The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012 Read online

  Two nights later, the phone woke us at two in the morning. Someone had smashed the front window of the store and broken in. Molly insisted on going while I stayed home with the boys, calling her often. Nothing seemed to be missing but the intruder had flung anything that was loose onto the floor, dumped out the paper trays of the copying machines, and smashed holes in the walls, maybe with a baseball bat. In the room where I worked, Molly reported, the Vandercook looked fine, but the vandal had scattered my stacks of completed pages, ruining everything I’d done for weeks, and—heartbreakingly—had spilled type from the big old wooden cases, hundreds of letters, numbers, and punctuation marks for each font.

  It was unthinkable that at this terrible moment for the business, Molly had more right than I did to be there. Somehow my father and I had made a mistake. By the time I got to the store the next morning, after the boys had gone to day camp, Molly had been interviewed by police and press, neighbors and customers. The store was closed and the broken glass covered with cardboard. Scattered copy paper had been gathered together, but much of it would be of no use to anyone except the flower lady. My father, who’d come by taxi early in the morning, paced and fretted. I worried about a heart attack. Molly, in shorts and a loose white T-shirt she’d pulled on in the night, was sweeping up glass and plaster, and Gil was on his hands and knees in the room where I worked, trying to save the type. The floor there was still covered with trampled pages. I tried to make sense of my predicament. I didn’t know if I could sort out the type, or how much of it had been damaged, but for the time being I put the neat little metal shapes, each with its letter, number, or punctuation mark backward on top, into a carton. We were closed for days, while the insurance company and a contractor did their work.

  Checking e-mail in our bedroom a couple of nights later, I heard voices from the next room: Molly and Julian. We already knew he’d been chosen to be in the movie, one of a group of boys playing near our store, but every little while he remembered something more to tell us. It was a relief to have something to talk about besides the break-in. Now Molly came into our bedroom, stepped out of her sandals, and stretched across the bottom of the bed. “They want him to get a haircut,” she said.

  “He’ll never do that.”

  “He’s doing it. He’ll be playing jacks. Three or four kids play jacks, and they run away at the sound of the gun.” She was lying on her back now, bicycling her bare legs. “I’m so upset.”

  Of course she meant the break-in. “Me too.”

  “When your father saw it, he cried.” She turned on her side and drew her legs into the fetal position. “I think it was Gil. I think your father thinks it was Gil.”

  I stood up so fast—as if I was going to hit her or shake her—that my typing chair tipped over. “Molly, that’s insane! My father doesn’t think that!”

  Molly stood up, too, took her hairbrush from the dresser, and began brushing her hair, something she did more often when she was upset.

  I righted my chair and sat down, watching her. “You’re not serious.”

  “I’m serious.” She laid the brush on the dresser, closed the bedroom door, and began to undress. “I need a shower,” she said.

  “But what do you mean?”

  She paused. “I don’t know what I mean.” She faced me, in her underwear. “The cops kept asking me about enemies. What’s the motive? Not burglary.”

  “Some deluded person, imagining something,” I said.

  “No. It looked—how to put this. Intended. Sane.”

  I didn’t know how chaos could look sane.

  “He’s been angry about something,” she said.

  “Gil’s worked in the store all his life,” I said. “He loves my dad.”

  “Black men have a lot of anger,” she said. “I don’t blame them for having a lot of anger. Maybe he wanted to buy out your father, but he couldn’t afford to.”

  “You think he has a whole new personality, all of a sudden?” I said. “You wouldn’t think this if he weren’t black.”

  “Maybe he’s a drug dealer,” she said. She took off her bra.

  “That’s really racist,” I said. “And besides—”

  “Don’t say that, Zo! You know me better than that.” She bent to take off her panties, and walked naked to the bathroom, carrying a robe. She seemed to be taunting me with her nakedness. When she came out, she said, “Look, he’s secretive. He seems angry. People sometimes just lose it—”

  “He’s not secretive,” I said. “He keeps his personal life to himself, but so what?”

