The Plot полностью

Jake took a breath. He was not, of course, entitled to the approbation, but he supposed he’d better go with it.

“I just thought, you know, maybe there’s a completed story I could send somewhere. You don’t have any pages, yourself, I suppose.”

“No. But you know, I wouldn’t say we’re talking about Nabokov, here, leaving behind an unfinished novel. I think you can consign the unwritten fiction of Evan Parker to history without too much guilt.”

“I’m sorry?” Jake gasped.

“As his teacher.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“Because I remember thinking—and I liked the guy—that he had to be pretty far off base the way he talked about this book. Like it was The Shining and The Grapes Of Wrath and Moby-Dick, all rolled into one, and what a huge success it was going to be. He did show me a couple of pages about this girl who hated her mother, or maybe it was the mother who hated her, and they were okay, but, you know, it wasn’t exactly Gone Girl. I just kind of looked at him, like, Yeah, dude, whatever. I don’t know, I just thought he was kind of ridiculously full of himself. But you’ve probably come across a lot of people like that. Man,” said Martin Purcell, “I sound like an asshole. And I liked the guy. It’s really decent of you to want to help him.”

“I just wanted to do something good,” Jake said, deflecting as best he could. “And since there isn’t any family …”

“Well, maybe a niece. I think I read about her in the obituary.”

Me, too, Jake didn’t say. In fact, he hadn’t learned a single thing from Martin Purcell that hadn’t been in that bare-bones obituary.

“Okay,” Jake said. “Look, thanks for talking to me.”

“Hey! Thanks for calling. And …”

“What?” said Jake.

“Well, I’m going to kick myself in exactly five minutes if I don’t ask you this, but …”

“What is it?” said Jake, who knew perfectly well.

“I was wondering, I know you’re busy. But would you be willing to look at some of my stuff? I’d love to have your honest opinion. It would mean so much to me.”

Jake closed his eyes. “Of course,” he said.

They wanted to know Who was it? of course. Apparently even more than What the fuck did she think she was doing? and obviously far more than How had they failed her as parents? Whatever the details, this clearly was not their fault, and it wasn’t going to be their problem. But who it was wasn’t information Samantha felt like parting with, so her choices were, one, to withhold or, two, to lie outright. Lying, as a general principle, didn’t matter to her one way or the other, but the issue with lying, at least about this particular thing, was that there were tests—you’d have to never have watched Jerry Springer not to know about the tests—and anyone she named (that is, anyone else she named) could eventually be shown not to be the person, which would in turn have revealed the lie and initiated the whole sequence again: Who was it?

So she went with the withholding.

“Look, it’s not important.”

“Our fifteen-year-old daughter’s pregnant and it’s not important who got her that way.”

Pretty much, Samantha thought.

“Like you said, it’s my problem.”

“Yeah, it is,” said her father. He didn’t seem as angry as her mother. He was more his customary shut down.

“So what’s the plan?” said her mother. “They been telling us for years how smart you are. And you go and do this.”

She couldn’t look at their blasted faces, so she went upstairs and slammed her bedroom door behind her, throwing her book bag on the floor next to the old desk. Her room was in the back, overlooking the slope down to Porter Creek, which was narrow and rocky through this patch of the woods and wide and rocky to the north and the south. The house was old, more than a hundred years. It had been the house of her father and his parents, and before that, the house of her great-grandparents. She guessed that meant it was supposed to be hers one day, but that had never mattered to her before and it didn’t matter now, since she wasn’t going to live here a minute longer than necessary. That—in point of fact—had always been the plan and it was still the plan. Just as soon as she sorted out her problem, finished up her credits, and got her scholarship to college.