Free A Person of Interest by Susan Choi

thought, was correct: he was not a sentimental man. He was pragmatic, and cheap.
    If he lost the Montblanc, he’d buy a Bic at the drugstore. But somehow he never had lost it, in almost forty years.
    In the car he looked at his Seiko, still running, and thought about getting gradually, drowningly drunk on many cans of Bud Light in his La-Z-Boy chair. But he still hadn’t started the engine. He took out the letter again and held it, by its edges: 14 Maple Lane. Dr. Lee. He felt a sob choke his throat, saw a single tear fall on the envelope, rippling it.
    Another mark that was his. Heat built up in the car from the struggling spring sunshine, but when he rolled down his window, the air came in cool. The most immediate source of his pain was his realization that once again he could not call Aileen. Of course he had thought of her first, when he’d opened the letter. Of calling and the instant she answered, declaring, I’ve found him.
    He finally started the car, rolled the window tightly shut again, and pulled out of the parking lot. The letter was buried again in his suitcase. As he drove, his misery plagued him like a murderous passenger, blocking his airways and blurring his vision, but he blinked and took breaths and kept going, an undeterred stoic. Comporting himself admirably. This was precisely what Gaither must want, Lee’s delayed dissolution, after all these long years. Vengeance not in spite of those years but because of them: it was far too late for every kind of reparation. It was too late for Aileen, and it was too late for Lee. Gaither must know this; Gaither always had seen the long view, a circumstance that had united Lee and Aileen in their absolute refusal to, or inability to, do the same. This must have been another gift of Gaither’s religion: his grasp of their acts’ future consequences, as if they lay before him sketched out on a map.
    Lee had always treated his drinking as a casual thing, but at his core he knew that it was something more precious: a lofty plateau; a lush table above glowing desert, beneath pristine skies; a space in his life so defined that it was truly a place, and one he relied on returning to regularly. In three decades it had evolved, toward greater cheapness and ease: the twenty-four-can suitcase of Bud Light and the Almaden 44 S U S A N C H O I
    box. Almost home, he stopped off at the A&P and bought one of each, and broccoli for his dinner, and these mundane transactions almost let him forget about the letter in his briefcase, locked inside his Nissan, like its own kind of slow-acting bomb. The checkout clerk, a heavy, motherly white woman he probably saw every week, smiled sympathetically at him. As she returned his change, she burst out,
    “You’re Professor Lee, aren’t you? From the university.”
    “Yes,” Lee said, trying to smile. He’d been recognized many times, at places like the gas station and in the aisles of this store, since his TV
    appearance, and he’d always responded with what he was starting to feel was his trademark calm dignity. But now that he’d gotten the letter, this recognition felt somehow menacing, though he knew that it was not.
    “I’m so sorry to bother you. I recognized you from your being on TV. Of course you’ve shopped here for years.”
    “Yes,” Lee said, feeling strain in his face where his cheeks remained lifted—gruesomely, he was sure—to bare his friendly white teeth.
    “Is there any news of that poor man? The other professor?” With relief, Lee let his face fall, back to its usual sternness. “Not yet,” he said.
    “We’re all praying for him.”
    With alarm, Lee realized that the clerk was near tears.
    “I never thought something like that could happen here,” she said miserably.
    “No one did—”
    “You spoke so well on TV. Someone like me can’t do much, but I’m praying. I pray that he’ll live.” She pulled a pawlike hand over her face, and it came away wet. “Oh, my goodness. And we’ve