The Plot полностью

Who it was was a person named Daniel Weybridge, who was also none other than her mother’s boss at the College Inn and in fact the proprietor of the College Inn, like his father before him, because the place was Family run for three generations!—it said so on the inn’s sign, its stationery, even on the paper coasters left in every room. Daniel Weybridge was married and the father of three bouncing boys, who would certainly be the next proprietors of the College Inn. He’d also had a vasectomy, or so he’d promised, the lying shit. No, she hadn’t told him she was pregnant, and she wasn’t going to. He didn’t deserve to know.

The story with Daniel Weybridge was that he’d been after her for at least a year to her knowledge, and probably longer than that, since before she’d been paying attention. Any number of times she’d skittered past him in a corridor of the inn, or in one of the hallways at the high school when he turned up to watch one of the three precious sons play whatever sport they were playing, and she’d felt the heat of him as they passed each other, and sensed the fixing of his attention on her fifteen-year-old self as they crossed paths. Of course he had been far too stealthy to make an outright grab. He led with attention, then moved on to compliments and little hints of genuine grown-up admiration: Samantha had skipped a grade—wasn’t that remarkable! Samantha had won some prize, he’d heard—what a smart girl, destined to go far! It pained her to admit that these had not been ineffective tactics. Daniel Weybridge, after all, was what passed for a sophisticate in her world. For one thing, he’d gone to the hotel school at Cornell, which was an Ivy League, and he read the newspapers from the city, not just the Utica Observer-Dispatch. Once, in the hotel lobby as she was waiting for her mother to finish up, the two of them had a surprisingly nuanced conversation about The Scarlet Letter, which Samantha was reading for eighth-grade English, and Daniel Weybridge had made a point that actually found its way into her paper. A paper for which, fittingly, she had received an A.

So when it dawned on her, as it eventually did, that there was a longer game being played here, and her mother’s boss was the one playing it, Samantha was a little more surprised than she should have been. Then she took a fresh look at things herself.

By then she was a tenth grader, though a full year younger than the next youngest in her grade. Most of her classmates—all of the boys, if you believed them, except maybe the shyest and most backward—were busy deflowering most of the girls, and if you didn’t count the trashed reputations of those two young ladies who’d already left school, nobody seemed especially exercised about it. Moments like these had a way of bringing the age difference into sharper focus, and though Samantha had been more than happy to skip that grade back in sixth she didn’t especially enjoy the feeling of being younger than everyone else. Besides, there was nothing especially meaningful—let alone romantic—about the act in question, just as there was nothing especially obscure about what Daniel Weybridge wanted or how he was trying to get it.

Still, it had all been her decision. The stakes didn’t seem all that high. If she did nothing, Daniel Weybridge would probably continue flattering and flirting with her until the day she left home, and when that day came he’d simply shrug and turn his attention to the next daughter of the next housekeeper, or the housekeeper herself. But the more she thought about it the more she liked the idea. From a practical standpoint, she was repelled by every boy she went to school with, and Daniel Weybridge wasn’t unattractive. Also, he was a grown-up and a father several times over, which meant he’d obviously know what he was doing when it came to the act itself. Also, unlike the boys in her grade who were congenitally incapable of keeping their mouths shut, it went without saying that Daniel Weybridge wasn’t going to tell a soul. And finally, when she let him take her to the Fennimore Suite (not an hour after her own mother cleaned it), he made a point of telling her that he’d had a vasectomy after bouncing baby boy number three. Which sealed the deal, basically.

So maybe she really wasn’t as smart as everyone had always thought she was, let alone as smart as she’d always thought she was. She had no idea how to go about getting rid of her problem. She didn’t even know how much time she had left to figure something out. But she knew it wouldn’t be enough.

“So, you know me, I don’t like to be that pushy agent, but …”