Chapter 37
TWO DAYS EARLIER
BENJAMIN
“You’re kidding.”
Dr. C is holding open the driver’s door of his orange Jag for me.
“Why, you’re too afraid to drive it?”
“Maybe.” I don’t even know if I’m allowed to drive someone else’s car without a full license. But fuck. This car.
“You’d prefer to drive the SUV?”
That one looks expensive, too, but it has a dented front bumper and scratched hood. The front license plate is missing. I walk around it. Actually, both plates missing.
“We’re taking them both up to Fond du Lac?”
“No, we’re leaving the SUV in storage, here at the house,” he says. Then he looks at me and laughs. “You look relieved.”
I’m about to ask Dr. C if he had an accident with the SUV—he never said anything about that even though I’ve seen him basically every day—but then I have a more interesting thought. “That means we’re taking the Jag all the way to Fond du Lac.”
He shakes the keys. “Now you’re getting it.”
So, driving is part of it. Maybe the best part.
Once we get there, he’s been telling me and Mom all week, I have to work for my “keep.” I’ve brought an old pair of jeans and two paint-stained shirts.
A swimsuit, which might be optimistic. His father’s mansion might have a pool or it might not, but there’s also lakes.
Or one big lake. I don’t know why I haven’t asked, I just don’t want to be one of those people who asks question after question, like What’s a dumbwaiter?
I heard him telling my mom something about that so I looked it up.
Used by servants to move stuff between floors.
Does his father have servants? Then I remember: I’m the servant.
Back home, Mom tried to give me sunscreen and a gardening trowel to bring, but I told her they probably had all that stuff.
Dr. C and I already loaded a toolbox into the trunk. Lots of other random hardware-store stuff—tape, ties, shovel, blue tarp.
“Premium,” Dr. C tells me. “Always.”
My mom says “cheapest one.” Always.
He goes inside the gas station while I’m pumping for him, and I see two girls checking me out.
One is pumping gas into a little hatchback and the other has the front passenger door open, digging pop cans and wadded-up tissues from the door pockets, but while she does it, she’s looking under her arm to check me out.
Okay, to check the car out. Not me, necessarily.
I stand up a little straighter, tense my biceps, squeeze the gas pump, and then immediately ease off, worrying the gas will overfill and spew all over the place.
Dr. C comes out. Sees what’s up. He wags a finger at me. I think he’s joking about it, with the girls and with me both, but then he comes up right next to me, takes the pump from my hand and says, “In.” He’s not joking.
I wasn’t even looking at them.
He’s crabby and quiet all the way to the Wisconsin border. It could be worse. We could be talking the entire way, every minute, which was closer to what I expected, since that’s what we do in his office. Talk talk talk.
His phone rings. I’m gonna kill my mom if it’s her. We just said goodbye less than an hour ago.
“Matt here,” he says, and I’m confused but I make sure I don’t look it.
It’s a real estate agent, I can tell, because he’s talking about the house, showings, something about taxes, something about the cracked tennis court—they have a tennis court?
—and then he’s telling her, yes, it will all be mowed by tomorrow.
Front and back. No, he’s got it covered.
He hangs up. “Bitch.”
This time, I let my expression slip. He sees it and laughs.
“I thought we weren’t supposed to say that word.”
“Bitch?” He cackles. “Go ahead, you can say it. Say whatever you want.” He reels off a whole list—the c word and the w word and various s words. “Just don’t say it in the wrong situation. Not in front of a woman, for starters.”
He drums on the steering wheel, pleased with himself, and I’m getting up the nerve to ask him how much a Jag XF costs when he adds, “and never text those words either. You already got in trouble for that.”
Yes, covered.
“It’s not so much what you do,” he says, “it’s what you get away with.”
I’m still working my way up to asking about the cost of his car when he says, “I go by Matt because that’s my birth name. Curtis is my middle name. Both are after my father. When I’m in Wisconsin, I like to leave my work identity behind, much as I’m able.”
“Oh,” I say, put at ease. I don’t know. Ease. Whatever. He can call himself anything he wants, especially when he’s talking to a bitch.
“I see that,” he says. I wasn’t even smiling yet. Sometimes I think Dr. C can read my mind.
“Matt’s a good name,” I say. Stupid comment. Not sure why I said it, except that we have a long day ahead. Me, him. Seats the color of a horse saddle. “I’d prefer to go by Ben but my mom says Benj which sounds like slang. Like it’s supposed to be short for ‘bougie’ or something else. I don’t know.”
