The New Yorker Stories

“Would you not tell my mother I came here?” the boy said.

“Okay,” Keller said. He waited.

“Were you ever friends with my dad?” the boy asked.

“No, though once we both donated blood on the same day, some years ago, and sat in adjacent chairs.” It was true. For some reason, he had never told Sigrid about it. Not that there was very much to say.

The boy looked puzzled, as if he didn’t understand the words Keller had spoken.

“My dad said you worked together,” the boy said.

“Why would I lie?” Keller said, leaving open the question: Why would your father?

Again, the boy looked puzzled. Keller said, “I taught at the college.”

“I was at my dad’s over Thanksgiving, and he said you worked the same territory.”

In spite of himself, Keller smiled. “That’s an expression,” Keller said. “Like ‘I cover the waterfront.’ ”

“Cover what?” the boy said.

“If he said we ‘worked the same territory,’ he must have meant that we were up to the same thing. A notion I don’t understand, though I do suppose it’s what he meant.”

The boy looked at his feet. “Why did you buy me the raffle tickets?” he said.

What was Keller supposed to tell him? That he’d done it as an oblique form of apology to his mother for something that hadn’t happened, and that he therefore didn’t really need to apologize for? The world had changed: here sat someone who’d never heard the expression “worked the same territory.” But what, exactly, had been Brad’s father’s context? He supposed he could ask, though he knew in advance Brad would have no idea what he meant by context.

“I understand Thanksgiving was a pretty bad time for you,” Keller said. He added, unnecessarily (though he had no tolerance for people who added things unnecessarily), “Your mother told me.”

“Yeah,” the boy said.

They sat in silence.

“Why is it you came to see me?” Keller asked.

“Because I thought you were a friend,” the boy surprised him by answering.

Keller’s eyes betrayed him. He felt his eyebrows rise slightly.

“Because you gave me six raffle tickets,” the boy said.

Clearly, the boy had no concept of one’s being emphatic by varying the expected numbers: one rose instead of a dozen; six chances instead of just one.

Keller got up and retrieved the bag of doughnuts from the hall table. The grease had seeped through and left a glistening smudge on the wood, which he wiped with the ball of his hand. He carried the bag to Brad and lowered it so he could see in. Close up, the boy smelled slightly sour. His hair was dirty. He was sitting with his shoulders hunched. Keller moved the bag forward an inch. The boy shook his head no. Keller folded the top, set the bag on the rug. He walked back to where he’d been sitting.

“If you’d buy me a bike, I’d work next summer and pay you back,” Brad blurted out. “I need another bike to get to some places I got to go.”

Keller decided against unscrambling the syntax and regarded him. The tattoo seemed to depict a spike with something bulbous at the tip. A small skull, he decided, for no good reason except that these days skulls seemed to be a popular image. There was a pimple on Brad’s chin. Miraculously, even to a person who did not believe in miracles, Keller had gone through his own adolescence without ever having a pimple. His daughter had not had similar good luck. She had once refused to go to school because of her bad complexion, and he had made her cry when he’d tried to tease her out of being self-conscious. “Come on,” he’d said to her. “You’re not Dr. Johnson, with scrofula.” His wife, as well as his daughter, had then burst into tears. The following day, Sue Anne had made an appointment for Lynn with a dermatologist.

“Would this be kept secret from your mother?”

“Yeah,” the boy said. He wasn’t emphatic, though; he narrowed his eyes to see if Keller would agree.

He asked, “Where will you tell her you got the bike?”

“I’ll say from my dad.”

Keller nodded. “That’s not something she might ask him about?” he said.

The boy put his thumb to his mouth and bit the cuticle. “I don’t know,” he said.

“You wouldn’t want to tell her it was in exchange for doing yard work for me next summer?”

“Yeah,” the boy said, sitting up straighter. “Yeah, sure, I can do that. I will.”

It occurred to Keller that Molly Bloom couldn’t have pronounced the word will more emphatically. “We might even say that I ran into you and suggested it,” Keller said.

“Say you ran into me at Scotty’s,” the boy said. It was an ice cream store. If that was what the boy wanted him to say, he would. He looked at the bag of doughnuts, expecting that in his newfound happiness the boy would soon reach in. He smiled. He waited for Brad to move toward the bag.

“I threw your trash can over,” Brad said.

Keller’s smile faded. “What?” he said.

“I was mad when I came here. I thought you were some nutcase friend of my dad’s. I know you’ve been