The Slippage: A Novel by Ben Greenman Read Free Book Online Page B

of an older version of Christopher. William thought of the girl who had sat beside him in school when he was twelve; hair sprouted from beneath her arms and it shocked him. His arms felt leaden, not quite his own, both then and now. He thanked the girl, asked after her father, and went out to join Karla in the parking lot.
    William’s afternoon was oversold, a trio of conference calls laid end to end, and when he finished the third he went to the bathroom, wet his hands, and ran them through his hair. The office water was hard, or maybe it was soft: he didn’t know which, but within an hour his hair would be stiff as a brush.
    On his way down the hall, William saw Fitch standing outside Antonelli’s office, pointing at the door. “I think I saw him in the break room,” William said.
    “Not today you didn’t,” Fitch said. “He’s gone. Fired. There’s a new guy coming to replace him next week from San Diego.”
    When William heard that changes were coming, he’d feared that this would be the first. Antonelli didn’t always have his mind in the game—hadn’t since that morning five years before when he had woken up early to play a round of golf on the course that bordered his backyard. He had eaten breakfast with his children, kissed his wife on the forehead, and made it to the first tee by seven. Antonelli was playing with an older Chinese man assigned him by the course, which was how he preferred it: “Less conversation means more concentration,” he liked to say. He birdied the first hole and parred the second. The third hole was the one that backed his house; it had a water hazard in the form of a small lake. Turning to square himself with the tee, Antonelli noticed Linda, his three-year-old daughter, peering through a gap in his fence. He waved. She shouted something. Antonelli could not hear and so he pointed to his ear. She shouted again. “ Pete ,” the Chinese man said. “She say Pete .” Pete was Antonelli’s son, six. Antonelli jogged closer to the wall. “What about Pete?” he said. “He fell in there,” she said. She indicated the lake. Antonelli went in with all his clothes on. He didn’t even drop his driver. Pete was in the shallows, not breathing, a lump on his head from where he had knocked against the rocks. Antonelli pulled him out onto the fairway and pumped his chest. The Chinese man called an ambulance. Antonelli’s wife arrived just in time to watch her son expire on the lawn.
    Like many personal tragedies, the incident was discussed frequently in Antonelli’s absence but never in his presence. Two years after Pete’s death, when Antonelli told the guys his wife was pregnant again, there was a moment of silence, a tensing, that preceded the round of congratulations. Once, William and Louisa had run into the Antonellis at a restaurant. William met the new baby, also a boy, and squeezed his foot. Louisa had praised him for this. “It’s the normal thing to do, which is why I’m glad you did it,” she said. But in the office, no one knew exactly how to handle the matter other than to ignore it, in part because they did not wish to do further injury to Antonelli, and in part because they feared, like all superstitious men—that is, like all men—that any mention of the drowning might begin an invisible process by which they, too, would be robbed of that which was most precious to them. Most of the other guys had kids, too, mostly sons, and on slow weeks they would bring the boys around and charge them with delivering paperwork or making copies or carrying out other duties that were not significantly more trivial than what went on at Hollister on an average day. William looked forward to opening his office door to a miniature Fitch or Cohoe. The last time, Elizondo had instructed his five-year-old son to walk into Antonelli’s office and say, “Lou, I really appreciate all that you’ve done for the company, but I think it’s time we go our separate ways.” Antonelli