The Face

Ethan.
        “Hello, Fric. You okay? I paged you here on the intercom a few minutes ago.”
        [454] “Didn’t hear it, ummm, no, not the intercom,” said the boy, lying so ineptly that had he been hooked up to a polygraph, the machine might have exploded.
        “You moved the chair.”
        “Chair? Ummm, no, I found it like this, here like, you know, just like this.”
        Ethan perched on the edge of another armchair. “Is something wrong, Fric?”
        “Wrong?” the boy asked, as though the meaning of that word eluded him.
        “Is there something you’d like to tell me? Are you worried about something? Because you don’t seem like yourself.”
        The kid looked away from Ethan, to the book. He closed the book and lowered it to his lap.
        As a cop, Ethan had long ago learned patience.
        Making eye contact again, Fric leaned forward in his chair. He seemed about to whisper conspiratorially but hesitated and straightened up. Whatever he’d been about to reveal, he let slide. He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m tense ’cause my dad’s coming home Thursday.”
        “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”
        “Sure. But it’s pretty tense, too.”
        “Why tense?”
        “Well, he’ll have some of his buddies with him, you know. He always does.”
        “You don’t care for his friends?”
        “They’re okay. They’re all golfers and sports fanatics. Dad likes to talk golf and football and stuff. It’s how he unwinds. His buddies and him, they’re like a club.”
         A club in which you’re not and never will be a member, Ethan thought, surprised by a sympathy that tightened his throat.
        He wanted to give the boy a hug, take him to a movie, out to a [455] movie, not downstairs to the mini-Pantages here in Palazzo Rospo, but to some ordinary multiplex crawling with kids and their families, where the air was saturated with the fragrance of popcorn and with the greasiness of canola oil tricked up to smell half like butter, where you had to check the theater seat for gum and candy before sitting down, where during the funny parts of the movie, you could hear not just your own laugh but that of a crowd.
        “And there’ll be a girl with him,” Fric continued. “There always is. He broke up with the last one before Florida. I don’t know who the new one is. Maybe she’ll be nice. Sometimes they are. But she’s new, and I’ll have to get to know her, which isn’t easy.”
        They were in dangerous territory for conversation between a family member and one of the staff. In commiseration, Ethan could say nothing that revealed his true judgment of Charming Manheim as a father, or that suggested the movie star’s priorities were not in proper order.
        “Fric, whoever your dad’s new girl is, getting to know her will be easy because she’ll like you. Everyone likes you, Fric,” he added, knowing that to this sweet and profoundly unassuming boy, these words would be a revelation and most likely disbelieved.
        Fric sat with his mouth open, as though Ethan had just declared himself to be a monkey passing for human. A blush rose to his cheeks, and he looked down at the book in his lap, disconcerted.
        Movement drew Ethan’s eye from the boy to the tree behind him. The dangling ornaments stirred: angels turning, angels nodding, angels dancing.
        The air in the library was as still as the books on the shelves. If there had been a low-intensity earthquake sufficient to affect the ornaments, it had been too subtle to catch Ethan’s attention.
        The movement of the angels subsided, as though they had been set in motion by a short-lived draft created by some passing presence.
        A strange expectation overcame Ethan, a sense that a door of [456] understanding might be about to open in his heart. He realized that he was holding his breath and that the fine hairs on the backs of his hands had risen as if to a baton of static electricity.
        “Mr. Hachette,” said Fric.
        The angels settled and the pregnant moment passed without the manifestation of… anything.
        “Excuse me?” Ethan asked.
        “Mr. Hachette doesn’t like me,” Fric said, by way of refuting the suggestion that he might be more highly regarded than he thought.
        Ethan smiled. “Well, I’m not sure that Mr. Hachette likes anyone terribly much. But he’s a fine chef, isn’t he?”
        “So is Hannibal