May We Be Forgiven

evening news all have psychiatrists; but I restrain myself. “It’s certainly something to think on,” I say. “Can you send me more information?”
    “Oh, we don’t send anything anymore—always a budget crunch around here. It’s all online.”
    “Right,” I say. “I’ll look online. Thank you.”
    Fuck it.
    I call Ricardo’s aunt and ask if she’d like me to take the boy out on Sunday.
    “Can you pick him up early?” she asks.
    “Is eight-thirty too early?”
    “Eight-thirty is good,” she says.

    P art of building my relationship with the kids is talking with them more often and more honestly, as though they’re real people.
    Nate has been distant since the Williamsburg trip, I’m not sure why, but it seems smarter not to draw attention to it and simply to wait it out. I ask for his advice about what to do with Ricardo on Sunday.
    “Well, there’s an indoor rock-climbing place, or bowling, or the video arcade.” Nate pauses. “You could just take him out and play catch. I didn’t get the sense that anyone plays with him. My glove is in my bedroom closet. And if you want to give it to him, that’s okay—it’s my old glove, I’ve got a newer one.”
    “Very generous of you, Nate.”
    “What made you call him?”
    “The truth, I missed the kid, and I miss you and Ash even more. I had a really good time on our trip.” There’s an awkward silence, but I don’t mind, I’m glad I said what I did. “What about you, how’s it going there?”
    “Going,” Nate says, and then goes quiet. “I wrote memoirs in our English class.”
    “I can imagine that would be difficult.”
    “I wrote about Dad—about something I remembered.”
    A long pause. “Maybe I could read it sometime?”
    “I don’t know,” he says. It’s as though what happened with George and Jane is just beginning to dawn on Nate; the initial trauma has now quieted, and he’s beginning to put it all together. “I’ve been having trouble sleeping, and so I went to the school counselor, who suggested I join some kind of meditation group two nights a week.”
    “Might just give it a try,” I say. “It’s been a pretty difficult few months.”
    “We’ll see,” he says.
    After talking with Nate, I call Ashley. “I just want to thank you for your note,” I say.
    “Did you get it?” she asks
    “I did,” I say. “And I was very impressed.”
    “When I was younger, I had a teacher who made us practice writing thank-you notes for everything. Like ‘Dear God, Much thanks for the sunrise this morning. It was very beautiful and I look forward to seeing it again tomorrow. Your Friend, Ashley Silver.’”
    “Amazing.”
    “She said if we had nothing else at least we’d have manners.”
    “She may have been right. What else is going on up there?”
    “Science,” she says. “We’re doing a lot of cooking. There’s a new teacher who is trying to use household chemistry as the basis for a cookbook, and the chemistry lab is functioning as a kind of test kitchen.”
    “Sounds flavorful,” I say.
    “Not really. I think it may actually be dangerous.”

    I n preparation for my return to the New York law firm to begin working with the stories, I replay my Nixon tapes—videotaped interviews he did with Frank Gannon in which he talks about Pat, about his family. I think of it as “the official version.” In all families we have the official version, the tacitly agreed-upon narrative that we tell about who we are and where we come from. I listen carefully, wanting to get Nixon’s cadence, his phrasing into my head, so that tomorrow, when I’m looking at the stories, I can hear his voice.
    The next morning, Wanda introduces me to Ching Lan, who will do the transcribing.
    Tall and thin, like a hand-pulled noodle, she shakes my hand vigorously. “Pleased to be working with you,” she says. “Just so you know, I read okay, I speak not so good.”
    “Where are you from?”
    “Downstairs,” she says. “I am the daughter of the deli owner.”
    “I know your mother from a long time ago,” I say, laughing.
    The woman nods. “She told me you are Mr. Cookie. I am so lucky,” she says. “They discover me; I type really fast; I can read Chinese, so any bad handwriting looks good to me; I can read like the wind—so I read and I type for them. I have no idea what I type, but they don’t care. It’s good I see my parents at lunch. We go to work together. And if I no know something, I ask,” she says