The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,51

two decades—and he said nothing, and eventually their talk exhausted itself, until their silent gathering was overwhelmed by the sounds of a lacrosse game on the cable television in the bar, as the programmers quietly fingered scattered french fries and rattled glasses of iced tea while the play-by-play man screamed, “Spinning! Shooting! Score!”

“Hey, my nine-year-old said something really funny the other day,” Mary Dickerson said suddenly, startling everyone to attention. She was a frumpy, raspy-voiced woman and the underling closest in age to her boss.

“And what was that?” said Scott, who was the only other person at the table with children.

“Well, I guess he’s been listening to me and his dad talk a lot, because he asked me, ‘Mommy, which is worse: a fool, or an idiot?’ “

“Good question!”

“I’ve often wondered that myself!”

“So what did you tell him?”

“ ‘Well, Patrick,’ I said, ‘a fool is someone who is aware that they’re stupid, sort of, and doesn’t care. You know, like a court jester. At least that’s how I understand the word “fool.” And an idiot is someone with, how should I say, a medical condition. They just can’t help being stupid. Which one is worse is, I guess, in the eye of the beholder.’ “

“Good answer!”

“We aren’t allowed to use the word ‘stupid’ in my household,” Scott said, rolling his eyes.

“So what did your little boy say?”

“He said he thought it was worse to be an idiot. And then he went back to playing his Game Boy.”

Moments later, the check arrived, setting off a round of programmer stretches, sighs, and yawns. By the time the waitress returned with Scott’s credit card in a leather holder, Mary Dickerson was already on her feet and ready to leave.

“I’m sorry, but the system is rejecting this card,” the waitress said with a no-nonsense directness that contrasted markedly with her cheer-iness when she first took their order more than two hours earlier. She was a tall black woman in her forties, her safari uniform covered midway through her shift with salsa and coffee stains: her suddenly stern demeanor caused the procession of programmers toward the front door to stop.

“What’s going on, Scott?” Mary Dickerson said, more as a rebuke than a question.

“Are you sure?” Scott asked the waitress.

“Yes, honey. I am. Shall we try another one?”

Scott opened his wallet, quickly surveyed the various plastic representations of creditworthiness and family photographs contained therein, and concluded that rather than taking a chance on a second card, the best course of action would be to make a run to the nearest automated teller machine. He looked at his now-standing employees, who were all staring at him as one does a second-rate substitute teacher in junior high school, and remembered that there was a dispenser of cash about three or four hundred yards away, at the other end of the asphalt lake upon which this restaurant, an armada of automobiles, and a dozen commercial establishments floated. Scott would hop into his car and drive to the machine and the round trip would take less than two minutes. “I’ll be right back,” he said to the waitress.

“What?”

“Just gotta get some cash.” He could feel the discomfort of his employees’ forced gathering propelling them toward the door. “Sit down. Don’t leave. Please.” Mary Dickerson glared at him with her mouth agape as he rushed out the door.

When he returned, six minutes and forty-five seconds later according to the timer function on his watch, a Mexican busboy was wiping off the empty table, whistling the melody of a reggaeton song, and all of Scott’s employees were gone except for Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki, who greeted him by the cash register with a sympathetic grin.

“We all just paid it, split it eight ways,” she said. “Everyone really wanted to go. So I paid your share.”

Which am I now? Scott wondered. A fool or an idiot?

Back at the office, it took sixty seconds at his computer terminal for Scott to uncover his wife’s latest credit-card betrayal. At the top of his online statement there was a charge from a company called Desert Landscaping for an astonishing four-figure amount, as much as he would have paid Pepe the gardener for two years of work, if not more. The cactus garden, he could now see, was another obnoxious vanity foisted upon him by his wife, equivalent to three months of their inflated, adjustable-rate mortgage payments, which were the chief obstacle to Scott getting their finances back into the black again, along with the several thousand dollars he