“Ben it is. You should have told me that in our first session.”
“Sorry.”
He speeds up to pass a yellow convertible, then whips back into the right lane. “Don’t catch your mother’s apologizing disease. It’s not attractive. Especially for a man.”
I count the number of cars we’re passing. After fifty, I say, “You knew my mom in college, and I know you guys went out on a date after Sidney’s funeral because she came home from the restaurant a little drunk.”
I wait for him to scold me for prying, but he looks calm and curious.
“So?”
“Do you like her?”
“Define ‘like.’”
“How many miles are we from your home?” he asks a while later.
I reach for my pocket before remembering I left my phone at home, the way he told me to. No screens for two weeks. He told my mom it would be just one, and he told me if I left my crappy phone at home he’d buy me a new one, as long as I never once whined about being offline. “I don’t know.”
“Math, Ben. Math.”
I look over at his speed. He’s doing ninety, but maybe only since we crossed the border into Wisconsin. I didn’t see what time we got in the car. But I look up at a sign for Milwaukee exits and I guess. “Fifty.”
“Close.”
He passes several more cars. Mr. C—I mean Matt—or Dr. Matt—has a killer foot. He taps the steering wheel again, which I now see has tiny holes in it, like a fancy leather glove.
“You know how many miles from home most serial burglars and rapists travel to commit their crimes?”
“Um. No?”
“Three miles.” He laughs. “Stupid, huh?” Then he looks over at me. Long and serious. “You’d never be that stupid. Would you?”
· · ·
We’re coming up to a sign that says MADISON when Matt says, “Not too late.”
We pass it before I have time to ask him what he means.
“Still not too late,” he says as we approach another sign. “We can get off at the next one and come back around.”
I have no idea what he’s talking about.
“You ever been up to Bosqueville?” he asks. “It’ll add another two to three hours, but driving’s the best part, right?”
I know Bosqueville. From the envelopes.
“My uncle’s in a maximum-security prison there.”
“Ding-ding-ding,” he says, like we’re on a game show. “Ewan would expect me to drop in, if I was in the area.”
“You know my uncle?”
He never mentioned that. Not the first time he came over and talked about my uncle and how I shouldn’t write to him, not the time my mom and I had a big fight about it.
Not a few days later in session when he asked me, again, how I felt about my uncle and would I want to talk to him after all. Maybe he’s pulling my leg.
“I know your whole family,” he says. “I knew your brother even before I met your mom. Can you guess why?”
“Because you taught at his college?”
“Your uncle never went to college. He was sent away at the age of eighteen, just two years older than you.”
I watch exits come and go—gas, coffee, fast food, gas. Matt keeps veering toward the right side of the road, like he’s waiting for me to say something, dropping speed from 80 to 75 to 70 to 60, then retaking the center of the lane.
“I met him at Menkoka before you were born,” he says, finally.
“And then I met him again when I was visiting Bosqueville to do some follow-up studies on recidivist research subjects. Boys of mine from Menkoka who ended up reoffending landed in maximum security in a location much less pleasant than our juvenile center. We had enough men of the same profile, all in the same place, that we were able to launch a larger study, including with men who’d never had the advantage of our Menkoka program—those would be the ‘controls.’ Do you know what control means? ”
I did science fair once. But I don’t answer, and I know he’ll go on anyway.
“We found variation between the groups, but not as much as we would have hoped. Certainly not as much as I would have hoped. It’s a stubborn population. Still, I got to know Ewan and other interesting men whom I continue to visit.”
Whom. The only other person I know who says whom is my English lit teacher.
“And imagine my pleasure,” he said, “when I found out Ewan had a sister. Imagine my extreme pleasure when that sister ended up in one of my classes. I was tickled talking to her. Noting their similarities, their differences—not that I let her know I’d talked to Ewan.
And then I found out she had a young son. ”
He takes one hand off the steering wheel and places it over his heart.
“A son with behavioral problems,” he goes on. “That was clear from the very outset, when she’d rattle off her various excuses for missing class.” He slows down again, like he’s expecting me to tell him to exit. “Not too late!”
“No, I don’t think I want to go to Bosqueville,” I say.
“Then why didn’t you say so.”
· · ·
We’re north of Madison when he finally puts on music. I thought I was going to die, going the whole way with nothing to listen to, no phone, neither of us talking about anything interesting. He plays with the dial, jazz to Bruce Springsteen to REM to classical to Taylor Swift.
“Like her?”
“Not really.”