Kohler was in the game room in the basement, knocking balls around a pool table for his own amusement. He was big enough that the cue looked small in his hands. Amanda re-introduced me and, mortifyingly, told him I was looking for a job.
“Actually I’m not,” I said. “I mean, I can’t. I have a student work permit, but I’m not a student anymore. I don’t even have a visa.” I explained again about my family situation.
“Finished three years at Sheridan?” Kohler asked.
“Yeah, but—”
“Tell me what courses you took.”
I listed them.
“Okay,” he said. “Promising. What kind of grades were you pulling down?”
I told him.
“Sounds like someone you could use,” suggested Amanda.
Kohler said, “What I’m setting up is basically a media-access and marketing business. People come to us, we give them what they want at whatever price point they can afford—TV, Internet, direct mail, anything from a full-court integrated ad campaign to a guy handing out leaflets on a street corner. So yeah, Amanda’s right, I’m looking to hire folks with the appropriate skills. If you’re up to speed on CSS and JavaScript, I can start you next week.”
“That’s amazingly generous, and it’s tempting, but like I said, I don’t have a valid work permit—”
“I have a legal guy who can expedite the paperwork. And I’m willing to advance you your salary until you’re authorized. Do you want to talk about salary?”
He cited numbers that seemed ridiculously generous. I nodded and said, “But, wait—I would love to do this but I’m kind of—”
“He’s new,” Amanda said, as if this explained something.
“I’d have to find a place to stay—”
“Lisa!” Kohler roared. He was a big man. Big chest cavity. He could roar pretty impressively. I tried not to flinch. “Loretta! Amanda, are the Sob Sisters upstairs?”
Lisa Wei came into the room before she could answer. “Keep your voice down, Walter; I’m sure they can hear you in Vancouver. What is it?”
“Homeless waif. A loose Tau.”
“Really?” Lisa took my hand and gave me a motherly look. Or what I imagined was a motherly look. I didn’t remember my own mother very clearly. “Well, then, you have to stay with us! There are a couple of rooms you can choose from. Tonight isn’t too soon, you know, if you don’t have anywhere to go.”
“My lease is good to the end of the month, but—”
“Then you can move in anytime. Welcome home, Adam! I’ll tell Loretta we have a new roomer.”
The next sound I heard was Amanda, laughing at the expression on my face.
“We call them the Sob Sisters,” Amanda said, “because they don’t mind if you cry on their shoulders. You don’t need to worry about imposing. Lisa and Loretta love having company. Tau company, anyway. So maybe I’ll see you next time, Adam.”
“Are you leaving?”
“Soon. It’s pretty late. I need to say my good-byes.” She hugged me and walked away.
But that was fine. A small miracle had taken place: somehow, over the course of a few hours, I had internalized the idea that I was among family—not the messy modus vivendi my Schuyler relations had arrived at, but family in a better and truer sense of the word. And for another forty-five minutes I drifted through the thinning crowd with a sheepish and slightly stoned grin on my face, striking up conversations that inevitably seemed to begin and end in mid-sentence. “Newbie euphoria,” someone called it. Fine. Yes. Exactly.
I caught a last glimpse of Amanda Mehta as she left the house. Dismayingly, she was on the arm of someone I hadn’t been introduced to. A big guy—huge, actually—with a shaved head and black Maori-style tattoos all over his face.
“Is that her boyfriend?” I asked Lisa Wei, who had come to stand beside me, looking at the end of the evening like a slightly tattered apple doll.
“That’s Trevor Holst. Amanda’s roommate.”
Lisa registered my questioning look but wouldn’t say more. Amanda waved to the room as the door was closing—at everyone, but I chose to take it personally.
“I should have thanked her,” I said.
“Thank her next time.”
“And, I mean, you, too. And Loretta. And Walter. For, well, everything.”
“You’d do the same in our place,” Lisa said calmly. “And sooner or later, you will.”
Chapter 4
The first big storm of the winter announced itself on a Friday in December. For two days a low-pressure cell rotated over the city like a millstone, grinding clouds into snow. All weekend, those of us who lived in the house and a handful of our tranchemates took turns excavating the driveway. Lisa and Loretta could have afforded a removal service, but we wouldn’t let them pay for labor any able-bodied Tau could perform. By Monday morning the streets were mostly passable and I was able to get to work; at the end of the day I made my way home under streetlights that bled a muddy orange glow, the color of pill bottles and chronic depression.
But I wasn’t depressed, just tired. Tired enough to slow down for the familiar quarter-mile walk from the subway; tired enough to be, as Amanda liked to say, in the moment, thinking about nothing in particular and paying casual attention to the street, the sidewalk, the few flakes of snow silting from a cloud-locked sky. I cataloged the cars parked by curbside, some still cloaked in the white burqas of the weekend blizzard. Which is how I happened to notice a Toyota Venza idling in the curb zone not far from the house. The skin of snow adhering to it suggested it had been in place for at least an hour. Much of its glass was opaque with condensation, but the moisture had been swiped from the side windows and windshield. Which meant I could see the shape of the car’s sole occupant: a man in a navy-blue parka who quickly turned away when he saw me looking.
There was nothing very unusual about this, but the long shadows of the streetlights gave it a film-noir ambience, a hint of mystery, enough so that I mentioned it to Lisa when I came into the house and found her in the kitchen fixing a paella de marisco so fragrant I wished I had something better in store for my own dinner than ramen and bagged salad. “There’s enough for three,” she said, tranche telepathy operating at optimum sensitivity, but I shook my head and asked whether she knew anybody who drove a green Venza.
She put her spoon on the counter and gave me her full attention. “Why do you ask?”
Which caused my own tranche telepathy to emit a cautionary buzz. “Because it’s outside idling, and the guy at the wheel looks,” I tried to make this light-hearted, “furtive.”
“Oh. I see.” Lisa exchanged a look with Loretta, who had come in from the next room with her finger marking her place in a hardcover novel.
“What? Is it somebody you know?”
“Adam, did you happen to notice the license number?”
“No—why would I notice the license number?”
Like two gray-feathered birds of distinct species cohabiting a single telephone wire, Lisa and Loretta frowned in concert. Lisa, ordinarily the voluble one, seemed reluctant to speak. Loretta, who seldom opened her mouth unless a word seemed urgent, said, “I’ll call Trevor. Should we tell Mouse?”
“Maybe not,” Lisa said. “I mean, until we’re sure…”