Baskets full of crafts were stacked three high along the walls. Zach’s beautiful playhouse sat at one end of the room as the crown jewel between the two silent-auction tables, its leafy top fluttering slightly beneath the whisper of the heating duct. I thought about my conversation with Sandy the day before, the questions I had answered for her about Zach’s distraction and Fairen’s negligible morals. The devil, it is said, will draw you in with nine truths and one lie.
“Still got a pile of these left to put in place,” he said. “You want me to get one of my friends to help instead?”
“I’ll be fine. I’m stronger than I look.”
He circled around the table and walked a diagonal line across the room to the storage closet. Leaning across a table stored on its side, he shifted his balance forward to remove some obstacle from the floor, revealing beneath his hiked-up shirt a band of skin on his lower back. In the small room, with the door blocking any curious eyes peering in from the hallway, I felt the urge to run my hand affectionately over the bumps of his spine, but restrained it. Since he had gotten well and returned to me, Zach was all business. He was still willing, but no longer warm. It made me anxious, but I consoled myself that it was probably meaningless in the long term. Despite his youth he was a man like any other: he would get over whatever made him petulant, so long as I kept it coming.
Footsteps behind me forced my thoughts back in line. I rested my hands appropriately on the table and turned only when my name was called.
“Phone for you in the office.”
Even over the phone line, the tension in Russ’s voice sounded thick enough to close off his windpipe. “I got a call from Maggie,” he told me. “We need to go up there and bail her out.”
I turned my back to the secretary. “I’m sorry. Did you say ‘bail her out’?”
“They picked her up at a protest. She crossed a line or yelled at a cop or something, beats the hell out of me. I can’t even tell for sure whether they actually set bail or they’re just being pains in the ass and won’t let her go unless we show up to claim her. She wasn’t exactly forthcoming with the information.”
I grunted an exasperated sigh. “What sort of protest?”
“Something about the impeachment. Some campus group protesting against it, and she was in the group on the other side in favor of it. They clashed, and now we’ve got a two-hour drive ahead of us. I vote we leave her there overnight, to tell you the truth. You want to play, you gotta pay.”
“That’s impossible. The bazaar is tomorrow. I have to be here.” I pushed my hair back with stiff fingers and heard the squeak of tables being dragged around in the multipurpose room. “Russ, can’t you just go get her yourself? They need me here to set all this stuff up.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ll kill her.”
I closed my eyes and considered it was probably a poor idea to let him loose on distant roads with his system full of pharmaceuticals. The last thing I needed was two family members in separate jails around various parts of Maryland. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll be home in a few minutes. Just—gas up the car before I get there, all right?”
20
We drove north. Along the way, Russ played his Ken Burns Jazz Collection CDs until I felt tempted to kick the player through the dash and into the engine. At one point, when he changed discs, a snippet of radio blasted through. I recognized the tune, a song Zach frequently sang along to, headphones on, as he worked on the playhouse.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Russ asked conversationally. “We got arrested twice for protesting the Vietnam War, and now here our daughter is getting arrested for being a right-wing nut job. Where did we go wrong?”
I took my eyes off the road long enough to glance at him. He sat back easily in the passenger seat, the corner of his mouth upturned in an ironic smirk. He had voiced no objection when I asked for the keys, although the car was his. Perhaps he had loaded up on downers, because he seemed nothing like his usual self.
“She’s determined to do things her own way,” I replied. “Come hell or high water.”
“Ah, the folly of youth. Maybe we pushed it all too hard. Crammed our views down their little throats. But Scott doesn’t seem to be any worse for wear. Just Maggie.”
I didn’t answer right away. After a minute I said, “Scott doesn’t care one whit about anybody.”
“It’s just his age. They’re all self-centered at that age. Give him a few years and he’ll probably become a civil- rights lawyer.”
I grunted in reply.
He offered a mild scowl I could see only at the edge of my vision. “You take everything too personally, Judy. If somebody gives you a negative answer, for whatever reason, it’s like from your gut you react as if it must be about
I snorted a laugh at that one. “I’m a narcissist,” I said in a mocking tone. “
“And there you go, right there,” he continued. “A little constructive criticism, and you’re giving me that slit-eyed glare like you’re going to set me on fire.”
“That’s not funny.”
He shifted in his seat. “It wasn’t intended to be.”
When we arrived at the police station, I hung back and allowed Russ to do the dirty work. Maggie, sullen and uninterested in communicating either explanation or apology, stepped out from the cell when the guard unlocked it but said little to either of us. On the drive back to her dorm Russ regaled her with stories of his own jail stints for
