look so bad at all. On the worst days, Dad, who had bad acne when he was in high school and still has scooped-out-looking scars on his chin, would say, glancing over while he drove me to school, “You’re a very handsome kid.”
When the girl left, the office secretary, a fat woman with braces and heavy makeup, said, “Stephen Takas just called and canceled, and Dr. Harrison’s just come back in, so you’ve got about forty minutes if you want to take lunch. Now, is this your brother? Why haven’t I been introduced?”
“Laura Ann, Henry; Henry, Laura Ann. This is the famous secretary who can balance her checkbook and do a month’s schedules and talk to two people on the phone, all at once.”
She blushed and looked down at her lap. Like he was already a big-shot doctor, David rapped his knuckles on her counter and said, “We’re gonna go around the corner. What can I bring you back?”
“Nothing for me, I’m having cottage cheese,” she said. “Here, Mona, come meet Dr. Elinsky’s brother. Henry, this is my niece.”
From a back room full of file cabinets stepped a girl who looked my age. Tan with blond hair pulled into a ponytail and a tight white T-shirt and a big smile. If I could get close enough I was sure she’d smell like warm laundry. “Hi there,” she said.
“Can we bring you anything, Mona?” David said. There was something about the way he didn’t quite look at her when he said it.
“No thanks.” And something about the way she didn’t look at him. “I was just about to leave for the day.”
David took me into a pizza place on Fiftieth. He asked me about the zoo, what I’d be doing, how much I’d be getting paid, but all I could think about was Mona. The idea that girls like her lived in the same world as girls like the one with acne—that girls like her lived in the same world as me—filled me with bright, itchy panic, like there was something crucial I’d missed doing years ago.
A crumpled old man was working behind the counter, opening and closing the ovens. There was something wrong with his hands—arthritis, maybe. He held them and used them almost like they were paddles. “How you doing today, pops?” David said in a voice I’d never heard him use.
“I’m not dead, and if you can say that, how bad a day can it be?”
David laughed hard and patted the old man on the shoulder while he paid.
“This place is great, huh?” he said when we sat down, but my slice wasn’t much better than the pizza I’d been getting at Somerset. “Silvio opened it when he was thirty-two, and he hasn’t been gone for more than two days since. A doctor told me he ratted on his brother in Florence and sent him to jail. I keep meaning to ask him about it when it’s not so crowded.”
I couldn’t figure out how to ask about Mona, but I had to know more about her. So I said, “Mona’s pretty, huh?”
“Mona?” But he flared his nostrils and had to really work not to grin. “She is pretty. I guess I haven’t thought about her like that.”
“How could you not think about her like that? She’s as pretty as a model.”
“I just … I don’t know—things in the office are a little strange.”
“What things?”
“Nothing. Enough. Tell me more about work. When do you start?”
“Just tell me what’s strange.” I knew how I was acting, but I didn’t care.
“Mona’s one of these people who gets a lot of crushes. She’s just young. How old are you now?”
“Eighteen.”
“Jesus. I’m not talking about it anymore.” The rest of my slice looked as good to eat as my stack of napkins.
“We don’t have to talk about it, just tell me what you meant. Then I promise I’ll stop.”
“No.” He put his big soft hand on my arm and looked right into my eyes like I was a mental patient. “No.” Once he’d decided I got it, he said, “Listen, I’d been meaning to talk about something anyway. Really Lucy’s been bugging me about it, just a couple of little things about staying with us—”
Had Mona seen David’s facial hair? Since he was fourteen he’d had to shave twice a day, and still he had a five-o’clock shadow by two o’clock. I once walked in on him in the bathroom with shaving cream all over his shoulders.
In high school he was the manager of the JV baseball team, and he never went to a single school dance, not even after Mom said she’d ground him if he didn’t ask someone. But while he worked in his room at night—when he was chubby and seventeen and I was chubbier and nine—I sat on the floor for as long as he’d let me, listening to his stories, mostly about the guys on the team.
“Seth and Pete screwed Carrie Feldman on the hood of Seth’s car, right in the parking lot. All three of them buck naked.” My penis would almost tear through my pajamas. “Last weekend Jon went to a place on N Street, and for ten bucks a Korean girl let him rub her all over with hot oil.” I’d throw tantrums when Mom would come in to make me go to bed. Just one more minute. Thirty more seconds. David sitting there muttering while he stapled packets at his desk was better than any TV show.
One night in his freshman year at Emory, when I was in fifth grade, he called home to talk to me. “I’m in trouble,” he said, almost whispering. “Big, big trouble. I’ve seriously never felt this bad. Everybody said it was going to be so different. But it’s not. It’s the exact same fucking thing.”
I wouldn’t have been any more terrified if he’d told me he had a brain tumor. I kept it secret from Mom and Dad, and I called him the next day, hiding in the bathroom with the portable phone crackling. After thirty seconds he said he had to run because his friends were leaving for a Braves game, and he never talked about feeling bad again. When we visited him that spring, he took me to a party at his frat, and I ended up playing Sonic the Hedgehog in the messiest bedroom I’ve ever seen with a guy with a yarmulke and a red beard.
While we dumped our crusts, he said, without looking at me, “What’s happening with you and girls, by the way?”
“I had something at home, but, you know, just looking around.” (Mona, we could play barefoot Frisbee in the park.)
“Nothing wrong with that,” he said. (I’d put suntan lotion on your shoulders, leave love notes on your side of the bed.)
Out on the street he puffed out his cheeks, glanced down at his watch, and said, “Time to get back to it.” He shook my hand again, squinting in the light, and said, “Look. Don’t worry too much about Lucy. Bottom line: I’m enjoying having you live with us, and it’s my place as much as it’s hers.”
In the elevator after one of my first days at work, Sameer asked me, sounding shy, if I liked to play Ping-Pong. He and Janek, the tall doorman from Slovakia, played every day on the seventh floor, next to the laundry room, with broken paddles and a baggy net and only one ball that wasn’t cracked. In middle school, before one of David’s friends jumped on our basement table and snapped two of the legs, I used to play most afternoons with Dad. We didn’t keep score—Dad said, smiling, that he didn’t like the idea of beating me. I kept score myself, though,
