With that, Dysart rose and stalked out of the room. Rob’s feeling of surreal disbelief ratcheted up to a whole new level as he watched Dysart go.
Kelleher took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Well, people,” he said, “I’d say we have some work to do.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Late at night in his cubicle, Tim leaned forward in his chair and hit the Page Down key occasionally while he stared at the computer monitor. He was skimming through the AMS computer programs, supposedly looking for any irregularities. He went slowly on purpose, since he knew there was nothing to find.
The calmness of his face belied the energy that churned within. He had burned up so much nervous adrenaline that day that he felt like a wrung-out dishcloth. What a rush to watch everyone running around like mice on exercise wheels. After all the months of planning and scheming, he couldn’t believe this day had actually arrived. A big part of him was still terrified that something he hadn’t anticipated would rear up and derail everything. So far, though, everything had played out exactly as he predicted. He had to wait another twelve hours for the next step in his plan, but he didn’t mind. Tim was good at waiting. After all, he had been doing it for most of his life.
As a young child he had waited for his parents to realize the world didn’t revolve around his older sister. His mother was forever talking on the phone with her friend Glenna about Kathleen’s track and field ribbons, and straight-A report cards, and later her oh-so-polite boyfriends.
In high school Tim waited to work up the nerve when he wanted to ask a girl for a date. He even managed to blurt out the words a time or two, not that it did much good. He usually received a rude “No, I’m busy that night.” Or even worse, the time Karen Cunningham stared at him in silent horror and then walked away shaking her head. She spent the next week reliving the event with anyone who would listen, using “can you imagine?” as her punctuation of choice.
Becky Farmer accepted his invitation to the Christmas dance once. The two of them stood to one side of the school gym and hardly spoke to each other the entire evening. Tim remembered feeling relieved during the times one of Becky’s friends wandered by and talked with her for a few minutes before rejoining the milling groups of Popular People. At the end of their walk home, she muttered a quick “Good night” and escaped up her front walk.
So he waited for someone comfortable, for the chance to be himself. He waited until his junior year when the McGrath family fled the New York City rat race by moving to Worcester, Massachusetts and bringing Lesley into his life.
Not that Tim was in her life, at least not at first. She was self-assured and pretty — gorgeous, actually — and was immediately swallowed up by the popular people. But he watched her and he could tell. She wasn’t snotty like the others. The barbs and cruel shots still jabbed out to sting him when he passed the knots of girls chatting in the corners, their school books clutched against perfect breasts he would never know. But Lesley just frowned when this happened, never joined in. And she always smiled at him when they passed in the hallway.
Before long he was waiting for Lesley, waiting to talk to her when none of the others were around to make him all tongue-tied.
He finally got his chance on a Saturday afternoon in his senior year. It was one of those late September days when the air had just enough bite to feel really good as you drew it in. The sun was so strong your shadow was practically etched on the ground, dark and sharp-edged so it seemed the shadow would stay there after you moved on.
Tim’s mother drafted him into her service that afternoon at the Johnny Appleseed U-Pick. He did his best to beg off going but to no avail. She needed his long arms to pluck those hard-to-reach gems from the topmost branches, where the apples would be red all around and not half yellow like the ones further down that she felt just anyone could pick.
She stood at the foot of the ladder and supervised the entire operation with the tenacity of a drill sergeant, pointing out this one and that, rejecting many perfectly delectable specimens after he pulled them off and showed them to her.
Tim’s father didn’t have the patience for this foolishness. He preferred to wait by the car, Marlboro in hand, until all the agonizing decisions had been made. Then it was his job to pony up the required six dollars and fifty cents — not, of course, without grumbling that the people who owned the U-pick were probably making an outrageous profit on the transaction.
At one point his mother had to walk back to the shed to get a different basket from the folks who owned the orchard. One of the baskets they had given her had a sharp point sticking up from inside, of all things, which was likely to poke her when she reached in for an apple and she wasn’t going to stand for it thank you very much. This left Tim at the top of the ladder with nothing to do except close his eyes and enjoy the sunshine on his face. He hadn’t noticed while his mother was harping at him but it was actually kind of pleasant. Tim shined an apple on the front of his shirt and bit off a mouthful of tart crunchiness.
That’s when it happened.
“Hi Tim.”
The patterns of sunlight that made it through the leaves looked like camouflage on Lesley’s white T-shirt and jean overalls.
“Are you picking any,” she asked, “or just working on a tan up there?”
Tim swallowed the bite of apple. “A bit of both, I guess.”
He scrambled down the ladder with all the agility he could muster, which didn’t feel like much.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
Her smile lit up her face. “What do you think? Same as everybody else.”
“No, what I meant was, I didn’t expect to see anyone I know. I mean, my mother basically had to kidnap me to get me to come along. Same thing happen to you?”
He was astounded at how easily the words spilled out.
“Not at all,” she said. “Mom and I have gone apple picking every year since I was a kid. Kind of a tradition, I guess. Autumn comes and we just … go.”
“That’s cool. Different from my family, but cool.”
“And this year was easy. It used to be quite a drive to find an orchard when we lived in New York.”
Tim watched her pony tail bob as she turned away momentarily to check her mother’s whereabouts. Man — so beautiful. This couldn’t be happening. Not only had she come over to talk to him, but he wasn’t even nervous. He knew it; she was different from the others.
“So how does a family from New York end up in Worcester?” he said.
He was surprised to see frown lines appear when she turned back toward him. “Oh, I don’t know.”
He waited for her to finish the thought, but she didn’t.
Tim saw his mother marching back up the hill, replacement basket firmly in grasp. He was struck by the certainty that if he missed this chance then he could stop waiting. Such an opportunity wouldn’t come up again. Gathering his small store of pent-up courage, he stepped to the edge of the cliff of vulnerability and leapt off.
“Are you busy tonight?” he said.
She hesitated, and Tim began to experience ground rush toward the boulder-strewn surface beneath the cliff. His breath caught in his throat. He could feel red heat blossoming on his face.
But then Lesley rescued him by saying, “No, I guess not.”
Tim found he could breathe again. He swallowed and said, “Maybe we could see a movie or something.”
She recovered from her initial hesitancy with incredible grace.
“Sure,” she said with a warm smile.
Tim’s happiness lasted just over three weeks. Twenty-three days filled with texting and studying together and holding hands between classes. Three weeks when he learned to kiss and even flirted with making it to second base. Three weeks when he could hold his head up while traveling the hallways at school, when he was a part of the conversations in the corners, when his self-image started to transform.