Spoonbenders

“I may have heard the name,” he said.

“He testified against Nick Junior this week.”

“Huh.” He never would have thought Bert would turn on any Pusateri.

“He said he heard Nick Junior bragging about killing Rick Mazzione.”

“But not Nick Senior?”

“Nope.”

Maybe Bert was still loyal to Nick Senior after all. Was the father really setting up his own son? Or had Nick Junior been stupid enough to brag about a murder he didn’t commit?

“It’s looking like I’ll be on my own soon,” Graciella said. “I really hope Irene can figure out what’s happening with the NG Group.”

“I have complete confidence,” Teddy said. “She’s got a head for numbers. It’s a crime that she’s not running her own company.” He loosened his tie. “But are you sure you want to know what’s going on?”

Graciella made a questioning noise.

“Say that NG really is a front company,” Teddy said. “Would you shut it down on principle, forgo all that income?”

“If Nick Senior is involved, then yes.”

“My guess is that Nick Senior is involved up to his God damn neck.”

He’d never been much of a sleeper. Restless mind, restless fingers. But after the accident (for that was what he called it when he came home from the hospital with his hands in bandages, and that was what Maureen told the kids, even if Maureen didn’t believe it herself), neither fingers nor mind were working and he found it nearly impossible to get out of bed.

Or rather, couch. He’d moved down to the basement after coming home, like a wounded dog going to ground. The pain pills made all hours equal, and in the basement he could watch TV or sleep at any time, night or day. The boys accepted the living arrangement without questioning it, though Frankie did ask if he could sleep in the basement, too. Irene repeatedly attempted couch-side interrogations, but even in his pill-fogged state he knew it was better to evade her questions than to try answering them. He’d open his eyes and there she’d be, frowning down at him. She’d ask blunt questions like “Why aren’t you sleeping in your bed?” and “Why is Mom crying?” He’d say something like “This is where the TV is,” or “Everybody cries.” What choice did he have? The truth was off the table. He couldn’t tell a ten-year-old, “I lied to your mother, betrayed her, and put our entire family’s future at risk.” The real reason he’d moved to the basement was so he didn’t have to see the expression on Maureen’s face when she looked at him. He wanted to stew and sulk in darkness.

He sat in that basement through the winter and into the spring, and slept in a bed only when he was at the hospital for the hand surgeries. Every morning Destin Smalls picked up Maureen and drove her to a government office downtown. (So vital was she to the project that living in D.C. was not a requirement; remote viewing, after all, could be done remotely.) Smalls dropped her off in the afternoons, though not always on time. Sometimes Mo—or her new assistant cook, Irene—didn’t get supper on the table until six. Sometimes it was little more than stove-top C rations: macaroni and cheese; bean and bacon soup; or the kids’ favorite, Breakfast for Dinner.

Mo tried to talk to him. When that failed, she tried to get him to talk to someone else—friends, his doctor, his hand surgeon, or “anyone who might help”—without using the word “psychiatrist,” which she knew would set him off. Men of his generation did not go to shrinks, certainly not men who’d emerged from the war unscathed. Teddy’s luck was largely due to the fact that he’d never left the States. He served on the front lines of the bureaucracy, deploying his typewriter with machine-gun speed, while at night embarking on daring raids to local bars and engaging in furious hand-to-hand poker games.

But after the accident, he knew his luck had run out. He began to see his body as an unreliable vehicle, prone to failure and breakdowns, and as protective as cardboard. Was this how Mo thought of herself, when she was out traveling the astral plane? Did she know how fragile this shell was? One day he climbed out of the basement—aka the pit of self-pity—to ask her what it was like.

Mo was washing up after dinner, scrubbing the cheap JCPenney pots she bought after their wedding. It was summer, months after she’d told him the diagnosis. He was alarmed at how exhausted she looked, how pale.

“Where’d you go today?” he asked. He made his voice cheery. “You know. Out there.” He’d not asked about her job since she started it.

“You know I can’t talk about it,” she said flatly. She was too tired to make that sound angry.

“I have a security clearance, too, you know.”

“Had.” She moved the sponge automatically, as if she wasn’t seeing what her hands were doing.

He said, “Agent Smalls must know that he can’t keep a wife from talking to her husband.”

She looked at him, and her face was so sad. “I was in the ocean,” she said.

“In the ocean?” Hunting for submarines, he thought. Smalls was obsessed with submarines. “Was it beautiful? How deep did you go?”