It was Abe who remembered.
“Don’t you have book club tonight?” he asked Jen in a half shout. His headphones were on.
“I’ll skip.”
“What?”
Jen tapped her ear and he pushed off the right earpiece.
“I’ll stay home with you guys,” she said.
In the hours since the expulsion, the three of them had been cocooned in the den. Paul worked, Jen pretended to, and Abe had played a loud and violent game of Foxhole, his favorite multiplayer video game.
All games of Foxhole were loud and violent, but they were also, Jen and Paul told themselves, extremely interactive and thus not a total wash. Going forward, could Foxhole count as PE?
“I’m fine,” Abe said. “Holla123 says being homeschooled is actually kind of fun.”
“Go to book club,” Paul said to Jen.
“Yeah, go,” Abe said, “it’s your one thing, Mom.”
Jen trotted out her book club membership when she wanted to appear normal. Jen’s mother fretting aloud (again) about how Jen didn’t have a support system since the move? I’ve met some lovely women at book club, Mom!
Paul breezing in from a business trip with stories of the outside world and pausing to ask gently if Jen talked to anyone, anyone at all while he was gone, about something other than Abe?
Book club! Everything’s fine, nothing to see here.
The actual club discussions were fine if a little stale, ditto the reading selections, which were, truth be told, a little on the commercial side for Jen’s tastes, but it was worth her while to attend. Someone in the group had found out that Jen had a Ph.D. and the way they all now looked to Jen for opinions and subtexts?
She pretended not to need the attention, but she soaked it up, a desperate parading peacock.
At one of last year’s meetings, she’d gotten loose-tongued tipsy, and tried to come clean to Harriet Nessel. My degree is in organizational psychology, Jen had lectured, not literature.
“I know,” Harriet said. “You study animals now.”
“I study the people who study the animals,” Jen had admitted. “It couldn’t be farther from popular fiction.”
“I guess that depends on your thoughts about the animal/human divide,” Harriet said drolly. “Has so-called civilization removed us as much as we like to think? Food for thought, dear, food for thought.”
Point: Harriet.
(Harriet had probably been tipsy, too. The drinks at book club were always shockingly strong.)
Jen realized that she probably missed teaching more than she had admitted to herself, and even if it wasn’t the cure-all she pretended it was, for the time being, the Cottonwood Book Club was the closest she was going to get to an exchange of ideas.
Abe and Paul were right. She should go. Jen rushed upstairs to grab a sweater and put on earrings, because the other women always looked so put-together and even though Jen pretended she didn’t care, obviously she did on some deep level—and then, as she stood in front of her bureau, Jen’s hand extended like some horror movie claw to reach into the sock drawer, palm Dr. Scofield’s business card, and slip it into the back pocket of her jeans.
By the time Jen got to Harriet Nessel’s house, a long line of cars extended far down the street. She pulled behind a dark SUV. Its door opened and Priya Jensen, one of the club’s core members, stepped out, tall and gorgeous as ever. She tossed her silky black hair over her shoulder, waved at Jen, and went inside.
If Priya or any of the others knew that book club was Jen’s “one thing,” they would probably stage an intervention, albeit one with themed finger sandwiches and a gift bag stuffed with lavender-scented hand lotions and candles.
Priya and the rest of the book club group regulars—manic Janine Neff and Deb Gallegos, who did the elaborate drinks, and Annie Perley, who reminded Jen of a plucky kid sister from a situation comedy—were constantly planning Fun Events: cocktails and tailgates and ski weekends. All of their kids seemed to be friends and most attended Sandstone K-8, the local public school.
Before their move, Jen had flown out to visit schools on Abe’s behalf. At Sandstone, she had been struck first by the blindingly aggressive level of activity: everyone—teachers and students—seemed to be kicking balls, or singing and dancing, or hurrying through the halls while talking and laughing. They were shiny-haired, white-toothed, zipped up in brightly colored fleece jackets.
Jen had walked out before the tour began.
Foothills Charter School was out-of-district, which had been inconvenient at the time, but was now a blessing. The women of book club wouldn’t have heard any gossip about Abe’s expulsion.
