Free You Think That's Bad by Jim Shepard Page A

our feet. She has a beautiful back, accentuated by the military cut of her overcoat.
    â€œExcept that the people you’re dealing with now
want
to be fooled,” I tell her.
    â€œIt’s not that they want to be fooled,” she answers. “It’s just that they’re not convinced they need to go around glum all the time.”
    â€œHow’d that philosophy work with your parents?” I ask.
    â€œNot so well,” she says sadly.
    We turn on Boompjes, which is sure to add to her melancholy. A seven-story construction crane with legs curving inward perches like a spider over the river.
    â€œYour mother called about the coffee grinder,” she remarks. “I couldn’t pin down what she was talking about.”
    Boys in bathing suits are pitching themselves off the high dock by the Strand, though it seems much too cold for that, and the river too dirty. Even in the chill I can smell tar and rope and, strangely, fresh bread.
    â€œShe called you or you called her?” I ask.
    â€œI just told you,” Cato says.
    â€œIt seems odd that she’d call you,” I tell her.
    â€œWhat
was
she talking about?” Cato wants to know.
    â€œI assume she was having trouble working the coffee grinder,” I tell her.
    â€œWorking it or finding it?” she asks.
    â€œWorking it, I think,” I suggest. “
She
called
you
?”
    â€œOh my God,” Cato says.
    â€œI’m just asking,” I tell her after a minute.
    All of Maashaven is blocked from view by a giant suction dredger that’s being barged out to Maasvlakte 2. Preceded by six tugs, it looks like a small city going by. The thing uses dragheads connected to tubes the size of railway tunnels and harvests sand down to a depth of twenty meters. It’ll be deepening the docking areas out at Yangtzehaven, Europahaven, and Mississippihaven. There’s been some worry that all of this dredging has been undermining the water defenses on the other side of the channel, which is the last thing we need. Kees has been dealing with their horseshit for a few weeks now.
    We rest on a bench in front of some law offices. Over the front entrance, cameras have been installed to monitor the surveillance cameras, which have been vandalized. Once the dredger has passed, we can see a family of day campers on the opposite bank who’ve pitched their tent on a berm overlooking the channel.
    â€œIsn’t it too cold for camping?” I ask her.
    â€œWasn’t it too cold for swimming?” she responds, reminding me of the boys we’d passed.
    She says Henk keeps replaying the same footage on his iFuze of Feyenoord’s MVP being lowered into the stadium beneath the team flag by a V/STOL. “So here’s what I’m thinking,” she continues, as if that led directly to her next thought. She mentions a conservatory in Berlin, fantastically expensive, that has a chamber-music program. She’d like to send Henk there during his winter break, and maybe longer.
    This seems to me to be mostly about his safety, though I don’t acknowledge that. He’s a gifted cellist, but hardly seems devoted to the instrument.
    With her pitchman’s good cheer she repeats the amount it will cost, which to me sounds like enough for a week in a five-star hotel. But she says money can always be found for a good idea, and if it can’t, then it wasn’t a good idea. Finally she adds that as a hydraulic engineer, I’m the equivalent of an atomic physicist in technological prestige.
    Atomic physicists don’t make a whole lot of money, either, I remind her. And our argument proceeds from there. I can see her disappointment expanding as we speak, and even as my inner organs start to contract I sit on the information of my hidden nest egg and allow all of the unhappiness to unfold. This takes forever. The word in our country for the decision-making process is the same as the one we use for what we