Free The Fugitives by Christopher Sorrentino Page A

contradictions, effaced to a certain extent what they’d been branded with at birth. But Nables couldn’t erase the rubbed ebony skin, the full lips, the broad nose with the flaring nostrils, and he was even less capable of erasing the stroke of indignation connecting his every decision to a central motivation. So he messed with his staff. It was a way of actively not waiting for the chimerical story that would force the world to apologize for being itself. He knew Saltino wasn’t a shit story; he knew that his budget was devised to accommodate some travel since the small regional bureaus had been shut down; he knew that overseeing a real story—any real story—had to beat the maddening job of compiling a gazette of AP stuff each day, setting some beery old reporter to the task of making the wire copy conform to the paper’s style sheet. And of course he’d heard all the same rumors everyone else had about plans for folding the Midwest section as a standalone and consolidating it into the main news section. Kat had looked around the little sheet-metal box that held them. No sign of the Pulitzer, either. Maybe you had to surrender it to the publisher, or maybe it was just too shaming to have Ben Franklin’s face smirking down on you in your tuna can cubicle. He’d given her two weeks.

    SHE CALLED BECKY from home that evening while Justin was out. The phone rang and rang, and just as she was about to hang up, a kid answered, too young to be bored by the chore of answering the phone, old enough to be vigilantly territorial.
    “Who is it, again?”
    “An old friend of your mom’s. Becky’s your mom?”
    “Yeah, she’s my mom. I mean what’s your name again?”
    “Kat, again. Is Becky there?”
    “I’m not sure. You want to talk to her?”
    “Yes. Please.”
    “Are you from Citicorp Credit?”
    “No, I’m a friend.”
    “Well, I don’t know you.”
    “No,” said Kat. “No, you don’t. I knew your mother before you were born. There in Nebising. Can you check if she’s there for me please?”
    Finally the kid put the phone down and went to look for his mother. Put the phone down: was Becky still making do with a phone that had a cord? Maybe even a rotary dial. But don’t be a jerk. She has e-mail, after all. Maybe the kid just liked making everybody take a couple of extra steps.
    Oh how well she’d avoided Becky Chasse for ten years. Just didn’t want to go wherever that might lead. People bobbed up all the time, more often than you’d ever dream; she pictured a billion souls spread out across the night, each tapping the names of the lost into a search engine by the light of a single lamp. But happy reunions were for Facebook, a nice smooth interface between you and all the bad habits and ancient disharmonies. Who was waiting for you in the vast digital undertow there? Kat had avoided it.
    Calls once in a blue moon. Those stopped because Kat never returned them. A very tense and uncomfortable lunch in Lansing. It kind of would have been that way anyway, but what made it memorably so was that a man had come in and waited for Becky at the bar while they ate, glancing over his shoulder at them from time to time. Becky tried to ignore him but Kat knew that he was keeping tabs on her. Ypsitucky trash, he looked like. Whatever—as long as he didn’t come over to say hello, even though that would have been the humanly normal thing to do. Unconsciously, she shook her head in frustrated disgust, and Becky caught it. “What?” she’d challenged. “What?”
    Once, she’d known everything about her. Becky was afraid of ghosts. Becky started smoking cigarettes when she was eleven. Becky and she had cut class one day, after they’d started going to the public school in Leatonville, and Becky had gotten into a car with two town boys and driven away while Kat stood there and watched. Becky loved the Narnia books. Becky’s father sat outside the trailer where he lived, and belched—he did it like you might