After Jen’s first book club meeting, Janine made it a point to invite Jen to a barbecue, so Abe could meet the other kiddos his age. While Jen had felt a bizarre pride that she’d faked normalcy convincingly enough to be asked, she had ultimately declined. Abe had no place at a barbecue in this neighborhood.
Jen wasn’t embarrassed by Abe, but she knew that he invited judgment. The slouch, the slightly forced smile, the intense and stony stare. He was that kid.
But Abe was so much more than that kid!
When people put him in a box or alienated him or she saw that inevitable flicker of derision across their faces, Jen burned like a devil doused with holy water.
Jen wasn’t one of those moms, the kind who insisted her child was perfect, but there was so much hypocrisy. Everyone preached tolerance to difference, but nobody practiced it.
She was stalling.
Jen took Scofield’s card from her jeans pocket and held it between her thumb and forefinger. He’d bet big on himself and sprung for the expensive card stock: the thing didn’t even buckle.
This shouldn’t surprise. Scofield was all about image, with that slicked-back gelled hair and that pungent cologne, probably to mask the odor from those bare feet shoved into loafers. He was immature and brusque and mansplainy and hadn’t let Jen get a word in.
Jen knew now that it was flat-out wrong to label a child as young as Abe. They could probably find several respected doctors who would agree it had been malpractice.
Someone must have sued Scofield by now, or maybe his license had been revoked. But even if he was still practicing, Scofield certainly wouldn’t remember Abe.
And here was Jen, carrying his card from state to state, like some sort of groupie. She considered calling him every time she read the newspapers after a horrific mass assault. The assailants were very frequently a young man, teens or early twenties, isolated and in pain. Inevitably, there had been signs from childhood that he hadn’t fit in, and Jen could not stop herself from reading those signs as a road map, a point of comparison to Abe.
Jen reminded herself that she, not Scofield, was the world’s foremost expert on Abe.
She would agree with anyone that Abe’s disposition wasn’t particularly sunny, but Abe wasn’t cruel. And as far as the hamster story went, Jen reassured herself that Abe had always been fine with their cat—if not affectionate, then at least neutral.
He wasn’t like those young men in the news, Abe just needed to learn how to cope a little better, but—
What if he never did?
What did people say about the young man who had taken hostages in the supermarket and the other who had brought assault weapons to the fraternities he had been rejected from?
They had been loners, too.
Forgotten shadows in the back of the class, most likely. At root, desperate to connect.
When Jen read about these lost souls, she felt for them as much as the victims (which was warped: empathy shouldn’t extend where they’d gone). Mostly, though, she felt for their poor parents. What warning signs, what chances to intervene had they missed?
Two other women walked past Jen’s car, Lolita copies in hand, but she couldn’t let herself go inside until she called Scofield.
Call him. Nothing else has worked.
It rang. Once and then again. When the message switched to voicemail, there was his voice—still so young!—and a beep.
“Dr. Scofield, hello. My name is Jen Chun-Pagano and you saw my son about seven years ago. Long enough ago that you probably don’t remember us.”
Jen gave her number, cut herself off, hung up.
Just a rule-out, she told herself. Just to confirm that Scofield was as unhelpful as she and Paul remembered him to be.
The women were already circled around Harriet Nessel’s living room when Jen creaked open the screen door. Thirty heads turned to stare.
“Jen, sweetie,” Janine said, “grab yourself a glass of Lolita Lemondrop from the kitchen and come on back.”
“Yes, please,” Jen said, a little too desperately, and the women laughed. The desperate need for alcohol was a running joke with this group.
When she returned to the living room, giant mason jar in hand, Jen settled into an empty spot on the piano bench next to Annie Perley, who pointed at the Lolita Lemondrop and mouthed, Lethal.
Jen smiled, nodded, took a gingery sip. It was delicious, actually, with a warm heat that lingered in the back of her throat.
Janine was explaining excitedly that they would start with introductions! Everyone had to say their favorite book or genre and then something fun and unexpected about herself!
