FROM SOMEWHERE HIS MOTHER IS CALLING HIM. He comes out of his room and down the stairs, and there by the front door stands his father.
“Where’s Mom—my mother?”
“Out in the car.”
“You’re coming, too?”
“You okay with that?”
Sam walks past him. In the driveway, the car’s already running: his mom hates to be late. A morning talk show, disembodied above engine noise, floats out the window and across the yard. Faintly self-impressed, politely interrogative, the radio anchor’s voice reminds him of the shrink he was sent to after his dad, all of a sudden and four months too late, turned himself in to the state troopers for accidentally running over Josh Learner and leaving him dead by the side of Reservation Road.
The shrink with the pale freckled skin and thinning Creamsicle-colored hair, always the same brown corduroy jacket and uncool Wallabees. The room where they met two times a week a former school bathroom—windowless, pipes sticking out of the walls where the urinals used to be, it was easy to imagine the piss smell if you let yourself.
Worse, as he walks to the waiting car, actual words come back, not an exchange of views or feelings but a psychiatric one-way street—something he hasn’t thought about in a long time and doesn’t want now, drowning out the radio chatter in his head like some advertising jingle that you swear you’ll never be loser enough to remember, yet end up singing to yourself anyway:
And how did it feel when you learned what your father had done?
Sam?
Was it that he didn’t tell you himself? Prepare you somehow? That he lied to you about something so huge? Was that what hurt most, that you had to hear about it from other people? How did that make you feel?
Sam, if you won’t talk to me, I can’t help you.
He never did talk, not to the shrink or anyone else. Him in a nutshell: plenty to think about and nothing to say. Which maybe was the thing about sports, the on-the-spot sense of acceptance it gave him at fourteen, fifteen, after—here, finally, was pure doing, not saying. Learn to do something, do it right or wash out; train your body till it knows nothing else; do that thing again and again till the mind separates itself, grasps its own pathetic worthlessness and quits the body. Out on the field, any field, if you stop to think, you lose.
Though every theory has its limits. Of which he is his own solid proof: he never even took a swing when it counted most.
“Why’s he coming?” he asks his mother in a low voice.
Exhaust fumes the air between them. Her bare arm rests on the sill of the open car window. Staring at her wrist, with its drugstore Timex on a cheap leather strap, he’s haunted by the wish to buy her a fine watch one day, something with real diamonds. Sentimental tears instantly threaten—in his heart he knows he’ll never buy her that watch—but he fights them off.
Behind him, his father shuts the door of the house and clumps down the porch steps.
Quietly, in a tone that gives nothing away, his mother answers, “He says he wants to be there for you.”
Sam gets in the front passenger seat, leaving the back for his father.
Nothing to say, but things get said anyway.
“Now, Sam, I’m going to ask you a couple of questions, and I want you to answer me with total honesty.”
Jack Cutter, Attorney at Law, sits behind a wide antique desk, the family threesome, such as they are, spread before his Majesty—mom and son on a two-cushion sofa, dad on a hardbacked chair he hardly fits into.
Dad butts his nose in: “Just hold on, Jack—what are you implying?”
The lawyer’s gaze sharpens to a practiced courtroom icicle, sizing up the antagonistic voice and its owner, evidently ruling thumbs-down on both. With the flat of a meaty hand, he smooths his green rep tie over his stomach.
He turns to Sam with a tight smile. “My professional advice is just ignore him, son. That’s right. Now, first question.”