Spoonbenders

1 Matty

Matty Telemachus left his body for the first time in the summer of 1995, when he was fourteen years old. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that his body expelled him, sending his consciousness flying on a geyser of lust and shame.

Just before it happened, he was kneeling in a closet, one sweaty hand pressed to the chalky drywall, his right eye lined up with the hole at the back of an unwired electrical outlet box. On the other side of the wall was his cousin Mary Alice and her chubby white-blonde friend. Janice? Janelle? Probably Janelle. The girls—both two years older than him, juniors, women—lay on the bed side by side, propped up on their elbows, facing in his direction. Janelle wore a spangled T-shirt, but Mary Alice—who the year before had announced that she would respond only to “Malice”—wore an oversized red flannel shirt that hung off her shoulder. His eye was drawn to the gaping neck of the shirt, following that swell of skin down down down into shadow. He was pretty sure she was wearing a black bra.

They were looking at a school yearbook while listening to Mary Alice’s CD Walkman, sharing foam headphones between them like a wishbone. Matty couldn’t hear the music, but even if he could, it was probably no band he’d heard of. Someone calling herself Malice wouldn’t tolerate anything popular. Once she’d caught him humming Hootie & the Blowfish and the look of scorn on her face made his throat close.

She didn’t seem to like him as a matter of policy, even though he had proof that she once did: a Christmas Polaroid of a four-year-old Mary Alice, beaming, with her brown arms wrapped around his white toddler body. But in the six months since Matty and his mom had moved back to Chicago and into Grandpa Teddy’s house, he’d seen Mary Alice practically every other week, and she’d barely spoken to him. He tried to match her cool and pretend she wasn’t in the room. Then she’d walk past, sideswiping him with the scent of bubblegum and cigarettes, and the rational part of his brain would swerve off the road and crash into a tree.

Out of desperation, he set down three commandments for himself:

So far tonight the first two had gone down in flames, and the third was in the crosshairs. The adults (except for Uncle Buddy, who never really left the house anymore) had all gone downtown for dinner, someplace fancy, evidently, with his mom in her interview skirt, Uncle Frankie looking like a real estate agent with a jacket over a golf shirt, and Frankie’s wife, Aunt Loretta, squeezed into a lavender pantsuit. Grandpa Teddy, of course, wore a suit and the Hat (in Matty’s mind, “Hat” was always capitalized). But even that uniform had been upgraded slightly for the occasion: gold cuff links, a decorative handkerchief poking up out of his breast pocket, his fanciest, diamond-studded wristwatch. They’d be back so late that Frankie’s kids were supposed to sleep over. Uncle Frankie mixed a gallon of powdered Goji Go! berry juice, placed a twenty-dollar bill with some ceremony next to the jug, and addressed his daughters. “I want change,” he said to Mary Alice. Then he pointed to the twins: “And you guys, try not to burn down the fucking house, all right?” Polly and Cassie, seven years old, appeared not to hear him.

Uncle Buddy was technically in charge, but the cousins all understood that they were on their own for the evening. Buddy was in his own world, a high-gravity planet he left only with great difficulty. He worked on his projects, he marked off the days on the refrigerator calendar in pink crayon, and he spoke to as few people as possible. He wouldn’t even answer the door for the pizza guy; it was Matty who went to the door with the twenty, and who set the two dollars’ change very carefully in the middle of the table.

Through some carefully timed choreography, Matty managed to outmaneuver Janelle-the-interloper and the twins to score the chair next to Mary Alice. He spent all of dinner next to her, hyperaware of every centimeter that separated his hand from hers.

Buddy took one piece of pizza and vanished to the basement, and the high whine of the band saw was all they heard of him for hours. Buddy, a bachelor who’d lived his entire life in this house with Grandpa Teddy, was forever starting projects—tearing down, roughing in, tacking up—but never finishing.

Like the partially deconstructed room Matty was hiding in. Until recently it and the adjoining room were part of an unfinished attic. Buddy had removed the old insulation, framed in closets, wired up lights, installed beds in both rooms—and then had moved on. This half of the attic was technically Matty’s bedroom, but most of the closet was filled with old clothes. Buddy seemed to have forgotten the clothes and the empty electrical sockets behind them.

Matty, however, had not forgotten.

Janelle turned a page of the yearbook and laughed. “Ooh! Your lover!” she said.

“Shut up,” Mary Alice said. Her dark hair hung across her eyes in a way that knocked him out.

“You want that big thing in your mouth, don’t you?” Janelle asked.

Matty’s thighs were cramping, but he wasn’t about to move now.

“Shut the fuck up,” Mary Alice said. She bumped her friend’s shoulder. Janelle rolled into her, laughing, and when the girls righted themselves, the flannel shirt had slipped from his cousin’s shoulder, exposing a black bra strap.

No: a dark purple bra strap.

Commandment #3, Thou shalt not touch thyself, began to smolder and smoke.

Twenty feverish seconds later, Matty’s back arched as if yanked by a hot wire. An ocean roar filled his ears.

Suddenly he was in the air, the studs of the slanted ceiling inches from his face. He shouted, but he had no voice. He tried to push away from the ceiling, but realized he didn’t have arms, either. In fact, no body at all.

After a moment, his vision swiveled, but he felt no control over that movement; a camera panning on its own. The floor of the room swung into view. His body had fallen out of the closet and lay stretched out on the plywood.

That’s what he looked like? That chubby belly, that pimply jawline?

The body’s eyes fluttered open, and for a vertiginous moment Matty was both the watcher and the watched. The body’s mouth opened in shock, and then—

It was as if the strings holding him aloft were suddenly cut. Matty plummeted. The body screamed: a high-pitched, girlish squeal he had time to register as deeply embarrassing. Then consciousness and flesh crashed into each other.

He bounced around inside his body like a Super Ball. When the reverberations settled, he was looking out through his eyes at the ceiling, which was now the appropriate distance away.

Thumps sounded from the next room. The girls! They’d heard him!

He jumped up, covering his crotch like a wounded soldier. “Matty?” Malice called. The door began to swing open.

“I’m okay! I’m okay!” he shouted. He launched himself into the closet.

From somewhere the blonde laughed. Mary Alice appeared at the closet doors, hands on her hips. “What are you doing in here?”

He looked up at her, the bottom half of his body covered by women’s apparel, the topmost dress an orange striped number that looked very seventies.

“I tripped,” he said.

“Okay…”

He made no move to get up.

“What’s the matter?” Mary Alice asked. She’d seen something in his expression.

“Nothing,” he said. He’d just had a bad thought: These are Grandma Mo’s dresses. I’ve just despoiled my dead grandmother’s clothes.

He propped himself on an elbow. Trying to look comfortable, as if he’d just discovered that twenty-year-old frocks made the perfect bedding material.

Mary Alice started to say something, then she glanced at the wall behind him, just over his shoulder. Her eyes narrowed. Through force of will, Matty did not turn around to see if she was looking at the empty electrical box.

“Okay then,” she said. She backed away from the closet.

“Right,” he said. “Thanks. All good.”

The girls left the room, and he immediately turned and covered the hole in the wall with the orange gown. He began to rehang the dresses and coats: a waist-length rabbit fur coat, a bunch of knee-length skirts, a plaid raincoat. One of the last items was covered in a clear plastic dry-cleaning bag. It was a long, shimmery silver dress, and the sight of it rang chimes somewhere far back in his brain.

Oh, he thought. That’s right. It’s what Grandma Mo wore on the videotape. The videotape.

Uncle Frankie had shown Matty the tape at Thanksgiving four years ago. Frankie had been drinking a lot of red wine, hitting it hard as soon as his wife, Loretta, unwrapped the shrimp cocktail appetizers, and his sentences had turned emphatic and urgent. He was railing about some guy named the Astounding Archibald, who’d ruined everything.

“Think what we could’ve had,” Frankie said. “We could have been kings.”

Irene, Matty’s mom, laughed, making Frankie scowl. “Kings of what?” she asked.

Irene and Matty had driven in from Pittsburgh the night before, and they’d woken up to find that Grandpa Teddy had bought a bird and not much else; he’d been waiting for his daughter to conjure the rest of the meal. Now that they were finally on the other side of dinner, the table turned into a postcombat battlefield: pumpkin pie destroyed, Rice Krispies Treats in ruins, all wine bottles depleted. Matty was the last kid left in his chair. He’d always liked hanging out with the adults. Most of the time he stayed under the radar, not speaking, in the hope that they’d forget he was there and start saying interesting things.

“That no-talent hack just couldn’t stand to see us win,” Frankie said.

“No, he was a talented man, a talented man,” Grandpa Teddy said from the head of the table. “Brilliant, even. But shortsighted.” As usual, he was the most dressed-up person in the house. Shiny black suit, pink shirt, riotous paisley tie as wide as a trout. Grandpa always dressed like he was about to go to a wedding or a funeral, except in the mornings or just before bed, when he walked around as if he were alone in the house: wife-beater T-shirt, boxer shorts, black socks. He didn’t seem to own “sportswear” or “work clothes,” maybe because he never did sports and didn’t work. He was rich, though. Irene said she didn’t know where the money came from, but Matty imagined it was all poker winnings. Grandpa Teddy, it was understood, was the greatest cardshark of all time. He taught Matty seven-card stud, sitting at the kitchen table for hours until Matty’s pennies ran out. (Grandpa Teddy always played for money, and never gave it back after a game. “You can’t sharpen your knife on a sponge,” he’d say, scripture that Matty believed in without entirely understanding.)

“Archibald was a necessary evil,” Grandpa Teddy said. “He was the voice of the skeptic. If your mother had shown him up, the audience would have loved us for it. We could have gone to the stratosphere with that act.”

“He was evil,” Frankie said. “A damn liar and a cheat! He wouldn’t take Communion without palming the wafer.”

Grandpa Teddy chuckled. “It’s all water under the bridge now.”

“He was just plain jealous,” Frankie said. “He hated our gifts. He wanted to destroy us.”

Matty couldn’t stand it any longer. He had to ask. “What did this guy do to us?”

Frankie leaned across the table, looking Matty straight in the eye. “What did he do?” he said in a low, emotion-choked voice. “He killed Grandma Mo, that’s what.”

A thrill went through Matty. It wasn’t just this dramatic declaration; it was the electricity of being noticed by his uncle. Of being seen. Uncle Frankie had always been kind to Matty, but he’d never talked to him as if he mattered.

“Can we drop this, please?” Irene asked.

“He did kill her,” Frankie said, leaning back but keeping his eyes on Matty. “Sure as if he’d put a gun to her head.”

Matty’s mom frowned. “You believe that, don’t you?”

Frankie swiveled his head to stare her down. “Yes, Irene. Yes, I do.”

Loretta got to her feet. “I’m going for a smoke.”

“I’ll join you,” Grandpa Teddy said. He rose from the table, straightened his cuffs, and took her arm.

“You’re not supposed to smoke, Dad,” Irene said.

“Loretta’s smoking,” he said. “I’m secondary smoking.”

Uncle Frankie gestured to Matty. “Come on, it’s time you saw something.”

“I’m not doing these dishes alone,” Irene said.

“Have Buddy help you.” He slapped his brother on the shoulder—a little too hard, Matty thought. Buddy’s eyes fluttered, but his gaze never moved from the middle distance. He had a way of sitting very still, slumping lower and lower, as if he were turning to pudding.

“Leave him alone,” Irene said.

Buddy remained unperturbed. He’d been in one of his trances since finishing his pie, staring into space, occasionally smiling to himself or silently mouthing a word or two. His muteness was a mystery to Matty, and the adults wouldn’t talk about it, a double silence that was impenetrable. Matty’s mom would only give him variations of “That’s the way he is.” Once Matty worked up the courage to ask Grandpa Teddy about why Buddy hardly spoke, and he said, “You’ll have to ask him.”

Frankie led Matty to the front room, where a huge console television was parked against the wall like a Chrysler. His uncle dropped heavily onto his butt—holding his wineglass aloft and managing to keep most of the wine inside it—and opened up one of the cabinets.

“Now we’re talking,” Frankie said. A VHS machine sat on a shelf, and in the space below was a jumble of videocassettes. He pulled one out, squinted at the label, and tossed it aside. He started working his way through the stack. “I gave Dad a copy,” he said under his breath. “Unless Buddy threw it out, that fuckin’—hey. Here we go.”

It was a black cassette box with orange stripes. Frankie ejected the current tape from the machine and jammed in the one from the box.

“This is our history,” Frankie said. He turned on the television. “This is your heritage.”

On the screen, a store clerk madly squeezed rolls of toilet paper. Frankie pressed play on the VCR, and nothing happened.

“You have to turn it to channel three,” Matty said.

“Right, right.” The TV’s dial was missing, exposing a naked prong. Frankie reached up to retrieve the set of needle-nose pliers Grandpa Teddy kept on top of the console. “That was my first job. Grandpa’s remote control.”

The tape had the swimmy look of something recorded off broadcast TV. A talk show host in suit and tie sat on a cramped set, with a brilliant yellow wall behind him. “—and they’ve been thrilling audiences around the country,” he was saying. “Please welcome Teddy Telemachus and His Amazing Family!” Matty could hear the capitals.

The applause on the recording sounded metallic. The host stood up and walked over to an open stage, where the guests stood awkwardly, several feet back from a wooden table. Father, mother, and three children, all dressed in suits and dresses.

Grandpa Teddy looked pretty much like himself, only younger. Trim and energetic, the Hat pushed back on his head, giving him the appearance of an old-time reporter about to give you the straight dope.

“Wow, is that Grandma Mo?” Matty asked, even though it could have been no one else. She wore a shiny, silvery evening dress, and she was the only member of the family who looked like she belonged onstage. It wasn’t just that she was Hollywood beautiful, though she was that, with short dark hair and large eyes like a 1920s ingénue. It was her stillness, her confidence. She held the hand of a sweet-faced, kindergarten-age Uncle Buddy. “She’s so young.”

“This was a year before she died, so she was, like, thirty,” Frankie said.

“No, I mean, compared to Grandpa Teddy.”

“Yeah, well, he may have robbed the cradle a bit. You know your grandfather.”

Matty nodded knowingly. He did know his grandfather, but not in whatever way Uncle Frankie was talking about. “Oh yeah.”

“Now, this is the number one daytime show in the country, right?” Frankie said. “Mike Douglas. Millions watching.”

On-screen, the host was pointing out various things on the table: metal cans, some silverware, a stack of white envelopes. Beside the table was a kind of miniature wheel of fortune about three feet tall, but instead of numbers on the spokes there were pictures: animals, flowers, cars. Matty’s mother, Irene, looked to be ten or eleven years old, though her velvety green dress made her look older. So did her worried expression; Matty was surprised to see it already set in place on such a young face. She kept her grip on the arm of her younger brother, a wiry, agitated kid who seemed to be trying to twist out of his suit and tie.

“Is that you?” Matty asked. “You don’t look happy to be there.”

“Me? You should have seen Buddy. He got so bad that—but we’ll get to that.”

Maureen—Grandma Mo—was answering a question from the talk show host. She smiled bashfully. “Well, Mike, I don’t know if I’d use the word ‘gifted.’ Yes, I suppose we have a knack. But I believe every person has the capability to do what we do.”

When she said “every person,” she looked at Matty. Not at the camera, or the audience watching at home—at him. They locked eyes, across a gap of years and electronic distortion. “Oh!” he said.

Uncle Frankie glanced at him and said, “Pay attention. My part’s coming.”

Grandpa Teddy was telling the host about keeping an open mind. “In the right kind of positive environment, all things are possible.” He smiled. “Even kids can do it.”

The host crouched awkwardly next to Frankie. “Tell the folks your name.”

“I can move things with my mind,” he said. Visible at Frankie’s feet was a line of white tape. Everyone except the host was standing behind it.

“Can you, now!”

“His name is Franklin,” his sister said.

The host held his microphone to her. “And you are?”

“Irene.” Her tone was guarded.

“Do you have a special ability, Irene?”

“I can read minds, sort of. I know when—”

“Wow! You want to read my mind right now?”

Grandma Mo put a hand on Irene’s shoulder. “Do you want to try, sweetie? How are you feeling?”

“Fine.” She didn’t look fine.

Teddy jumped in to explain that Irene was a “human lie detector—a divining rod, if you will, for the truth! Say that we use these cards—” He reached toward the table.

“I’ll get them,” Mike Douglas said. He stepped over the taped line and picked up a large stack of oversized cards.

“Fucker,” Uncle Frankie said.

“What?”

“Wait for it,” Frankie said.

On-screen, Teddy said, “Those are ordinary playing cards. Now, Mike, shuffle through the deck and choose a card, then show it to the camera for the folks at home. Don’t show it to Irene, though.”

Mike Douglas walked to one of the cameras and held up a five of diamonds. He goofed around a little, moving it in and out of focus.

