The Witch (16 page)

At the same time he was sizing her up, Massey realized she must be doing the same to him, in some knowing, professional way. He wasn't young enough anymore to enjoy being looked over by any woman, for whatever purpose. He'd come straight from work and he wore his usual job site clothes, jeans and boots, and he guessed he was clean enough but he was afraid they might mark him as crude and jerk-like, the kind of man who would bluster and bully a daughter, or beat up her boyfriends, and he wasn't really, or he wouldn't be here in the first place, would he?

“Come on in, find a place to sit,” Sharon Glaser said. There were four black leather chairs arranged around a low coffee table and Massey took the closest one. “How are you today?”

Massey said he was good, thanks. Let's get this show on the road. The coffee table had a box of Kleenex for the weepers, and one of those desktop metal sculptures, chrome spheres and blades, so people would have something to look at. As he was now doing. Sharon Glaser settled herself in a chair opposite and said, “Why don't you start by telling me why you're here.”

This confused him. “You mean my wife didn't tell you? She made the appointment.”

“She made it with my secretary. We haven't spoken.”

He would be allowed to give his own side of things, then. That made him feel better. “Well, it was her idea. Not mine. Just so you know. We've been having some problems with our daughter—or I guess, my wife thinks I'm the problem.” He was aware of blundering into defensiveness and blame. He shook his head, in a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger fashion. “She's sixteen. My daughter, Phoebe. I worry about her. Not that she causes us any real trouble. Attitude, sure. Kids that age, you know?” Sharon Glaser's expression was perfectly neutral and receptive. Some of the alphabet letters were probably a degree in making the right kind of faces. “I just like to be careful about where she goes. Who she goes out with. My wife thinks I'm being unreasonable. Too strict.”

“And does Phoebe think so too?”

“Oh yeah. Big-time.”

“Do you have any other children?”

“Yeah, my son. He's fourteen.” Massey shrugged. “He's not a
problem. Or he'll be a different problem. Boys. Don't you need to take notes or something? I mean, excuse me, I haven't done this before, but I thought you'd take notes.”

“I've found that it makes people self-conscious,” Sharon Glaser said, pleasantly. “It makes them wonder what they just said that made you snap to attention, and then they stop talking. I make mental notes, and when the sessions are done, I write them down.” She smiled. She had an answer for everything, but she wasn't snotty about it. He thought she was probably okay. He wondered what she'd look like if she fixed herself up a little, and didn't settle for the female jock look.

“So you and your wife disagree about setting the rules for your daughter.” Massey nodded. That's what it boiled down to. “Would you like to work on some negotiating strategies, ways you and your wife could come to an agreement about what's appropriate for Phoebe?”

“Sure.” Massey nodded again. “That would be a good thing.” He thought they were making progress. He could do this.

“All right.” Sharon Glaser seemed pleased also, as if he was catching on, as if this was all it took to get things ironed out. Fine-tuning the communications. “But talk to me a little more about why the two of them, your wife and your daughter, are fighting you on this. Why you're on different sides.”

She waited while he made a show of thinking about it. There was some difficulty he'd need to steer past, but he couldn't see its shape clearly. He spread his hands in a who-knows gesture, chuckled. “I was hoping you could explain women to me, doctor.”

“I'm not a doctor,” she corrected him, but in a nice way, not like she was offended or anything. “Do you think your wife is
careless, or indifferent about what your daughter does? Is she a disengaged parent?”

“I wouldn't say that.”

Sharon Glaser was waiting for what he would say. So was Massey. “Ah, they don't know the things that can happen when kids are running around without supervision, when being on their own is all brand-new to them. I mean, they know, they hear about all the depraved stuff—you know? Like that girl in Pennsylvania?—but it's like it doesn't sink in.”

“Why are you more tuned in to the dangers, do you think?”

“I guess because I was a teenage boy myself.” Massey shook his head, chuckled again, as if remembering, what was the word: “hijinks.”

“You grow up around here?”

“No, out West. Tucson. Home of the Sun Devils.”

“Oh, I went to a conference in Tucson once. Pretty place. All those mountains. You get back there much?”

“Not really.”

“Any family still there?”

“My mom. And my brother, he's pretty much in charge of taking care of her. That's just the way it worked out.” Massey would have liked to move on. Everything she said was a question, and what he had taken as ordinary curiosity, run-of-the-mill conversational filler, was instead intended to throw some sort of net over him, but he couldn't just leave things hanging, and so he said, “I guess I'm just not the high school reunion type.” He wasn't. Never went to one.

Sharon Glaser appeared to be struck by a genuine spontaneous thought. “You know there was a movie about a high school reunion set in Tucson.
Romy and Michele's High
School Reunion
. Do you know it?”

Massey shrugged, meaning he did not. Didn't want to.

“Try and see it sometime. It's pretty funny. Sometimes that's the best way to look back on high school, when you can see it as a comedy.”

“I guess,” Massey said, indicating he was not very interested. There weren't any clocks in the room and he didn't want to look at his watch, but he hoped they'd reached at least the halfway point. “So, these negotiation tips.”

“Yes, we can talk about those. But first, what are the important things, the basic guidelines you want to set for Phoebe?”

“No alcohol. No drugs.”

“Understandable.”

“Not that you can ever be a hundred percent sure, hell, even fifty percent sure, that some wiseass won't show up with that kind of thing. I mean, why else do kids have parties?”

“Not too many ice cream socials around, huh.”

“Yeah, a dying breed.”

“Were you much of a party animal, back in the Tucson days?”

“I did my share of partying.”

“Probably a little spicier than the comic movie version, I'm guessing.”

