Operator - 01 (3 page)

Veronica smiles sourly. “George. Trouble. Big trouble, that’s his story. I could see it in him from the beginning, but Mel didn’t have that instinct. She trusted people, took them at their word. She was so naïve. And he was this big shot banker, very charming when he wanted to be, knew everyone in town and took her out places she couldn’t afford to go. But he was a player, you know – there were probably ten other girls besides Mel at the same time, most of them Russian with no brains, but legs up to here,” she chops her hand at her Adam’s apple, “who would do anything for a nice meal or a night out at a club. And he had a temper – almost as bad as mine.” She smiles briefly, flashing perfectly straight white teeth. “One day, about a year after they started dating, Mel came home from a weekend with a bruise on her cheek and said that she tripped and hit a doorknob. Then a few weeks later it was a broken arm – this time she fell playing tennis. Then finally she showed up with a black eye and that’s when I called her parents. She spent a whole weekend crying on and off the phone with them. I asked a friend of mine who had connections to do me a favor and the next week a messenger showed up at our door with an envelope. There were a whole bunch of pictures of George with other women. Mel left the country three days after that.”

I think about that last part for a moment but don’t say anything. I can tell that Veronica is aggrieved, really upset. George’s appearance at the funeral home must have been a slap in the face. “How did they get back together here?” I ask.

“They didn’t!” she hisses, almost spitting. “No way. He left St. Petersburg about six months after she did and moved to Manhattan. Then another six months later I get a call from her saying that George showed up at her school. It really scared her. I mean, that’s like a five-hour drive round-trip, right? I actually flew back home to stay with her for a week. Then about a month later he appeared outside her place, pounding on her door in the middle of the night. She threatened to call the police and he finally left. When I got back she hadn’t seen him for nearly a year. Then last year he started calling again and about two months ago he showed up at her place and tried to force her into his car. Her landlord started hitting George with a rake and someone called the police this time. Right afterward, Mel took out a restraining order on George and as far as I know he hasn’t been around since then. Until last night.”

“And last night he was saying that he was her fiancé?”

“Yes! Can you believe it? I’m standing there talking to Mrs. Harris and suddenly I hear his voice. He’s chatting up some bimbo, telling her that he and Mel were engaged and giving her some sob story. He wouldn’t dare say that to her parents, but can you imagine? Mel is lying there literally twenty feet away from him and he’s hitting on some nineteen-year-old. So when he leaves I follow him out. I tell him exactly what I think of him. And that’s just when you show up to rescue me,” Veronica smiles charmingly, her soft pink lipstick glowing against those white teeth.

“George looked like he was about to take a swing at you,” I observe.

Veronica nods vigorously. “How stupid am I? I’m standing there in the dark on a deserted street arguing with this crazy guy who beat up my best friend? I just got so angry and I thought, ‘I’m not going to let him get away with that – not here.’ And I don’t stop to think that he might actually hurt
me
.” She puts a hand over her eyes, massaging her forehead, and leans back in her chair. Her feet slide out of her shoes and she props them up on the inlaid wood coffee table between us. Black wool stockings cover her legs. “That was very clever, by the way, how you handled George last night,” she says, smiling at me.

I shrug again. I feel myself being pulled in an uncomfortable direction.

“No, seriously, it was. You just played dumb and whisked me away before he could even respond. No confrontation, no fight. Pretty smart. You’re a man of twists and turns, aren’t you?” she smiles. I raise an eyebrow because I get the reference, but I don’t respond. “And here we’ve been sitting for nearly an hour and I keep talking and talking and you’ve hardly said two words about yourself.”

I stop a moment to consider that. “It’s been a long time since I was home and you’re helping me catch up, which I appreciate.”

“You know Melissa talked about you a lot. She really idolized you,” Veronica says. Her voice quiets as her tone turns more serious.

She catches me off-guard again. I actually stutter when I respond.

“I…I would have thought that she hated me. I walked out on her – I abandoned her.”

Veronica shakes her head with conviction. “She didn’t think that. I mean…of course she missed you. I think she spent her first two weeks of college crying. But she didn’t blame you. You left your mother, not Mel. And you still helped support your family, didn’t you, even if you didn’t stay in Conestoga? That’s a lot to carry for an eighteen-year-old.” I see a spark of compassion in Veronica’s eyes and look away.