“Here’s your chance to lie to a little girl,” Teddy said. “Let’s put your card back in the deck. Excellent, Mike, excellent. And a couple of shuffles…all-righty, then. Hold out your hand, if you please. I’m going to start dealing cards, faceup. All you have to do is answer Irene’s question. And don’t worry, she always asks the same thing, and it’s a very simple question.”

Grandpa Teddy dealt a card onto the host’s palm. Irene said, “Mr. Douglas, is that your card?”

“No-siree, little miss.” He mugged for the camera.

“That’s the truth,” Irene said.

“It’s that simple,” Grandpa Teddy said to the host. “You can say yes or no, whatever you like.” He dealt another card onto his palm, and another. Mike said “no” to each new card, and Irene would nod. Then Mike said, “That one’s mine.”

“You’re lying,” Irene said.

Mike Douglas laughed. “Caught me! Not the queen of spades.”

They went through more cards, Mike saying “no” each time, but after the tenth Irene shook her head.

“That’s your card,” she said.

The host held out his palm to the camera: on the top was the five of diamonds. Then he addressed Grandma Mo. “What do you say to people who say, Oh, those are marked cards. They taught the girl to read them!”

Grandma Mo smiled, not at all upset. “People say all kinds of things.” She was still holding Buddy’s hand. He was so small his head was barely in the frame.

The host reached into his jacket pocket and brought out an envelope. “So what I’ve done is brought some pictures. Each of them is a simple, geometric pattern. You’ve never seen into this envelope, right?”

Irene looked worried—but then, she’d looked worried from the start of the show.

“Ready?” the host asked. He picked a card from the envelope and looked hard at it.

Irene glanced at her mother.

“Simple geometric shapes,” the host said.

“You don’t have to prompt her,” Grandma Mo said.

“Tell me if I’m lying,” the host said. “Is it a circle?”

Irene frowned. “Um…”

“Is it a triangle?”

“That’s not fair,” Irene said. “You can’t ask me questions, you have to—”

Uncle Frankie pressed a button and the image froze. “Take a look at the bowl.” He pointed at a small, round-bottomed stainless steel bowl. “It’s got water in it. Ready?”

“Sure,” Matty said.

Frankie pressed play. On-screen, Irene seemed angry. “He’s not doing it right. There’s no way I can say yes or no if he keeps—”

From offscreen, Grandpa Teddy said sharply, “Frankie! Wait your turn!”

The bowl on the table seemed to tremble, and then the whole table began to vibrate.

The camera swung over to little Frankie. He was sitting on the ground, cross-legged, staring at the table. The pile of silverware rattled, and the bowl began to rock back and forth.

“Careful now,” Grandpa Teddy said. “You’re going to—”

The bowl tipped a bit more, and water sloshed over the edge.

“—spill it,” Grandpa Teddy finished.

“Holy cow!” the host said. “We’ll be right back.” A band played, and then a commercial came on.

“You did that, Uncle Frankie?” Matty asked. “Cool.”

Frankie was worked up. “You see that shit with the pictures? That was Archibald’s idea, too, trying to fuck us over. Told Douglas not to let us use our own material, gave him those Zener cards.”

Matty wasn’t sure how that would throw off his mother’s power. He knew that she couldn’t be lied to, just as he knew that Grandpa Teddy read the contents of sealed envelopes, that Grandma Mo could see distant objects, and Uncle Frankie could move things with his mind, and that Uncle Buddy, when he was small, could predict the scores of Cubs games. That they were psychic was another Telemachus Family Fact, in the same category as being half Greek and half Irish, Cubs fans and White Sox haters, and Catholic.

“It gets worse,” Frankie said. He fast-forwarded through the commercials, overran the resume of the show, rewound, then went forward and back several more times. Grandma Mo and Buddy were no longer onstage. Grandpa Teddy had his arm around Irene.

“And we’re back with Teddy Telemachus and His Amazing Family,” the host said. “Maureen had to take care of a little family emergency—”

“Sorry about that,” Teddy said with a smile. “Buddy, he’s our youngest, got a little nervous, and Maureen needed to comfort him.” He made it sound like Buddy was an infant. “We’ll bring them back out here in a sec.”

“You’re okay with going forward?” the host asked.

“Of course!” Teddy said.

“What happened to Buddy?” Matty asked his uncle.

“Jesus, he broke down, crying and wailing. Your grandmother had to take him backstage to calm him down.”

The host had his hand on young Frankie’s shoulder. “Now, just before the break, little Franklin here seemed to be—well, what would you call it?”

“Psychokinesis, Mike,” Uncle Teddy said. “Frankie’s always had a talent for it.”

“The table was really shaking,” the host said.

“That’s not unusual. It can make dinnertime pretty exciting, Mike, pretty exciting.”

“I bet! Now, before we continue, I want to introduce a special guest. Please welcome noted stage magician and author the Astounding Archibald.”

A short bald man with a ridiculous black handlebar mustache strode into the shot. Teddy shook his head as if disappointed. “This explains so much,” he said. The bald man was even shorter than Grandpa Teddy.

“Good to see you again, Mr. Telemachus,” Archibald said. They shook hands.

“G. Randall Archibald is not only a world-renowned magician,” Mike Douglas intoned, “he’s also a skeptic and debunker of psychics.”

“This explains so much,” Teddy said again, more loudly.

The host didn’t appear to hear him. “We asked him here to help us set up these tests for the Telemachus family. See this line?” The camera pulled back to show the full extent of the white gaffer tape. “It was Mr. Archibald’s idea that we do not allow Teddy or members of his family to handle the silverware, or approach the table in any way.”

“Perhaps you noticed,” Archibald said to the host, “that Irene had no problem reading the cards when they were the ones that Teddy provided for you. But when you used the Zener cards—which Teddy had no advance access to, and was not allowed to touch!—she hemmed and hawed.”

“Not true, not true!” Teddy said. “Mike was doing it wrong! But worse, someone filled with negativity was causing interference. Severe interference!”

“You mean my mere presence caused her powers to fail?” Archibald asked.

“As I told you, Mike,” Teddy said, “you gotta have an open mind to allow these abilities to work.”

“Or an empty one,” Archibald said. Mike Douglas laughed.

Archibald, looking pleased, addressed the audience. “While Irene was concentrating so hard, we had a camera focused on her father. Mike, can we show the television audience what we recorded?”

Teddy looked shocked. “Are you mocking my daughter? Are you mocking her, you pipsqueak?” This from a man barely two inches taller.

“I’m not mocking her, Mr. Telemachus, but perhaps you are mocking the audience’s ability to—”

“Let’s bring my wife out here,” Teddy said. “Maureen Telemachus is, without a doubt, the world’s most powerful clairvoyant. Mike, can you bring her out here?”

The host looked off camera and appeared to be listening to someone. Then to Teddy he said, “I’m told she’s unavailable. Tell you what, let’s just look at the videotape, and we’ll see if she can come back out after the next break.”

“I think you’ll notice something very interesting,” Archibald said. He had a showy way of speaking, punching the consonants. “While everyone was distracted by the little girl, the table began to move and shake.”

“It sure did,” Mike Douglas said.

“But how did that happen? Was it psychokinesis…or something a little more down to earth?”

The screen showed the stage from minutes before, but from a side angle, slightly behind the family. At first the camera was aimed at the host and Irene, but then it swung toward Teddy. He had stepped across the strip of gaffer tape, and his foot was pressed against the table leg.

Archibald spoke over the playback. “This is an old trick. Just lift the table slightly, and slip the edge of your shoe’s sole under the leg.”

Teddy’s foot was barely moving, if it was moving at all, but the table was undoubtedly shaking. Then the screen showed Archibald and the host. Teddy stood off to the side, looking into the wings, grimacing in frustration.

“I can teach you how to do it,” Archibald said to the host. “No psychic powers required.”

Mike Douglas turned to Grandpa. “What do you say to that, Teddy? No powers required?”

Teddy appeared not to hear him. He was staring offstage. “Where the—” He stopped himself from swearing. “Where is my wife? Could someone please bring her out here?”

Irene grabbed Grandpa Teddy’s arm, embarrassed. She hissed something to him that didn’t make it to the microphones.

“Fine,” Grandpa Teddy said. He called Frankie to him. “We’re leaving.”

“Really?” Archibald said. “What about Maureen? I’d really like to—”

“Not today, Archibald. Your, uh, negativity has made this impossible.” Then to the host he said, “I really expected better of you, Mike.”

Teddy and his children walked offstage—with great dignity, Matty thought. Mike Douglas looked flummoxed. The Astounding Archibald seemed surprisingly disappointed.

Uncle Frankie pressed the eject button and the screen turned to static. “See what I mean?”

“Wow,” Matty said. He was desperate to keep the conversation going, but he didn’t want Frankie to get fed up and stop talking to him. “So Grandma Mo never came back onstage?”

“Nope. Never got to do her part of the act. It would have shut Archibald up, that’s for sure, but she never got the chance. Buddy got worse and we all went home.”

“Okay, but…”

“But what?”

“How did that kill her?”

Frankie stared at him.

Uh-oh, Matty thought.

Frankie hauled himself to his feet.

Matty hopped up, too. “I’m sorry, I just don’t—”

“You know what chaos theory is?” Frankie asked.

Matty shook his head.

“Butterfly wings, Matty. One flap and—” He made a grand gesture, which brought his almost-empty glass into sight, and he drained it. “God damn.” He studied the front window, perhaps seeing something new in the old houses. But the only thing Matty could see was his uncle’s reflection, his shiny face floating like a ghost over his body.

Frankie looked down at him. “What was I saying?”

“Uh, butterflies?”

“Right. You have to look at cause and effect, the whole chain of events. First, the act is wrecked. We’re dead as far as the public is concerned. Gigs get canceled, fucking Johnny Carson starts making fun of us.”

“Carson,” Matty said, affecting bitterness. Everybody in the family knew that Carson had stolen Grandpa Teddy’s envelope act.

“Once they isolated us, we were sitting ducks.” Frankie looked down at him with an intense expression. “Do the math, kid.” He glanced toward the dining room; Matty’s mom had moved into the kitchen, and no one was in sight, but Frankie lowered his voice anyway. “Nineteen seventy-three. Height of the Cold War. The world’s most famous psychics are discredited on The Mike Douglas Show, and just a year later, a woman with your grandmother’s immense power just dies?”

Matty opened his mouth, closed it. Immense power?

Frankie nodded slowly. “Oh yeah.”

Matty said, “But Mom—” Frankie put up a hand, and Matty lowered his voice to a whisper. “Mom said she died of cancer.”

“Sure,” Uncle Frankie said. “A healthy woman, a nonsmoker, dies of uterine cancer at age thirty-one.” He put his hand on Matty’s shoulder and leaned close. His breath smelled like Kool-Aid. “Listen, this is between you and me, right? My girls are too young to handle the truth, and your mom—you see how she reacts. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, your grandmother died of natural causes. You follow me?”

Matty nodded, though he wasn’t quite following, starting with why he could be told this secret, and Mary Alice, who was two years older than him, could not. Though maybe that was because she wasn’t a Telemachus by blood? She was Loretta’s daughter from a previous marriage. Did that make a difference? He started to ask, and Frankie put up a hand.

“There’s more to this story, Matthias. More than’s safe to tell you right now. But know this.” His voice was choked with emotion, his eyes misty.

“Yes?” Matty asked.

“You come from greatness,” Uncle Frankie said. “You have greatness in you. And no jackbooted tool of the American government can—”

Matty would never know what Uncle Frankie was going to say next, because at that moment a loud bang sounded from upstairs. Mary Alice screamed, “Fire! Fire!”

“God damn it,” Frankie said softly. He squeezed his eyes shut. Then he hustled up the stairs, shouting for everyone else to stop shouting. Matty followed him into the guest bedroom, which served double duty as a kind of utility room, crowded with boxes and laundry baskets. The padded cover to the ironing board was on fire, and the iron sat in the middle of the flames, its black cord dangling over the side, not plugged in. The three-year-old twins stood in a corner, holding hands, looking wide-eyed at the flames; not afraid so much as surprised. Mary Alice held one of Buddy’s huge shirts up in front of her, as if she was shielding herself from the heat, though she was probably thinking of smothering the flames with it.

“Jesus, get Cassie and Polly out of here,” Frankie said to Mary Alice. He looked around the room, didn’t see what he was looking for, and then said, “Everybody out!”

The twins bolted for the hall, and Mary Alice and Matty moved only as far as the doorway, too fascinated to leave completely. Frankie crouched beside the ironing board and picked it up by the legs, balancing the iron atop it. He carried it toward them as if it were a giant birthday cake. Mary Alice and Matty scampered ahead of him. He went down the stairs, moving deliberately despite the flames in his face. This impressed Matty tremendously. Mary Alice opened the front door for him, and he walked to the driveway and dumped the ironing board on its side. The smoking, partially melted iron bounced twice and landed bottom-side down.

Aunt Loretta appeared from around the corner of the house, followed a moment later by Grandpa Teddy. Then Matty’s mom burst through the front door, followed by the twins. The whole family was standing in the front yard now, except for Buddy.

“What happened?” Loretta asked Frankie.

“Whaddya think?” Frankie said. He turned the ironing board so that it was upside down, but flames still licked at the sides. “Pack up the hellions and Mary Alice. We’re going home.”

For months Matty couldn’t get that videotape out of his mind. It seemed to be a message from the distant past, an illuminated text glowing with the secrets of his family. He desperately wanted to ask his mother about it, but he also didn’t want to break his promise to Uncle Frankie. He resorted to asking his mother oblique questions about The Mike Douglas Show or Grandma Maureen or the government, and every time she cut him off. Even when he tried to sneak up on the topic—“Gee, I wonder what it’s like to be on TV?”—she seemed to immediately sense what was up and change the subject.

The next time he and his mother returned to Chicago, he couldn’t find the cassette in the TV cabinet. Uncle Buddy caught him pawing through the boxes, trying each tape in the machine, fast-forwarding to make sure Mike Douglas didn’t pop up mid-tape. His uncle frowned and then slumped out of the room.

Matty never found the tape. The next Thanksgiving Frankie didn’t seem to remember showing it to him. At holidays Matty sat around the dinner table, waiting for the adults to talk about those days, but his mother had placed some kind of embargo on the matter. Frankie would bring up something that seemed promising—a reference to Grandma Mo, or “psi war”—and Mom would fix him with a look that dropped the temperature of the room. The visits became less frequent and more strained. A couple Thanksgivings Frankie’s family didn’t show up at all, and some years Matty and his mom stayed home in Pittsburgh. Those were terrible weekends. “You’ve got a melancholy streak,” she’d tell him. If that were true, he knew where he got it from; his mother was the most melancholy person he knew.

It was true that he was unusually nostalgic for a kid, though what he pined for was a time before he was born. He was haunted by the feeling that he’d missed the big show. The circus had packed up and left town, and he’d shown up to find nothing but a field of trampled grass. But other times, especially when Mom was feeling good, he’d be suddenly filled with confidence, like the prince of a deposed royal family certain of his claim to the throne. He’d think, Once, we were Amazing.

Then his mother would lose another job, and they’d have to eat Kraft macaroni and cheese for weeks straight, and he’d think, Once, we were Amazing.

And then, when he was fourteen years old, his mother lost the best job she’d ever had, and they moved back in with Grandpa Teddy, and soon afterward he found himself sitting in a closet full of his dead grandmother’s clothes, recovering from the most interesting thing that had ever happened to him. His embarrassment had faded, which made space in his body for other emotions, a thrumming mix of fear, wonder, and pride.

He’d left his body. He’d floated eight feet off the ground. Some ceremony was called for.

He thought for a moment, then lifted the silver dress by its hanger and addressed it. “Hiya, Grandma Mo,” he said, quiet enough that Mary Alice and her idiot friend couldn’t hear him. “Today, I am—”

He was going to say, “Today, I am Amazing.” It was going to be a poignant moment that he would someday tell his children about. He was young Bruce Wayne vowing to avenge his parents, Superman promising to uphold his Kryptonian heritage, a Jewish boy doing whatever Jewish boys do on their Bar Mitzvahs.

Then he noticed the shadow at the door.

It was Uncle Buddy. He held a hammer in one hand, and a staple gun in the other. His gaze slowly moved from Matty to the closet, then back to Matty—and the dress. His eyes widened a fraction. Was he about to smile? Matty couldn’t take it if he smiled.

“I was just putting it away!” Matty said. He thrust the gown at him and ran, frantic to escape his uncle, the room, and his body.

2 Teddy

Teddy Telemachus made it a goal to fall in love at least once a day. No, fall in was inaccurate; throw himself in was more like it. Two decades after Maureen had died, the only way to keep his hollowed heart thumping was to give it a jump start on a regular basis. On summer weekends he would stroll the Clover’s garden market on North Avenue, or else wander through Wilder Park, hoping for emotional defibrillation. On weekdays, though, he relied on grocery stores. The Jewel-Osco was closest, and perfectly adequate for food shopping, but in matters of the heart he preferred Dominick’s.

He saw her browsing thoughtfully in the organic foods aisle, an empty basket in the crook of one arm; signs of a woman filling time, not a shopping cart.

