Not Kyle spinning on the lab stool, once, twice, three times. Before I open the door to the Marsh Road Diner in Wilmington, the breakfast counter is framed in the diner door. A compact man with no gray hair faces the controlled chaos in front of the grill, the waitresses reaching and cooks flipping eggs and orders hanging from clips. No one else sits at the counter, and Sam’s not charming Nancy at the moment.
“Sheila forbid you drinking coffee?” I take the stool next to him at the counter. Start with family. Work toward harder topics like Tim-Tim’s, like Mr. Bad-Boy’s dad.
“Can’t get service,” Sam says. His shoulders go up when he turns toward me, and that’s when I notice the backsides of the waitresses lined up. All the aprons are tied with perfect bows. I never could tie an apron on Kim with a bow like that. Nancy is two meters away, and ten galaxies.
“Not even water?”
“Nada,” Sam says. He faces the line of bows.
“Hey, Nancy,” I say to the bow, second from the right, “How about coffee for your favorite professors?” When she turns part way around, her right hand holds a Mr. Coffee Thermos, but the steps she takes move on a vector away from us, around the end of the counter, to the booths. No smile, no wisecrack, no how.
“It seems that bad press overshadows good,” Sam says. He spins toward me on the stool.
The Taiko drum hits me inside. “Suuu,” the drummer yells. My parents walk every day to the grocery store, my mother chatting to the clerk as she rings up fish and vegetables. Will the clerk in San Diego know the news? Will the clerk close her line before my mother unpacks her cart?
“How could they,” I say more to the counter than to Sam, “think such a thing? Nancy knows me.”
“What do they know, Song? You’re a customer, that’s all.” Sam lines up objects near him on the counter. The napkin dispenser. “And you’re not from here.” Salt. “And you’re a Jap.” Pepper.
“Right. I forgot.” Teacher of teachers, Sam grew up in Delaware, grew up next to Tim-Tim’s. He knows how people think. In Delaware, all almond eyes are Oriental eyes. And he doesn’t say the other thing, the thing the waitresses think but don’t say to us. The women turned away from us do a syllogism inside: Song touched boy. Boy killed himself. Song killed boy. If one piece is fallible, the whole is fallible. The only true part of their syllogism is the middle one: boy killed self.
“Let’s get out of here,” Sam says.
Without our usual goodbye to Nancy, we leave Marsh Road Diner. There’s a McDonald’s down the street, and the bright orange and plastic inside are perfect for a couple of guys who don’t want to spend time in the place. We take a booth.
Nancy and those waitresses contain the wave in them. The wave does not pass through. They are the middle of the rope suspended between two bodies. The wave continues to undulate, and they do not break its pattern.
“Sam,” I say, “I’m sorry you got dragged into all this.”
“Me, too,” he says, “I like that place. Good sausage.” His dark eyebrows rise when he looks across the orange table at me.
“Maybe Sheila will thank me.”
“Maybe.”
“How was talking to Charles Zurkus III?”
“A lot like eating broccoli,” Sam says. He takes the salt shaker and shuffles it between his small hands. Back and forth, the glass bottom on plastic table, lots of drag.
“Did you know him at Stanford?”
“Not much, but enough. And you know how that goes, alumni stick together. Besides, his company does some work on the side for our company.” CIA Sam doing covert work with Zurkus III. Textiles and engineering somehow saving the U.S. from the Soviets, and both forces colluding to protect one man’s son and one man’s friend. Sam’s force exerting more influence than Charles’ force. No science can explain relationships.
“What did you say?”
“The truth, that his son has an active imagination.” The salt shaker was more hockey puck, back and forth.
“And Daddy agreed?” Hard to imagine a parent backing down so quickly. Puffy Zurkus III, all bluster, no bite.
Sam looked through his bushy eyebrows at me, “That and a little reminder that I’m in charge of the contracts his company has with us.”
“You didn’t threaten him.”
“No need.” Sam shakes his head.
“I can’t thank you enough.”
“Again, no need,” Mr. Magnanimous says. The salt shaker stops in his right hand. My eyes move to his left hand out of habit. “The boy, the one who died, he’s the one you told me about, correct?”
“Yes. And you know,” I say.
“I know you did nothing,” Sam says. “His mother? I saw her on the news.”
“Yes, Nagasaki.”
“Terrible.”
“The boy was adopted, but he had hyo. One boy army trying to save his mother from another atom bomb. Trying to save all of us.”
The salt shaker still fitting the palm of his hand, Sam says, “That’s a lot for a little kid.”
“Too much.”
The Big Macs come in their orange baskets, and Sam is licking his fingers and attacking his fries before I have picked out the pickle and tossed it away. After finishing his fries, he looks at mine until I push my basket toward him.
“Help yourself,” I say, and he does. He finishes my fries, and I finish my Big Mac, and he asks questions about Tim-Tim’s and what the Whites did for Kyle and what they didn’t, if they knew about the bullying when it was happening and if they took steps to stop it. He shakes his head about the Second Formers still at the school, about the press conferences, about the rat maze cubbies that house those boys. Neither of us has answers, but we both know that kids away from home are earth on us, earth on the school.
“Next time let’s get a real meal,” Sam says, and we pick a day to meet next month. We’ll find a new place to eat, some place with omelets that hang off the plates and plenty of sausage.