Two

“Mom,” Tommy said, “I can’t do it. I just can’t.”

Tuesday evening, Peyton looked across the kitchen table at her ten-year-old son, his blue eyes turning away.

“What am I going to say to you, Tommy?”

Peyton’s sister, Elise, was at the stove, adding green peppers to her spaghetti sauce. Tuesday nights had become what the sisters referred to as “sacred sister nights.” Younger sister Elise and her four-year-old Max and adopted daughter Autumn, three, ate with Peyton and Tommy every week, the sisters alternating houses. Elise had lost her husband, figuratively at first, then literally, three years earlier. He left her for a former student, with whom he’d fathered Autumn. When he passed, Elise adopted the baby. Now she was raising her as her own, while taking classes year-round in hopes of becoming a high school teacher.

“I know,” Tommy said, “I know. If I put my brain to it—”

“Your mind to it, yes. So why do you say you can’t do it?”

“Because it’s the truth.” He was crying now and looked at his aunt, embarrassed. “Mom, you don’t understand.”

Elise poured a glass of red wine and set it before Peyton. “Things don’t always come easily to people,” Elise said to her sister.

“I know that,” Peyton said.

“Do you?” Elise asked and went back to the stove.

Peyton watched her, but Elise said nothing else. Their mother, Lois—who Peyton thought incapable of going a single day without mentioning her daughter’s divorce (“It’s against the Church”), her career (“Why aren’t you a stay-at-home mom?”), and her gun (“What kind of lady did I raise?”)—had gone home after watching Tommy all afternoon.

Autumn, playing with Polly Pocket dolls on the floor, reminded Peyton that not everyone started out life with advantages. She was the product of Elise’s late husband’s affair, and Peyton had found her as an infant, abandoned, on a cold fall night near the border.

Peyton exhaled, turning from Autumn to Tommy. “Tell me what I don’t understand, Tommy. Tell me again.”

Peyton looked past him out the window over the sink. The Aroostook County skyline was vastly different than the one she’d viewed in El Paso for seven years, and this was never more evident than at sunset. In the distance, a canola field, like a yellow river, rose to meet the setting summer sun. She’d never forgotten the Aroostook vistas—not when she’d left for the University of Maine and lived in Orono and not when she’d served her mandatory seven years on the Southern border.

Elise tossed a salad. “You’d think this was my house,” she said, “the way I’m working tonight. How about you take a break and help your tired aunt, Tommy?”

Tommy looked at her as if considering the lesser of two evils: math homework or dinner help? He stood and went to help his aunt.

Peyton picked up Autumn and held her. She looked around the kitchen. She loved the new granite countertop. The contractor had finished it only the week before. An agent’s salary went further here than it might in other sectors throughout the country. After living with her mother for close to a year, she’d purchased a three-bedroom, two-bath cape two years earlier. But the house had been built in the seventies, and she felt as if she lived in a continuous cycle of saving to update another room every few months.

“Every time I do a math problem,” Tommy said—Elise was showing him how to slice a cucumber—“it feels like I’m climbing a wall, and someone keeps knocking me off, and I have to start again.”

“Math was never my strong suit either,” Elise said.

“Where, sweetie?” Peyton said. “Show me where it happens. I taught you how to carry the one yesterday.”

“And my teacher showed me how to carry the one again today,” Tommy said. “It’s always someplace different. Every time. I told you that yesterday, Mom.”

Max pushed a green-and-white John Deere tractor across the floor.

Tommy had, indeed, told her that. And he’d said it the day before, too. His story never changed. So what was she doing? Interrogating her son? Hoping he’d say something different, as if long division would suddenly click? Fifth grade had proved more difficult than she’d anticipated for this little boy in a New England Patriots jersey. And his failing math quizzes had piled up. Tommy had now been referred to a learning disabilities specialist.

Her cell phone vibrated. She saw the office number but didn’t answer. Right now, the office could wait.

“What’s your math teacher’s name again?” she said.

“Why?” He looked at her, and she could see his wheels turning.