She was perhaps in her mid-forties. Her style was deceptively simple: a plain sleeveless top, capri pants, sandals. If anyone complimented her, she’d claim she’d just thrown something on, but other women would know better. Teddy knew better. Those clothes were tailored to look casual. The unfussy leather bag hanging to her hip was a Fendi. The sandals were Italian as well. But what sent a shiver through his heart was the perfectly calibrated shade of red of her toenail polish.

This is why he shopped at Dominick’s. You go to the Jewel on a Tuesday afternoon like this, you get old women in shiny tracksuits looking for a deal, holding soup cans up to the light, hypnotized by serving size and price per ounce. In Dominick’s, especially in the tony suburbs, your Hinsdales and your Oak Brooks, it was still possible to find classy women, women who understood how to accessorize.

He pushed his empty cart close to her, pretending to study the seven varieties of artisanal honey.

She hadn’t noticed him. She took a step back from the shelf and bumped into him, and he dropped the plastic honey jar to the floor. It almost happened by accident; his stiff fingers were especially balky this afternoon.

“I’m so sorry!” she said.

She stooped and he said, “Oh, you don’t have to do that—” and bent at the same time, nearly thumping heads. They both laughed. She beat him to the honey jar, scooped it up with a hand weighted down by a wedding band and ponderous diamond. She smelled of sandalwood soap.

He accepted the jar with mock formality, which made her laugh again. He liked the way her eyes lit up amid those friendly crow’s-feet. He put her age at forty-five or -six. A good thing. He had a firm rule, which he occasionally broke: only fall in love with women whose age, at minimum, was half his own plus seven. This year he was seventy-two, which meant that the object of his devotion had to be at least forty-three.

A young man wouldn’t have thought she was beautiful. He’d see those mature thighs and overlook her perfectly formed calves and delicate ankles. He’d focus on that strong Roman nose and miss those bright green eyes. He’d see the striations in her neck when she tilted her head to laugh and fail to appreciate a woman who knew how to abandon herself to the moment.

Young men, in short, were idiots. Would they even feel the spark when she touched them, as he just did? A few fingers against his elbow, delicate and ostensibly casual, as if steadying herself.

He hid his delight and assumed a surprised, concerned look.

She dropped her hand from his arm. She was ready to ask what was wrong, but then pulled back, perhaps remembering that they were two strangers. So he spoke first.

“You’re worried about someone,” he said. “Jay?”

“Pardon?”

“Or Kay? No. Someone whose name starts with ‘J.’ ”

Her eyes widened.

“I’m sorry, so sorry,” he said. “It’s someone close to you. That’s none of my business.”

She wanted to ask the question, but didn’t know how to phrase it.

“Well now,” he said, and lifted the honey jar. “Thank you for retrieving this, though I’m sure it’s not as sweet as you.” This last bit of corn served up with just enough self-awareness to allow the flirt to pass.

He walked away without looking back. Strolled down one aisle, then drifted to the open space of the produce section.

“My oldest son’s name is Julian,” she said. He looked up as if he hadn’t seen her coming. Her basket was still empty. After a moment, he nodded as if she’d confirmed what he suspected.

“He has a learning disability,” she said. “He has trouble paying attention, and his teachers don’t seem to be taking it seriously.”

“That sounds like a tough one,” he said. “A tough one all right.”

She didn’t want to talk about the boy, though. Her question hung in the air between them. Finally she said, “How did you know about him?”

“I shouldn’t have brought it up,” he said. “It’s just that when you touched my arm—” He tilted his head. “Sometimes I get flashes. Images. But that doesn’t mean I have to say everything that pops into my head.”

“You’re trying to tell me you’re psychic?” Making it clear she didn’t believe in that stuff.

“That’s a much-maligned word,” he said. “Those psychics on TV, with their nine hundred numbers? Frauds and charlatans, my dear. Con men. However…” He smiled. “I do have to admit that I misled you in one respect.”

She raised an eyebrow, willing him to elaborate.

He said, “I really have no need for this honey.”

Her low, throaty laugh was nothing like Maureen’s—Mo’s rang like bells over a shop door—but he enjoyed it just the same. “I didn’t think so,” she said.

“It seems you’ve loaded up as well.”

She looked at the basket on her arm, then set it on the floor. “There’s a diner in this strip mall,” she said.

“So I’ve heard.” He offered her his hand. “I’m Teddy.”

She hesitated, perhaps fearing another joy-buzzer moment of psychic intuition. Then she relented. “Graciella.”

Teddy became a convert to the Church of Love at First Sight in the summer of 1962, the day he walked into that University of Chicago classroom. A dozen people in the room and she was the only one he could see, a girl in a spotlight, standing with her back to him as if she were about to turn and sing into a mic.

Maureen McKinnon, nineteen years old. Knocking him flat without even looking at him.

He didn’t know her name yet, of course. She was thirty feet from him, talking to the receptionist sitting at the teacher’s desk at the other end of the big classroom, which was only one chamber in this faux-Gothic building. The lair of the academic made him edgy—he’d never recovered from two bad years in Catholic high school—but the girl was a light he could steer by. He drifted down the center aisle, unconscious of his feet, drinking her in: a small-boned, black-haired sprite in an A-line dress, olive green with matching gloves. Oh, those gloves. She tugged them off one finger at a time, each movement a pluck at his heartstrings.

The secretary handed her a sheaf of forms, and the girl turned, her eyes on the topmost page, and nearly bumped into him. She looked up in surprise, and that was the coup de grace: blue eyes under black bangs. What man could defend himself against that?

She apologized, even as he removed his hat and insisted that he was the one who was at fault. She looked at him like she knew him, which both thrilled and unnerved him. Had he conned her in the past? Surely he’d have remembered this Black Irish sweetheart.

He checked in with the receptionist, a fiftyish woman wearing a young woman’s bouffant of bright red hair, an obvious wig. She handed him his own stack of forms, and he gave her a big smile and a “Thanks, doll.” Always good policy to befriend the secretary.

He took a desk a little behind the girl in the olive dress so he could watch her. He assumed she was here because of the same newspaper advertisement that had drawn him to campus:

Then in smaller type:

He figured the study was the usual academic foolishness, preying on the two types of people who’d answer such an ad: the desperate and the deluded. Those four yahoos in shirtsleeves and dungarees, laughing as they hunched over their desks, egging each other on? Desperate for the dough. That mole-faced student in the cheap suit, knee bouncing, all greasy hair and thick glasses: deluded into thinking he was special. The black kid in the shirt, tie, and Sunday shoes: desperate. And the old married couple helping each other fill out the paperwork? Both.

Teddy was here for the cash. But what about the girl? What was her story?

Teddy kept checking on her while he filled out his paperwork. The first few forms asked for demographic information, some of which he made up. It only got interesting a few pages in, when they started asking true-false questions like “I sometimes know what people are going to say before they say it.” And “Watches and electrical devices sometimes stop working in my presence,” which was followed twenty items later by “Watches and electrical devices that were broken sometimes start working in my presence.” Pure silliness. He finished quickly, then carried his clipboard to the front of the room and handed it to the red-wigged secretary.

“Is that it?” he asked.

“The five-dollar check will be mailed to the address you put on the form,” she said.

“No, I mean, the rest of the study? What happens after this?”

“Oh, you’ll be contacted if you’re one of the ones chosen.”

He smiled. “Oh, I think they’re going to want to talk to me.”

“That’s up to Dr. Eldon.”

“Who’s he?”

She seemed a little put out by this. “This is his project.”

“Oh! Wait, is he a big guy, kinda heavy, with Einstein hair and big square glasses?”

A hit. A palpable hit. “Have you already met with the doctor?” she asked.

“No, no. It’s just…well, when I was filling out the forms I kept getting this image. Somebody who was really interested in what was happening here today. It kept popping up, so I started doodling. May I?” He held out his hand for the clipboard he’d just given her. He flipped back a few pages. “Is that him?”

Teddy was no artist, but he could cartoon well enough for his purposes. In fact, it helped if you weren’t too good, too accurate. What he’d drawn was little more than a circle to suggest a fat face, a couple of squares for the glasses, and a wild scribble of hair above.

The receptionist gave him the look he liked to get, confusion taking the slow elevator to amazement.

He lowered his voice. “And the weird thing is? I kept picturing me in a meeting with him. Him, me, and that girl—” He nodded toward the girl in the olive dress with the black hair and the blue eyes. “All of us sitting around a table, smiling.”

“Oh,” the receptionist said.

“This is why I need to be in this study,” he said earnestly. “This kinda thing happens to me all the time.”

He didn’t mention that this kind of thing happened usually in bars, when there were a few bucks on the line. Fleecing fivers out of drunks was easy, but no way to earn a living. It was time to upgrade his act.

When he saw that ad in the Sun-Times, he realized that his first step should be to get certified as the real thing by real scientists. He made sure to do his homework before he showed up: a visit to the U of C library; a few questions about the Center for Advanced Cognitive Science; a quick flip through the faculty directory to see a picture of Dr. Horace Eldon; and voilà. One soon-to-be psychic flash, complete with doodle. The last bit, adding the girl into his precognitive vision, was a late improvisation.

He left the classroom without saying another word to the girl. Yet he knew, with an unexplainable certainty, that they’d meet again.

Graciella was a woman ready to talk. While their coffees steamed in front of them he asked many questions, and she answered at length, which seemed to surprise her; he got the impression of a tightly wound woman, normally guarded, who was playing hooky from her internal truant officer.

She was, as he’d guessed, a stay-at-home mom—or, given the size of some of the homes in Oak Brook, the suburb where she lived, a stay-at-mansion mom—whose primary duty was to arrange the lives of three school-age sons, including the problematic Julian. Her days were entirely set by their needs: travel soccer, math tutoring, tae kwon do.

“Sounds stressful,” he said. “To do that alone.”

“You get used to it,” she said, ignoring the obvious question. “I’m the rock.” She still had not mentioned her husband. “But why am I telling you all this? I must be boring you.”

“I assure you, you’re the furthest thing from boring in months.”

“Tell me about you,” she said decisively. “Where do you come from, Teddy? Do you live near here?”

“Just up the road, my dear. In Elmhurst.”

She asked him about his family, and he told her of his grown children, without mentioning grandchildren. “Only three, two boys and a girl. My wife was Irish Catholic. If she’d lived, we’d probably have had a dozen, easy.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” Graciella said.

“She was the love of my life. She passed when the kids were young, and I raised ’em on my own.”

“That was probably unusual at the time,” she said.

She made it sound like it was so long ago. And he supposed it was, though he didn’t want her to dwell on their age gap; where was the fun in that? “Difficult, sure, very difficult,” he said. “But you do what you have to do.”

She nodded thoughtfully. He’d learned not to rush to fill the silence. He saw her notice the Rolex on his wrist, but instead of commenting on that, she said, “I like your hat.”

He’d set it on the edge of the table. He’d been absentmindedly stroking the crown as they spoke. “It’s a Borsalino,” he said. “The finest maker of—”

“Oh, I know Borsalino.”

“Of course you do,” he said, with pleasure. “Of course you do.”

“So,” she said. Finally getting to it. “Do something psychic.”

“It’s not something that you can flip on like a switch,” he said. “Some days it comes easily for me, easy as pie. Other days…”

She raised her eyebrow, egging him on again. She could do a lot with an eyebrow.

He pursed his lips, then nodded as if coming to a decision. He plucked a napkin from the dispenser on the table and tore it into three pieces.

“I want you to write three things you want for your family.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just two words, two words on each piece, something like ‘more money.’ Call them wishes.” He doubted she’d wish for money. That was clearly not her problem. She opened her purse to look for a pen and he handed her the one he kept in his jacket pocket. “Take your time, take your time. Write forcefully, in all caps—put some emotion into it. This is important.”

Graciella bit her lip and stared at the first slip. He liked that she was taking it seriously. Taking him seriously. When she began to write, he turned in his seat and looked out across the empty plastic booths. It was afternoon, the dead zone.

“Finished,” Graciella said.

He told her to fold each slip in half, then fold it again. “Make sure there’s no way for me to read what you’ve written.” He turned over the Borsalino and she dropped in the slips.

“The next part’s up to you, Graciella. You need to think hard about what you wrote. Picture each of the things on the paper—all three wishes.”

She gazed up at the ceiling. “All right.”

The front door opened behind him, and she was distracted for a moment. A man in a black coat took a seat at a table kitty-corner from them. He sat just behind Graciella’s left shoulder, facing away from them. Jesus Christ, Teddy thought.

“Concentrate,” he told her—and himself. “Got all three?”

She nodded.

“Okay, let’s see what we’ve got.” He shook the three slips onto the table, then arranged them into a row. “Take the nearest one and put it in my hand. Don’t open it. Just cover it up with your hand.”

They were palm to palm, with the paper between them.

“Graciella,” he said. She looked into his eyes. She was excited, yes, but nervous. Scared by what she’d written. By what was going to be said aloud.

“School,” he said. “New school.”

A puff of surprise escaped her.

“I guess that’s about Julian,” he said. “Turns out you’d decided after all, yes?”

“That one’s too easy,” she said. “I told you all about him. You could have guessed that.”

“It’s possible,” he said. “Quite possible. Still—” The man behind Graciella coughed. He was big, with a crew cut like a gray lawn that rolled over the folds in his neck fat. Teddy tried to ignore him. He opened the slip and read it. “ ‘New school.’ It’s a good wish.”

He set the paper aside and told her to pick the next slip. Again she covered his palm. His fingers touched her wrist, and he could feel her pulse.

“Hmm. This one’s more complicated,” he said.

Her hand trembled. What was she so afraid of?

“The first word is ‘no.’ ” He closed his eyes to concentrate. “No…rabbits?”

She laughed. Relieved now. So he hadn’t hit the slip she was worried about.

“You tell me,” she said.

He looked at her. “I’m seeing ‘No rabbits.’ Are you writing in code? Wait.” His eyes widened in mock surprise. “Are you pregnant?”

“What?” She was laughing.

“Maybe you’re worried about the rabbit dying.”

“No! I definitely want them to die. They’ve eaten my entire garden.”

“This is about gardening?” He shook his head. “You need bigger wishes, my dear. Perhaps this last one. Put this one into my hatband. There you go. Don’t let me touch it.”

She tucked it into the front of the band. “How are you doing this?” she asked. “Have you always been able to do this?”

The man behind her snorted. He made a show of studying the plastic menu.

“Let me concentrate,” Teddy said. He put on the Borsalino, but kept his fingers well away from the band. “Yes. This one’s definitely a big one.”

The man laughed.

“Jesus Christ!” Teddy said. “Would you mind?”

The man turned around. Graciella glanced behind her, then said to Teddy, “Do you two know each other?”

“Unfortunately,” Teddy said.

“Destin Smalls,” the man said, offering her his hand.

She refused to take it. “You’re a cop, aren’t you?”

Ding! Teddy’s heart opened like a cracked safe.

“I work for the government,” Smalls said.

“Is this a setup?” Graciella asked. “Is this about Nick?”

“Who’s Nick?” Smalls asked Teddy.

“My husband,” said Graciella.

“I have no idea why he just showed up,” Teddy said to Graciella. “I haven’t seen this guy in years.”

“Don’t be taken in,” Smalls told her. “It’s called billet reading. An old trick, almost as old as he is.”

That was hurtful, trying to embarrass him in front of a younger woman. But she didn’t seem to be listening to Smalls, thankfully. “I have to go,” Graciella said. “The boys are getting dropped off soon.”

Teddy rose with her. “I apologize for my acquaintance here.”

“It was a pleasure meeting you,” she said to Teddy. “I think.” She started for the door.

Teddy scowled at Smalls, then said, “Graciella, just a second. One second.” She was kind enough to wait for him.

“The last wish,” he said, his voice low to keep Smalls out of it. “Was that about you? Are you going to be okay?”

“Of course I’ll be okay,” she said. “I’m the rock.”

She marched across the parking lot. He had so many questions. The two words she’d written on the last slip were NOT GUILTY.

Destin Smalls, to Teddy’s annoyance, took Graciella’s seat.

“Still running the Carnac routine, Teddy?”

“You look like death’s doorman,” Teddy said. It had been four years since he’d seen the government agent, but he looked like he’d aged twice that. A bad patch. That’s the way it happened. A body could hold the line for a decade, one Christmas photo just like the ten previous, then bam, the years zoomed up and flattened you like a Mack truck. The last of the man’s football-hero good looks had been swallowed by age and carbohydrates. Now he was a blocky head on a big rectangular body, like a microwave atop a refrigerator.

“You have to know you’ll never get past first base,” Smalls said. “You’re an old man. They talk to you because you’re safe.”

“I’m serious, your color looks like hell. What is it, ball cancer? Liver damage? I always took you for a secret drinker.”

The waitress reappeared. If she was surprised that an attractive suburbaness had been replaced by a seventy-year-old spook, she didn’t show it.

“Coffee for my friend here,” Teddy said.