  “It had to be him or the flower lady,” Molly said. “The part-timers wouldn’t be bothered. And if it was Doris, Gil knew about it.”

  “That’s insane,” I said again. I could not prove Gil had been home in bed when the store was vandalized. I thought of him sweeping up type with his long thin musician’s hand the morning of the break-in. He was elegant; he looked dignified even on his hands and knees, in blue jeans that he wouldn’t ordinarily wear to work. He too had been summoned in a hurry. He sat back on his heels and tried to sort the type. Until his recent silence, he’d continued to tease me for my interest in letterpress printing, despite my limited talent. With my clumsiness and occasional frustration, I was likelier than Gil to have scattered that type and spoiled those sheets.

  The conversation left me sick with anxiety, unable to sleep, but somehow not surprised. Now that Molly had said it, I realized that I had known she might. Nothing quite like this had happened before, but it reminded me of a few incidents. Years ago, she flew to see her mother after an operation, and made accusations against a woman caring for her. None of the people on the scene—who sounded persuasive to me—agreed with Molly. More recent was the trouble with her boss at the California job. Apparently Molly had tried to place the blame for a mistake of her own on a recently hired young woman.

  The filmmakers taught Julian to play jacks. He looked so different with short hair that I found myself speaking more formally to him. Long socks and knee pants were hot and uncomfortable, he informed us. Having the movie to talk about was lucky, because Molly and I could barely speak about the break-in. We reopened more quickly than I’d expected, and I spent a weekend, helped by Julian and Tony, sorting type, examining it, and replacing it in the cases. I taught them how to compare the metal shapes to make sure they were really from the same font. I wasn’t sure Tony would understand what to do, but he caught on more quickly than Julian.

  Not all the cases had been yanked out of the frame, and the task wasn’t as hopeless as I’d thought at first. But I had to start over on the printing job for the book of children’s poems, and it was just when preparation for teaching was claiming my attention. Meanwhile, as the filming grew closer, streets were closed and driving downtown became a series of detours. Nobody was allowed to drive within a block of our store, not that parking would be possible amid the trucks and trailers brought in by the film company. I worried about loss of business but couldn’t fail to enjoy Julian’s excitement, Tony’s vicarious pleasure, and the old-fashioned sign that the filmmakers had hung. Molly didn’t mention her suspicion again.

  But I couldn’t catch up on the big printing job. I wasted time with too many breaks, then hurried and made mistakes. I was able to work steadily only if I was rewarded with unmistakable progress. I wanted to finish early—to be done before the filming began—but I couldn’t.

  My father stayed away from the store. One afternoon I bought a few bottles of Foxon Park white birch beer, which he’d always liked, and drove to his house. It was cool and dim, with shades drawn. We drank birch beer in his kitchen.

  “Dad, Gil didn’t break into the store and damage it, did he?” I said at last.

  “Of course not,” said my father.

  “Then what?”

  “Molly’s a wonderful girl. She makes me laugh. I watch her walk through the place thinking things up.” I knew what he meant, and waited for what he’d say next. For a moment it seemed he’d stop th
ere, but he didn’t. “I think we made a mistake, Lorenzo,” he said.

  “You have to tell me what you’re thinking,” I said. “I can’t protect Gil if you don’t tell me.” I thought of something else my father had said when he said that Gil had secrets: that he himself had secrets, and that I did, and Molly didn’t. Molly held the secret of her unpredictable self, but did she have no secrets of the conventional sort? Some of my secrets had to do with Molly. I had not kept secret from her how I felt about the incidents in which I felt she’d been unfair in the past—far from it—but I’d kept secret how I counted and reconsidered them.

  “And can you protect him if I do?” my father said, and I’d been so distracted by my own thoughts that it took a moment to remember that him referred to Gil. Dad tipped the bottle of Foxon Park to his lips, not slobbering or dripping—he was still my father—and set it on the floor.

  The day before the shooting of the film, I had faculty meetings all day, but Molly and I went to the store after supper, leaving the boys at home, so we could do a little work. She’d been subdued while we ate.