Just as he was getting ready to tell Ms. Sharon Not-A-Doctor that it had been a real pleasure, and if she was so interested in Tucson, she could get a plane ticket, she threw it into reverse. Headed off in a different direction. “Could you tell me a little about how you and your wife decide other issues. Other conflicts. Just so I get a bigger picture here.”

“Ah. Well, happy wife, happy life. I guess she pretty much rules the roost.”

“You're okay with that?”

“What choice do I have? No, really, my wife is just more of a manager type than I am. She's smart about money, she keeps us on track.” Massey hoped that came across the right way. “It's like any partnership, the two of you have different responsibilities. Mine are along the lines of follow-through. Implementation. Like, if we go on vacation, she packs the suitcases and I carry them around. Seems like most couples I know operate pretty much the same way.”

“You mean, the wives make most of the decisions,” Sharon Glaser said, making it not a question. How did she keep track of the time? Was there a clock he couldn't see?

“I guess they take the lead when it comes to, you know, family life,” Massey offered. “Maybe that's why we're having this problem, she's so used to calling the shots.”

“What I hear you saying is, women have all this power. But at the same time they need to be protected. Like you feel the need to protect your daughter. Have I got that right?”

“I guess. I don't know.” He was going to just shut up now.

“Because maybe it's not a contradiction. Maybe it's women's sexuality that gives them their power, but it also makes them vulnerable. It's possible to have a complicated response to that. To resent that power, to imagine how it might be undone—”

“Whoa.” Massey held up a hand. “Sorry, this is getting a little too wacky for me.”

“I know it can be difficult. But what you seem to be most worried about where your daughter is concerned is sexual misbehavior, sexual victimization. You referred to the case in Pennsylvania, the kidnapping. Not something like a car accident.”

“Of course I'm worried about car accidents. Is that something I have to spell out?”

“And you aren't expressing any particular worries about your son. He's not the reason for the conflict with your wife.”

Massey stood up. “You're going to have to excuse me. I guess I'm not smart enough to see how this is supposed to help. Thank you for your time.”

Sharon Glaser stood also and opened the office door for him. She didn't seem particularly upset. She was probably used to pissing people off with her nosy-ass questions. She held out her hand and Massey shook it, though he didn't want to. “Please think about making another appointment,” she told him. “Therapeutic goals can take a while to achieve. This first session is only”—her face lit up, pleased with herself—“the ice cream social part.”

Oh ha ha, Sharon. “I'm pretty sure you have us all figured out already,” Massey said, meaning to be sarcastic. He wished he could have come up with something worse to say. He would have liked to tell her the fake waterfall was stupid.

“It doesn't matter what I figure out. It's what you figure out,” Sharon Glaser said, with her aggravating, smartest-girl-in-the-class smile. “Very nice to meet you, Mr. Massey.”

Yeah, you too, dear.
He walked out to his car and started it but he didn't want to go home yet, so he drove for a time around the edges of a shopping mall, and then in another loop that took him out beyond the new, raw housing at the town's edge, and back again to his own neighborhood. He stopped at the liquor store and bought the expensive dark beer that he favored when he felt like spending money.

He already had things all figured out. That didn't mean you could do anything about them.

Nobody was there when he got home; a note said they were all out shopping. Massey fixed himself a sandwich and
opened one of the beers and ate in front of the television, a History Channel show about World War II, all smudgy gray film footage.

Lila hadn't known him when he was young, before he'd made the move East. They met when he was already here, just starting out on somebody else's crew and happy enough to be pulling down a paycheck. Lila was the ambitious one. There was a series of steps he'd had to take to get to running his own business and the good living it brought, and each one of them had come about because she'd talked him through it, backed him up. He was grateful, and he thought she knew that, even if he didn't go around announcing it every five minutes.

No one from his family had come to their wedding, or done much more than send a couple of Christmas cards over the years. Massey had explained this to her as bad blood between him and the others, the usual sad shit: alcoholism, fights, divorce, first one, then the other parent heading off in different directions, Massey and his brothers and half sister and half brothers never living under one roof together, one of those families with an asterisk that required a lot of explaining. All that was true enough, but that didn't mean you could draw any straight line between the way he grew up and the trouble he'd made for himself. Nobody would have been very interested in his excuses anyway.

When Lila and the kids came home from their shopping trip, Massey was upstairs. He heard their voices and the familiar racket of doors opening and shutting, but he stayed where he was. Lila came in to find him lying on his back in bed. “Hey there. Did you get any supper?”

“Yeah. You buy out the place?” She was carrying two big paper shopping bags, which she set down on the end of the bed.

“Want to see?” She took out some packages wrapped in rustling tissue paper and undid them. Massey had been hoping they might be lingerie, or some kind of sleepwear that wasn't flannel, but she held up a sweater-and-slacks set, the kind of thing she might wear to work.

“Very nice.”

“You don't like them.”

“Did I say that? They're fine. You will look like one badass customer service rep. People will pay right up.”

“Thanks. That's the look I was hoping for, badass. So how did it go?”

“Okay, I guess. She was okay.”

Lila folded the clothes and put them on her dresser. She sat down on the bed next to him and looked him over, as if the appointment might have left a visible mark on him. “Did she come up with anything helpful?”

“We have to learn how to negotiate. Like, you're North Korea and I'm America.”

“Uh-huh. What else?”

“Ah, guidelines. Decision-making tools. I'm still chewing on it.”

“All right. Are you going back for another appointment?”

“Still chewing on that too.”

Lila started to get up and he pulled her back down, one arm around her waist. “I'm trying,” he said. “It's just a lot of new ideas, you know?”

“As long as you're trying.”

“Do you ever feel like, even when everything's going all right, or especially when it's going all right, that there's some horror movie version of your life that's going to come sneaking up behind you?”

Lila raised herself up to look at him. “No. What are you talking about, that's creepy.”

Massey said nothing. He was creepy, then.