“No thank you,” he said to her. “Water with lemon, please.”

“I forgot, he’s Mormon,” Teddy told her. “Could you make sure the water’s decaffeinated?”

She stared at him for a moment, then left without a word.

“I take it back, you can still charm them,” Smalls said. “So how are the hands?”

“Good days and bad days,” Teddy said.

“Good enough for the billet trick,” Smalls said.

Teddy ignored that. “So what are you doing in Chicago? D.C. too hot for you?”

“They’re trying to force me out,” Smalls said. “They’re closing Star Gate. They cut my funding to nothing.”

“Star Gate’s still running?” Teddy shook his head. “I can’t believe they hadn’t already chased you all out of the temple.”

“Congress is shutting down every project in the SG umbrella. Too much media blowback.”

“You mean media, period.” Teddy leaned back, relaxing into it now, the old banter. “You guys never liked it that any honest report had to mention your complete lack of results.”

“You know as well as I do that—”

Teddy held up a hand. “Excepting Maureen. But without her, you had nothing.”

The waitress returned with the water and the coffeepot. She refilled Teddy’s cup and vanished again.

“Here’s to Maureen,” Smalls said, and lifted his glass. “Forever ageless.”

“Maureen.”

After a while, Teddy said, “Too bad about the job. Nobody likes to be the last one to turn out the lights.”

“It’s a crime,” Smalls said. “A strategic mistake. You think the Russians shut down the SCST?”

“Why not? They just shut down their whole country.”

“Ex-KGB are still running the place. Not five years ago, we had intelligence that the Ministry of Agriculture was ahead of us on developing a micro-lepton gun.”

“Jesus, are you still trying to build one of those? How much government dough have you spent on that?”

“That’s classified.”

“But somebody in Congress knows, don’t they? No wonder they’re shutting you down. Nobody but you believes in remote viewers and psychokinetics.”

“Speaking of which, is Frankie staying out of casinos?”

“Leave Frankie out of it.”

Smalls raised a hand in surrender. “How is he, then? And Buddy and Irene?”

“They’re fine,” Teddy lied. Frankie kept borrowing his money, Irene was depressed, and Buddy—Jesus, Buddy got worse every year. A mute and a recluse. Then a few months ago he started taking apart the house like a man who knew only half a magic trick. Observe, ladies and gentlemen, while I smash this watch! Okay, now I’ll, damn it…what was it? “Buddy’s turned into quite the handyman,” Teddy said.

“You don’t say. And the grandchildren? You have how many now?”

“Three and a half,” Teddy said.

“Half?” Smalls looked surprised. “Is Irene pregnant again?”

“God I hope not. No. I mean Loretta’s girl, Mary Alice.”

“You shouldn’t do that. Categorize like that. There’s no such thing as a step-grandchild.”

“You didn’t come all the way to Chicago to ask me about my grandkids,” Teddy said. “Strike that. That’s exactly why you came out here, isn’t it?”

Smalls shrugged. “Are any of them…showing signs?”

“I thought they were shutting down your program, Agent Smalls.”

“It’s not dead yet.”

“Well, until it’s dead or alive, keep the kids out of it. That was the deal you made with Maureen and me. That goes double for our grandchildren.”

“There are two ends to that deal,” Smalls said. “You’re supposed to keep them out of trouble.”

“You mean, keep them from using their great and terrible powers for evil.”

“Or at all.”

“Jesus, Smalls. Those grandkids, none of them can do so much as read a menu unless it’s in front of them. Besides, the Cold War’s over.”

“Yet the world’s more dangerous than ever. I need—we need—Star Gate and people like Maureen.”

Teddy wasn’t used to Smalls sounding desperate. But a desperate government agent, even one barely in the game, was a useful thing. “Fine,” Teddy said. “Give me your number.”

The abrupt capitulation surprised Smalls. He took a moment to pull a business card from his wallet. The face of it was blank except for Smalls’s name, and a number. D.C. area code.

“They paid for you to fly all the way out here just to talk to me for ten minutes? I thought they cut your funding.”

“Maybe I thought it was worth doing.”

“Like you could convince them to—” Teddy stopped. The frown on Smalls’s face told him he’d hit the mark. Teddy laughed. “You’re robbing your own piggy bank for this? Jesus, you need to save for retirement. What’s Brenda have to say about that?”

Smalls rubbed a thumb across his water glass.

“Oh Christ,” Teddy said. “I’m sorry. She was a good woman.”

“Yes. Well.” He stood up, and pocketed the slip of paper. “You and I both married better than we deserved.”

If nothing had happened after the day he first saw Maureen McKinnon—if Dr. Eldon hadn’t seen his cartoon and flagged his application for inclusion in the study; if he hadn’t also chosen Maureen; if he hadn’t found himself side by side with her a few weeks later—well, her spell might have worn off.

First, though, had been his solo audition for Dr. Eldon. Two weeks after the initial survey, Teddy had been invited back on campus to discuss “his gift” and found himself in the doctor’s weirdly shaped office, a bent L intruded upon by support beams, ductwork, and plumbing.

“I just see things,” Teddy said. Not making too big a deal of it. “Especially on paper—there’s something about the way people concentrate when they’re writing or drawing that lets me see it more clearly.”

Dr. Eldon nodded and scribbled in his notepad. Eldon was at least ten years older and fifty pounds heavier than his already unflattering picture in the faculty directory. “Do you think you could, ah, demonstrate something for me?” the doctor asked. His voice was soft and earnest, almost wheedling.

“Okay, sure,” Teddy said. “I think I’m feeling strong enough to try. Do you have a piece of paper?” Of course he did. “Just make three drawings that are simple to visualize. Something famous, or a simple cartoon figure, or geometric shapes, whatever you like.”

Teddy got up from his chair, walked a few feet away, and turned his back to him. “I’ll cover my eyes,” he said. “Just tell me when you’re finished.”

Dr. Eldon frowned in concentration, then drew his first figure. Teddy couldn’t believe how well this was going. He’d been sure Eldon would insist on doing his tests, under all kinds of laboratory controls, but instead he was letting Teddy run the show. This was easier than bar work, where the marks were always looking up his sleeves—or into his cupped palm, where he currently held a tiny mirror that allowed him to watch the academic. It never crossed Eldon’s mind to wonder why a guy with his back to him also needed to cover his eyes.

When the professor was done, Teddy slipped the mirror back into his pocket and told him to fold the papers into squares.

“I’m not going to do these in order,” Teddy said. “I’m just going to sort through the images as I get them, and you’ll tell me if I’m in the ballpark.”

Teddy pressed the first square to the front of his hat. Pretended to concentrate. Then he put that square down and picked up the next one, then the next, squinting and wincing his way through each one.

“I’m receiving images,” Teddy said. The first thing Dr. Eldon had drawn was a Mickey Mouse face. Typical. Tell somebody to draw “a simple cartoon figure” and that was the first thing that came to mind. The other drawings were straightforward enough. The second one was a pyramid. And the third was an airplane.

“So many things,” he said. “I’m getting a bird flying over a mountain. No, it’s a triangle. A triangle mountain? And a big circle, maybe the moon? No, there’s more than one circle. They’re kind of stacked up around each other, and the bird…” He shook his head as if confused. “The bird is…metal? Oh!” He all but snapped his fingers. “It’s a plane. A triangle and a plane. But what’s with the circles?” He tapped his forehead. “There are two of them behind one middle circle. Like the Olympic rings, but not as many, you know? It seems so familiar, so…”

Teddy slumped in his chair, looking defeated. Dr. Eldon stared at him, his face stiff with the effort of hiding his delight.

“I’m sorry, Doc,” Teddy said. “That’s all I got.”

“It’s quite all right,” the professor said softly. Then: “You did very well.”

“Did I?”

Dr. Eldon passed him the pages, and Teddy pretended to be as amazed as the academic felt. “Mickey Mouse! Of course!”

Dr. Eldon grinned in satisfaction. “So would you be willing to participate further?”

Teddy could almost hear the sha-ring of a cash register. He didn’t respond right away. “I have to work most days,” he said apologetically. “I can’t afford to skip too often.”

Eldon said, “There will be a stipend for all research participants.”

“Enough to lay off a day’s work?”

“A significant stipend.”

“Well then, that sounds fine,” Teddy said.

Dr. Eldon said, “I’m afraid we have to stop now; there are other participants waiting. When you go back to the room, could you, ah, send the next person in?” Then with a wry smile he couldn’t repress: “I think you can guess who it is.”

Teddy played dumb, even as his heart tightened in his chest. “I’m sorry? Is this part of the test?”

“You mentioned to Beatrice—that’s my secretary—that you got a flash of a young woman meeting with me.”

“Oh, right!” Teddy said. “Is she back there?” He was proud at how steady his voice was. “Who do I ask for?”

Dr. Eldon glanced down at a list of names that lay on the desk in front of him. All but the last three had been checked off. “Her name’s Maureen McKinnon.”

This was the first time he’d heard her name spoken aloud. He liked the music of it. “No problem, sir.” He bent over the list as if making sure of her name. “Miss McKinnon. Got it.”

He walked to the classroom down the hall, the same room where he’d filled out the application forms two weeks earlier. It had been empty and dim before his interview, but now three people were there: the young black man, wearing the same tie and maybe the same shirt; the white, slick-haired mole boy; and the girl of his dreams. She sat in the first row, legs crossed under a blue skirt with yellow polka dots, one dainty yellow shoe like a ballet slipper kicking nervously.

The black man sat several rows back, but mole boy was right next to her, talking eagerly. See what happens? Leave a girl alone in the room, and some pimply-faced kid immediately starts bird-dogging her.

The kid held a copper-colored key in his hand, and he was saying, “It’s all about concentration. Imposing your will.”

“Whatcha doing?” Teddy asked Maureen. Ignoring the boy.

She looked up and smiled. “He’s trying to bend a key.”

“With my mind,” the kid said.

“You don’t say! Is your name Russell Trago?”

“That’s right.”

Teddy had read his name off the list, and took a guess that this was Russell. Which made the black man Clifford Turner. “You’re up next, Russell. Good luck in there.”

“Okay! Thanks.” He put the key on the desk, then said to Maureen, “Remember what I said. Impose your will.”

Teddy slid into the seat he’d vacated, and picked up the key. Weird that he’d left it behind. Usually a man liked to keep his props with him. “Still flat,” he said.

“He barely got started,” Maureen said.

“That’s too bad; it looked fascinating, just fascinating. I’m Teddy, by the way. Teddy Telemachus.”

“I’m—”

“Don’t tell me. Mary. No. Something like Mary, or Irene…” A pen and a piece of paper sat on the desk in front of her—the invitation from Dr. Eldon. He could use that paper if it came to it. Maybe do the Three Wishes routine for her. “Wait, is it Maureen?”

“Aren’t you a clever one,” she said. He liked that gleam in her eye. “It’s not really Russell’s turn, is it? They sent you out here to get me.”

“Ah. You’re too smart for me, Maureen McKinnon.”

“What did he have you do?”

He told her about the guess-the-drawing game, but refrained from explaining how he’d done it—or how easily.

“They seemed quite excited when I picked the first one,” he said. “I thought it was a triangle, but it turned out to be a pyramid.”

“Oh! Really?” She seemed a little too surprised.

“Why, you think ol’ Trago is the only one with powers beyond those of mortal men?”

“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s just that—”

He picked up the key and said, “Let me give it a try.”

“You bend keys, too?”

“Among other things,” he said. He closed his fist around it. “But I may need your help with this one.” He scooted the desk closer to her. “It’s not about imposing your will. You just have to ask the object to bend. The object wants to listen to you. All you have to do is think, Bend…Bend…And you know what happens?”

“I hope ‘explode’ isn’t on the menu,” she said.

He laughed. “Only if you yell at it. You have to ask sweetly.”

It was a simple trick. He’d already passed the key to his left hand. When he’d moved the desk, he’d jammed the tip beneath the desk lid and pushed down. The bend wasn’t much, just twenty or thirty degrees, but all the best magic tricks started small.

“Let’s see how we’re doing,” he said. He began rubbing the closed fist, which let him pass the key back into his right palm. He allowed the tip of the key to appear between thumb and index finger.

“You say it now,” Teddy said. “Bend.”

“Bend,” Maureen said.

“Please bend,” he said.

“Please bend,” she said.

He slowly pushed the key up, between thumb and index finger, letting more and more of it appear, exposing the bend.

“Oh no,” Maureen said.

“What’s the matter?”

“I might have trouble getting back into the house.”

“It’s your key?”

“I thought you realized—”

“I thought it was his! You gave that kid your only house key to play with?”

“I didn’t think he could actually do anything,” she said.

This seemed hilarious to both of them. They were laughing when Russell Trago returned to the room, looking wounded. Maureen covered her mouth. Trago seemed to sense he was the target of their laughter.

“They said they wanted Maureen,” he said. Looking at Teddy.

“Oh,” Teddy said. “Sorry. My mistake.”

Maureen slid out from her desk, then held out her hand. He pressed the warped key into her palm.

“What happened?” Trago said. His eyes widened. “Did I bend it?”

Teddy saluted her as she walked away. “Knock ’em dead, Maureen McKinnon.”

She’d left behind the pen and paper. She’d folded it over, hiding it from Trago maybe when he sat beside her. Teddy unfolded it. There were three drawings:

Pyramid.

Airplane.

Mickey Mouse.

“Holy Christ on a stick!” Teddy exclaimed.

He ticked through the usual methods, then ruled them out one by one. Yes, he’d told her about the first drawing, but not the other two. The distance to Dr. Eldon’s office made eavesdropping impossible. Plus, Trago had been in the room with her during most of Teddy’s interview, trying to bend her God damn house key, with Clifford Turner as witness. There was no method that Teddy knew of to see those drawings, from this far away.

There was only one explanation. Maureen McKinnon, nineteen years old, was the best damn scam artist he’d ever met.

Teddy drove home from the diner thinking about amazing coincidences. He didn’t believe in them unless he engineered them himself. But how to account for meeting Graciella, the most interesting woman he’d talked to in years, on the same day that Destin Smalls strolled back into his life? Like Graciella, he smelled a setup, but it wasn’t Smalls who set it up. Not his style. The agent moved in straight lines like a righteous ox.

Teddy parked his Buick in the garage, went out the side door, and stopped dead. A hole had appeared in the backyard, and Buddy was in it, thigh deep, and shoveling deeper.

“Buddy!”

His son looked up at him, curious. Naked from the waist up, which only made him look fatter.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Buddy looked down at the hole, then back at Teddy.

“It’s a God damn hole in the middle of the yard!”

Buddy didn’t say anything. Of course. Buddy had decided he was Marcel Marceau.

“Put it back.” He waved at the mounds of dirt all round him. “Put it back now.”

Buddy looked away. Jesus Christ. The kid used to be so talented. Could have made them all rich, just by sitting around writing numbers with his crayons. Now he’d turned into a God damn golden retriever, digging holes in the lawn.

Teddy threw up his hands, marched into the house. There were dishes in the kitchen sink, but at least all the appliances were still in one piece. In the front room, Matty sat cross-legged on the couch, swami-style, his eyes closed.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Matty’s eyes snapped open. “What? Nothing!” Then: “Thinking.”

“You’re doing a hell of a job.” Teddy placed the Borsalino atop the rack. “Why aren’t you at school?”

The kid hopped up. “School’s over.”

“What?”

“Half day for the last day of school. It’s summer vacation.” He was chubby, pale like Maureen’s side of the family, short like Teddy’s. Poor bastard. Literally. His mom was broke, and his dad had abandoned the family years ago.

“And now what?” Teddy asked.

Matty blinked up at him.

“You’re going to be around here all the time?”

“Uh…”

How had he lost all control of his house? Home is a castle my ass. More like a refugee camp. He picked up the pile of mail on the front table, started shuffling through the envelopes. Bill, bill, junk mail. Another one of those computer disks. America Online. Got one every damn day, sometimes two in the same day.

“Why don’t you clean up the kitchen,” Teddy said. “We’ll start cooking when your mom comes home.” That was the best thing about having Irene back in the house. When it was just Teddy and Buddy, it was Chinese takeout three nights a week. Takeout or omelets.

Matty moved past him, and Teddy put out a hand, a five-dollar bill between his fingers. “Say, kid. You got change for a five?”

Matty put his hands in his pockets. Too early and too obviously, but they could work on that. “I don’t know, mister. Let me check.” A little telltale smile. They’d have to work on that, too. “Yeah, I think so.” Plucked the fiver from Teddy’s fingers, started folding it.

“Hey, I said I needed change,” Teddy said, playing the gruff customer.

“Oh, I’ll change it.” Teddy had taught him the patter, too. Matty unfolded the bill carefully, then stretched it out between his hands. “How about that?”

The five had turned into a two-dollar bill.

“Give it a little snap,” Teddy said. “Like a towel. Make ’em hear it. And don’t smile till the end. Tips ’em off.” The kid nodded, then went off to the kitchen without offering to return his five. At least he’d learned that much: never give the money back.

