Look Closer

by David Ellis

The best lies are the ones closest to the truth.

Simon has often joked that he has Irish Alzheimer’s—he only remembers the slights, the grudges.

“Tear” and “tier” are pronounced the same but “tear” and “tear” are not. “Fat chance” and “slim chance” mean the same thing. I dig into my email. Not the In-Box or the Sent but the Drafts folder. “Arkansas” and “Kansas” are pronounced differently. We drive on a parkway but park in a driveway. If a vegetarian eats vegetables, is a humanitarian a cannibal?

“Don’t speak unless you have something to say,” she used to say to me during our talks when she tucked me in. “But when you do choose to speak, say what you mean, mean what you say, and be ready to support your points. If you can’t support your point of view, then it wasn’t much of a point of view to begin with.”

Nobody pays attention to a woman in workout clothes, power walking through a neighborhood, headphones on, even if nobody recognizes her, even if she tends to stop on the sidewalk outside a particular house every day. For men, it’s different. Strange men who linger are creepy, potential stalkers, someone to keep an eye on. A woman? A woman can walk a regular route every day and nobody will notice.

But that’s what you do with the people you love. You trust them. You trust them until they prove you wrong. Until they betray you. And then, you react however you’re wired to react.

It’s almost humorous. This guy’s a con artist himself, in cahoots with a fellow swindler. And yet the possibility that someone swindled them seems beyond his capacity at the moment.

It’s a lot easier to fool someone than to convince someone they’ve been fooled.

The only exercise I get is when I jump to conclusions, right?”

“I don’t believe I invited you in, Jane.” “I’m not a vampire.”

Virtually every moral code and penal code would condemn my actions. I analogize it to the law of war, instead. My father and Lauren declared war on my mother and me. They killed her, and I killed them back.