“For instance,” she said. “I’m Janine!” She stabbed her index finger into her chest with surprising torque. “And my favorite book is The Giving Tree! My something unexpected is that I have a tattoo”—she winked exaggeratedly—“but I’m not telling you ladies where.”
Through the years, Jen had developed a little game where she imagined how other people might handle raising Abe. The women of book club—there had been a man in the group last year, but he was notably absent tonight, scared off, perhaps, by last spring’s startlingly passionate discussion of that menopause book—had such canned and untested beliefs about “parenting,” namely that any and all behavioral issues should yield to Respectful Discussion and/or Diminished Screen Time and/or Organic Diets.
Janine was a bragger, especially about her daughter Katie. Would she be putting a spin on whatever material Abe gave her?
He’s not quite Lizzie Borden yet, but the ER doctor said his blade skills were very advanced. And you should see his work with blasting agents!
Abe offered plenty of legitimate opportunities for bragging, Jen reminded herself. He was smart, he was creative, he had goals—currently to program an entire video game from scratch. He could be thoughtful, too. He’d reminded her about tonight’s meeting.
And he had never tortured their cat. At least so far as she knew.
“Someone’s communing with her Lolita Lemondrop,” Janine sang out, and Jen realized that all of those politely inquiring faces had turned toward her.
“Jen,” Janine said, “surprise us! Tell us your secret!”
None of them, Jen was certain, could even begin to handle her secret.
“I’m Jen Chun-Pagano,” she managed to say. “And I love Regency fiction. Bodice rippers. The steamier the better. I’m hoping that’s embarrassing enough to also qualify as my something unexpected.”
Jen’s chest melted into liquid warmth at the group’s kind laughter.
“Last but not least,” Janine trilled, “our hostess with the mostest. What’s your favorite book, Harriet?”
Harriet, another book club mainstay, had lived in Cottonwood Estates longer than anyone else in the club. She had a severe gray crop, a perpetual frown, and the belief that every book had one correct interpretation, which it was her job to understand. Ostensibly to further this goal, she brought a yellow legal pad to every book club meeting and spent the entire discussion filling the thing with furiously handwritten notes, as though she were anticipating a test.
“One favorite book?” Harriet said with skepticism. “That’s impossible to answer.”
“Genre then? You love your mysteries.”
“I suppose any amateur sleuth story,” Harriet said. “Or the classics. Can that be our segue, Ms. President, to get on with this month’s selection?”
Jen largely ignored the Lolita discussion. She had studied the book in high school and college and was already familiar with the role of games, the metacommentary about how Nabokov played with the reader.
As per usual with Lolita, there were two camps: those who couldn’t get past the molestation and murder and those who thought the ugliness was exactly the point—that the book was a master class in unreliable narration and satire.
Jen had probably argued both sides in her life, but who cared?
It had been a mistake to call Scofield. Jen already regretted it.
She wasn’t even sure that Abe had smiled in the car; he had been subdued all afternoon. And he seemed so relieved to not have to go back to Foothills.
School must have been even worse for him than Jen had realized.
Jen didn’t know what exactly had happened to make Harper turn on Abe, but the aftermath had been awful—whispers on line for PE, shoves in the cafeteria, “not it”s during group projects for school, all perfectly timed for when the teachers’ backs were turned.
Find a new friend, Jen had urged, but Abe explained with resignation that everyone had already heard he was a freak. If only he smiled more, Abe had said, but he was always nervous there and could never remember to do so.
Jen had tried to tell the school, but they were over Abe at that point. When Abe found a note in his drawing kit that said “Satan’s Minion,” Jen brought it up to the art teacher. Are you sure he didn’t draw it himself, Mr. Marley had said in his infuriating stoner’s drawl, Abe can get pretty dark.
What her son needed, more than anything else, was protection. Foothills had not provided it.