Teddy looked at the last envelope in the pile and felt a pinprick in his heart. Recognized the handwriting, that graceful, quick hand. Say what you will about Catholic school, those nuns knew how to teach cursive. Above the house address it said simply “Teddy.” No return address.

He dropped the rest of the mail back onto the table, then walked upstairs to his bedroom, gazing at the envelope, feeling heavier with every step.

God damn it, Maureen.

He went into his bedroom and shut the door. As always, he was tempted to leave the letter unopened. But as always, he couldn’t stop himself. Slit open the envelope, and read what she’d written. Then he dialed open the door to the little safe in his closet.

Inside, above the velvet tray that held his watches, was a stack of older envelopes. He used to get one every week. Then every few months. The last one had come a little over four years ago.

He held the envelope to his nose. Breathed in. Couldn’t smell anything but the old paper. Then he tossed it onto the stack with the rest and shut the door.

3 Irene

Nothing killed nostalgia for your childhood home like moving back into it. She’d come limping back to Chicago in her eight-year-old Ford Festiva, a teenage son in the passenger seat sprouting and stewing from every pore, dragging a U-Haul crammed with the entirety of her possessions: a mattress and box spring; a wood-veneer coffee table; two sturdy kitchen chairs; and two dozen wet cardboard boxes labeled HUMILIATION and DISAPPOINTMENT.

She was thirty-one years old. She’d failed to achieve escape velocity, and the crash landing was brutal.

There’d been a few Christmases, back when things were going almost okay in Pittsburgh, that she’d feel a thrill of warmth when she turned the corner into her old neighborhood and saw that pale green house, the hedges glowing with fat red and green lightbulbs, and the little square window on the second floor that marked her bedroom. Behind the house loomed the huge weeping willow, and when she saw its naked winter limbs she’d think of five-year-old Buddy up there, fearless in those years before their mother died, swaying in the high branches.

Now the first look at the house when she came home from work made her chest tighten in something like despair. She’d pull up after a nine-hour shift at Aldi’s, feet aching and brain punch-drunk with boredom, and realize, again, that the house was a trap.

Lately it had been a trap under construction, and today was no exception. She couldn’t even get into the driveway because of a stack of lumber. Annoyed, she parked on the street and went in through the front door. In the front hallway were three white boxes of various sizes, each splotched with black Holstein patches.

“Mom!” Matty shouted. He practically threw himself down the stairs. “Is this ours? Did you buy this?”

“I don’t even know what it is.”

“It’s a Gateway 2000! And a monitor. And a printer, I’m pretty sure.” He squatted beside the biggest box. “It’s got a built-in modem, with a Pentium.” The back of his head was matted and greasy.

“Don’t touch it. We might have to give it back. What time did you sleep to?”

“Uh, pretty late.”

“Did you take a shower today?”

“Sure.”

She looked hard at him.

“I mean, not yet. I was about to, then the computer—”

“You’re fourteen, Matty. You can’t walk around like a caveman.” And he should have known, too, that he couldn’t lie to her. Was he hoping that someday she’d be so distracted she wouldn’t notice?

“Can’t I just look at it?” Matty asked.

“Where’s your grandpa?”

“Out back, talking on the phone. Somebody called Smalls? Deep voice. He wanted Grandpa.”

“Destin Smalls?”

Matty shrugged. She started for the kitchen and the back door.

“I promise, I won’t even break the packing material,” he said.

“Do not open anything,” she answered.

Out on the patio, Teddy sat in a lawn chair reading a newspaper, his knees crossed, shoes gleaming. He wore his suit jacket despite the heat. The air smelled like cigarette smoke, but there was no cigarette in sight. His left hand rested mock-casually on the aluminum arm of the chair. The cordless phone lay on the cement beside him.

“Why is Destin Smalls calling you?” Irene asked.

Teddy didn’t look up from the news. “It’s none of your business.”

“Is he going to arrest you?”

That got him to lower his paper. It was the Tribune, which was weird. They were a Sun-Times family. “Don’t be ridiculous,” Teddy said. “He’s practically retired.”

“Then why’d he call?”

“Old friends check in, Irene. That’s a normal human activity.”

“Since when is he your friend?”

“Jesus Christ.” He raised the paper again—and immediately dropped it. “And could you get those boxes out of the front hall? Nearly broke my neck.”

“They’re not mine. Did Buddy order a computer?”

“Who the hell knows what Buddy does.”

“Where would he get the money? That’s, like, two thousand dollars.”

“Two grand? For a computer? What do you do with it?”

“You can go on the Internet,” Matty said. “Or do homework on it.” He’d appeared in the doorway, keyed up as a puppy.

“I’m not having you sit around this house playing computer games,” she said.

“Can we ask Uncle Buddy if we can open them?” Matty asked.

“What’s for dinner?” Teddy asked.

“I’m not making dinner tonight,” Irene said.

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“I think you just did. I’m busy enough, making a cake.”

“A cake? Why would you—oh. Maureen’s birthday.”

“Buddy would have a fit if we didn’t celebrate.”

“Did I say I didn’t want to celebrate? Of course I do.”

“Good, because Frankie and Loretta are coming over.”

“Hey, maybe Buddy bought the computer as a birthday present,” Matty said.

“For his dead mother?” Irene said.

“It’s Buddy,” Matty said reasonably.

“You make the cake, I’ll take care of dinner,” Teddy said, as if it was his idea. “I was thinking pizza.”

“You hate pizza,” Irene said.

“No, I hate most pizzas. I have high standards. I used to stop by this restaurant in Irving Park. Nick Pusateri ran it. He could do this crispy crust, just snap in your mouth like a God damn cracker. I used to bring them home for you guys.”

Irene had forgotten all about them. He’d carry them in on a cardboard bottom with a puff of white paper over them, no boxes. You’d break open that paper and delicious steam would bathe your face.

“He had a son, Nick Junior,” Teddy said. “Not the brightest bulb. Somehow managed to become a real estate developer and get rich.”

“You don’t say,” she said.

“So last week, I run into this woman at Dominick’s. Never met her before. Her name’s Graciella, has three kids. And guess who her husband is?”

“If it’s not Nick Junior, then you’re shitty at telling stories.”

“I’m going to ask Uncle Buddy,” Matty said, and vanished back inside.

“Small world, right?” Teddy said. “Small God damn world.” He put aside the paper and pushed himself out of the lawn chair. “I’ll be back for dinner.” He set his hat on his head, then adjusted the angle. He stepped out the side gate just as Matty came sprinting up. The kid had run all the way around the house.

“Buddy says I can open it!” Matty said.

“He did?” Irene said.

“Well, I asked him if I could, and he nodded.”

“Fine. You can set it up in the basement—after you take a shower. And do not install the Internet!” He ran inside again.

She watched her father back the car out of the garage, going extremely slowly. She wondered how many years were left before they had to take away his keys. It was a certainty that she’d have to make the call alone. Buddy was oblivious and Frankie was too much in the sway of the Legend of Teddy Telemachus to take action.

She picked up the newspaper Teddy had been reading. A headline was circled in black marker: PUSATERI OUTFIT MURDER TRIAL BEGINS. She read the first paragraph, then the second.

“God damn it,” she said.

“What is it?” Matty said from behind her.

“Your grandfather’s hanging out with mobsters,” she said. “Again.”

“Really?” He sounded more excited by this than she liked. She looked up and saw that he was wearing only a towel.

“The water’s turned off downstairs,” he explained. Matty and Irene had been using the downstairs shower, ceding the upstairs bath to Dad and Buddy.

“Use the other one,” she said, and walked into the kitchen, reading.

Nick Pusateri Jr. may take the stand in his own defense, his legal team said Monday. This continues weeks of speculation about whether Pusateri, accused of the 1992 slaying of Willowbrook businessman Richard Mazzione, would testify. Pusateri is thought to be a high-ranking member of the Chicago Outfit, and the son of alleged crew boss Nick Pusateri Sr. Prosecutors are eager to implicate other members of the organization.

She finished the article and dropped the paper into the garbage. Murder, mobsters, and Destin Fucking Smalls. Whatever was going on with her father, she didn’t like it.

The death of her mother was the landmark by which Irene navigated her memories. The day she first met Destin Smalls was only seven months before Maureen’s death. It was early in February, on the morning Irene found her mother crying.

Irene couldn’t remember why she’d gone upstairs to look for her. It was a school day, so perhaps Irene wanted to complain about Buddy or Frankie not getting ready. When she pushed open the door to her parents’ bedroom, she found her mother sitting on the edge of the bed, palms on her thighs, eyes closed. Tears had traced a line down each cheek.

There was something obscene about the sight. It was not just that her mother rarely cried; it was that the tears were falling and she was doing nothing to wipe them away, nothing to hide them. It was the most naked she’d ever seen her mother.

Perhaps Irene gasped; something made her mother’s eyes snap open. And still she didn’t wipe at the tears. She glanced at Irene, but then her attention moved somewhere else, somewhere inside.

Irene said, “Are you divorcing Dad?”

Her mother seemed to take a moment to parse the words. “What?” Then: “Why would you say that?”

There were so many reasons Irene could name. The fact that Dad slept on the basement couch now. That when he woke up he stalked the house in silence, scowling at every noise the kids made, barking at them, For Christ’s sake go play outside! He was not a drunk, Irene decided later, when she’d come to know a few, but he had the alcoholic’s tunnel vision, the addict’s hollowed wound. This was the winter Dad got into a car accident and spent weeks with bandages on his hands, the winter after the summer of The Mike Douglas Show and the family’s public humiliation. Somehow he made the house feel as small as one of those hotel rooms they’d stayed in when the Amazing Telemachus Family had been on tour.

“You didn’t say no,” Irene said, as if catching her in a trick.

Anger flashed on her mother’s face, raw and fierce. Her hands had not moved, but Irene felt as if she’d been slapped. For a long moment, no one spoke.

Irene realized that Buddy had come up behind her. His sixth birthday would be soon, but he looked younger, a big baby head on a skinny body, no hint that he’d someday be the tallest of them.

Her mother, finally, wiped one cheek with the knuckles of her hand. “You’re a bright girl, with a great talent, and I love you.” She stood up. Her mouth was set in a hard line. “But you’ve got to learn some manners. And no, I’m not divorcing your father.”

She walked out of the room and downstairs. Irene followed her, and Buddy trailed silently after. Her mother took her winter coat from the coatrack and pulled it on.

“Where are you going?” Irene asked. It was not yet eight in the morning.

“To work. Walk Buddy to the bus stop. Make sure Frankie gets out of bed.”

“You have a job?” Irene was outraged that she hadn’t been told this.

“Don’t wake your father.” Her mother opened the front door. Cold rushed in and circled Irene’s bare legs like a frantic dog.

Outside it was gray on gray, snowflakes hovering in the air, the world rendered as a pencil sketch. Her mother walked toward a dark sedan parked in the driveway, its exhaust puffing clouds. A man in a long coat stepped out of the driver’s side. He said something to her mother that Irene didn’t hear, and opened the passenger door for her. He touched the small of her back as she stepped around him, and then closed the door behind her. Then he turned, and saw Irene standing in the doorway, Buddy holding on to her legs.

“You two will catch cold!” he said in a friendly tone. He was square-jawed and tall, twice the size of her father. And twice as handsome. His black hair was parted with Ken doll precision.

Irene shut the door—and immediately stepped to the picture window and pushed aside the drapes. The car backed out of the driveway, leaving tracks that she was sure her father would notice when he awoke. But no: by the time she escorted Buddy to his bus stop a half hour later, the snow had already filled them in.

Here’s a question of etiquette that could only come up in the Telemachus family: Who should blow out the candles on a dead woman’s cake? They used to let Buddy do it, but then Cassie and Polly started begging for the honor, and not even Buddy could turn down the twins when they were in Full Cute mode.

“Go to town, girls,” Irene said to the twins. There were seven candles on the cake. There should have been fifty-two, but Irene didn’t dare have that much fire around the girls. So five yellows, one for each decade, and two reds for remainder. Buddy watched anxiously until each candle was extinguished.

Maureen Telemachus had died twenty-one years ago, when she was thirty-one, the same age as Irene was now. This is the last year I have a mother, Irene thought. From now on she’ll be younger than me.

Hardly anyone talked as they ate. Loretta, usually in a good mood, seemed subdued. Buddy’s silence was no mystery, but Teddy’s was. He’d brought home the pizza—a pair of Giordano’s, thick as motorcycle tires, not the crispy style that he’d been rhapsodizing about earlier—but wouldn’t say where else he’d been for the rest of the two hours since he’d left the house. He was distracted, and picked at his cake as if he couldn’t decide what it was.

Frankie’s silence, however, was aggressive, peppered with grunts that begged for someone to ask what was the matter. Irene already knew. Two weeks ago Frankie had taken her and Dad out to dinner at the Pegasus, all on Frankie’s dime, he said, because he had some fantastic news to share. It wasn’t until they were done with the meal that he came clean. His fantastic news was that Teddy and Irene could become distributors in something called UltraLife, which he claimed was the fastest-growing multilevel marketing company in the United States.

At the Pegasus, Teddy had said, “When you say multilevel marketing—”

“He means pyramid scheme,” Irene had said.

That comment pretty much ruined the rest of the night. And the rest of Frankie’s month, evidently. But why did he think he could convince Irene or Teddy to invest in such an obvious scam? Irene was broke, and Teddy, though he had plenty of money (from sources he would not identify), refused to bankroll his kids. He’d grown up poor, and clawed his way out of poverty on his own, which in his mind was the ultimate test of evolutionary fitness. How many times had he told his children: Never lend chips to someone who can’t buy their way into the pot.

Irene blamed her father for Frankie’s crooked little heart. Dad had filled his head with tales of gambling and gangsters, schemes and scams, con men and ex-cons. On the road, he’d sit eight-year-old Frankie on a hotel bed and teach him how to do a false cut. (Not Irene, though, not a single card trick. That stuff wasn’t for girls.) He’d constantly say to Frankie, You’re going to go far, kid! And Frankie would eat it up. He’d spend hours trying—and failing—to levitate pencils and spare change and paper clips. By the time the family got booked onto TV, Frankie was planning his solo career as a Vegas headliner, despite having no ability with either psychokinesis or sleight of hand. It wasn’t until Mom’s funeral that he showed a hint of talent, and by then it was too late to help the act.

Once Mom died, there were no adults driving the bus. Teddy closed his eyes and refused to take the wheel. Frankie became a free-range malcontent, and Buddy became, well, Buddy.

Matty said, “We got a computer.”

He wasn’t looking at Mary Alice, who sat beside him, but that’s who he was addressing. She didn’t seem to notice. She stared at her uneaten cake as if it were an unmoving clock.

Frankie squinted at Irene. “You can afford a computer?”

“I didn’t buy it. Buddy did.”

“Buddy?”

“I set it up downstairs,” Matty said. “If, uh, anybody wants to look at it.”

Frankie turned to his brother. “What the hell do you need with a computer?”

Buddy sought out Irene’s eyes with a classic Buddy look: mystified and sorrowful, like a cocker spaniel who’d finally eviscerated his great enemy, only to find everyone angry and taking the side of the couch pillow.

“He bought it for Matty,” Irene said, even though she was not at all sure about that. “He’s going to pay him back, when he gets a job.”

“I am?” Matty said.

“He can’t sit around all day,” Teddy said. It was the first thing he’d said since the cake came out. Thanks for that, Dad.

“I could help Uncle Buddy,” Matty said.

“Ha,” Frankie said. “Have you seen the way he works? I’m surprised he hasn’t electrocuted himself. Keep your distance, kid. It’s bad enough Buddy’s going to kill himself.”

Buddy’s eyes widened.

“Figure of speech,” Loretta said kindly.

“No, he’ll work with me,” Frankie said.

“At the phone company?” Irene asked.

“He’ll be my apprentice.”

Loretta said, “Maybe you shouldn’t promise anything until—”

“Nobody tells me who rides in my van,” Frankie said. “It’s settled. He starts Monday.”

Irene lay on top of the covers, exhausted but unable to quiet her brain. When she’d gone to bed that night she’d plummeted into unconsciousness, and had disappeared into two hours of dreamless sleep before being hauled up into the waking world, her thoughts wrapped up like seaweed on a fishhook.

In other words, the usual. Wide awake in the thin hours of the night, her mind churning along on the All-Star Tour of Embarrassments and Mistakes. The tour could visit any decade, and feature any number of characters from her past, from middle-school girlfriends to strangers she’d never known the names of. She’d remember a conversation or, more often, an argument, and try desperately to get her previous self to say something smarter, or kinder, or nothing at all. Yester-Irene’s behavior, however, was almost willfully resistant to modification.

Lately the tour had been returning again and again to the most disastrous period in her life: the last year in Pittsburgh. In that time she’d gone from dream job (or at least, the best she could hope for with only an associate’s degree) to alleged criminal. It had broken her financially and emotionally. Matty had caught her more than once sitting at the kitchen table, hate-crying into a pile of bills and overdue notices. Which only made her feel worse. A child shouldn’t see his mother worrying about money. It made the kid into a figurehead parent, with all the responsibility and none of the power. She knew this from personal experience.