  We stayed late. Molly was busy in the front part of the store, working on a big offset job that included diagrams and maps. In a little more than two years she’d gone from being a marketer to being a marketer of printing to being a printer, if not an old-fashioned letterpress printer. Gil had taught her, I suppose. She had a better sense of how to put jobs together than I did. We often called in a graphic designer, but Molly had picked up design principles easily. Now she worked steadily in the other room, and my tension diminished in the pleasure of my own task. If I didn’t hurry, my pages were done without trouble. When I tried to work quickly, I placed letters improperly and they didn’t receive the ink as they should. Now crisp sheets emerged from the Vandercook. “The Man Who Lost His Umbrella,” one of the poems was called, and I said the lines out loud:

  A silly man lost his umbrella

  And he asked his dog

  “Did you see my umbrella?”

  And the dog wagged her tail.

  I’d been about to set this poem the day before the vandalism. For the first time, I thought I might be able to finish, and even finish on time. When Molly was ready to go, I talked her into staying a little longer. Then we turned off the lights and set the alarm.

  No cars were parked on the block, and the surrounding streets were filled with trucks and trailers belonging to the movie company. We’d parked blocks away. We walked along Chapel and crossed the New Haven green, where a few homeless men slept on benches. The three famous churches were massive in the dark; chimes from city hall, beyond the churches at the edge of the green, rang out the quarter hour. Molly was silent; then she said, “I know what happened.”

  I didn’t have to ask what she meant. “How do you know?”

  “He told me.”

  “Gil?”

  “He told me this afternoon.”

  “What did he tell you? He didn’t do it!”

  “No, you’re right. He didn’t personally do it.” We crossed Elm Street and walked next to the library. Our car was halfway down the block.

  Molly paused and then spoke in an expressionless voice. “Gilbert is gay. Or bisexual. His wife doesn’t know, but for ten years he’s been in a relationship with a man. He broke it off last month, and the vandalism was the man’s revenge.”

  I could imagine that Gil might be gay, but I couldn’t imagine him talking about it. “Gil said, ‘I’m gay’?” I said.

  “You think I’d make something like this up?” Molly said.

  “No, no—I can’t imagine him saying the words.” It seemed darker than other nights, even in well-lit downtown New Haven.

  She was silent again, and this time sounded resentful when she spoke. “He said, ‘I’ve been in a liaison with a gentleman you do not know.’ ”

  That I could imagine. “But he’s only supposing that the man did it? He doesn’t know?”

  “He wouldn’t say—and he wouldn’t tell me anything about the guy, so there’s nothing to say to the cops.”

  “So it’s over,” I said, as we reached our car—it was Molly’s car. She hated being a passenger.

  “No,” said Molly. “No. I think I have to let him go.”

  “No, that’s absurd,” I said. It was so clear to me that it made no sense that for a moment I expected Molly would agree. I’d stopped outside the car, but she unlocked it and slid into the driver’s seat, so I walked around to the passenger’s side. She pulled out of the parking space.

  “In a way it doesn’t make sense,” she said. “It wasn’t exactly his fault. But I can’t afford someone whose personal life would lead to something like this.”

  “You can’t think this,” I said. “It’s impossible for you to think this.”

  She didn’t answer, then after a silence said, “I hope the kids aren’t still up. Julian has to be alert tomorrow.”

  “And you don’t know for sure that it’s true. Have you any idea what this would do to him? To his family? He’s fifty-six years old.”

  “Let’s talk about something else,” she said. Then she said, “I’m not putting this business at risk, Zo. I’m just not.”

