Free A Person of Interest by Susan Choi Page A

started a fund for his care, I don’t know if you knew. On behalf of the store.”
    “I . . . didn’t know,” Lee stammered.
    “It’s in the jar by the door. Near the bulletin board. Of course you shouldn’t contribute, Professor. You’ve already been through so much.” Lee left the store feeling sour acid at the back of his throat. He popped a beer the instant he turned into his driveway, drinking hun-grily while he waited for the garage door to slowly grind open.
    There was no longer much possibility of a message from Esther, brief and falsely cheerful: “Hi, Dad, it’s me. I’m just calling to say that A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 45
    I’m fine. I’ve been out a lot lately, but next week things should calm down a little, so I’ll give you a call and catch up.” These falsely dutiful messages, which had really been prophylactic, a firm barrier against substantive discourse, had never been followed by the promised catch-up, and in the six years since Esther had dropped out of college they’d trailed off into virtual silence. Esther now lived somewhere in the West, apparently as an unpaid volunteer for a group who were trying to save an endangered eagle of some kind by interfering—benignly, of course—with its reproduction. Esther was dropping shreds of raw meat through long tubes into the nests of eaglets, because the parent birds couldn’t care for them, for some unknown reason. Esther lay all day pressed to the lip of a cliff overlooking a river, the tube’s mouth near her hand, as the eaglets let out squeaks of distress in their wind-battered nest on the cliff face below. Or at least this was the incomprehensible image she herself had evoked, in a postcard of almost a year ago that represented the sum total of Lee’s understanding of his only child’s life.
    Because there was no possibility of a message from Esther there was no reason to play the machine; with four messages, about four times as crowded as it usually was, it would only be more of the stock messages he’d received since the day of the bombing: from old colleagues who’d left town long ago with whom he hadn’t kept up, from current neighbors in his beige subdivision with whom he’d only ever exchanged cordial nods or bits of news about septic-tank problems.
    There would be messages of concerned inquiry from these people, masking blunt nosiness; they’d want news, more than they got from TV and the papers, about the bombing of Hendley. Perhaps there would be a message from Associate Adjunct So-and-So, denied tenure a decade ago and now calling from the U of Paducah to share the school’s distress. His concerned inquiry would mask schadenfreude.
    My God, that young Hendley, such an unequaled mind. An inspiration to colleagues, what a loss to us all if he died!
    Lee thought of the clerk at the grocery store and her tears. He opened his second beer, pressing the tab into the top of the can with a pop like a gunshot. There was another reason he didn’t want to push
    “play.” The letter might have a telephoned counterpart, another arrow that would cleanly strike home.

    46 S U S A N C H O I
    Then he struck “play” anyway in defi ance, and promised himself he would change his phone number the first thing in the morning. He would change it, and make it unlisted.
    He started the rice cooker and boiled water for his broccoli while he listened. There was a message from Esther’s second-grade teacher, who always asked after Esther—“One of my two or three best students ever”—on the rare occasions, every four or five years, she and Lee crossed paths in town. Lee took down her number, which he probably already had in a leather address book that dated from his years in grad school. Then, on second thought, he threw the number away. He didn’t know how he would explain to Mrs. Frankford what Esther had chosen to do with herself.
    But the second message and the third were from an old colleague of Lee’s named Fasano, a man