The Testing of Luther Albright by MacKenzie Bezos

Author:MacKenzie Bezos
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061758096
Publisher: HarperCollins

THE EVENING MIGHT HAVE GONE DIFFERENTLY IF I HAD BEEN A better predictor, at this point, of what my son would do, but in that respect I think it is clear that I had never had much intuition. I had guessed that he would have pointed questions about my story. So on the way home, tapping the brake pedal in traffic, I had rehearsed answers to these. Then, because I wanted to afford it as little importance as possible, I told them in the kitchen. Liz was generally garrulous, I had noticed, when she came home from the Crisis Center: a little flushed and talking fast and quick to laugh. Counting on this, I did not do it as soon as I arrived home, but instead waited until she finished a story of how she had gone to her hairdresser to touch up Peggy’s cut and he had not recognized her.

Maybe things went worse because of how entering upon this simple exchange unsettled me. Liz was in the kitchen unwrapping barbecue sandwiches onto our plates. She was only a few sentences into her story, but somehow my small sense of being a bystander in my own kitchen was magnified by the memory of my disorientation the night of her haircut, and the way the quality of Elliot’s attention made me imagine that he and Liz had talked about Peggy since then, maybe even about that underwear, and that if I was right about this Liz had not even tried to share her knowledge with me. I set my briefcase down and took off my suit coat in a weak attempt both to busy myself and to bridge the gap between us, and Liz, in a gesture of courtesy that was at once kind and surprisingly sad, turned a little to include me.

“He was giving me directions to a place called Counter Culture Cuts when I said, ‘Danny, it’s me, Liz,’ and he almost poked his customer in the cheek with his scissors he was so surprised. He asked all the other stylists over to look at me, and then he told me he could shape it into a soft Dorothy-Hamill-kind-of-thing.”

Elliot snorted, and she laughed with him.

She said, “He was flipping through a magazine to show me pictures before I could explain that I liked it. I said, ‘You’re like a small-town barber with your don’t-worry-we-can-fix-its. I just want you to touch it up. I actually want to keep this same cut.’”

Elliot laughed again, but his eyes shifted towards me, and in hindsight it is sweet I suppose, that his sense of my outsider status made him uncomfortable. But to dispel the awkwardness of this, I said, “Something funny happened to me today too. A reporter called to try to get me to say something interesting about the investigation for an earthquake scare piece. It was like something from a spy movie. She tried to pretend to be somebody I knew.”

Liz’s eyes grew wide for less than a second. This was worse.

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