Straight Man

Mr. Quigley’s been trying to reach you. She says you’ll understand.”
    Unfortunately, I do, though if Billy Quigley’s trying to reach me, that’s a pretty good reason to stay where I am.
    “Mom says he refuses to believe you aren’t home.”
    I stand up, slide my chair back. “When Billy’s home, he expects other people to be home too,” I explain, approximating my drunken colleague’s logic. Billy’s problem is he’s smart enough to know I don’t want to talk to him, but he’s too drunk to remember that I always talk to him whether I want to or not.
    “I’ll give you a lift,” Russell offers.
    “No,” Julie says, showing him the keys dangling from her pinkie. “You’ve had a rough day. Relax.”
    Russell takes this parting shot like a man, without flinching. I flinch for him. “Hank,” he says without getting up, “take care.” There’s danger everywhere, he seems to imply.
    We take Julie’s Escort.
    I’m about to break one of the few simple rules I live by and ask Julie if everything is okay between her and Russell, when she says, “So what’s with this job interview Mom’s got in Philadelphia?”
    “It’s not something she’s seriously considering,” I explain. “The principal at Railton High is supposed to retire after next year though. The school board could clarify the line of succession if they felt sufficiently motivated.”
    “What if they won’t? Would she take this other job?”
    “Aren’t you asking the wrong person?”
    We’ve stopped at the Presbyterian church intersection. Its spire is a beacon, and with the surrounding trees so bare, the scene lacks only snow to be straight out of Currier and Ives. Julie’s looking at it, without really seeing. We’re idling roughly at this literal crossroads, as if we’ve both lost our sense of direction. Anyone coming up behind us would probably conclude that we’ve taken a wrong turn and are lost, that we’re either hunched over a map or consulting the stars, the full firmament of which are winking above us, suggesting an infinite number of possible directions, when in fact there are only three, two of which are wrong, and we know which two.
    “What would
you
do? Leave your job at the campus?” When I don’t have an immediate answer, she adds, “Are you the right person to ask that?”
    “No, that would be your mother again.”
    What happens next surprises me. Without warning my daughter, her small hand balled into a fist, pivots in her seat and punches me as hard as she can on my left biceps. No, as it turns out it wasn’t as hard as she could. The second punch is harder, and it’s hard enough to cause me to catch her by the wrist before she can deliver a third.
    “You bastards,” she cries. “You
are
getting a divorce.”
    “What are you talking about, Julie?”
    She’s glaring at me, like I’m someone she’s concluded, over a lifetime, is not to be trusted. I let go of her wrist to show that I trust her, and she punches me again, though not so hard this time. “I want you to tell me what’s going on.”
    “I don’t know,” I confess. “Have you been talking to your sister?” I no sooner ask this than I can tell I’ve intuited the truth of the matter. Karen, an otherwise sensible girl, has always been certain that her mother and I were on the verge of divorce. When she was in high school, several of her best friends’ parents went through rancorous divorces, leaving her friends shattered and Karen herself shaken and alive to the possibility the same thing could happen to her parents. She was always looking for signs, and most everything she witnessed, from petty bickering to benign conversations she didn’t understand or had joined in progress, she construed as omens of the impending dissolutionof her parents’ union. And of course, being older than Julie, she was able to convince her younger sister to share her anxieties.
    “Mom’s always telling her things she won’t tell me,” Julie explains. “It really pisses me off.”
    “What did she tell Karen?” I ask, genuinely curious.
    “Karen won’t say. Which also pisses me off. It’s like they’re a club, and I can’t get in.”
    “You’re imagining things. So is your sister. There’s nothing wrong between your mother and me.”
    Julie shoots me a look. “How would you know? You never know when Mom’s unhappy.”
    “When is she unhappy?”
    “See?”
    A car has come up behind us and is waiting for us to do something.
    “I