Bright Shards of Someplace Else (2 page)

He stared at the phone and she stared at him.

“The manager,” the boy finally said. “He was supposed to call right back.”

Andy was wearing a shirt with a clutch of tiger cubs screen-printed on the front, and he kept pulling it down as if it were riding up. His mouth was smeared red from a rash or the juice, and his bangs covered one eye. They both looked at the phone for a few moments before Grace spoke up.

“You know, if you want to negotiate on the phone, I've got something better for you than an exterminator.”

“What? Are you going to trick me into calling my mom or some special kids' therapy hotline?”

Grace chuckled. She liked how he already knew the games a grownup might play. “No, no. I don't see anything wrong with you talking on the phone. I was impressed with what I overheard. How would you like to make an even tougher call?”

The boy nodded, wide-eyed, as if shocked at being indulged.

“Just give me one second. Let me give you the information you need.”

Grace walked to the foyer and dug her cellphone bill out of her purse. With all that was going on, she hadn't had a chance to get those overage charges removed. She hated making such calls and always fell for the representative's tricks and runarounds, buying new products and features and even thanking those perky voices, when she hung up, for screwing her over. Let the boy wander into that maze of automated voices, menu options, on-hold music. He could defend her money from the call-center monster; it would be like one of his
little video games. If nothing else, the call would keep him busy for at least an hour or so, leaving her free to call Greg and see what new dirt he'd dug up on Susan.

The foyer adjoined the dining room, so she swung off, refreshed her drink, and reentered the living room from the other side.

“Alright, Andy. Here's my bill. Here's my customer code. The last four digits of my social security number are 7419.” She sat down on the couch by him and laid out the documents as if they were a board game. “They're going to ask you for all that. Then they'll ask you how they can help. Here's where you need to be sharp. You're going to ask them to take these charges off.” She pointed to a line of numbers. The boy was transfixed and seemed to be holding his breath. He stared at the bill the way most boys his age would stare at pile of Legos, perhaps imagining all the configurations the call might take. Grace noticed his ears were bent down at the tips, as though he had not yet unfolded from the womb. There was no way he would get past the main menu, she thought.

Harmless fun. Still, she explained why the charges weren't fair, and for good measure let him in on some further injustices in her own grownup world. “I have to call a lot of lawyers. They charge me just for talking to them on the phone, and then the phone company charges me, too! Can you believe it?” She laughed.

“Are you in legal trouble?” The boy looked at her. His face was bland and rosy like any little kid's, but his eyes actually reminded her of her lawyer, J. T. Hillman, Esq.—the same sharp look, the pinprick of a pupil that would pop any of your bullshit before it even formed in your head. She'd have to be straight with the boy.

“We'll get to that. Are you ready to call now, or do you need some review time?”

In answer, he dialed. For a while they were both silent. She could hear the hold music muffled by the child's ear. He let out a deep breath and squeezed his eyes shut, but then his face softened and took on a meditative look. He pressed a few buttons with great precision
and a bit of flourish, like a pianist. Grace watched him and sipped her drink.

This wasn't nice, what she was doing. He would get frustrated. He might tell his mother. No, he wouldn't do that; she had enough leverage with the exterminator call. They had achieved that equilibrium where she had something on him and he something on her.

“I have a problem with some charges on my bill,” he began. His voice rang out with a compelling combo of childish eagerness and unmistakably adult impatience. Grace tensed up. Suddenly, she didn't want to be there to witness the eroding of his innocent confidence. She stood up, wandered into the dining room, and checked her voice-mail. Greg had left a message. After he got through baby-talking to her, she heard what he had found out about her sister:

“Baby, I dug through everything. She is as clean as a whistle. A plowed snowdrift—nothing like her sis. Anyway, I stayed up all night and finally found, in the expunged crime record of Henry County, a charge for misdemeanor embezzling. She stole from Girl Scouts. Does that ring a bell?”