“Relax, sweetie.”

“Don’t call her, Mom. She’ll think I’m stupid. It’s bad enough meeting with Dr. Thompson.”

“Who’s Dr. Thompson?” Elise asked.

“An educational consultant the district hired,” Peyton said; then to Tommy: “No one will think you’re stupid. How many times have you met with Dr. Thompson?” Thompson was evaluating Tommy.

“Three. Don’t call my teacher. Please.”

“Why?”

“It’s bad enough at school. Please don’t.”

She looked at him, saw the fear in his eyes. What was “bad enough” at school?

Elise, standing behind Tommy, shook her head, as if to say, Let it go, Sis.

“Okay,” Peyton said.

After dinner, and after Elise and Max had left, Tommy read her a chapter from a Percy Jackson book. She didn’t call Tommy’s teacher afterwards. She, of course, emailed her instead.

“Why didn’t you pick up when I called the first time?” Patrol Agent in Charge Mike Hewitt said.

“I was with my family,” she said. “When my son was in bed, I checked for messages. There weren’t any. Figured it was a question about my shift and someone else answered it.”

She was in gray sweatpants and an oversized T-shirt and was curled up on the living room sofa with a Lisa Scottoline novel, sipping a glass of wine.

“I called your work phone,” he said, “not your personal phone.”

She knew what he meant. She dog-eared the page and closed the book, took a sip of wine, and set the glass on the coffee table.

“And if you’d have left a voicemail or called a second time I’d have known something was up and would’ve picked up, Mike. But you didn’t, and I was with Tommy. I like to compartmentalize my life as well as I can, which usually isn’t that well, but I’m trying.”

“You’re saying that when you’re home, you’re home?”

“I’m saying that I try to be a mom when I’m home.”

“Look, I was calling because your theory just got more in-
teresting.”

“What does that mean?”

“The guy they pulled from the burned-out cabin wasn’t killed by the fire,” he said. “He had a bullet hole in his forehead.”

“Have they done an autopsy? The hole wasn’t caused by flying debris during the explosion?”

“No. They found a twenty-two slug in the guy’s skull, Peyton. Can you meet me tomorrow morning at eight?”

“I was going to email you tonight. Tommy’s teacher wants to meet me at eight.”

“I have a meeting with Wally Rowe at eight thirty. Can you come by after that?”

Rowe had begun life as an FBI agent. Now he was Secret Service, stationed in Boston, and responsible for coordinating trips to the region by any top government officials or diplomats. The last time Rowe made the eight-hour drive from Boston, the president had taken a fishing trip to an Aroostook County sporting camp. Rowe had visited Garrett Station to be briefed on border activity, and since Hewitt was the top-ranking federal official in the region, he’d had been included in several security details, and he’d brought some agents with him. Peyton remembered sitting in her truck at the end of a dirt road while the president (and what seemed like a small village of Secret Service agents) scoured a brook for rainbow trout. (If memory served correctly, the only one to catch a fish that afternoon had been the president’s seven-year-old grandson.)

“I can come by around nine,” Peyton said.

“Don’t cut your meeting short to do it,” Hewitt said. “Tommy having a hard time in school?”

“Yeah.”

“Anything I can do? Maybe take him out for ice cream, talk to him.”

“That’s a kind offer, Mike. Pete took him to the batting cages last week.”

“Same guy you brought to the Christmas party?”

“Yeah,” she said, “Peter Dye.”

“I remember,” Hewitt said. “I talked to him for a while at that party. Nice guy. A teacher, right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “We’re sort of dating.”

Sort of dating. What the hell did that even mean? Even she didn’t know what—exactly—she and Pete Dye had been doing for the past six months.

“That was nice of him,” Hewitt said. “I’m sure he’s a good role model for Tommy.”

“Tommy’s failing math, and the special ed teacher is having him tested. I really need to be at this meeting.”

“Yeah,” Hewitt said, “you do. We can catch up when you get to the office.”

“Thanks for understanding,” she said.