The End of an Error by Mameve Medwed

Author:Mameve Medwed
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061969997
Publisher: HarperCollins

Six

This morning Ben is getting ready to leave for Chicago, for the meeting of the Organization of American Historians. Lee offers to drive him to the Bangor airport. “I don’t have to be at the college until noon,” she says.

“Don’t bother,” he says. “I’ll take the car and park it there. Airport good-byes always remind me of Casablanca.”

Lee is about to say, Bangor, alas, is not Casablanca. You and I, alas, are not Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, but changes her mind. “You’ll be great,” she encourages.

“You think?” he asks.

“Not think. Know.”

He smiles. He checks his briefcase for the paper on Nathaniel’s view of labor relations along the Allagash. He runs his hand over the bright blue binding in its plastic sheath. Lee remembers the book covers they used to make out of wax paper when she was in grammar school. “So if you dribble jam on Treasure Island, you will avert a disaster,” her teacher pointed out. A contingency that made sense, Lee had realized, only if the book was closed, only if you weren’t reading it.

Ben snaps the two briefcase clips shut, then spins the dial on its center lock. Its combination, like their bank IDs, credit card PINs, telephone passwords, Internet access codes, marks the day, month, and year of their first date.

“Where could your paper have disappeared to,” Lee asks, “between now and breakfast when you last confirmed it was there?” Tucked into his pocket is the backup disk containing not only his paper but his whole Nathaniel Tarbell oeuvre. At the bottom of his garment bag lies an extra printout, in the event of an emergency.

“I have seen more than one briefcase the spitting image of mine.”

“With your name on it?”

“Anything’s possible.”

“Locked with the precise combination of numbers as our first date?”

“Why not? ‘Caution is its own reward,’ Nathaniel always said.” He pats his bag. “The quote is right in here.” He frowns. “You know where my extra copies are? On the top of the file cabinet. The one behind the closet door next to my desk.”

“Ben!” Lee laughs.

“Some things aren’t funny. If I lost—”

“Impossible!”

He holds up his hands. “I’m acting silly.”

“I’ll say.”

“Still, even taking into account paranoia, bad things can happen once you step out of your own backyard.”

“As if disasters can’t occur right in your own backyard. Within a foot of your kitchen sink.”

He shrugs. “I guess it’s the prospect of leaving home…”

“Not that you haven’t done it before.”

“But I’m getting older. More stuck in my ways. And in the past, you’ve usually been at my side.”

That’s true, she agrees. She’s spent more hours than she’d care to count sitting on the folding chairs and bar stools supplied by Westins and Marriotts and Holiday Inns; she’s filled whole days as a glazed-eyed attendant at panels on hay threshing methods or colonial courtship rituals; she’s been trapped in corridors as an unwitting witness to dueling theorists and plagiarism accusations—all courtesy of the Organization of American Historians. Except for the time of her grandmother’s death, she can name hardly a night when she and Ben didn’t share a bed.

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