Jen’s career ambitions were not the cause of Abe’s issues—linking the two was misogynist draconian nonsense—but part of Jen had always wondered deep down, oh so very deep down because she knew it was crazy, plenty of parents worked, but—
If Janine were Abe’s parent, she might brag about him, but she also would have been a solid, irrefutable daily presence, there in his corner from preschool on. Janine would have volunteered to be room parent and signed Abe up for Scouts, organized a troop if there weren’t one in existence. She would have served punch at the class parties and dances (assuming that was an actual job and not just something Jen had seen on TV). She would have thrown him into social situations, and maybe he’d have developed better skills.
Paul said that Jen couldn’t help but compare herself to other parents because she was a fundamentally competitive person. All parents compared themselves to other parents, though. People operated in relation to each other, just like wolves did, or prairie dogs or meerkats.
Or birds.
Lately, Jen’s research had been heavy on the birds—there was a lot of recent work in the avian-navigation field—and reading about a flock’s inexplicable telepathy, how it majestically ascended to the skies in one coordinated rush, Jen could not help but picture her neighbors, similarly in thrall to the mandates of a group soul.
At book club, differences were not celebrated, they were barely acknowledged. Last year, Jen had initially been pleasantly surprised to note that she was not the only book club member with a multicultural background. There was Priya and also Athena, who was half Liberian, half French.
Not that race or heritage was ever truly discussed. Everyone worked to gently herd the conversation toward safe common ground: opinions about the book, families, work stress. Teasing was always delivered with a smile, to emphasize that it was all in harmless fun.
Even amid tonight’s rowdy Lolita debate, you could see the women striving to agree, their nods of reassurance toward whoever was speaking little pigeon neck-bobs of support.
The real currency at the Cottonwood Book Club wasn’t literature, it was sameness. And Jen craved this feeling of belonging even as she hated what it confirmed: there was safety in numbers.
And danger in being an outlier.
The book club was really getting into Lolita. Annie kept clapping her hands together like a teacher trying to get control of a recalcitrant class and inadvertently elbowing Jen in the ribs.
“People,” she shouted. “He’s a pedophile. Sorry, Jen.”
“You don’t have to be friends with the characters, Annie,” Deb said.
“Well, what a relief that is.”
“Lolita is a classic novel,” Harriet Nessel repeated stubbornly.
“Good grief. Who in the heck cares that it’s a classic? Or that he’s funny? We’ve spent hundreds of pages listening to the point of view of a murdering pedophile. Whoops, sorry, bumped you again, Jen, but if you all just think about that girl trying to put back her life together after this monster broke it into pieces, and then tell me: Do we need his perspective on anything?”
After a swell of dissent, the conversation grew even livelier.
Jen sipped her Lolita Lemondrop and rubbed her ribs where Annie kept jabbing her. She let the discussion wash over her until it died down and the women broke into small groups. Next to Jen, Annie Perley heatedly told Janine that if she liked Humbert Humbert so much, why didn’t she hire him as a babysitter.
“Oh honestly,” Janine said. “I’m changing the subject to our savior.”
Religion was usually Jen’s cue to politely excuse herself, but Janine was watching her with an unnerving soupy smile.
“Me?” Jen said.
“Yes! For volunteering to host November’s meeting in my place.”
Crap. Crap. Crappity Crap.
Jen had volunteered. She recalled the email plea—S.O.S. LADIES! We are DESPERATE for a host—from a million years before in the summer, when Jen had been full of optimism about her research grant and seventh grade.
“Oh, right,” Annie said to Janine. “Your floors.”
“I’m redoing my floors,” Janine explained with a sigh, “so I can’t host, and I know it’s probably stupid, because our dogs are old and we’ll wind up with a new puppy at some point soon and that puppy will of course ruin the floors, but then tell me, Jen, will there ever be a good time? We’re probably perpetually three years away from a new puppy! You get the impossibility, of course you do!”
“It’s amazing you can even function.” Jen’s tone was tart enough that Annie meowed and formed her hand into a claw. Janine’s giggle made clear that she couldn’t be less offended.
“Right?” Janine said with great enthusiasm.
Jen imagined gesturing to a waiter—I’ll have a bucket of whatever she’s having, please.
