A Thousand Pardons by Jonathan Dee Read Free Book Online

rice and string beans. Sara had always hated eating dinner with her parents, and took no pains to disguise it. Like all of her contemporaries, she was restless when not doing at least two things at once, and the thought of eating—just eating, without the TV or her iPod on, without a phone in hand, without a book to read—struck her as not just wasteful but sentimental. She talked to her mother easily enough when the atmosphere was more relaxed and spontaneous, but at the table it felt quaint and enforced, all the more so now that the conceit that they were a Normal Family, one that Sat Down To Dinner Together, had been debunked forever. Nothing provoked a teenager like the whiff of hypocrisy.
    “What did you do today?” Helen asked tentatively.
    Sara shrugged. “Same old,” she said. “Class, lunch, class, soccer.”
    “Weren’t you going to Sophia’s house after, to study?” Sara shrugged, which could have meant any number of things, but some of those things were so potentially heartbreaking—when seventh grade had ended, and everything was still outwardly normal, Sophia was Sara’s best friend—that Helen didn’t have the heart to pursue it any further. “How was soccer?” she said instead.
    Sara scowled. “The coach is so unfair,” she said.
    She was developing an acne problem already, just a few months after turning thirteen. One of the many revelations of adoption: whatever had happened to you at the age your daughter was now, good or bad, whatever changes you went through, early or late—it was irrelevant, it was of no value to anyone. Even the fact that Sara and her mother were of different races somehow hadn’t prepared Helen for the shock of her own uselessness in that regard. There were no genetic predictors. You were as surprised by what she became as she was.
    On Thursday Helen was filling out some parental-consent formsfor school and watching CNN with the sound down, in case anything major happened somewhere in the world, when the phone rang. “Helen, it’s Harvey Aaron,” she heard. “Listen, I am very pleased to tell you that for various reasons those two other guys didn’t work out and so I’d like to offer you the job here, if you’re still available, that is. Probably rude of me just to assume that you’re still available. I’m sorry for that. So are you?”
    “Yes,” said Helen, amazed, hearing her own voice while watching the anchorwoman’s lips move silently on the TV. “I am available.”
    Harvey asked if she could start as soon as Monday, and she almost said no, but then she realized that there was nothing other than fear of the unknown that would prevent her starting two hours from right now, if it came to that. She hung up and, after a few moments, whooped with laughter. What the hell had she just done? Harvey himself seemed so chaotic, and the office so moribund, that it wouldn’t have surprised her if the whole operation went under before she cashed her first paycheck; she had to remind herself that the place had somehow stayed in business for thirty years. It was the first instance of good timing her life had seen in quite a while. She finished off the endless school forms—liability waivers, most of them—with a much lighter heart. That night at dinner, she told Sara what had happened, and what to expect in terms of the change in their routines.
    “They hired you ? Really? A PR firm? No offense,” Sara said. “Well, it’s a good thing, I guess. I mean I’ve been wondering if we were just going to go broke or what.”
    “We’re not going to go broke,” Helen said quickly. “But it’s true, we do need some money coming in while your father’s not working.” It was so much more dire than that, but Helen was constitutionally averse to talking about money with her child. Besides, she didn’t really want to find out how much Sara already knew. “And now we’ll have it. So that’s great.”
    Sara looked thoughtful. “What time will you get home?”