“I know you can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but how do you protect the kids? I mean, I don’t do that much on the Internet, but even so, I’m always getting e-mails promising to enlarge my penis or show me girls gone wild. Are there ways to filter that stuff out, keep kids from seeing it?”
She made a face. “In theory. We’ve tried both CyberPatrol and Net Nanny, which promise to block that kind of stuff. But the reality is, even if they’re ninety-nine percent effective, which they’re not, even one percent of what’s out there is an enormous amount of smut. Hell, you know me, Bill; I’m a free-speech advocate, I give to Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, and I opposed the death penalty until I started to hear about the kinds of people whose handiwork you end up dealing with. But I swear, bleeding-heart liberal though I am, the parent in me thinks we need to get a whole lot more restrictive about what’s on the Internet.”
“I agree,” I said. “But meanwhile, what do you do to protect Tyler and Walker?”
“We don’t let them go into chat rooms. We don’t let them download files-if they come across some reference to something they need, Jeff or I will download it for them. We only let them e-mail with a very limited group of friends-we’ve created a list of approved contacts, and the computer blocks anything to or from anybody who’s not on that list. Mostly, though, we try to keep a pretty close eye on what they’re doing-that’s why neither one of them will ever have a computer in their bedroom. Not till they’re in college, anyhow.”
“Sounds like you’re being super careful.”
“We are,” she said, “but we can’t be with them all the time. They have computer access at school, at the library, at friends’ houses. We do our best to make sure those places are pretty strict, too, but sooner or later they’re bound to get curious and get into stuff I wish they wouldn’t. All we can do is hope and pray that by that time, they’re pretty well grounded.”
CHAPTER 6
I HEARD A SHARP rap at my front door, but before I could get there, the door rattled open and Jess Carter’s voice rang out, “Bill? I’m here and I’m hungry. Where are you? Or where’s the food?”
“Back here in the kitchen,” I called. “Straight back.” Her boots clomped on the slate floor of the entryway. I realize it’s just a function of the materials used to make the heels, but I’ve always found it fascinating that women’s shoes tend to announce themselves so much more loudly than men’s. The designers’ strategy, if that’s what it is, works well, at least on me.
She appeared in the kitchen doorway holding a cloth shopping bag in each hand. She set them down on the granite counter. “You still a teetotaler?” I nodded. “As I suspected. I came prepared.” She reached into one of the bags, pulling out a fifth of vodka and a bottle of cranberry juice cocktail.
“What’s in the other bag? After-dinner cigars?”
She made a face. “Yuck, no. Something much tastier. You mentioned steak and asparagus and potatoes, but you didn’t promise dessert.” She fished a low, wide box out of the other bag. The picture showed a golden brown fruit pie, which the label proclaimed as “Razzleberry.”
“What kind of berry’s a razzleberry?” I asked. “Never heard of it.”
“Them,” she said. “Two kinds, raspberry and blackberry. Good on their own, fabulous together. The perfect couple, you might say. Much like us.” She faced me dead-on and raised her left eyebrow by what seemed to be an inch, while the right remained perfectly stationary.
I laughed. “How’d you do that?”
“What, this?” She did it again, this time with her right eyebrow.
“Yeah. That’s amazing. How’d you learn to do that?”
“Diligent practice. While the other med students were dissecting cadavers, I was perfecting facial gymnastics in the mirror. Honing indispensable skills like this.” One side of her mouth suddenly turned upward in a big smile; the other side drooped in an exaggerated, clownlike frown; it was as if invisible hands were tugging in opposite directions on either side of her face. I shook my head in astonishment. “It’s just muscle isolation,” she said. “Like belly-dancing, only higher-brow.” She did the eyebrow again to underscore the pun.
I tried to duplicate the maneuver. I felt my whole face contort with the effort. She grimaced in mock horror. I took another run at it; this time, I felt my scalp shifting and my ears twitching. “Ow. I think I just pulled a muscle I didn’t know I had.”
She shook her head and patted my arm. “There, there. We all have our special talents. I’m sure you’ll discover yours one of these days.”
“Hmph,” I said. “Now you’re patronizing me.”
“Everybody needs a patron,” she said.
I opened the cabinet and pulled out a tall glass, then filled it with ice cubes from the freezer and handed it to her. She set it on the counter and half filled it with vodka, which she topped off with cranberry juice.
“You don’t need to measure?”
“It’s not chemistry lab,” she said. “Plenty of margin for error.” She took a long pull and smiled happily. “Ah, just what the doctor ordered. You sure I can’t corrupt you?”
“Pretty sure,” I said. “I can barely keep up with you sober. I wouldn’t have a prayer if I were impaired.”
“You would if I were more impaired,” she said, taking another swig.
I took this as a sign that it was time to put the steaks on. I opened the fridge, took out the steaks, and unwrapped the white butcher paper. They were big, thick filets, nearly as tall as they were wide, wrapped in bacon. I’d picked them up at the Fresh Market, the grocery store on the edge of Sequoyah Hills. Sequoyah is Knoxville’s ritziest neighborhood, unless you count some of the suburbs to the west, in Farragut. Normally I shopped at Kroger-not the Fellini Kroger, but a far closer and far tamer one-but the Fresh Market’s meat was the best in town. It was actually worth paying Sequoyah Hills prices for.
My house was in Sequoyah Hills, but it was not of Sequoyah Hills, to borrow a prepositional distinction Jesus once made to his followers about their relationship to the world. I had an archetypally common ranch house-an extra-ordinary house, I sometimes called it-which shared a shady circle with a half dozen other ranchers. The only remarkable thing about them was the way they were surrounded by hundreds of mansions. Whenever things got dangerously ostentatious in the neighborhood-a fancy symphony party or political fund-raiser at the Versailles-like palace around the corner, attended by glittering people in formal wear-it comforted me to imagine our modest homes as pioneer wagons, circled for self-protection. If our protective circle were ever breached, it probably wouldn’t take long before every ranch house on the street got torn down and replaced with some stucco-slathered behemoth three or four times as big, crowding its property lines and its equally steroidal neighbors. Not that I was bitter or anything.
Plopping the steaks on a plate, I sprinkled both sides with salt and pepper, rubbing the seasonings in, then dashed some Worcestershire sauce on top to add a little zing.
Jess nodded approvingly. “You gonna put some sizzle in that steak?”
“Gonna try.”
“How you cooking them?”
“I’m a guy; on the grill, of course.”
“Gas or charcoal?”
“Be a waste of a good steak to cook it over gas,” I said.