She pulled on her robe and went into the hall. The house was quiet except for Buddy’s snore. Her usual insomnia treatment was to read until the book dropped out of her hand, but when sleep seemed impossibly out of reach, she’d do penance for her wakefulness by performing some onerous task: cleaning out the refrigerator, balancing the checkbook, verifying the date of each canned good in Dad’s basement pantry. (Scariest find: a can of kidney beans purchased by her mother twenty-five years ago.) Some nights Irene came dangerously close to pitching in on one of Buddy’s renovation projects.

None of that appealed to her tonight. She went downstairs and drifted through the first-floor rooms, her eyes growing wide in the dark. Surfaces caught errant light and became strange. Objects trembled with arrested motion, waiting for her to glance away. Every chair and table became a wary animal. Don’t be afraid, she thought. It’s just me.

Irene had realized at her mother’s funeral not only that she had inherited her position as Sole Responsible Adult, but that she’d been training for the job since she was ten. She was the one who’d managed Buddy’s tantrums. She was the one who’d poured water onto Frankie’s bed to get him up and out to school. (Only had to do that twice, but it worked.) Most of all, she learned how to keep Dad out of her way. She resented the job, but she was secretly proud of it. She knew that if she had not grabbed the wheel, they would have all gone over the cliff.

It wasn’t until the winter after she’d graduated high school, in the wide backseat of the Green Machine, that she was asked the question she’d been waiting to hear all her life. Lev Petrovski, half naked and beautiful and sweating despite the frost outside the windows, pressed his forehead to hers and whispered, “But who’s going to take care of you, Irene?”

This was not a statement she could weigh for truth. It was a question, and her heart shouted the answer: You, Lev. You will.

What a stupid, stupid girl she was.

On her second circuit of the first floor, she became aware of a faint, shifting light emanating from the basement. She went down the stairs and saw that Matty had left the new PC running. Multicolored lines zigzagged across the screen.

She sat at the desk (a battered hulk that had once occupied a corner of Frankie and Buddy’s bedroom) and touched the keyboard. A field of blue appeared, and icons popped up like square flowers. It was a new version of Windows, and everything seemed shinier and somehow more insistent than what she’d used at her old job. Back then she’d been considered the office computer expert, not because of any actual expertise, but because her immediate supervisor had abdicated all technological responsibility. It fell to Irene to print out the electronic mail (or else how could the partners read it?) and become the guru of WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.

She bent to look for the computer’s off switch, and noticed that Matty had already hooked it up to a phone jack. It’s got a built-in modem!

Irene got up without turning off the machine. The little clock on the screen said that it was 12:32.

She went upstairs and found the stack of mail that had accumulated over the past couple of days. There were five AOL CDs, each one promising 50 FREE HOURS! Well, she thought, if there was one thing she had, it was free hours.

A few minutes later, the modem squealed loud enough to wake everyone in the house—or so it seemed; the night made the house seem both larger and smaller than it was in daytime. Soon the screen filled with a wall of colorful, rectangular buttons: “Today’s News,” “Clubs & Interests,” “Personal Finance,” “Entertainment.” And this one: “People Connection,” with a picture of two men and two women, laughing and smiling with their arms around each other. Her mouse cursor hovered over it, then slid away to safety. Who were these people? What the hell were they so happy about? And why should she connect with them?

She went exploring elsewhere, reading new stories she wouldn’t have bothered with if not for the novelty of them being on-screen, and looked through the “Education” section in case there was anything that might be of use to Matty. It was like wandering her house, except that everything was bright and blinking and pixelated.

Eventually, though, she returned to the “People Connection” button. She stared at it for ten, fifteen seconds. Then clicked.

She was presented with a page of “Chat Room Listings” that gave her another batch of online metaphors to unravel. She could chat (which meant type), in a room that didn’t exist, to people she couldn’t see. The number of categories was overwhelming: Friends, Gay & Lesbian, Town Hall…Romance. She could almost hear their desperate clamoring behind the screen. Do you like me now? Am I funny? Oh, sure, I work out all the time…

No. Nope. Nada. She was not going to become one of those lonely people sitting up all night bleaching their eyes against a computer monitor. She signed off, turned off the PC, and went upstairs to find a junk drawer to clean out.

It took all of two days for Matty to notice. He met her at the front door as she walked in from work, his voice quaking with indignation. “You installed AOL?” Then: “Without telling me?”

Irene flushed with embarrassment. “It was an experiment. We’re not paying for it, so forget it.”

“I’ll pay! Frankie’s giving me a job.”

“Frankie says a lot of things that don’t happen. And even if you paid, I wouldn’t let you on AOL.”

“What are you afraid of? It’s just the Internet!”

“The Internet is made out of people,” Irene said. “Terrible people.” She’d gone back online a second night, and had quickly learned that the AOL interface was little more than a colorful picnic blanket thrown over a seething pit of sex. She was not going to tell him how much time she’d spent staring into that tawdry abyss. Matty was at an age at which dirty talk would be kerosene thrown on an already burning crotch.

Last week the inevitable happened. Long after he’d headed up to bed, she’d gone into his room to deliver a load of laundry and found him rigid on the mattress, holding himself, staring up at the ceiling. She said a quick “Sorry!” and backed out of the room—and then was struck by the fact that he hadn’t moved a muscle, or even covered himself. Had the shock paralyzed him?

She knocked on the door. “Matty? Are you okay?” Then: “Of course you’re okay, it’s fine, it’s natural.” He didn’t answer. “I know you’re embarrassed, but I really need you to answer me right now.”

She pushed the door open an inch, not looking in. “Matty?” She heard a heavy thump.

“Matty?”

“I’m here!” he yelled. “Everything’s okay!”

I’m here? She left him alone, and told herself she’d talk about this later with him. She’d already put him through a sex talk that left him mortified and mute. She didn’t want to go further. That’s what dads were for.

Except Matty’s. Lev Petrovski was somewhere in Colorado, she’d heard, living in the woods where the postal system was so primitive that child support payments could not make their way out. Evidently.

Sometimes she worried that her son had inherited some of Lev’s weasel DNA. As Matty had grown up, he was learning to dodge her questions, just like his father, who was practically a Jeopardy! champion in his skill at phrasing every answer in the form of a question. When she asked Lev about getting married, he replied with, “Cool! When do you want to do it?” If she expressed doubt about his commitment, he’d bounce back with, “Hey, babe, don’t you know I’m your guy?” Then later, he’d touch her belly and say, “Aren’t you psyched about this baby?”

She didn’t know if she’d subconsciously taught Lev to speak to her like this, or if he’d known instinctively that it was the best method of slipping under her radar. Either way, his fluency in this mirror dialect made him the only boyfriend she could tolerate, and for a while, the only man she trusted. Maybe she was led astray by the few times he’d expressed his feelings directly, in the early days of their relationship. Only when they were making love did he allow himself to be swept away by declaratives. “I want you,” he said to her, his hand slipping up her shirt. “I need you.” And then, when he was about to come: “I love you.”

Irene’s power gave her no access to absolute truth; she could only know whether or not the speaker believed what he was saying. In that moment, Lev was telling the truth. And that allowed Irene to lie to herself.

Her fourth night behind the screen, she was asked to join her first private chat.

She wasn’t in the Romance room when it happened, thank God. That’s where she’d started on her second night. In minutes, two different people had asked her, “A/S/L?” She had no idea what that meant; American Sign Language? The next day, after work, she stopped at the Waldenbooks and thumbed through America Online for Dummies, looking for definitions, and realized they were asking for Age/Sex/Location. It seemed incredibly rude, until she realized that if she were at a bar, a man would instantly know her Location, and could make reasonable guesses about her Age and Sex. Likewise, she’d be able to tell if she was talking to a man or a twelve-year-old wearing a trench coat and a fake mustache. That second night in the Romance chat room, she was having a perfectly nice, if erratically spelled, conversation with RICHARD LONG when he typed, “SO NOW YOU WAN TO SUCK MY DICK?????”

She didn’t go back to the Romance chat room.

Eventually she found an area for single parents that seemed to be inhabited by real adults, because they talked about things no teenager would find interesting: divorce settlements; insurance premiums; whether grounding a child was more punishing for the parent; insomnia. Yet after her experiences in other chat rooms, she kept waiting for, say, BUCKEYEFAN21 to ask her to touch her nipples.

For the first time in her life, she was unable to tell if someone was intentionally lying to her. In this 2-D world of text, these “people connections” were little more than paper dolls with screen names scrawled on their faces.

Yet. As much as she tried not to be drawn in by the creatures of Flatland, after just a few days it was hard not to think of a select few of them as flesh and blood. LAST DAD STANDING, for example, sounded convincingly like a divorced, slightly lonely man who worked at some kind of white-collar job and took care of a grade-school-age daughter. He lived in the Mountain Time Zone, and so usually came online around the same time of night as she did. She looked forward to him showing up, because he was one of the few people who both typed in complete sentences and got her jokes. It was such a relief to not have to type “:)” after every jab of sarcasm—and she liked to jab a lot.

Then tonight, after she’d mentioned that she was feeling stressed, he suggested they start a private chat. It was a bit like being asked to sneak behind the bleachers. Was she the kind of girl who had private chats? How did one even begin such a thing? Literally, how did one start a private chat?

No smiley faces—yet she understood that he was joking. Only joking.

In a few clicks, nothing had changed except the title of the chat window, but she was surprised to find that the basement felt cozier, like a private booth in a crowded restaurant. America was online all around them, but Irene and her new friend were huddled together, talking in low voices.

She decided to tell him about the wreck she’d made of her life in Pittsburgh.

She laughed. Out loud. Did that mean she should type “LOL”? Some kind of punctuation smiley face?

When her son was born, she’d been trapped in her father’s house, working jobs that barely covered the cost of child care. Burger King assistant manager. Shift manager at Hot Topic. Night manager/cashier at the Dollar General. Lev had long since bolted, so no help there. It wasn’t until Matty was about to enter first grade that she glimpsed daylight and made her escape. Pittsburgh became her destination solely because a friend of a friend was willing to sublet a room to her. She took a series of low-level jobs. She was good with money, as every boss she worked for eventually figured out. She learned how to keep a ledger and, when PCs entered the picture, picked up Lotus 1-2-3 and databases like Paradox.

She liked the honesty of numbers. The zeroing out of debits and credits, the black-and-white judgment of reconciliation. A balanced ledger was a thing of beauty.

Matty turned twelve the year she finally wedged a foot into a white-collar door. At Haven Financial Planning she became a receptionist with “light bookkeeping duties.” It was a tiny firm on the edge of the city, and when she signed on as employee number five she didn’t know anything about finance, or about any of the instruments by which money could be hidden, put to work, shielded, and redirected. By the time Haven fired her and initiated legal action against her, she knew not only how those instruments could be wielded, but exactly how the company used them to separate clients from their cash.

It was the lying, of course, that tipped her off and tripped her up. Not the casual fibs; she wasn’t surprised at the way the company’s partners, Jim and Jack, told aging clients how wonderful they looked, complimented ugly women on their hair, flattered fools on their business acumen. It was the deeper, down-to-the-money lies that got to her. One of Irene’s jobs was to help with signings, managing the stack of documents with their dozens of yellow SIGN HERE stickies. While the clients signed, the partners ushered them along on a wave of encouragement, talk of future returns, confident-sounding advice. And it was clear to Irene that Jim and Jack were lying their asses off.

That limited power of attorney, for example. Jim and Jack always made it sound like a formality, but in actuality it was the key to the kingdom, because it allowed Haven to put clients’ money into “special situation investments.” The primary SSI, which could take up to 40 percent of the money, was itself an investment company that funded other corporations, which were usually described as tech companies that were about to “explode” in value. (“Have you heard of the Internet, Mrs. Hanselman? It’s huge.”) Every time Haven transferred money into the primary SSI, Haven took a portion as a fee. The “technology” firms that SSI invested in were in fact nothing but investment firms, which were also controlled by Haven.

She went to Jack, the marginally more approachable of the two partners, and laid out the documentation on the partnerships and transfers they’d pushed onto their biggest customers. Jack explained to her that of course she was confused, this was complicated stuff, and gosh, she didn’t even have a college degree, did she? The important thing was to not worry, that Haven was of course doing the best for its clients.

Irene failed to disguise her disgust, because suddenly Jack’s eyes turned flat and glittery. It was a stare she’d seen before in men, in the faces of assistant principals and shift supervisors and tin badges of all types: Do you really want to call me on this? Are you ready to take me on, bitch?

She’d replay this moment during the All-Star Tour over and over, and try to get her former self to smile and say, “Thanks for taking the time to explain that, Jack,” and keep her well-paying job until she could move on.

She told him the rest of the story: the first letter from Jack and Jim’s lawyer documenting her “assault,” the failed attempts to find a competent attorney to defend her, the rapid evaporation of her tiny savings. The day she became homeless.

She detailed every sad, humiliating turn, but there was one detail she was too embarrassed to mention: her last name. She couldn’t bear it if he typed back, “Telemachus? That rings a bell. You aren’t any relation to that crazy psychic family, are you? Ha ha!”

No. No ringing. No bells. Even the “T” in her screen name made her nervous.

Because she dared not tell him her name, she felt she had no right to ask him his. That felt strangely pure. They were creatures made of words, reaching through the wires to each other, without the distraction of names or faces or bad breath or unfashionable clothes. Without bodies.

Oh. Something fluttered in her chest.

Then he exited the chat room, and she was left in the dark, staring at that final message, as cryptic as a fortune cookie’s. Had he been flirting with her? Just making a musical reference? What did he intend?

She had no idea. She kept rereading it, looking for clues. The computer, with its much-vaunted Pentium chip, was no help; she’d have had better luck interrogating a carrier pigeon. All her usual tools for managing people, men especially, had been taken from her.

It was exhilarating.

4 Frankie

Where the hell was the sock?

He pulled the dresser drawer all the way open. Ran his hand along the back. The drawer was full of white tube socks and a few colored dress ones, the pairs rolled up into balls. He was looking for a solo white sock tinged pink from a washing machine run-in with the twins’ outfits, folded over itself. He kept it right there, in the back right corner. And now it was gone.

He started unrolling socks and tossing them to the carpet.

“What are you doing?”

Loretta, suddenly in the doorway, making him jump.

“I’m looking for socks,” he said.

“You’re wearing socks.” Eyeing him half dressed in his tighty-whities.

“Other socks,” he said testily. “Have the kids been in my stuff?”

“Your stuff?” Her eyes narrowed. Did she know about the stash? Or was it just Loretta being Loretta? She could do that, go cold. Like she was reconsidering the whole enterprise—marriage, kids, mortgage, everything.

He lifted a hand. “I’m just saying—”

“No one’s interested in your underwear,” she said. “Your sister’s here.”

“What?”

“She’s in the living room. With Matty?” She stared at him. “First day of the new job?”

“Tell ’em I’ll be right there,” Frankie said.

“Don’t forget your pants,” she said.

He pushed the door closed, then yanked the drawer free of the dresser and dumped the contents onto the bed. Finally he spotted the pale pink sock—but it was unfolded. And suspiciously flat.

He pulled open the neck and fished out the bills. Mostly twenties, but a handful of fifties, and a couple of hundreds. Quickly he counted the stash, and came up a hundred bucks short of the three thousand he’d hidden there. Frantically he started counting again.

From the living room Loretta yelled, “Frankie! You coming?”

“Just a minute!” Now he’d lost count. But did it matter? He was drastically short of what he needed today—another hundred wouldn’t have made him any less screwed. He pulled on his yellow work polo and his pants, and then folded the cash and pushed it into a front pocket.

Before he left the bedroom he confronted himself in the full-length mirror hanging on the door. Mirror Frank was a mess. Sweat dotted his forehead.

“Embrace life,” he said to his reflection. He tried to say this every day. “Embrace the UltraLife.”

In the living room, the twins were bouncing around, competing for Matty’s attention. Loretta and Irene conspired in the corner. Frankie shook Matty’s hand, making sure Irene saw that. “You ready to work?” he asked the boy.

“I guess,” Matty said. “I mean, yes, I am.”

“You sure this is okay?” Irene asked Frankie. That skeptical tone. “You checked with your supervisor?”

“I say who rides in my truck,” Frankie said.

“Because if he’s not allowed—”

“I said it’s fine, Irene.” He put a hand on Matty’s shoulder. “And if you work hard, I can see about keeping you on part-time through the year.”

“Really?” Matty asked. Loretta and Irene were looking at him with two flavors of disbelief.

Frankie considered backpedaling, then thought: Why not? Frankie would pay the kid out of his own pocket if need be. It sure as hell would do Matty some good. The kid needed a man in his life. A male role model.

“If you work hard,” Frankie said. “I guarantee it.” The twins hung on Matty’s arms, trying to tell him things. Frankie knelt and pulled the girls in to him.

