I was your age. I guess there are two of us who know the trick.”
“The trick?”
“With your eyes closed the mirrors can’t fool you.”
Davey squints up at him, the beginning of farsightedness. “Didn’t I see you before?”
“Maybe. I’ve been around the carnival all night.”
Davey takes a step, bumps into the glass hard, laughs, and then makes faces at himself. In the mirror a dozen boys are grinning madly.
A white ball of fur lay sprawled across the breakfast table, basking in the slanting light from the bay window. Amy sat on the bench, stroking Casper’s head with one hand and holding a book in the other. Simon dropped a yellow legal pad on the table and slipped in on the opposite side. He poked the cat in the rear a few times with his pen. No response. “I gather we’ve given up trying to keep Casper off our eating surfaces.”
“She does it all day when we’re not here, so why bother?” Amy turned back to a bookmarked page. “What do you think of this? ‘People only grow around sadness.’ ”
“Sounds right, I guess. Who said it?” Amy held up the book:—Semrad: The Heart of a Therapist. He figured that he was supposed to know who Semrad was. She had probably mentioned him dozens of times.
“He mentored a generation of therapists in how to connect to their patients with their heart, not just their heads. But I think he got it backward. People don’t grow when they’re sad, they’re too busy being sad. The same if people are angry or depressed or in pain—they get trapped in these emotions.”
“You’re disagreeing with the eminent Semrad?”
“Daring, aren’t I?”
Simon wrote on his pad, and Amy let her book close over her finger. “Doing your column?”
“I’m taking to heart your suggestion that the postcard sender is a threat and making a list of all the people who might want to fold, spindle, or mutilate me.” He scribbled a name, and Amy leaned across the table to see.
“Who’s Ray Jefferson?”
“My first roommate after college. I told him he had to move out after his year was up.”
“Why did you do that?”
Simon tried to project back to his former self. “He seemed fake to me. He’d say things like, ‘I love the smell of winter, don’t you?’ and ‘Making music is like making love’—that’s another one. He was pretending to be sensitive.”
“Maybe he thought you’d like that about him.”
“Why would I care how sensitive he was?”
Amy shrugged. “Sensitivity is one of those positive qualities a person can have.”
“Not to a twenty-two-year-old male it isn’t.”
“Wait—he wasn’t gay, was he?”
“No, I didn’t kick him out because he was gay or I thought he was gay, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“So how did he react?”
Simon remembered the expression on Ray’s face, a strange mixture of embarrassment and disbelief with a dose of hatred. “He said he’d fall apart if I kicked him out, and I guess he did for a while, with cocaine, went to jail for eighteen months. I can imagine him blaming me.”
Amy reached her hand to stroke Casper, and the cat stretched out, exposing her belly. “You think twenty years later he’d still be blaming you?”
“I don’t know,” Simon said. “He was the kind to carry a grudge.”
When Simon called Davey for dinner, the boy came rushing down the steps as always, one misstep away from plunging headlong into the front door. At the bottom he grabbed the post to turn into the hallway, and Simon saw a thin metal handle jutting from his back pocket. “Hold on, what’s that?”
Davey twisted around to see. “What?”
“Is that a knife?”
He pulled it out. “No, it’s a letter opener.”
“A letter opener is a knife.”
The boy rubbed his finger along the blade. “Not when it’s this crappy. It couldn’t cut soup.”
Simon put out his palm, and Davey handed it over, blade first. “Why did you take this off my bureau?”
“Why would I take your stupid old letter opener?”
“That’s what I’m asking you.”
“I found it on the stairs, okay? It was sticking out from the rug.” He pointed to the spot. “You shouldn’t leave your knife lying around like that, Dad, ’cause I could have stepped on it with my bare feet and got lockjaw.”
“I didn’t leave it on the steps, Davey.”
“Does your jaw really lock when you get lockjaw?”
“It can, if you don’t get a tetanus shot.”
“Then I better eat dinner fast.” He started for the kitchen.
“Wait, you didn’t take this out anywhere, did you?”
Davey hesitated. “Not really.”
“What does that mean?”
“I put