“He’s fine,” Angie said.
“I mean, I don’t think he’s going to shoot up the school or anything,” Paul said, thinking that I’d find that reassuring. “But he really is a computer genius. I think he spends his spare time inventing viruses. You know when the Hong Kong stock market or something crashed? I think he did that. And the MyDoom virus? I’m betting that was him. His dad’s some software king, makes bazillions of dollars, but now that Trevor’s living on his own, I’m guessing this is his way to get back at his old man, to cripple the Internet or something.”
“Where do you get this information?” I asked.
Paul shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Sarah hung up. “I have to stay late again tonight. I’ve got to run the meeting again. Bailey’s still gone.” Bailey was her boss, the city editor. “I was hoping to get tonight off, since they’ve got me going to this retreat later in the week.”
“Retreat?” I said.
“Maybe I should write everything down for you,” Sarah said. “You know, department heads, other management types from circulation and advertising, we all get together off-site and brainstorm about how to make the paper better and how we can all work as a team, improve employee relations, make everyone feel part of the process, and we draft some list of goals, then come back to the paper and forget it ever happened.”
“Does that mean I can’t get the car?” Angie said. “I have to have a car.”
We only had the one, an aging Toyota Camry. Before we moved back into the city, from Oakwood, we had a second car. Out in the suburbs, where there were no subways or decent bus lines, you couldn’t survive with just one vehicle. But our Honda Civic came to a grisly end one night (Sarah and I very nearly did as well, but that’s a long story, and I’ve already told it), and we opted not to replace it once we’d sold our house and returned to our old neighborhood.
We bought a house a few doors down from our former one, on Crandall, a couple of blocks from the subway and connecting streetcars, and we’d been managing with one car for some time now. Paul’s high school was within walking distance, but in the last few weeks Angie had started college, in town, and, as she’d just reminded us, a few of her classes were in the evening. That meant a walk of several blocks in the dark to catch the subway home, and Sarah was almost as paranoid as I on this issue. We wanted Angie walking alone at night as little as possible.
“What time do you finish?” Sarah asked.
Angie thought. “Eight? Eight-thirty?”
Sarah said, “You take the car, swing by the paper on the way home and pick me up.”
“Then I can’t hang out with anyone after,” Angie said. “I was thinking of getting a coffee with someone after the lecture.”
“Who?”
“Someone. I don’t know.” She got all sullen. “Anybody.”
Which of course meant someone in particular. Sarah said, “You want a car, you pick me up.”
“Jeez, fine, I’ll pick you up. I just won’t make any friends at college at all. I’ll go to school, come home, leave it to the people who live on campus to have lives.”
I wanted to steer the conversation in another direction, not only because I hated family arguments, but because my head was pounding. “What’s the class tonight?” I asked.
“Some psych-sociology male/female studies thing,” she said. “I have to do some research paper for, like, ten days from now. About why men are so weird.”
“Interview your father,” Sarah offered.
“And I need five dollars for parking,” Angie said.
Sarah sidled up to me as she put in some toast. I said to her, quietly, “Maybe it’s time to think about getting another car.”
“I can’t have this discussion now,” she said.
“We’re having these kinds of problems every day,” I said.
I squeezed out of the way as she got some strawberry jam out of the fridge. This kitchen was about half the size of the one in our house out in the suburbs, and quarters were close. “We can’t afford another car now,” Sarah said. “We’ve got Angie’s tuition, a mortgage—”
The phone rang again. I grabbed it instinctively, not thinking to look at who the caller was, and already had the receiver in my hand when Angie started to shout “Don’t answer it!”
But she cut herself off as I brought the phone to my ear, the mouthpiece exposed. Angie mouthed to me, “I’m not here!”
“Hello?” I said. At this point, I looked at the call display and saw “Unknown name/Unknown number.”
“Hi. Is Angie there?” Very cool. You could almost tell, over the phone, that he had to be wearing sunglasses.
“Can I take a message?” I said.
“Is she there?”
“Can I take a message?” I repeated.
A pause at the other end. “Who’s this?”
Now I paused. “This is her father.”
Angie raised her hands up, rolled her eyes, mouthed, “Jeez!”
“Oh,” he said. “You wrote that book.”