“Cassie, Polly. Look at me.” Jesus they were adorable. “You’re going to be careful today, right?”

“You always say this,” Polly said.

“ ’Cause if you’re not careful, Mom’s going to separate you, right? We don’t want what happened last time to happen again, right?”

“Why don’t you take us to work?” Cassie said.

“When you’re older,” he said. Thinking, Holy shit, what a disaster that would be. He kissed them on their cheeks and told them again to be careful. “You ready, Matthias?”

Matty was looking in the other direction, eyes wide. The basement door had opened, and there was Mary Alice, half asleep, wearing nothing but a long black T-shirt and a scowl. Her mother’s daughter, all right.

“Vampirella awakes,” Frankie said.

“Hi, Malice,” Matty said.

She clumped down the hall toward the bathroom without a word.

“Malice?” Frankie said to Matty. “Now she’s got you doing it.” Matty’s mouth was hanging open. “Snap out of it, kid. We gotta carpe the diem.” He kissed Loretta goodbye, and made Matty kiss Irene. “Always kiss your women,” he said. “In case you don’t come back.”

“A little dark,” Irene said.

The van was not exactly tidy. Frankie had the kid clear off the passenger seat: a roll of Cat 5 cable; a trio of Toshiba phones, their cords tangled like a rat king; an administration manual; half a dozen boxes of UltraLife Goji Go! powdered goji berry juice. “Just throw that shit behind you.” The back of the van was crowded with UltraLife boxes. Loretta didn’t know how many he had in there. He hoped.

The job site was out in Downers Grove, in the western suburbs. They headed south on Route 83, and Frankie rolled down the window and lit up a cigarette. His stomach was in knots. The wad of cash in his front pocket burned like a radioactive payload. It was going to be a hell of a day, but he’d have to keep up appearances for Matty.

After a while, the kid said, “Uncle Frankie? When did you start—?”

Didn’t finish the question. Frankie glanced over. The kid wore an anxious expression. “When did I start what?” Frankie asked.

Matty swallowed. “Nothing.”

“Look, this is the way this has to work. When you’re riding in my truck, that means you’re more than family, you’re my partner. Partners can tell each other anything. I’m not going to run to your mother about it. It’ll all be between us. Now, out with it. When did I start…start…”

“The phone business?” Matty said finally.

“The phone business,” Frankie repeated. Fine, if the kid wanted to play it that way. Let him warm up. “You know I used to run my own installation company, right? Bellerophonics, Inc. Get it? Bell, phones, and the Greek angle.”

“Uh…”

“Bellerophon? Greatest of the Greek heroes? Rode Pegasus?”

“Sure, sure.”

“I had two guys under me, they didn’t get it. But you and me, Matthias, we’re descended from heroes. Heroes and demigods.”

“So what happened?” Matty asked. “To Bellerophonics?”

“I sank everything I had into that business, and a little more besides. Okay, a lot more. Then, my friend, the business sank me. Had to go to work with these fuckers at Bumblebee. Oh, it’s okay. A steady paycheck. You gotta bring home the bacon, and keep your family safe from the wolves.”

“Because they can smell the bacon,” Matty said.

“You bet they can,” Frankie said. “Especially when you owe the wolves a shit-ton of bacon.” The kid’s eyebrows lifted, and Frankie realized he’d said too much. Change of topic, then. “You know what a PBX is?” Of course he didn’t. Frankie told him about the system they’d be working on today: a hundred and twenty handsets plus a dedicated voice mail system. Tried to get across what a great opportunity this was. “God if I’d been exposed to this stuff when I was thirteen.”

“Fourteen.”

“You pay attention, learn the tech, you’ll be in high demand,” Frankie said. “A stable career waiting for you.” Frankie saw the look on the kid’s face.

Matty let a half smile escape. “It’s not show business.”

Frankie laughed. “Is that what this is about?”

“Grandpa Teddy—”

“Grandpa Teddy never held a straight job in his life.”

“I know!” Matty said. “Isn’t that great?”

“Let me tell you a story about your grandfather. Before he was married, before the arthritis, he conquered every poker table he sat down at. How do you hide your cards from Teddy Fucking Telemachus? You don’t, that’s how. But it’s not always enough, right? Like this one time, this is in Cincinnati, I think, or Cleveland, one of the ‘C’ cities. Grandpa Teddy’s in this deep, weekend-long Texas hold ’em tournament with a bunch of sharks and one whale.”

The kid nodded, but he had no idea.

“Whale,” Frankie said. “That’s a mark with too much money and not enough sense to get out of the water. Anyway, Teddy’s doing the usual, taking their money but not too much of it. Don’t want to scare the fishes. But after like thirty hours of playing, the whale’s cashed out, and the sharks start eyeing each other. You gotta understand, all these guys left, they’re not nice guys, right? Mobbed up. Teddy’s supposed to be just this mook who’s new in town, they don’t know who he is, but still. Your grandpa had balls of steel. Clanked when he walked.

“Now, Teddy knows that all this time two of the guys at the table have been cheating their asses off. They’re working as a team, wiring the cards to each other, practically writing love notes. Teddy was making his money, but still letting these guys think they’re running the show. And up till now it’s all been about the whale, right? But now they think Teddy’s the whale. He’s the fucking tourist, he’s not one of them, so they start gunning for him. And Teddy, being Teddy, can see them using every trick in the book, dealing off the bottom—these guys couldn’t even deal seconds, they weren’t mechanics like Teddy—and they’re taking obvious peeks. Fucking with him. But what can he do? Like I said, these are not nice guys. They’re not going to let him get up and walk away with their money.”

He glanced over at Matty. The kid was eating it up.

“Picture it,” Frankie said. “The tension in the room. Because these three guys that are left with Teddy, they’re not all friends. I mean, they’re all connected in one way or another, but—you know what I mean by connected? Never mind. There’s bad blood. The guy who’s not on the team, the guy working solo, he fucking hates those other two guys. Teddy knows this. But Teddy’s still pretending to be the mark, and the only thing all three of those other guys agree on is sucking Teddy dry first. So he stays in, looking for an opening, but he’s getting poleaxed, like, every hand.”

“But he can read their cards,” Matty said.

“Of course he can. Read their hands like they’re holding up cue cards. But these fuckers, the two guys working the team? They’re dealing themselves unstoppable hands. Not the same guy every time, they don’t want to tip off their third guy, but they’re having their way with the table. Now, Teddy could just give it all back. He could lose the hands, and get out of there with his life. But this is Teddy Telemachus.”

“Never give back the money,” Matty said.

“Damn straight. So Teddy figures, the only way to get out of this alive and with his hard-earned cash, too, is be the last man standing. He’s gotta turn these guys against each other. Let the tag team fuck up so badly, and screw the third guy so obviously, that they go for each other’s throats. Soon as the shit hits the fan, Teddy can grab his cash and go.

“He can’t rig the hands while he’s dealing, that’s too obvious. So he waits, and he waits, and finally he gets his moment. One of the tag-teamers is dealing, and suddenly this guy’s got two aces in his hand. And his partner, across the table? He gets a pair of aces, too. They can’t fucking believe it. They start running up the pot. By the time you get to the flop, there’s ten grand in the pot. Ten thousand dollars, Matty. And when they turn over their cards, and the tag-teamers show their aces, guess what?”

The kid could not guess what.

Frankie smiled big. “Each of ’em has a fucking ace of spades.”

Matty laughing now, into it.

“Two aces of spades!” Frankie said. “The guy not on the team went batshit! And he can’t blame Teddy, because he wasn’t even dealing! Boom, the other guys go at it, and Teddy hits the streets, the bills practically falling out of his pockets.”

“So how did he do it?” Matty asked. “How did he rig the hand without dealing?”

“He’s Teddy Fucking Telemachus, that’s how.”

“Was it telepathy?” Matty asked.

“What?”

“Like, he made them see an ace of spades, but it was really, I don’t know, the ace of clubs?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Teleportation?”

“Jesus, Matty, no. He did it in the cut. They asked him to cut the cards, and that’s when he—why are you making that face?”

“He does have…powers, right?”

Oh Jesus. The kid looked like he’d just swallowed something with legs.

“Of course he does!” Frankie said. “But he’s a reader. That’s his thing. He can’t just teleport shit, or cloud men’s minds. Everybody’s got their own talent.”

“Like your psychokinesis,” Matty said.

“Right, right.”

“And Mom’s thing. And Uncle Buddy’s—”

“Don’t get me started on Buddy, whatever talent that shithead used to have—never mind. The point of this story…”

What was the point? Somewhere along the way Frankie had lost track of what he was trying to prove to the kid. Something about paychecks. But fuck, what had a steady check done for Frankie, except sap his soul? After Bellerophonics went down and he got in deep with the wolves, he’d had one more shot to make it all back. A brass ring moment. And fucking Buddy had ruined it. Now, with all the interest, he was so far in the hole that the steadiest paycheck in the world wasn’t going to save him.

“Uncle Frankie? You okay?”

“What, me? Of course.” He was sweating again, his stomach burning like a furnace, and the cash in his pocket throwing off its own heat. Two months of mortgage there. “Just thinking about the day, Matty. It’s going to be a busy one.” He glanced over at the kid. That look on his face again. “What is it, partner?”

Matty took a breath. “It’s still real, right? You can move stuff with your mind?”

“I’m insulted you even ask,” Frankie said.

Once, he’d been a pinball wizard. The White Elm Skating Rink on Roosevelt Road, that’s where he rolled and ruled. Camped out for hours in a coatroom turned arcade. There was space for only three games, two pinball machines and a brand-new Asteroids cabinet. Most of the kids wanted to play Asteroids, couldn’t get enough of it. Not Frankie. At sixteen he already considered himself an arcade purist. Video games weren’t real. They were TVs, every game the same no matter where you played it.

Pinball machines, though, were alive. Individuals. The same game could be totally different from arcade to arcade; the paddles hard or spongy, springs tilt-happy or sluggish. A single table could change its mood, cranky one day and sweet the next.

Of the two pinball games at the rink, All-Star Basketball was a bore, with dead bumpers and a theme that left him cold. He had no rapport with it at all. But the Royal Flush, that was his baby. Near the top of the playing field stood a diagonal line of card targets—ace of hearts, a pair of kings, three queens, a pair of jacks, and a ten of hearts—that he could knock down with ease, racking up full houses and three of a kinds and sometimes, when he was in the groove, the high-point combo that gave the game its name.

Lonnie, the manager, liked to hassle him. “I oughta kick you the fuck out of here. You put one quarter in the machine and you hog that thing all day.”

It was true. Some days it was like the Force was with him, and he could keep the ball in play for long stretches, the steel bearing running smooth and warm as a dollop of mercury. The flippers batted the ball wherever he wanted, knocking down the cards for him—ace, king, queen—the numbers on the scoreboard rattling up and up. Even on a bad day he was pretty damn good. After school and all afternoon in the summers, Frankie would work the Flush, while Buddy, his permanent babysitting assignment, perched in the corner, watching him play.

By junior year, school had become a tedious nightmare. So in late October, on one of the last warm days of fall, he granted himself a vacation day. He biked halfway to the high school, circled back to the rink, then smoked the nub of a joint out back while he waited for the rink to open.

Lonnie met him at the door at noon, grimacing to find a pinball rat and not a paying customer. The man was an alcoholic, face like a bad road, with a mood as unpredictable as Chicago weather. He let Frankie in with a grunt.

The machines were plugged in and humming, Asteroids running through its demo. Frankie ran his fingertips across the scuffed glass of the Royal Flush, tested the plunger. Slid a quarter into the slot.

After thirty minutes he was still on the first ball. He reached into his jacket for his cigarettes and Bic, then lit up.

“What the hell?” Lonnie said. The manager was standing behind him, looking at the table.

The left flipper had just knocked the ball to the top of the playing field, up and around to the joker chutes. Both Frankie’s hands, however, had been occupied with cigarette and lighter.

“Did you break it?” Lonnie demanded. “What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything!” Frankie said. Behind him the ball dropped into the drain with a clunk, ending his magic run.

“You rigged it, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Frankie said.

“Get the hell out,” Lonnie said. “You’re banned.”

“What?”

“Out! Now!”

“You can’t do that.”

Lonnie loomed over him. He was skinny, but tall, a foot taller than Frankie.

Frankie refused to run. He walked out, back straight, neck cold, like a man who knows there’s a gun aimed at his head. Got onto his bike and rode away. When he got home, he put his forehead to the wall of the house. He felt nauseated, naked. He’d never let anyone see him move things. Not since Mom died.

The job site was a three-story building just north of Sixty-Third Street, a medical research company. Two other Bumblebee vans in the parking lot. “Wait till I show you the cow,” Frankie said.

“There’s a cow?” Matty said.

“You won’t fucking believe it.”

Frankie picked up his tool bag, gave the kid a stack of Goji Go! boxes to carry. The receptionist buzzed the door behind her to let him into the building proper, but he ignored it.

Embrace life, he told himself. He launched toward her desk with a smile. “Lois, this is my nephew, Matthias. He’s helping me out today. Matty, put the boxes down a sec.” Frankie opened one of the boxes, took out two sixty-four-ounce canisters. “This is the stuff I was telling you about.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” Lois said. “You don’t have to—oh.” He pushed the canisters in front of her. She was in her fifties, friendly and round-faced.

“I drink this stuff every morning, Lois. One scoop for every eight ounces of water. The scoop’s right inside the bottle. Some people are addicted to coffee, but goji berries are a super-fruit, loaded with antioxidants. Did I tell you about Li Qing Yuen?”

“The one who lived so long,” Lois said.

“Two hundred and fifty-six, Lois. He holds the record, it’s documented. Lived off of goji berries, ate nothing but. You can’t believe what it does for your skin.”

“I don’t know, I don’t really—”

“Usually these are thirty dollars per canister. That sounds like a lot, but you can make a hundred and twenty shakes out of one canister. Did I mention you can mix this with milk, too?”

“I don’t have cash,” she said.

He suppressed a grimace. “Not a problem,” he said. “I trust you. Just make the check out to me. You spell Telemachus like ‘telephone,’ then ‘m-a-c-h-u-s.’ ”

All this work for thirty fucking bucks. Jesus Christ.

Finally he led Matty downstairs to the phone room. Dave, his boss, crouched in front of the patch panel, punching down new cable. The cutover was tomorrow, and they were behind.

“Where you been?” Dave asked him, already cranky.

“Come on, you know you just started,” Frankie said. “Matty, stack those boxes in the corner. Dave, this is my nephew, Matty. He’s my apprentice for the summer.”

“You poor kid,” Dave said, but with a smile. Shook Matty’s hand. He was a decent guy that way. “How old are you, Matty?”

“He’s thirteen,” Frankie said. “But really mature for his age.”

“Fourteen,” Matty said.

“You want me to do the CPU stuff?” Frankie asked.

“I got it,” Dave said. “Hugo and Tim are on the first floor. You can help them.”

Typical. Dave wouldn’t surrender his position in the phone room to wire jacks. On their way upstairs, the kid said, “Could you call me Matt?”

“What?” Geez, he looked so serious. “Okay. Matt it is. But you have to call me Frank. Not Uncle Frankie. Deal?”

Frankie found the guys wiring up a big conference room. “Boys, this is my nephew, Matt. Matt, this ugly fucker here is Tim. The Mexican is Hugo. Don’t lend him any money.”

Matty looked like he was in shock. Hugo held out his hand to the kid. “This son of a bitch is your uncle? I hope to God you’re adopted.”

“Seriously, we need to talk,” Tim said to Matty. “Genes like those…”

“Fuck you,” Frankie said to both of them. They turned away, laughing.

Frankie led the boy to the other side of the room. Matty whispered, “Is everything okay?”

“What, those guys? They’re fine. You’re on the job now. They give you shit, you gotta give it right back. Now take a look at this.” Two cables jutted through the access hole, their open ends sprouting colored wire. “The white cable’s voice, blue’s data.” He picked up the end of the white cable. “See how there’s four pairs of wires inside? Analog used to use three or four pair, but these new digital phones only use two. We run ’em all, though, in case you want to add more jacks, you don’t have to run more cable.”

The kid nodded. Frankie was pretty sure this made no sense to him. Then Matty said, “But isn’t it all data?”

“What?”

“You said they were digital phones, so the voice is digital, too, right?”

“Smart boy! You got it.” Frankie handed him a screwdriver. “Okay, you wire up this RJ11 jack.”

The kid gripped the screwdriver like an ice pick. Poor kid. He’d probably grown up without a single tool in the house. See what came of not having a father figure?

“Uh-oh,” Hugo said. He stood up and looked at the end of his white cable, frowning.

“What’s the matter?” Tim asked in a totally fake voice.

“I’m out of dial tone,” Hugo said. “Matt, could you help me out?”

Frankie gave Hugo a hard look.

Hugo handed Matty a set of keys and said, “Run out to my van—it’s the one closest to the door—and bring me back a box of dial tone.”

“What’s it look like?” Matty asked.

