she’d lost weight. She let out a sigh that told me there was a lot more she wanted to say but was choosing not to.
“I just can’t believe you took the boys. To Italy?” Her hushed tone heightened the impact. I’d have preferred a scream.
Still, the effect was the same. Her 105 pounds had transformed into a menacing hulk. She lifted her eyes toward the ceiling, then leveled them at me again. “If going on the bike trip was something you really wanted to do, they could have stayed with me.”
My head swam with half a dozen possible comebacks to that one: Barb, you were away at one of your conferences. (This was true). Or: You mean you didn’t know I had it in me to take them on an adventure like that? Well, surprise surprise! Or maybe this: Give them to you only to expose them to hazards like this? I held up the cookies in a hapless pantomime, which of course was lost on her.
Instead, my reply was so feeble I felt humiliated even before I opened my mouth to speak.
“Really, Barb, what am I supposed to do?” My throat closed down around the last couple of words, and when they emerged, I sounded like I was testing an oboe reed.
She was quiet again. “Where are they?”
“In their room,” I said. “I think they’re taking a nap. We’re all still jet-lagged. I can go check.”
“No, that’s okay. I really came to see how you are.” Then she touched my arm for an instant. Her touch was so light it just brushed the hair without making contact with my skin. A familiar tingle of desire I had long since tamped down found its way in pinpoint form to the very spot she had touched.
She was wearing her concerned look. “Ethan, you need some help. Real help.”
Now I was annoyed. “Barb, thanks for the cookies, which, as-you-may-recall, the boys can’t eat. I need to make dinner.”
“Please eat the cookies, Ethan. You’re too thin.” She paused, searching for what to say next. Then she added softly, as if by way of conciliation, “Eat them even if the boys can’t. I baked them for you.” She turned and left. I watched as she folded herself into the old red Yaris with the dent down the driver’s side—our old red Yaris—and backed out of the driveway. I looked at the bag of cookies, still in my right hand, and then at the letter from Hill and Dale in my left. I had to wonder if she was right. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken the boys. No. She was wrong. Of course I should have taken the boys. For starters, they were my children, and I was their primary custodian. It was up to me to decide what was or wasn’t in their best interest. Besides, it was when I was with them that I felt most alive.
2.
It’s a good thing Barb arrived when she did, because I definitely didn’t want her around when I started making dinner for Tommy and Sam. When she pulls one of her drop-bys and catches me fussing over the boys, I can’t decipher what she’s thinking. The look on her face (is it pain? embarrassment?) is a distraction I can do without, and things grow awkward quickly. I detect judgment coming from her, which I chalk up to her disdain for my insistence on routine. She used to find it endearing.
Routine is critical, especially when it comes to cooking dinner for Tommy and Sam, picky eaters who have trouble gaining weight. Add to that their allergies, and total focus and planning are required. The complicated dinner routine was another area where Barb and I diverged during our time together. Barb is spontaneous. I’m a planner. Take this Hill and Dale trip, for example. I bought the plane tickets early enough to snag an entire row for the boys and me. Barb would have procrastinated about the flight until it was too late for such ideal seating. Then, when we ended up in seats miles from each other, she would have said, “Oh well. We’ll just have to make the best of it.”
Thinking back on the planning for the flight made me replay the entire trip, and that made me wonder how things could have gone differently. Izzy was definitely the saving grace. If it hadn’t been for her quick thinking, we wouldn’t have found easy shelter from the rain that day, and we’d never have stumbled on that choir practice in the church. Still, it’s not Izzy but Barb I have to thank for the outsized role that Hill and Dale came to play in my life.
Standing in the hallway with the bag of nut-laden cookies still in my hand, I suddenly felt too exhausted to go through the whole convoluted exercise of preparing dinner. Besides, the boys were still napping, hardly clamoring for a meal. Just this once, I thought, we could skip dinner. I opened the Ziploc and retrieved a cookie. I had to admit it was delicious, with the perfect amount of crunch on the perimeter, a soft center, and chocolate so dark and rich it was almost tangy. I reached into the bag for another.
Barb and I first met when she was still in grad school and we were both working at Rita Receptionists, an answering service started in 2010 in response to people’s growing frustration with voice mail. The company’s operating philosophy was simple: Phones Should Be Answered by Humans. Companies around the country hired us to answer their phones from Philadelphia, and we did our level best to create the illusion that an actual receptionist was sitting in Seattle or Moab or San Diego. I was hired in 2010 as the first official employee. I’d met the two Rita founders in college, when I was a senior and they were getting their MBAs at Wharton, where I worked part-time doing IT support. When they started Rita, they got in touch with me and said they needed a computer wizard to write all the software from scratch. They made me chief technology officer.
Rita receptionists were trained to give the impression that they worked for the company being called. That seemed like a lot to ask of people who were being paid just a little over minimum wage, sitting in a soulless office building on Chestnut Street in West Philadelphia. Rita’s founders talked a lot about “delivering an outstanding customer experience.” At the time, that sounded to me like a bunch of marketing mumbo jumbo. But if you stop to think about how automated and alienating the entire service economy has become, those two guys were prophets.