Grace shut the phone and topped off her drink. So that's all he found. Her sister Susan, four years her junior, was suing her for about ten grand, money that their mother had
not
left to Susan, who contended that their mother had not been lucid when she drew up the version of the will that favored Grace, and that Grace had manipulated their mother into excising Susan from the will. This was all true; Grace had done just that. Her mother had thought, in her addled state, that the newly drawn-up will was a petition for freeing the whales from Sea World.

But Grace and Susan had been feuding so long that everything could be framed as a justifiable retaliation. Their bad blood predated everything. Susan stole her boyfriends, turned relatives against her, tried to get her involuntarily committed. Grace had come back with restraining orders, countersuits, and most recently had hired a private investigator to find dirt. She was disappointed with Greg's find.
He was no better an investigator than he was a lover, apparently. Still, the private Catholic girls' school Susan worked at might be troubled by the Girl Scout thing. She stirred her drink and began rehearsing, under her breath, what she might say on Susan's voicemail. “St. Victoria's might be interested to learn that their 2000 Administrator of the Year awardee hasn't always been so upstanding …” Ugh. Thin gruel. It would take more than that to rattle Sue.

The boy was—remarkably—still on the phone when Grace returned. He was scribbling on her bill and his expression was that of Renaissance cherub. He beamed and chuckled into the receiver. She could hear a woman's warm voice trilling a laugh. “I'm so glad we had this talk,” the boy said, convincingly earnest, chewing on the pen cap. His lacy eyelashes quivered, and he rubbed the underside of his nose with his index finger, playing his nostrils like a fiddle. “Bye now.” He set the phone on its charger so softly it didn't make a click, then pulled up his empty juice box and did a staccato slurp on the straw.

“Well? How'd it go?”

“I got the charges off the bill. And I redid your contract so you now have unlimited minutes and it'll cost less than what you were already paying.”

“Really?” Grace figured the boy was lying or simply confused. No way could the boy have done what he'd said.

“Really. And it wasn't even hard. It was boring. Kid stuff.” He sneezed into his sleeve. “The representative started talking to me about her life and her kids and junk. Her name's Tracy and she said my call made her day.” He squeezed the juice bladder in his fist. “You can call the automated system and check if you don't believe me. It's okay if you don't believe me. Most people don't. I won't be mad.”

Grace studied the boy. She wanted him to see that she wasn't just another skeptical, unimaginative adult. She was different.

She
felt
different, alright. Her cup seemed to have lightened to the point that it was floating off her hand, pulling her arm up with it. Why did she suddenly care what the kid thought?

“I believe you,” she began, lurching toward the phone with her cup held above both of them. “But I'm going to check anyhow.” She pressed redial and hit the menu buttons while the boy watched like a master observing a fumbling apprentice; he whispered “just hit zero” when she accidentally got to the wrong part of the menu and had to start over to get to her billing statement. A sensual and robotic voice reported in perfect deadpan that the boy had done it. Zero on her balance and forty dollars per month.

“Wow, kid … color me impressed.” She was now sitting next to him on the couch, the phone between them on the cushion. He had grabbed his video game again and his thumbs twitched on the buttons with what seemed to her a virtuosity. She had been really dreading making that call, and now it was all taken care of, just like that. This small relief was like a shot of clean oxygen in a deep cave. “Andy,” she began. “Would you like to make another call?”

“Only if it's tougher.”

“It's tougher. I owe some money. A few thousand, in fact. I need you to see if you can get the interest charges off the debt.”

“Who do you owe?”

“I owe some money to Firekeeper's Casino. I have a credit card with them. I lost some money playing slots. I think there was something wrong with the machines that day, or something. Usually I can just watch the lights and the fruit and get a payout pretty regularly. I have a system. This one night the same two bananas and a cherry kept coming up. Maybe you could say there was a glitch.”

