Free Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane Page B

from the window as they spoke to him, and then stepped aside as he rushed into the house and swept his hand back and forth, back and forth across the top of the bookcase. Mr. Smith phoned to make sure Peter was okay. As soon as he’d gotten home and told his wife everything that had happened, his wife had reprimanded him for dropping Peter off, for leaving him alone when it would be dark soon, what a thing for a boy to cope with by himself. “Slow down,” Brian Stanhope said, stretching the phone cord as far away from Mr. Gleeson and Officer Dulley as possible. “Now say all that again, would you?”
    For the next few hours there were dealings at the adult level that Peter couldn’t quite follow. His father noticed him sitting on the staircasein the dark, listening, and sent him to his room, but he returned not two minutes later and listened more. Mr. Gleeson and his father were in the same precinct again, Peter gathered, like they’d been for a few years when they were rookies, but now their precinct was in Manhattan, the Two-Six, near Columbia University. He remembered now. Mr. Gleeson had a brogue that was different from his mother’s but they both said “Brian” like “Brine”—blending the syllables into one.
    “Brian,” Mr. Gleeson said, “no one wants you to get jammed up.” Officer Dulley’s expression confirmed this was true. His father raised his voice, “I was at home! I was off duty!” Mr. Gleeson pointed out that, in fact, Brian had not been at home. In fact, he was at the auto shop on Sentinel and now he was up a fucking creek. Mr. Gleeson sounded both angry and disgusted, and for the first time Peter wondered if Kate’s dad was his dad’s boss. He tried to remember how the ranks went. His dad was a patrolman. Mr. Gleeson was a lieutenant.
    “Get organized, Brian,” Mr. Gleeson said. “You have to think ,” he said, jabbing the side of his own head as he said it. Peter tried to peer around the banister to see his father’s face where the weak light from the corner lamp found it.
    Once, when Mrs. Duvin told Peter he had to get his act together in front of all the other kids, he felt his face burn and was afraid he would cry. He prayed his father wasn’t crying, but he couldn’t see his face, only his knee, the leg of his pants. They were quiet in there for a long time. Then, without warning, they seemed to decide something. Officer Dulley handed his father a gun that Peter realized was his father’s own gun. His father shoved it into the waistband of his jeans.
    His mother slept and slept.
----
    Nineteen ninety-one arrived, winter break ended, and Peter went back to school. On that first school day of the new year he made himself agood breakfast. He packed his lunch. He brushed his teeth. His mother came downstairs as he was rinsing his cereal bowl but she didn’t speak to him at first. Instead, she opened the window over the sink and closed her eyes to meet the blast of cold air that rushed in. “You’re exactly like him,” she said after a minute, still with her eyes closed.
    “Like who? Like Dad?” Peter said. He knew she didn’t mean it as a compliment.
    “Like Dad?” she mimicked, exaggerating his expression without looking at him, making her face dopey and stupid, like she was performing for an audience she hoped to make laugh. “Like Daaaad? Like Daaaaaaaaaaaaaad?” He calmly took his backpack from the peg by the door and fitted it over his shoulders. He felt lonely all of a sudden. Everything in their house was lonely: the dark china cabinet filled with fragile things no one ever touched, the fake plant sitting next to the sofa, the crooked window shade, a silence so violent he wanted to clap his hands over his ears. The bus honked outside.
    “Bye,” he said.
    She made a wave in the air like she was swatting a fly.
    “Did something happen to your mom?” Kate asked when they’d taken their seats on the bus.
    “No,” Peter said.
    “I thought I heard my parents