Rita Receptionists (the name was a nod to a Beatles song the founders liked) took off quickly, and by the time I met Barb, my stock options looked like they might actually be worth something. Barb was getting her PhD in psychology at Penn, and she started working at Rita part-time one summer, on the 5:00 p.m.–to–9:00 p.m. extended-hours shift. I often worked late, so I saw her a lot. She usually wore a thin pale-blue cardigan, which she would drape across the back of her chair. I guessed that the sweater had been in her life for a good long time. For some reason, the sight of the cardigan on the back of that cheesy Office Depot chair struck me as regal. Within a few days of her starting at Rita, I began with some regularity to look for the chair with the cardigan. After a month, if I spotted the chair unoccupied but the sweater still there, a quiet joy came over me.
Barb’s was a subtle beauty. At five foot four, she wasn’t that much shorter than me, but there was a lightness to her that made her seem smaller. She wore no makeup—at least not to work—and kept her thick strawberry blond hair swept back into a barrette. I fantasized more than once about what all that hair would look like without the barrette, the loosed sheaf cascading across her back.
One evening, I approached her desk on the pretext of needing to switch out a set of cables on her computer. I had vowed that morning to ask her out. She was on a call. I lurked around her cubicle waiting for her to finish, while also eavesdropping. The extended-hours calls usually came in from the West Coast, but sometimes they were from people just looking for someone to talk to. I guessed that Barb was dealing with one of those. She was nodding, as if the caller could see her. Unlike a lot of the receptionists at Rita, she stayed focused on the conversation: “I’m so sorry about that,” she was saying, while absentmindedly pulling pills from a sleeve of her sweater. She placed each tiny knot of wool on a growing pile of pills next to her keyboard. “The office is closed, but I can get a message to customer service for you. . . . Oh, I agree with you about batteries. Every time you turn around, another battery has to be replaced. . . . No, I don’t own one myself, but it does sound like a handy thing to have around the house.” She made conversing sound so easy. Hearing her on that call blew my heart wide open.
After she hung up, I switched out the cable quickly, hoping she wouldn’t notice how unnecessary that was. I stole a closer look at all the sweater pills clustered on top of each other. It took everything I had to open my mouth. To give you a sense of how unusual such a move was for me, let me just say this: I possess more than my share of aversions, and speaking to people I hardly know is one of them. I had a sudden flash of something I could have sworn my mother once said as she practically pushed me onto the school bus, a thing I dreaded daily: “Have heart, Ethan sweetie. Another word for heart is coeur, and that’s where we get our word courage.” Now my heart was racing, each beat a small thunderclap in my chest. But before I knew it, I had asked Barb if she’d like to get a cup of coffee and a slice of pie at the all-night diner across the street, Miss Flo’s. As the words left my mouth, this suddenly felt like a very 1950s thing to suggest, but also somehow fitting. Barb looked straight at me with those wide-set green eyes. She had a slightly startled look on her face. She told me a few months later that she and a couple of other Rita receptionists had wondered if I had a speech impediment of some kind, because they had never heard me speak.
Her look of surprise quickly softened into a gentle smile. “Sure! That sounds great,” she said.
Predictably enough, things at the diner started off awkwardly. Barb headed for one of the front booths, but I stopped her and stammered my way through something about not sitting under the AC because she had just the thin sweater, and the draft under the vent could be brutal. She seemed to appreciate that, and we took a booth near the back. Barb loved the tabletop jukebox. It was a Seeburg Wall-O-Matic, beckoning from its square, neon-lit chrome box. It took dimes.
She flipped through the selections wide-eyed, murmuring that she had never seen such a thing. She chose Aretha Franklin singing “Respect.” Even after the song started, Barb kept flipping through the selections. I could tell that she was enjoying the tactile encounter with the stiff tabs.
“I can’t believe I’ve been at Rita for months and I’ve never come here,” she said.
I didn’t want Barb to know that I was all too familiar with Miss Flo’s, that the wait staff knew first the two Rita cofounders and me as the three guys who came in with their laptops and stayed for hours, and then just me, the nerd, still with his laptop, but always alone, now that the two business-school guys were both busy with girlfriends and the growing company. When Barb picked up her menu, I had to stop myself from recommending the chocolate cream pie. I didn’t want to come off as a know-it-all. When the waitress arrived at our table, if she was surprised to see I had company or that my computer was missing, she didn’t show it.
Barb was frowning while she studied the menu. She looked up, not at the waitress but at me. “Sometimes I get decision paralysis when it comes to ordering,” she said. “I don’t want to be disappointed.”
“Pretend it’s a song in the jukebox?” I suggested. “Even if you aren’t happy with your choice, you get a chance at something different next time.”
“Hmm,” she said, and turned back to the menu. “Maybe.” She said the maybe slowly, quietly appraising my idea and thus me.
The waitress gave up on Barb and looked at me. I ordered the chocolate cream pie. Barb finally ordered the apple pie, heated and à la mode. I hated myself for not jumping in. Of all the pies, that was probably the worst possible choice. Gooey canned apple filling and too much cinnamon. Sure enough, as soon as her slice arrived—a viscous ooze between layers of soggy crust—I could tell she was privately miserable.
I slid my plate to the middle of the table and she did the same with hers. No words required.
Barb went back to choosing songs. “Thriller.” “Tuxedo Junction.” “The Twist.” We had only six dimes between us, so she got up, went over to the cashier, and returned with a pile of them. “How long would it take us to get through all the songs?” she asked.
I’d never thought about that. “Well, assuming all the button combinations really correspond to a song, that would make it a hundred songs, and if the songs average three minutes apiece, that would be about five hours.”