She was lying about the banana and cherry thing, but not about her system. Typically she did get a payout, although she had to admit that her system usually involved simply getting blitzed and pulling from a five-gallon bucket full of tokens at her feet. The servers and staff would all whistle when she came in with the bucket, and the other gamblers—those who were tourists and not locals, so to speak—might turn and look at her like she was something more real, in that context, than they were. The rest of the herd didn't look up.
To her credit, the bucket was never actually full. She filled the bottom with several hotel-bar-sized bottles of wine and liquor, covered them with a tin pie plate, then topped it off with tokens. She wasn't about to blow her money on the house's pricey drinks, so all night she would feed the slots and surreptitiously fill up her red plastic cup. She'd watch the fruit and the lights and get to feeling that she was decoding a language every time she pulled the handle. When the payout came, it was like she'd been speaking pidgin to an uncomprehending foreigner and had suddenly achieved fluency. The dings and bells told her she had made herself understood.

“I don't think that would work,” the boy said. “And why were you gambling so much? The odds of those machines are, like, really bad.”

Grace had to expect some judgment, she figured. She had lost thousands over the years. She had little left for legal fees and nothing left of her mother's inheritance. She wasn't above prostrating herself in front of the boy, if that's what it took to get the job done.

“What can I say? I'm stupid. I mean, you get a payout so you keep playing. Sometimes I don't know when to fold 'em, as they say. But there are people a lot worse off than I am.”

“Just because people are worse off doesn't mean you aren't bad.” He seemed to consider his own words. “I guess I should say ‘no offense.' So, no offense.”

“None taken. Hey, we all make mistakes. I'm sure you get in fights with your little friends or steal their crayons sometimes.” She sucked down the last of her drink, then picked the now-tiny ice cubes from her cup and pressed them into the dirt of a potted plant on the side table.

“I don't get in fights with friends because there are none to fight. And I don't use crayons. Colored pencils give a lot better control.”

Should she latch onto the friend comment and try to find some deeper emotional ground with the boy? Or was it best to just roll on past? The house and the mother told the story: this unusual, cloistered boy no doubt lived a solitary life, too precocious for his peers
and too young for any adults to take seriously. She could tell him that she, too, considered herself an outsider, with few allies in the world and even fewer friends. But why draw attention to that? Better to just give him the phone. The call would offer him an escape from his circumscribed life as a boy-genius; that was better than the two of them moaning about loneliness. She ruffled his hair with awkward affection; her hands, wet with ice, got nicely dry in his blond mop.

“I hear you. I'm a colored pencil girl, all the way. Try drawing an eyeball with a crayon! Ready?”

The boy nodded, and again she laid out the relevant information. Grace jumped up from the couch as he began dialing. She paced around the first floor, hearing snippets of his progress (“Can I speak to a manager?”) and debating about whether she needed another drink. She popped the cork from a small bottle of port and escaped her indecision. She returned to the boy and sat across from him; he was in the midst of a monologue:

“You could get into my notes page and erase the earlier records on my account so no one would know what you did. You could also do the opposite and rack up my bill. I think your job would be fun, Jim, for these reasons.” The boy's voice, this time, sounded higher and oddly husky, like female smoker trying to baby talk. He spoke quickly and laughed a bit, a charmingly nervous sound that threaded through his words and made everything he said a sweet half-joke. “Oh, so it's not fun … just in a call center. I guess if I were you I'd want to do something crazy now and again. But I'm already a bad gambler. So I shouldn't propose stuff like that.” He paused and pulled the phone away from his ear and held it out at arm's length. This struck Grace as a showboating gesture, as if he were a cyclist weaving through traffic no-handed. The voice on the phone—Jim—let loose a stream of corporate gibberish into open air, but the boy didn't appear to be listening. He pulled the straw from his juice and gnawed on it. In a slow, smooth motion, he wound the phone back to his ear and said a few garbled and urgent words into the mouthpiece.

Another long pause, and then “No, of course not … no more than five or six times, tops … As a matter of fact, yes … She plays volleyball? The sport of princesses!”