Ask Again, Yes

by Mary Beth Keane

That was another thing about America. Everyone was Irish, but back a ways.

People went to Mass in shorts and T-shirts here. Not long ago he’d seen a woman driving a taxi. People walked around Times Square in their knickers.

because you try it and try it and try it a little longer and next thing it’s who you are.

“The pregnant wife is why he’s staying out,” one of the others cracked.

Gross

It was the bride’s day anyway.

Every moment Francis spent there, he said, he felt like he should be offering to help with something, do something.

But it was a good kill, they all said, because the man was a known junkie and had been armed.

The man had had a mother. He’d been a father. He hadn’t always been a junkie.

“Should I stay here until November?”

It was so unexpected she started laughing. Then she was laughing so hard she was crying again.

Once, at work, when Lena was passed over for a promotion, her boss Mr. Eden had said that it was no reflection of Lena’s performance, it was just that the other woman had more presence, and the promotion would mean greeting clients.

Now she wondered if presence was the thing her new neighbor had, if it was something a person had to be born with and could never be learned.

Every woman learns on the job.

“Of course you can!” she said finally. “I just know it’s hard in the beginning so I thought—” “It’s not hard at all. He’s a perfect baby. We’re fine.”

Peter could feel her frenetic buzzing all the way from his seat, two rows away.

She paused at their seat to let him slide past—since kindergarten he’d been sitting by the window.

Kate knelt facing backward so that she could see and talk to everyone.

she looked around like it was the most obvious thing in the world, like it was a completely normal thing for her to join the game when in fact in all the years they’d been at St. Bartholomew’s no girl had ever played before.

Over the years, whenever the subject of Peter’s parents came up, Kate studied him and was uncharacteristically quiet.

They watched her park her car, hurry into the house without looking left or right or saying hello to anyone.

“Okay, well, you’ll ask, right?” Kate said. “You might be allowed.”

glass. She had a way of cringing and closing her eyes as if against the sight of something too painful to look at straight on, except it was just Peter, just his father.

So he’d put it somewhere safe. But where?

It occurred to Peter that his father actually liked these periods where she disappeared to her room for a few days.

And when she did emerge after a few days, she usually emerged as Peter’s favorite version of his mother. She’d been tired and needed rest, Peter figured, and she’d gotten it.

“I saw them. Go on. Have fun.”

because her mind was that sharp at moments like this, everything spotlighted so that details she’d overlooked were now glaringly obvious—that in fact they’d orchestrated her exclusion for private, petty reasons that weren’t worth trying to understand. They smirked and nodded and gave each other signals. They’d banded together and decided that number fifty-one would get skipped.

Death was something for grown-ups to worry about but, still, he knew that when his time came he didn’t want it to come at Food King.

“Plus it’s different for women,”

Peter felt like telling him that

he and his father had put up their tree. He alone had baked cookies when the day came for the class bake sale.

They had no brains for nuance. They had no conception of a way of thinking that was different

“You’re exactly like him,”

His father used to golf, Peter knew, or at least he’d purchased a set of clubs in hopes of learning.

Kate’s legs were scabbed from a weekend softball game where she’d slid badly into third base.

A home run meant they could watch her boobs move under her uniform shirt as she ran around the bases.

We will leave them all one day, Peter thought, not for the first time. We’ll live on our own and we won’t have to listen to any of these people.

Does it bother you that everyone hates you?”