The Tell A Novel by Hester Kaplan

Author:Hester Kaplan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780062184030
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-12-19T05:00:00+00:00

9

Downtown was emptying out at 5:30 on a Tuesday. Owen watched the Department of Corrections van back out of the courthouse lot and slide into traffic. He couldn’t see through the dark windows, but he knew those inside could see him. At Kennedy Plaza, people waited for their buses, some forced to stand beyond the reach of the skimpy, overcrowded shelter. They perched on the curb with the tilt of impatience. In the soft rain, nylon parkas gleamed like rock and shopping bags slumped on the pavement. Christmas decorations, left hanging into January, still festooned the decidedly unfestive plaza, a crisscross of slushy walks bordered by winter trees and ringed by the city’s few tall buildings. At one end, the glass elevator of the Biltmore rose over the park and a cluster of wet men hanging out by the waterless fountain. This center of the city—scene of frequent high school fights and, recently, the death of a drug addict who was run over by a bus that refused to let him board—was gazed upon indulgently by City Hall. The building’s ornate façade presented a perverse kind of civic pride. We might be provincial and historied with corruption, but this is who we are, the city proclaimed. Providence—the entire state, in fact—was without pretension but full of self-importance.

Owen passed the skating rink on his way to the Donnell Building, which he’d been summoned to by Mike Levi. He assumed Mike was going to fire him for not showing up to one too many tutoring appointments. He deserved it, after all. Squealing skaters were undeterred by the rain. Overbundled, they moved across the ice like Frankensteins. He’d watched Wilton move the same way down his slick, ice-coated driveway a few days earlier. He’d had a lean, distracted look and shivered in a sweater that hung open at the neck. The man wasn’t made for winter. Mira said Wilton kept the thermostat in his house turned up high to blast hot air into rooms he never even entered. It was a profligate and lonely luxury.

Mike’s company, Educational Excellence Consultants (EEC—sounds like eek! Mira had pointed out once), newly occupied the far corner of the third floor. The elevator still smelled of someone’s lunch and old coffee. He felt the stuffy, adenoidal silence of office buildings. The view at the end of the hallway was of the low backsides of other buildings, the tops of revolving doors and heads emerging one by one, without umbrellas. On the walls of the reception area, where Owen waited for Mike to get off the phone, were framed letters from grateful parents, thanking EEC for helping their daughter realize her potential, brightening their son’s future, building their child’s confidence. The testimonials were breathless, written as though Mike and his corps of tutors, coaches, and advisors had heroically pulled these already too advantaged children from the academic trash heap. For some of the parents of his Spruance students, struggle might have already gripped and staggered their lives, but more than anything, they wanted to spare their kids the same disenchantment they’d faced.

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