Freedom [246]
“That’s what they’re doing right now with Bush and Iraq, actually.”
“Well, you’ve paid your dues. And now you and I get our little reward. Did you tell Mr. Haven we’re going ahead with Free Space?”
“I was feeling lucky not to be fired,” Walter said. “It didn’t seem like the right moment to tell him I’m planning to spend the entire discretionary fund on something that’ll probably get even worse publicity.”
“Oh, my sweetheart,” she said, embracing him, resting her head against his heart. “Nobody else understands what good things you’re doing. I’m the only one.”
“That may actually be true,” he said.
He would have liked to just be held by her for a while, but her body had other ideas, and his own body agreed with them. They were spending their nights now on her too-small bed, since his own rooms were still full of Patty’s traces, which she’d given him no instructions for dealing with and he couldn’t begin to deal with on his own. It didn’t surprise him that Patty hadn’t been in touch, and yet it seemed tactical of her, adversarial, that she hadn’t. For a person who, by her own admission, made nothing but mistakes, she cast a daunting shadow as she did whatever she was doing out there in the world. Walter felt cowardly to be hiding from her in Lalitha’s room, but what else could he do? He was beset from all sides.
On his birthday, while Lalitha showed Connie the Trust offices, he took Joey into the kitchen and said he still didn’t know what course of action to recommend. “I really don’t think you should blow the whistle,” he said. “But I don’t trust my motives on that. I’ve sort of lost my moral bearings lately. The thing with your mother, and the thing in the New York Times—did you see that?”
“Yep,” Joey said. He had his hands in his pockets and was still dressing like a College Republican, in a blue blazer and shiny loafers. For all Walter knew, he was a College Republican.
“I didn’t come off very well, did I?”
“Nope,” Joey said. “But I think most people could see it wasn’t a fair article.”
Walter gratefully, no questions asked, accepted this reassurance from his son. He was feeling very small indeed. “So I have to go to this LBI event in West Virginia next week,” he said. “They’re opening a body-armor plant that all those displaced families are going to be working at. And so I’m not really the right person to ask about LBI, because I’m so implicated myself.”
“Why do you have to go to that?”
“I have to give a speech. I have to make grateful on behalf of the Trust.”
“But you’ve already got your Warbler Park. Why not just blow it off?”
“Because there’s this other big program Lalitha’s doing with overpopulation, and I have to stay on good terms with my boss. It’s his money we’re spending.”
“Sounds like you’d better go, then,” Joey said.
He sounded unpersuaded, and Walter hated looking so weak and small to him. As if to make himself look even weaker and smaller, he asked if he knew what was up with Jessica.
“I talked to her,” Joey said, hands in pockets, eyes on the floor. “I guess she’s a little mad at you.”
“I’ve left her like twenty phone messages!”
“You can probably stop doing that. I don’t think she’s listening to them. People don’t listen to every cellphone message anyway, they just look to see who’s called.”
“Well, did you tell her that there are two sides to this story?”
Joey shrugged. “I don’t know. Are there two sides?”
“Yes, there are! Your mother did a very bad thing to me. An incredibly painful thing.”
“I don’t really want any more information,” Joey said. “I think she probably already told me about it anyway. I don’t feel like taking sides.”
“She told you about it when? How long ago?”
“Last week.”
So Joey knew what Richard had done—what Walter had let his best friend, his rock-star friend, do. His smallening in his son’s eyes was now complete. “I’m going to have a beer,” he said. “Since it’s my birthday.”
“Can Connie and I have one, too?”
“Yes, that’s why we asked you here early. Actually, Connie