“The group will be much smaller next month, cross my heart,” Janine said. “All the book club lookie-loos will be gone.”
“Jen lives in the Stollers’ old house, right?” Annie said.
“Which has that amazing great room,” Janine said.
“With the wood beams and vaulted ceilings,” Annie said, with a dreamy look on her face.
“Thank you?” Jen said, although the compliments did not seem directed at her.
“We’ll do everything,” Janine promised. “It will be barely any work.”
“When are we going to talk about the vandal?” Deb Gallegos said. She and Priya Jensen had appeared behind Janine, and everyone shifted to let them into the circle.
Despite tonight’s eighty-degree weather, Deb wore suede boots that came up to almost her waist. She had Disney princess hair, coiled perfectly over her shoulders in glossy waves.
“What vandal?” Jen said.
The women regarded Jen as though she’d announced that books were stupid, especially when you could just see the movie.
After a cycle of how did you miss this, where have you been? Deb explained worriedly that someone had graffitied not only the Cottonwood signs by the entrance but also—she lowered her voice, infused it with pathos—Lena Meeker’s mailbox.
As in Lena Meeker, of all people.
Jen wasn’t entirely fluent in neighborhood lore, but fragments of Lena’s story had come up in some of the meetings—her husband had died in a horrible car crash years before in the neighborhood, and Lena had apparently responded by sealing herself off in that big house on top of the hill.
How would someone like Lena Meeker parent Abe?
At last an answer that Jen liked: Not as healthily as Jen Chun-Pagano, who made it a point to leave the house and go to book club every single month.
“Even if it is just bored kids,” Priya said. “They’re cruel. I’ve been pregnant four times, ladies. When my bladder sees a sign screaming PEE each morning, it thinks ‘great idea!’”
“Hey,” Annie said. “When did you guys get here?”
Annie’s daughter Laurel, who was roughly Abe’s age, had appeared behind Annie. “Five minutes ago,” she said. In a gesture of casual affection, she’d draped her arms around Annie’s middle, pressed her chin into Annie’s shoulder. “Dad and Hank are saying hi to Mrs. Nessel.”
Laurel smiled at Jen. She held excellent eye contact with those alert upturned amber eyes. Her mass of long curly hair was captured haphazardly by a scrunchy. Everything about her said middle school is a breeze!
“Mike,” Deb Gallegos cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted across the room to Annie’s husband. “Come here.”
Jen stifled an eye roll. Whenever Mike Perley stopped by book club, everyone acted like they were on vacation and he was the hot scuba instructor who was making them feel twenty-one again.
He was different from the other husbands—because of his youth and that cheeky grin, because of his shaggy shoulder-length orange hair, occasionally swept up into a man bun, because of his penchant for accessorizing: rope bracelets around his wrists, leather cords with beads around his neck, ornate tattoos, one on each forearm. Because instead of leaving at seven thirty each morning for the office, he owned a struggling restaurant and seemed to be around a lot.
As he approached their group, the women’s faces turned toward him like sunflowers.
“Mike Perley.” Janine beamed. “Be still my beating heart. How was the blood drive?”
“Excellent!” Mike said.
The women swooned and tittered as he and Laurel jointly narrated the highs and lows of the school blood drive they’d just attended, after which Laurel was dispatched to protect the food table from Hank. Before she left, though, she referred to Hank by an affectionate nickname—Jen didn’t catch it—that made Annie and Mike dissolve in laughter.
Tonight, proximity to the Perleys was a little too much for Jen to take. She suddenly felt a burning need to find cracks in their family dynamic. There had to be cracks. Didn’t every family have cracks?
She had become a total jerk.
“Did you donate blood?” Janine asked Mike in a teasing lilt.
Mike gestured to the Band-Aid in the crook of his elbow, shrugged with false pride.
“I won the blood drive, actually,” he joked. “Great veins, universal donor. They actually invited me back for next year and”—Mike raised his eyebrows and—“I don’t think they do that with everyone.”
Janine threw back her head in laughter. Her hand, Jen noted, lingered on Mike’s arm, patted that defined bicep.
