what I was about to say. He lowered his head and stared at me. That gilded octopus ticked on the wall. I took a deep breath, and when I spoke I whispered in a childish way that I immediately found shameful but which riveted them.
Please don’t tell Mom I said this. Please?
Joe, said my father. He took off his glasses and set them on the table.
Please?
Joe.
All right. That afternoon when Mom went to the office there was a phone call. When she put the phone down, I could tell she was upset. Then about an hour afterward she said she was going after a file. A week ago, I remembered about the file. So I asked her if they found the file. She said there was no file. She said that I should never mention a file. But there was a file. She went after it. That file is why this happened.
I stopped talking and my mouth hung open. We stared at one another like three dummies with crumbs on our chins.
That is not all, said my father suddenly. That is not all you know.
He leaned over the table in that way he had. He loomed, he seemed to grow. I thought about the money first, of course, but I was not about to give that up and anyway to speak about it now would also implicate Sonja, and I would never betray her. I tried to shrug it off.
That’s it, I said. Nothing else. But he just loomed. So I gave up a lesser secret, which is often the way we satisfy someone who knows, and knows that he knows, as my father did then.
All right.
Bjerke leaned forward too. I pushed my chair back, a little wildly.
Take it easy, said my dad. Just tell what you know.
That day we went out to the round house and found the gas can, well, we found something else there too. Across the fence line, down by the lakeshore. There was a cooler and a pile of clothes. We didn’t touch the clothes.
What about the cooler? asked Bjerke.
Well, I believe we opened that.
What was in it? asked my father.
Beer cans.
I was about to say they were empty and then I looked at my father and knew that a denial was beneath me and a lie would embarrass both of us in front of Bjerke.
Two six-packs, I said.
Bjerke and my father looked at each other, nodded, and sat back in their chairs.
Just like that I ratted out my friends in order to hide the fact of the money. I sat stunned at how quickly it had happened. I was also shocked at how perfectly my admission covered up the forty thousand dollars I had just secured that very day with Sonja’s help. Or under Sonja’s direction. It was me helping Sonja, after all. She was the one who’d had the idea. She was the one who hadn’t gone to my father or to the police. She was an adult and so theoretically she was responsible for what had happened that day. I could always take refuge in that, I thought, and that I had this idea surprised and then humiliated me so that, sitting there before my father and Bjerke, I began to sweat and I felt my heart quicken and my throat seize tight.
I jumped up.
I gotta go!
Did he smell like beer? I heard my father ask.
No, said Bjerke.
I locked myself in the bathroom and could hear them talking out there. If there’d been a window easy to open I might have jumped out and run. I put my hands under the water and muttered words and very deliberately did not look into the mirror.
When I came back out and slunk to the table, I saw a slip of paper next to my empty cake plate and milk glass.
Read it, said my father.
I sat down. It was a citation, though just on scrap paper. Underage drinking. It mentioned juvenile detention.
Should I cite your friends too?
I drank both six-packs. I paused. Over time.
Where would we find the cans? asked Bjerke.
They’re gone. Crushed up. Thrown out. They were Hamm’s.
Bjerke didn’t seem to think the brand was remarkable. He didn’t even jot this down.
That area was under surveillance, he said. We knew about the cooler and the clothes, but they don’t belong to the attacker. Bugger Pourier came home from Minneapolis to see his dying mother. She kicked him out, as usual, and he moved in down there. We were hoping he’d come get his beer.