“It wasn’t like that. I was a stupid kid.”

I can feel my face burning. Veronica is so earnest that I can almost see things from her perspective. But what looks brave to her was just plain fear and immaturity. Yes, I was furious at my mother but even more mortified by my reaction to her ultimatum. “With your father gone, you have to help me support the family,” she’d said to me exactly one day after my Dad’s funeral. “Ned Vickers will give you a job at his machine shop.” It wasn’t a discussion, just a statement of fact. Like the solid sound of a prison door slamming shut. I ran upstairs and threw some clothes and a few personal items in a duffle and then I walked out of that house and never looked back. It was just a few weeks after my eighteenth birthday.

I couldn’t go to Michigan and play football after my mother told me I’d be starving my sisters, but I was damn well not going to get stuck in Conestoga for the rest of my life. So I enlisted. I sent money back home every month: that was atonement. In all the time since, even after I left the Army, I’ve been too ashamed to come home and face my mother. At least once a month for the past few years, Ginny calls, pleading with me to make peace with mother. And Amelia tries to goad me by saying I’m too proud to make amends. The truth is worse. Thinking about my mother reminds me of the conceited self-image I had in high school and how quickly it fell apart when I was asked to make a real sacrifice. Running off and enlisting was a hasty, angry decision. I had no idea of the consequences, of the price I’d pay for that moment of rebellion. And I am only just beginning to understand how childish I was. My mother is not an easy person to like, but she has given her entire life to her family. I ran when I was asked to sacrifice a few years.

It was different with Mel, of course. We dated for three years in high school. She knew why I left Conestoga and abandoned my football scholarship and she understood my choice on some level. I stayed with her family while I was winding my way through the enlistment process. Maybe if I’d actually gone to Michigan when she headed to Syracuse, we would have ended up married. She wrote me nearly every day that summer before she went to school, but I was in basic training and it was hard for me to write back. Eventually our worlds became so different that the letters slowed down then stopped altogether. Despite everything Veronica has said, I don’t know how Mel really felt about me.

But Veronica doesn’t give up easily; I already know that about her. She shakes her head resolutely. “You were a soldier, weren’t you? Mel talked about the medals you earned in Afghanistan.”

Here it is, the conversation I’ve been trying to avoid. “That was a long time ago. I spent most of my time in the Army in a clerical division.” Technically, this is almost true. Veronica looks skeptical, narrows her eyes, but lets it pass. I change the subject and ask her about her career. She chats animatedly about her editor and the difficulty of getting real estate developers to comment on zoning issues, the awful lack of good restaurants in Westchester County and her strong desire to land a job in the city and move out of her parents’ place. When the conversation lulls again, we leave the coffee shop. She drops me at my motel, wrinkling her nose when she catches sight of it. She asks me for my cell number and I give it to her, thinking with a twinge of regret that I will probably never see her again.

I’m wrong, of course.

* * *

I stop ten feet from the door to my childhood house, realizing that I have no idea what I’m going to do when I see my mother. What can I possibly say to unravel a dozen years of silence? My pride is gone. Everything I’ve seen and experienced since I left home tells me that I’ve been a fool to not hold on tightly to my family. I just don’t know how to take the first step. It doesn’t occur to me that I already have.

The Herne house is a pre-war Victorian with a wraparound porch and a detached one-car garage. It is painted in a matte, off-white color that probably has some artsy sounding name like “eggshell” or “ochre”. Still, the yard and the house itself have been cared for better than most of the other houses in the neighborhood, or the town for that matter. The grass in the yard is trimmed, a flowerbed of chrysanthemums is gamely holding on more than a month past Labor Day and a pile of autumnal leaves has been neatly raked to the side of the porch. It’s a big house for Mom and Ginny, but Amelia and Jeff live just a town over and Jamie teaches in Albany, about an hour north.

