The Husband

become a mother if she hadn't met a man with firm theories of child development and with a system to apply them.
    Because Mitch would not have life without his mother and because her cluelessness did not encompass malice, she inspired a tenderness that was not love or even affection. It was instead a sad regard for her congenital incapacity for sentiment. This tenderness had nearly ripened into the pity that he withheld from his father.
    "It's nothing important," Mitch said. "It'll keep."
    "I can give her a message," Daniel said, following Mitch across the living room.
    "No message. I was nearby, so I just dropped in to say hello."
    Because such a breach of family etiquette had never happened previously, Daniel remained unconvinced. "Something's on your mind."
    Mitch wanted to say Maybe a week of sensory deprivation in the learning room will squeeze it out of me.
    Instead he smiled and said, "I'm fine. Everything's fine."
    Although he had little insight into the human heart, Daniel had a bloodhound's nose for threats of a financial nature. "If it's money problems, you know our position on that."
    "I didn't come for a loan," Mitch assured him.
    "In every species of animal, the primary obligation of parents is to teach self-sufficiency to their offspring. The prey must learn evasion, and the predator must learn to hunt."
    Opening the door, Mitch said, "I'm a self-sufficient predator, Daniel."
    "Good. I'm glad to hear that."
    He favored Mitch with a smile in which his small super-naturally white teeth appeared to have been sharpened since last he revealed them.
    Even to deflect his father's suspicions, Mitch could not summon a smile this time.
    "Parasitism," Daniel said, "isn't natural to Homo sapiens or to any species of mammal."
    Beaver Cleaver would never have heard that line from his dad.
    Stepping out of the house, Mitch said, "Tell Kathy I said hi."
    "She'll be late. They're always late when the Robinson woman joins the pack."
    "Mathematicians," Mitch said scornfully.
    "Especially this one."
    Mitch pulled the door shut. Several steps from the house, he stopped, turned, and studied the place perhaps for the last time.
    He had not only lived here but had also been home-schooled here from first grade through twelfth. More hours of his life had been spent in this house than out of it.
    As always, his gaze drifted to that certain second-story window, boarded over on the inside. The learning room.
    With no children at home any longer, what did they use that high chamber for?
    Because the front walk curved away from the house instead of leading straight to the street, when Mitch lowered his attention from the second floor, he faced not the door but the sidelight. Through those French panes, he saw his father.
    Daniel stood at one of the big steel-framed foyer mirrors, apparently considering his appearance. He smoothed his white hair with one hand. He wiped at the corners of his mouth.
    Although he felt like a Peeping Tom, Mitch could not look away.
    As a child, he had believed there were secrets about his parents that would free him if he were able to learn them. Daniel and Kathy were a guarded pair, however, as discreet as silverfish.
    In the foyer now, Daniel pinched his left cheek between thumb and forefinger, and then his right, as if to tweak some color into them.
    Mitch suspected that his visit had already more than half faded from his father's mind, now that the threat of a loan request had been lifted.
    In the foyer, Daniel turned sideways to the mirror, as though taking pride in the depth of his chest, the slimness of his waist.
    How easy to imagine that between the facing mirrors, his father did not cast an infinity of echo reflections, as Mitch had done, and that the single likeness of him possessed so little substance that, to any eye but his own, it would appear as transparent as the image of a spook.

Chapter 18

     
    At 5:50, only fifteen minutes after he had arrived at Daniel . and Kathy's house, Mitch drove away. He turned the corner and traveled a quick block and a half.
    Perhaps two hours of daylight remained. He could easily have detected a tail if one had pursued him.
    He pulled the Honda into the empty parking lot at a church.
    A forbidding brick facade, fractured eyes of multicolored glass somber with no current inner light, rose to a steeple that gouged the sky and cast a hard shadow across the blacktop.
    His father's fear had been unfounded. Mitch had not intended to ask for money.
    His parents