A Thousand Pardons by Jonathan Dee Read Free Book Online Page A

she said.
    “Six,” Helen said, though in truth she and Harvey hadn’t discussed it. She hadn’t even thought to ask him. “But you’ve got soccer until five most days anyway, and you can go to friends’ houses if you don’t wantto be here alone, and you’ve got the cellphone if you need anything and the neighbors—”
    “Yeah, I think I can survive here for an hour or two all by myself,” Sara said acidly. “But I mean—”
    “What?” Helen said.
    “What about just moving to the city?”
    Helen blanched. It was something she had planned to wait at least a month before bringing up as a possibility, on the grounds that there was only so much change a child should be asked to accommodate in one shot. But Sara’s whole life was founded on upheaval. It was Helen, really, who had a limit on how much of a chance she was willing to take that life might improve if they just tried their luck somewhere else.
    “First things first,” she said. “Let’s bank a few paychecks and then see where we are. But that’s something you’d be willing to consider?”
    Sara snorted. “Consider? Try dream of,” she said. “These people are hicks. And now they all think they’re better than us. Plus I’m not saying I want to forget about Dad or anything but it would be kind of a relief to be able to look at something, or someone, that doesn’t remind me he’s not here. Is there dessert?”
    On Monday Helen took the earlier, more crowded train, full of tense faces and clubby nods of recognition, and showed up at work so far ahead of schedule she had to wait in the hallway for ten minutes until Mona arrived with a key to let her in. She expected some kind of formal orientation, but instead Mona just showed her how to set up Google news alerts for all nine of the business’s current clients, as well as twelve other names Harvey had identified as potential clients. When that was done, it was just a matter of waiting for these alerts to show up in her inbox; in the meantime she was handed a stack of gossip magazines and asked to scan them thoroughly for any mention of those same twenty-one names. Harvey came in around eleven; he looked surprised to see Helen sitting there at her desk but then nodded quickly in embarrassment, went into his office without a word to her and shut the door.
    Mona and the other employee there, whose name was Nevaeh, spoke all day long to each other but never once to Helen, unless it wasto answer some question they couldn’t pretend not to know the answer to, like where the ladies’ room was. At four forty-five they reapplied their makeup and left without a word to the boss or to Helen. The whole first week was like that. She didn’t mind the idleness, or the feeling of being ignored—this wasn’t some journey of personal growth or something, she was just looking to keep herself and her child out of the poorhouse—but so little happened around there that she didn’t see how any of their jobs could possibly last. She was relieved when Mona handed her her first paycheck and then relieved all over again when it cleared. When she mentioned to Harvey that she didn’t feel like she had that much to do, he looked embarrassed and said, “Hurry up and wait, as they used to tell us in the Army,” and went back into his office with a bag full of Chinese food and shut the door.
    “The guy who used to have your job quit to go back to school,” Mona finally told her. “He didn’t have nothing to do either. But if Harvey doesn’t hire someone to take his place, that’s like admitting that the business is shrinking.”
    Then one morning Harvey came in on time for once and called all three women into his office. “I think we may have something here,” he said. “I went out to Brooklyn last night to have dinner with my son, and the two of us ordered out for some Chinese. Any of you ever heard of Peking Grill?”
    Mona and Nevaeh nodded sagely. “There’s one up in the Heights,” Nevaeh