All I Love and Know by Judith Frank

Author:Judith Frank
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062302885
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-06-06T16:00:00+00:00

HE LOOKED UP AT April, his heart sinking. “They read the story in the Globe,” she said, handing it to him with the pages folded back to the article. Terrifyingly prepared, she had highlighted in yellow the paragraph where he talked about the terrorist.

“I wasn’t speaking as college editor,” he said, scanning it again for signs of extremism, or of having misspoken.

“That’s what I told the president.”

The president: he absorbed the fact that they had discussed him. “Am I in trouble?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I just wanted to let you know that this is happening. This isn’t the only letter; it’s the most judicious of the lot.” She pulled out another letter. “This one basically says the same thing, but it adds, ‘I pity Mr. Rosen, who will realize soon enough that when one has children, one cannot always afford the politically correct position.’ ” She looked up at him and he wondered why she’d felt compelled to read that to him. “And then there’s the one that says, ‘What’s next? Inviting terrorists to speak on campus?’ ” The corners of her mouth rose in a wan attempt at wryness.

“What do you want me to do, April?” he asked.

“What’s done is done,” she said. “I just wanted to alert you to it.”

“I didn’t go to the Boston Globe,” he said, provoked by the long-suffering quality he heard in her voice. “It was a local human interest story, for God’s sake. I never imagined it would get picked up by the wires.” He felt his throat catching with righteous intensity. “I turned down a request to be on a Boston TV news program, did you know that?”

“I didn’t know that,” April said.

“Are these people who wrote in important donors?” he asked.

She paused, then answered, “Not important ones.”

How, he wondered, had he become this person—a needy liability at work, blamed for the bad things that happened to him? He was good at what he did, great at it even, he knew that. But now he felt like one of those single moms who’s chronically late for her shitty, low-paying job because she has to take two buses to get there, and one is always late or packed to the gills with passengers and sailing past her as she frantically tries to wave it down.

“They weren’t even big donors!” he raged to Matt when he got home. “So why did she feel it necessary to call me out? Did it hurt the college in any way? No. Did it affect my ability to do my job in any way? No. Did it have anything whatsoever to do with the fucking alumni magazine? No.”

He was getting into the tight, hyperlogical argumentative mode he got in when he was truly furious. Matt, sitting at his desk, trying to get a little more work done before Michelle brought the kids home, knew that at any moment he might need to duck for cover. “She’s an asshole,” he said.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Daniel said. “I

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