بخش 03 - فصل 17

17

Linda Saubers is monitoring the mid-morning activity period at Northfield Elementary School when Peggy Moran comes in and tells her that her daughter has been taken sick at Dorton Middle, some three miles away.

‘She’s in the nurse’s office,’ Peggy says, keeping her voice low. ‘I understand she vomited and then sort of passed out for a few minutes.’

‘Oh my God,’ Linda says. ‘She looked pale at breakfast, but when I asked her if she was okay, she said she was.’

‘That’s the way they are,’ Peggy says, rolling her eyes. ‘It’s either melodrama or I’m fine, Mom, get a life. Go get her and take her home. I’ll cover this, and Mr Jablonski has already called a sub.’

‘You’re a saint.’ Linda is gathering up her books and putting them into her briefcase.

‘It’s probably a stomach thing,’ Peggy says, sliding into the seat Linda has just vacated. ‘I guess you could take her to the nearest Doc in the Box, but why bother spending thirty bucks? That stuff’s going around.’

‘I know,’ Linda says … but she wonders.

She and Tom have been slowly but surely digging themselves out of two pits: a money pit and a marriage pit. The year after Tom’s accident, they came perilously close to breaking up. Then the mystery cash started coming, a kind of miracle, and things started to turn around. They aren’t all the way out of either hole even yet, but Linda has come to believe they will get out.

With their parents focused on brute survival (and Tom, of course, had the additional challenge of recovering from his injuries), the kids have spent far too much time flying on autopilot. It’s only now, when she feels she finally has room to breathe and time to look around her, that Linda clearly senses something not right with Pete and Tina. They’re good kids, smart kids, and she doesn’t think either of them has gotten caught in the usual teenage traps – drink, drugs, shoplifting, sex – but there’s something, and she supposes she knows what it is. She has an idea Tom does, too.

God sent manna from heaven when the Israelites were starving, but cash drops from more prosaic sources: banks, friends, an inheritance, relatives who are in a position to help out. The mystery money didn’t come from any of those sources. Certainly not from relatives. Back in 2010, all their kinfolk were just as strapped as Tom and Linda themselves. Only kids are relatives, too, aren’t they? It’s easy to overlook that because they’re so close, but they are. It’s absurd to think the cash came from Tina, who’d only been nine years old when the envelopes started arriving, and who couldn’t have kept a secret like that, anyway.

Pete, though … he’s the closemouthed one. Linda remembers her mother saying when Pete was only five, ‘That one’s got a lock on his lips.’

Only where could a kid of thirteen have come by that kind of money?

As she drives to Dorton Middle to pick up her ailing daughter, Linda thinks, We never asked any questions, not really, because we were afraid to. No one who didn’t go through those terrible months after Tommy’s accident could get that, and I’m not going to apologize for it. We had reasons to be cowardly. Plenty of them. The two biggest were living right under our roof, and counting on us to support them. But it’s time to ask who was supporting whom. If it was Pete, if Tina found out and that’s what’s troubling her, I need to stop being a coward. I need to open my eyes.

I need some answers.