  We had to close the next day, when the scene near the store would be shot: nobody would be allowed on our block for hours. But since we were still behind in filling orders, Molly had decided that she and Gil and I, if we arrived early enough, could spend the day locked inside, catching up. Maybe we could even watch some of the moviemaking, and glimpse Julian playing jacks and running away. He was up early; before I was out of the shower, Molly had left to drive him downtown, calling to me that she’d see me at the store. I’d been awake much of the night. In the dark, I had finally said, “You may not do this,” and from her pillow, sounding wide-awake, she’d said, “You may not tell me what I may not do.” I asked myself what I’d do if Molly fired Gil, and I didn’t know the answer. I needed to become someone I was not, someone who’d know what to say. It was too late.

  Tony was supposed to spend the day with a friend, but he woke up insisting that he wanted to see Julian in the film. Then my father called. He asked me to take him to the store, even though it was closed—it would be the first time since the break-in—and when his voice became sharp, I agreed to take him, too. By the time we’d parked downtown, several blocks from the store, it was late morning.

  Summer was ending, but the day was hot and the blocks seemed long. My father and Tony walked slowly, my father steady and silent, the gray cotton hat pulled low on his forehead, the brim tilted forward. Before we reached the store’s block, I saw that a crowd had gathered behind a barrier at the corner, with an off-duty police officer.

  Equipment filled the block, and there were more workers in ordinary clothes than actors with fedoras or boys in short pants, but we spotted Julian in his unfamiliar getup at the other end of the street. The filmmakers had brought in fake lampposts and antique cars. In the street before us, emphatic people conferred, argued, filmed, filmed again. The star and his pursuer ran, and the star fell forward, then got up and discussed something, then fell again—no gunshot noise—and this time he landed on his side, his hat next to him. An actress in a hat and high heels ran diagonally across the street toward him. Extras, including Julian, assembled, acted, retreated. Then they all did it at once: the leading man dashed in our direction, followed by the gunman, then he fell as Julian and the two other boys scurried; Julian sprinted across the street at an angle, just as the woman rushed past him, falling to her knees at the dead man’s side, her bare arms flung above her head.

  “It’s her own fault,” Tony said with some impatience, and I recalled overhearing Julian tell him the plot of the film: the star played a murderer, and his girlfriend had turned him in, even though she loved him.

  I tried to convince myself that I could finish the letterpress job quickly. I tried to believe that Gil and Molly were working quietly together behind the store’s glittering windows. Then my father said, “W
e should have sold the business.”

  At last I persuaded the police officer that my father was in danger of dehydration. Heads down, glared at by moviemakers who had stopped shooting but were still conferring, we made our way to Conte’s Printing. The door was locked and I used my key, pushing Tony and my father ahead of me into the air-conditioning. Gil crossed the floor toward us, silent. He put the palm of his hand on the back of my father’s head and pressed Dad’s face into his own white shirt, like a parent protecting a child from seeing something terrible.

  Of course, what had happened—what Molly had said—was not visible, yet the colors of objects seemed harsher, their edges sharp. Molly’s back, in glaring blue-and-white stripes, was toward us.

  “Mom?” Tony stepped forward. “Mom?”

  Molly turned, looking at Tony, not me, and I understood that it was because she didn’t want to find out—yet—how much she had lost. I couldn’t look at her frightened face. I wanted love to be simple. I wanted to tell her how nimbly our son with his new haircut had darted across the street, how scared he seemed, how hard it was not to run toward him, stretching my arms out wide.

  Sam Ruddick

  Leak

  I WAS TELLING Peyton about a friend of mine who’d seen a documentary on polar bears one day and quit his job in marketing the next; he’d moved to Alaska and gone to work for an environmental nonprofit, and I thought there must have been something wrong with him, because he’d always been so business-minded in the past, and the polar bear thing came out of nowhere.

  I was on my back and Peyton was on her stomach, one leg bent so her foot was in the air, and at a little after two o’clock in the morning in the dark she looked like one of those three-page black-and-white fold-out ads in the front of Vogue—head on the pillow, high cheekbones, angular jaw, everything in shadow—and when I told her I thought maybe my friend was crazy, maybe it had something to do with his father being sick and his feeling like he couldn’t do anything to help, she said you couldn’t pin things down that way. She said it was like that sometimes. People just did things.