How would the Perleys have parented Abe?
They’d be unruffled, Jen guessed, which would probably be excellent for Abe. She and Paul both could get uptight and they tended to care too much about even the unimportant things.
At the food table, Laurel handed cheese cubes to her brother, who had the same bright orange hair as his dad and was hamming it up, overstuffing his mouth with the cheese.
Jen still occasionally questioned whether she and Paul should have tried for a second child. Abe had always seemed too fragile, and they’d been exhausted and worried it might disrupt his ecosystem. But maybe it would have been exactly what he needed.
Would Abe be more adaptable if he’d had a sibling looking after him, feeding him cheese?
Probably. And he’d have strong bones, too. All that calcium!
“Your son’s not at Sandstone, right?” Deb asked Jen.
“Abe goes to Foothills,” Priya said before Jen could respond.
“Great school,” Janine said. “People love Foothills. That principal, people rave about him. What’s his name, Denton? Talk about cult of personality—”
Because Jen was working so hard to keep her expression measured, it took a moment for her to recognize that the ringing phone was hers. Saved by the bell!
When the ID flashed her former area code she realized she hadn’t been saved at all.
She managed a scrambled “excuse me,” and pressed the phone to her ear as she rushed out the front door to Harriet’s front steps.
“Hello?”
“Scofield here.”
“That’s some prompt service.” Jen paused for Scofield to laugh, which he didn’t. “I’m sure you don’t remember us, it’s been years since you saw our son, seven if I’m counting right, he was in kindergarten—”
Jen lowered her voice as the Perleys walked past her and Laurel paused on Harriet’s porch for Hank to hop on her back. Annie and Mike linked arms and Hank chanted a pop song and they all joined in as they strolled across the street to their house, not even bothering to check for cars.
“Eight years,” Scofield corrected. “He’s just turned thirteen, right?”
“Right, I don’t know if you keep notes or not, but his name is—”
“Abe. The guinea pig killer.”
“It was a hamster,” Jen said, already annoyed, “and no one died.”
“Riiight,” Scofield said in an indulgent ooze that made clear that the rodent’s well-being wasn’t the point.
“But I’m wondering,” Jen said, “if you might have been right about him.”
“Which part?”
There was a long, empty pause.
He was a horrible man, sadistic. He was going to make her say the word aloud. There was a difference between thinking it and tasting it on her tongue, slithery and rotten.
“The part—” Jen held her chin high just on principle, and realized in a flash that Dr. Scofield was inconsequential. The man was not some oracle. He was an asshole, and always would be. The important struggle had always been the one between Jen and herself. Could she even consider this about own son, let alone say it?
It turned out that she could.
“The part,” she said, “about Abe’s being a sociopath.”
OCTOBER
To: “The Best Book Club in the World”
From: proudmamabooklover3@hmail.com
It’s that time again, Ladies!!! Put down that pumpkin carving knife and open this month’s read …
The book: IN SICKNESS AND HEALTH. Paige Smithson is a pediatrician, married to the love of her life, with the career of her dreams, two beautiful young children, and a diagnosis of terminal cancer.
The story of a woman, mortality and how to say goodbye, written by the husband who loved her, has been called “as heartbreaking as it is life-affirming.” “A treatise on what it means to be human.”
I’ve read this twice now—am-A-zing!—and will warn you: bring tissues!!!
The place: Deb Gallegos’s house, 5552 Frontview Way. Deb would like me to warn you about the hole in the front yard due to an issue with the pipes, so please watch your step, especially in the dark! And also, please leave your shoes in the front hallway when you come in.
I am just realizing, Deb, that all of your instructions are feet-related! Fetish anyone?;););)
The time: 7:30*
To bring: Tissues, drinks and snacks (so many great offerings last time, let’s keep those themed masterpieces going!)
Until then, readers!!!!! (Who’s with me in not believing it’s October?? Where is the year going???)
*Is anyone else open to pushing the start back to a little later in the evening? (Just maybe like eight? Soccer mamas, are you with me? Katie’s sport schedule is killing us this year!! #Goaliemom)