Ginny answers the door and winks at me, then gives me a big hug. She’s more excited than anyone and knows how hard this is for me. The smell of roast turkey hits me like a body blow, flooding me with memories. I walk stiffly into the living room and I get the sense that time has paused while I’ve been away. The TV is new, or at least newer than the 27-inch walnut console I remember, but the floral sofa and stuffed armchairs look not a day older. Amelia and Jeff are both in high spirits and Jamie pecks me on the cheek while she continues an animated conversation on her cell phone. I stand there in the living room, rooted in place until my mother emerges from the kitchen wearing a calico apron. I see immediately that she has passed through middle age. Her hair is steel gray and a network of lines maps the contours of her face. She’s very near retirement age and has not lived an easy life. With a jolt, I realize that my mother has become old. I never saw my dad age and it’s a shock to see how my mother has changed.

My mother stops a couple feet from me and regards me with those green-gray eyes. I am frozen. I can feel a collective inhale of breath from my sisters. After a second she simply nods at me and says, “Michael…you can peel potatoes in the sink.” I numbly shuffle into the kitchen and taking up the peeler, use it to attack a stack of russet potatoes.
Hi Michael, do some chores,
I grumble to myself. I realize that I shouldn’t have expected either a tearful greeting or an angry scolding. The woman who didn’t shed a single tear through my father’s depression and alcoholism, their constant fights, his layoff from the mill and his suicide, the woman who didn’t cry at her husband’s funeral or on the day when her eighteen-year-old son cursed her and left the house with a single bag slung over his shoulder – that woman is not going to get flustered by that boy’s return. With the water running and the peeler moving smoothly, tears leak from my eyes. I can’t remember the last time I cried, and I’ve seen some truly awful things since I left Conestoga. Only Ginny seems to notice. She puts a hand on my shoulder before grabbing another peeler to help me.

As I cut into a drumstick and pile peas and stuffing onto my fork, I realize that something inside me feels different. A familiar knot in my stomach is gone. I have no illusions: my mother will not become warm and affectionate and I doubt that my sister Amelia will ever stop reminding me of my drill Sergeant from basic training. But I’ve been accepted back into my family. In my life, I’ve been adopted twice: once by the Army and once by my classmates at Georgetown. But this is not the same. Blood matters.

“So how do you like civilian life? Is it weird to go a whole day without shooting someone?” Jamie teases.

“It’s sad, very hard to pass the time,” I reply with a straight face. Jamie looks shocked for a second before she laughs. Amelia rolls her eyes and asks for the mashed potatoes. She may be the only one who was angrier than Mom when I left home.

“How do you like your new job?” Jamie asks.

“It’s great. Fascinating, but I’m only six months in.” That’s not entirely true. I’m not a hundred percent sure that I fit the sedentary life that I’ve worked so hard for. A suit doesn’t feel comfortable on me. But it’s the path I’ve chosen and if I learned anything in the Army, it’s how to track a path to the end.

“And what is it that you do, exactly?” my mother asks in a tone that suggests she may not want too many details.

“I’m an intelligence analyst for the State Department.”

“Oh, my God! You’re a spy!” Ginny says, savoring the last word.

I shake my head emphatically. “More like a reporter. It’s a desk job. I look at things like satellite photos and intel reports, as well as publicly available stuff from the Internet, to put together stories. I have a little area of responsibility that I follow and I write articles for some classified journals that circulate in the intelligence community.”

“What’s your specialty area?” Jeff asks. I hesitate because I know he’s obsessed with guns. I’m weighing an offer to join him tomorrow morning for a hunting trip before I head back to Washington.

“Generally speaking I work on arms transfers – when a country sells arms to another country through a defense contractor. I can’t be more specific than that or I’ll fail my next polygraph and lose my job.”

“They make you take a lie detector test?” This from Ginny, who looks like she’s smelled bad fish.

“It usually catches people who are nervous about the test…” I drift for a second, remembering the exact moment when I learned to flat-line a polygraph while telling the most outrageous lies.

Amelia turns away from me to mother and pointedly changes the topic. “So I snuck a peek at the blanket you’re quilting for the baby. I love the pink trim!” And there it is. About six weeks ago she called and asked me to come home for the weekend. I said no. She said it was important. I apologized but held my ground. I found out later that she and Jeff announced that weekend that they are expecting a baby girl. Amelia never called to tell me. I realize that I have a lot of ground to make up with her and I think about that and being an uncle while the baby talk continues for the rest of the meal.