“It’s on the shelf in the back of the van. You’ll know it when you see it.”

The kid scampered off. Hugo and Tim held their laughter until he was out of the room. “Dial tone,” Tim said. “Never gets old.”

“Guys,” Frankie said. “He’s a kid.”

Hugo said, “Come on, Frankie—is he on the crew or not? You gotta break him in.”

Matty came back in a few minutes later, looking flustered. Hugo and Tim had their serious faces on. “I’m sorry,” Matty said. “I just can’t find it.”

“It’s in a cardboard box about yay big,” Hugo said.

Tim nearly lost it. Matty glanced at him, frowned.

“Let’s drop it,” Frankie said.

“No,” Matty said. “Let me check again.” He ran out before Frankie could stop him.

“At least he’s determined,” Hugo said.

Matty came back two minutes later. “I think I found it.” He was holding a little cardboard box, one hand on the bottom. He walked over to Hugo and said, “Is this it?” Tilted the box toward him.

Hugo spared a look at Frankie, not quite winking, then opened the box flaps. “Let me see if—” He burst into laughter. Tim came over, looked in, and then he cracked up, too.

“All right, all right,” Frankie said. “What is it?”

Matty walked over, his face still serious. Frankie leaned over the box. It was empty except for Matty’s hand, which he’d poked up through the bottom. His middle finger was extended. Frankie laughed, and Matty’s face relaxed into a grin.

“I like this kid!” Hugo said.

“See?” Frankie said. “You can’t fuck with a Telemachus.”

After Lonnie banned him, Frankie stayed out of the rink, but not exactly away from it. He started riding by, watching for Lonnie’s Chevy Monza in the parking lot. Finally an afternoon came when Lonnie’s car wasn’t there. Frankie was supposed to be home babysitting Buddy, but he parked his bike at the side of the building—not chained to the rack, in case he needed to get away quick—and went inside. The usual guys were huddled in the coatroom.

Then he saw it. The Royal Flush was gone.

Frank pointed to the video game cabinet in its place. Some new game he’d never seen. “Where’s the Royal Flush?”

Nobody spoke.

“I said, where the fuck is the Royal Flush?”

A freshman in glasses said, “Lonnie said it was broken.”

Frankie wheeled on him. The kid put up his hands. “He said you broke it. Sent back the All-Star, too.”

Frankie was speechless.

He pushed through the throng of boys to the new video game. Shoved aside the kid playing. He stared at the screen—the color screen—and the stupid fucking joystick.

“What the fuck is a Pac-Man?”

Frankie wanted to punch the screen. He wanted to shake it apart with pure psychokinetic hate. (Not that it would have worked. Nothing happened when he was this flustered. Plus, he couldn’t do anything in front of these morons.)

Frankie shoved his way out of the coatroom and headed for the door of the rink. He reached the parking lot just as Lonnie was climbing out of his car.

“You took it,” Frankie said. His voice strangled.

“What?” Lonnie said, confused. Then he got it. “The pinball machine?”

Frankie took three steps toward him, his fists clenched.

Lonnie kept his hand on the door. Standing behind it like a shield. “It was broken.”

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Frankie said. A dozen feet still between them.

“Fuck you, you little punk,” Lonnie said. “You shouldn’t have broke it! You want to fucking fight me now?” He slammed the door shut and strode toward Frankie.

In a year Frankie would get his growth spurt and add three inches. Later, in his twenties, he’d gain almost fifty pounds and turn burly. A couple of times strangers in bars would ask him if he used to wrestle, and he’d shrug and lie, “I did all right. Went to states.” But at that moment he was just a kid, a skinny-armed teenager.

Lonnie stopped when he was a foot away. “You can’t damage the equipment and just walk back in here.” His breath fruity with alcohol. He shoved Frankie with both hands, sent him stumbling back. “You’re fucking banned.”

Frankie yearned to take a swing. But he was terrified of what would happen a half second later. He could already feel the man’s fist hitting his jaw.

Lonnie shoved him backward again, and Frankie put up his hands, turned his head to the side. “What’s the matter with you?” Lonnie shoved him again. Frankie bounced off the brick wall and Lonnie grabbed him by the collar of his jacket. “You fucking cheater.”

Lonnie’s voice seemed to be coming from far away, the syllables lost in a general roar. Frankie felt his body getting ready to do something, but he didn’t know what it was. Something terrible. He could feel it in his hands, like warm steel about to roll.

Lonnie grunted in pain, stepped back. “What the fuck?” His voice garbled. He wiped at his mouth, and the back of his hand came away bloody. He stared at Frankie, frightened now. Frankie hadn’t moved his hands.

A new voice yelled, “Get the hell away from him!”

Irene, in her Burger King uniform, and behind her, twelve-year-old Buddy, face screwed up in an expression that looked to strangers like concentration but was actually intense worry. Frankie hadn’t seen the car pull up, hadn’t heard it.

Irene stepped between Lonnie and Frankie. “What did you do?” Irene said to Frankie. Mad at him.

“I’m calling the cops,” Lonnie said. Blood in the corner of his mouth.

Irene wheeled on him. “No you’re not.”

Lonnie straightened. “I’m calling ’em right now.”

“You’re drunk,” Irene said.

“No I’m not.”

Frankie thought, You should never try to lie to Irene.

She said, “It’s the middle of the day, you’re drunk, and you’re beating on a little kid. You just drove here, didn’t you?”

Lonnie glanced back at his Monza. Confused now.

“You want a DUI?” Irene said. “You fucking watch yourself.” She pointed at Frankie. “Get in the car. I’m late for work.”

“Just go,” Frankie said quietly. Mortified. He knew without looking that all the guys were watching from the rink entrance. “I’ve got my bike.”

“Get in the God damn car,” Irene said, sounding like Dad. “I told you you had to watch Buddy. I don’t know what the hell you’re doing out here.”

She stalked back to the car, a big green Ford LTD with rusting door panels. She’d left the engine running. Frankie made for the passenger seat, but Buddy slipped in before him, so then it was three of them in the front seat.

“How’d you find me?” he asked.

“Buddy said you were here,” she said. Her voice softened. “He said you were about to do something terrible.”

Buddy seemed not to hear. He stared out through the windshield. Twelve years old, all elbows and knees. Then he leaned against Frankie’s arm, his cheek hot.

During the second afternoon break, Frankie smoked a cigarette to settle his nerves while Matty watched. The cash simmered in his pocket. He’d told Mitzi that he’d deliver it at lunch. Instead he’d taken the kid to Steak-and-Shake.

“You’re really fast,” Matty said. “Wiring jacks.”

“I’ve been doing it awhile,” Frankie said. “You’ll learn.”

“No, I mean compared to Hugo and Tim. They’ve done like three offices together, and you did four on your own. Even with the smoke breaks.”

“Not alone. I had you, didn’t I?”

The kid wasn’t buying it. They walked back toward the building and Matty said, “So is there really a cow?”

“The cow! Right!” He took the kid down to the basement.

One of the scientists sat back there, typing at a computer. She glanced up and said, “I told you, I’m not interested in goji berries.”

“You’re making a mistake about that. Reputable studies have proven—” Suddenly he lost energy for the sale. “Never mind. Okay if I show my nephew her highness?”

She eyed Matty. Seemed to decide he wasn’t a wild child. “Don’t touch. But you can look.”

Frankie led the boy through a set of doors, down a ramp, and into a room that had probably been slated for a garage before someone decided what they really needed was a windowless, industrial barn: cement floors, big drains, and four steel-railed cattle stalls. The sole occupant, in the nearest stall, was two thousand pounds of Barzona cow named Princess Pauline.

“Is she sick?” Matty asked. Wires connected her to a blue metal switchbox.

“Naw, come closer.” Set into Princess Pauline’s side, near the front legs, was a foot-wide section of Plexiglas. Inside, meat throbbed. “See through that hole? That’s her heart.”

“Holy cow.”

“I know, it’s—hey! Funny.”

Matty bent to get a better look between the slats. “Why did they do this?”

“There’s an artificial heart in there. That’s what they build here.”

“And they just want to…watch it?” The kid wasn’t grossed out, he was fascinated.

Frankie put a hand on his shoulder. “Science, huh?”

They spent a moment contemplating this miracle of animal experimentation. Princess Pauline paid them no mind.

“Something happened to me,” Matty said in a small voice. “A couple weeks ago.” He squinted as if in pain. Frankie had seen that same worried look on Irene’s face all his life.

“We’re partners,” Frankie said. “You can tell me anything.”

“I know, but…”

“Is it about girls?”

The kid flushed—then seemed to get mad at himself for being embarrassed. “It’s girl related,” Matty said. “A couple weeks ago, I was…” That pained expression again.

“Out with it.”

“I was thinking about a girl. Not anyone you know. And something happened.”

Behind the kid, the double doors swung open, and there was Dave, looking pissed. “Frank! I need you downstairs!”

Frankie wanted to say, Shut up, Dave, this is important. But he needed this job.

Down in the phone room, everybody had gathered around the Toshiba CPU. The laptop was wired to the diagnostics port. “What’s the matter?” Frankie asked.

“Half the phones on the first floor are dead,” Hugo said. “The laptop won’t tell us what’s wrong.”

“Maybe you need more dial tone,” Matty said.

Dave looked at him. “What?”

“Nothing,” Frankie said. “Did you check the cards?”

“The laptop says they’re all working. Could you just do your thing?”

The crew was all looking at him. “Fine.” He popped the lid off the CPU. He started checking the cards, making sure they were seated properly. All the indicator lights were on, but all that meant was that they were getting power; the circuit boards could still be malfunctioning.

The first half a dozen cards he checked seemed okay. Then his fingertips brushed the edge of one of the cards at the bottom.

He pulled the card from its slot. “This one,” he said.

The guys knew better than to doubt him.

By then it was time to wrap up. Frankie packed up his tools and he walked with Matty out to the parking lot. Before they reached the van, he gripped the boy by the shoulder.

“So. This thing,” Frankie said, picking up their conversation from the cow room. He’d been rehearsing what to say. As a man marooned on an island of daughters, he wasn’t quite ready for this moment, but who else could Matty turn to? “The first thing you gotta know, it’s totally normal. The same thing happened to me when I was thirteen.”

Matty opened his mouth to say something, then closed it.

“This isn’t something to worry about,” Frankie said. “This is something to celebrate. And I know just the place to go.” As if he just thought of it. As if he had any choice.

Mitzi’s Tavern was starting to fill up with the after-work crowd, if you could use the word “crowd” to describe the dozen wretches who huddled here for a beer and a bump before facing the wife. The décor was Late-Period Dump: ripped-vinyl booths, neon Old Style signs, veneer tabletops, black-speckled linoleum in which 80 percent of the specks weren’t. The kind of place that was vastly improved by dim lighting and alcoholic impairment. Frankie loved it.

“Your grandpa used to bring me here,” Frankie said to Matty. “This is where real men drink. You ever start sitting around the bar at a Ruby Tuesday’s, I will kick your ass.” He pointed to an empty stool. Matty put the UltraLife box on the bar and hopped up.

“No kids,” Barney said. He’d been the bartender since forever—came installed with the building. Frankie had never liked him. He was a big mother, over six feet tall. His head was 90 percent jowl, a face like a mudslide.

“We’re only going to be here a minute,” Frankie said. “Barney, this is my nephew, Matthias. Can you get him a pop? It’s his birthday.”

“How old are you?” Barney asked the kid.

“Depends who you ask,” Matty said quietly.

“Mitzi in the office?” Frankie asked. He scooped up the box from the bar and headed for the back of the room.

“Knock first,” Barney called.

Knock first. Jesus. How many years had he been coming here? Frankie rattled the knob of the office door. “Knock knock,” Frankie said.

There was no answer, so he opened the door. Mitzi sat behind her desk, on the phone. She shook her head at him, but didn’t object when he sat down. He started unpacking the box.

“You know the deal,” Mitzi said into the phone. “Friday, no ifs ands or buts.” She frowned at the growing number of white plastic bottles lining the front of her desk. Mitzi was older than Barney, but where the bartender seemed to ooze excess flesh from his forehead down, Mitzi was shrinking every year, drying out and hardening like beef jerky.

Then to the phone: “Don’t disappoint me, Jimmy.” She hung up. “What’s all this?”

Frankie smiled. “Last week you mentioned you had an upset stomach. This is the UltraLife Digestive Health Program. This one—” He picked up the tallest bottle. “This is aloe concentrate, original goji berry flavor, plus other natural additives. You just mix it with water, or Pepsi, whatever, it soothes your stomach. This is Ultra Philofiber, a mix of fiber and acidophilus, perfect for diarrhea or constipation.”

“Both?” Mitzi said.

“It works on the bacteria in your gut, so it straightens you both ways. And this—”

“I’m not buying, Frankie.”

“I’m not selling. This is a gift.”

“Oh, Frankie, I don’t need gifts—I just need what you owe. Where you been? You said you’d be by at lunch.”

“Sorry about that. My boss is an S.O.B.”

“Are you going to make good on what you owed me Friday?”

It was highly unusual to allow a client to get an extra weekend. Letting Frankie come in on Monday was a favor, and he knew it. He set the cash on the desk. “I gotta tell you up front—it’s light.”

Mitzi didn’t change expression. She picked up the money, dropped it into a desk drawer, and closed it. Behind her, on the floor, sat a black safe the size of a mini-fridge. After he was gone, she’d move the deposits there. She’d never opened it in his presence, but he spent a lot of time thinking about that safe.

“You’re kinda falling behind here, Frankie.”

“I know, I know.”

“I don’t think you do. Counting today’s payment—which is how much?”

“Two thousand nine hundred,” he said.

“Puts you at thirty-eight thousand, five hundred seventy-five.” No hesitation, the number right there in her head. Every visit she gave him the new total, every week he fell a little further behind.

“It’s about to turn around,” he said. “My UltraLife distributorship is bringing in a lot of income.”

“Distributorship,” Mitzi said evenly. She shook her head. “I don’t want you to get in trouble, Frankie.”

“I’m not. I won’t.”

But of course he already was. He was in debt to the Outfit. Mitzi’s brother ran the northwest suburbs. There really wasn’t much worse it could get.

“It would kill your dad,” she said. “How is he?”

He forced a smile. “Not dead yet. Though he’s dressed for the funeral.”

She laughed, a sound like wind through dry leaves. “God he had style. Nothing like the Cro-Magnons I grew up with. You give him my regards.”

Frankie stood up. He felt shaky, like he’d been clocked in the head. Maybe that’s what relief felt like. He should have been happy. Another payment down, another week to turn this ship around.

“Oh, Frank?”

The back of his neck went cold. He turned.

“Which one do I take first?”

“What? Oh.” He gestured at the big bottle. “Take the aloe every day, just squirt it into your water. The Philofiber and the Morning Formula you take every morning. Then there’s the Evening Formula, which you take, uh…”

“Every night?”

“You got it. Straighten you out in no time.”

Matty was sipping from a narrow glass, watching the silent TV that hung in the corner. Frankie had planned on sitting with the kid and downing an Old Style or two, but now he wasn’t in the mood.

“Let’s go, Matty. Gotta get you home.”

“Oh, okay.” Disappointed. He put down the glass and wiped at his mouth. Barney gave Frankie a hard look. Next time he should bring in something for the man. Maybe a tin of the replenishing face cream. Maybe a bucket of the replenishing face cream.

They were only a couple of miles from home—Teddy and Buddy’s home, and now Irene and Matty’s. At least Frankie had his own house. Paid his own bills. Kept the ball in play. Were there setbacks? Of course. Ninety percent of small businesses go under. Banks turn their backs on you. The table fucking turns. Game over. But what do you do? You find another fucking quarter, or borrow one, or steal one, and live to play another day.

“Uncle Frankie?”

They were almost home. He’d been driving on autopilot. He made the turn into the neighborhood, and Matty said, “I want to tell you something. It’s important.”

Frankie eased up to the stop sign and, since no one was at the intersection, put the van in park. “You don’t have to thank me. You did a good job today. Consider yourself hired for the summer.”

“Thank you,” Matty said. “We could use the money.”

That was the truth. Irene was broke-ass broke. “So why you still have that look on your face?”

“Something happened to me a couple weeks ago.”

“I told you, kid, it’s perfectly—”

“No, not that,” Matty said firmly. “It was something amazing.”

The kid told him what had happened, and how later he’d made it happen several more times. Cars came up behind them and Frankie waved them through, not wanting to interrupt.

Then finally Frankie said, “So you lie there in this meditative state—”

“Right,” Matty said. “Definitely meditating.”

“And then it happens. You start floating around, seeing into other rooms.”

“Uh-huh.”

Frankie was getting an idea—or rather, the warm glow that indicated that an idea was about to poke its head above the horizon. Finally he asked, “Does your mom know about this?”

“Not really,” Matty said. “I mean, no. She caught me meditating, but that’s it. You’re the first person I’ve told.”

“That’s good,” Frankie said. “Let’s keep this between you and me.”