Apology by Jon Pineda (books to read this summer .txt) 📕

the boy, who had to be fifteen or sixteen by now, would even remember him. He dialed the sequence of numbers. He waited for someone to answer, but no one did.

Later that evening, he ate dinner at the small roadside restaurant near the motel and brought back to his room some coffee and a slice of lemon meringue pie, touted by the lone waitress as a specialty of the place. The pie filling was tart and the coffee was bitter, but he enjoyed them nonetheless. He opened the window and lay back on the bed and listened as the moths gathered on the screen. As far as he knew, he was the only guest.

He tried the numbers again.

This time, a woman answered.

“Who’s there?” she said, when he wouldn’t speak.

“I’m sorry,” he said, struggling. “I must have the wrong number.”

“Is that you?” she said.

There was a pause on her end.

He tried to take a breath quietly, so as not to be heard breathing.

“Exequiel?” she said. “Is that you?”

He answered her, and she laughed, saying she thought it was him. She asked where he was. How had he been? Just the other day she was talking on the phone to her brother Wallace. She couldn’t remember if he had ever met Exequiel. Then she made a joke about her ex and how his broken jaw remembered Exequiel, for sure. She laughed again. He didn’t know what to say exactly, and so he said, “I’m fine. I’m working in Georgia.”

“Oh,” she said. “I thought you might be closer.”

“No,” he said.

There were more pauses in the way they spoke to one another. More moths left the darkness to brush the screen.

“How is Wendell?” he said finally.

“Wendell?”

“Yes, Wendell,” Exequiel said. “What is it?”

She whispered, but he couldn’t make out what she was saying, even when she spoke clearly and started telling him about the boy. He didn’t want to hear what he knew she would say, but as she spoke, he could already see the way it had happened. The boy growing up with fresh anger. Having joined with other boys in the neighborhood who shared the same way of looking at the world. Each night they would ride their bikes into the streets, keying cars or throwing bricks through windows. One day, the oldest of them was able to drive and took the boys to meet other boys nearby who were older. She said it had become too much in the house. These boys had begun to hang out at all hours, coming in when they wished.

They had tested Wendell to see what he would do.

At thirteen, he took a bandana and wrapped it around his face like an outlaw and walked into a convenience store and asked the man behind the counter for all of his money. When the man refused, Wendell pulled out a gun. The oldest of the boys had used the gun in similar robberies. Wendell took aim at the man, but the man fell, clutching at his chest. Wendell had not pulled the trigger. It didn’t matter.

The paramedics brought the man to the hospital, and he gave a description of the car and the boy who had pointed the gun at him, who had foolishly thrown it down onto the floor and raced off with the others. It wasn’t long before the sheriff’s deputy came to the house and arrested Wendell.

“I’m sorry,” Exequiel said.

He could still hear the boy’s laughter, could see him walking slowly into the kitchen those mornings, rubbing his eyes as his hair stood up in back like the broken springs of a clock. Each time, it was the same ritual. The boy would step between Elle and him and pretend he wanted their coffee, just to hear them say, “No, no, you’re too young.” Then they would hold him.

Exequiel stopped listening to the story. He could hear her breathing on the other end of the line. Somehow they were connected by a thin strand of wire that left the room where he waited to hear her just once more and extended elsewhere, into an unfortunate oblivion.

five

It wasn’t long after their time together in Charlottesville that Rachel and Tom were engaged. Rachel had graduated with honors and had job offers from a number of firms in both the Richmond area and a few cities in Hampton Roads, most notably Norfolk. Her aspirations involved going to law school eventually, and she believed experience as a paralegal would help her application.

When they had first met, never in those early discussions about life had she mentioned such an interest. Perhaps he had inadvertently influenced her, describing too often the horror of the crime in his childhood, how his family had been left to make sense of something senseless?

Before the proposal, Tom had been meaning to break things off. The perfect opportunity for such a discussion, though, never seemed to surface. So he waited, but as he did, he grew angry with himself.

One day, he spoke up.

“Now you’re telling me this shit?” she said.

She threw a glass. It smashed against the wall near him.

Tom clutched his hand. There was blood. He carried the small shard over to the sink. He would not say anything as he ran water over his hand.

Rachel decided to tell him.

He looked up from the running water.

“Yeah, right,” he laughed. He thought she was making it up.

“In a month or so we’ll hear the heartbeat,” she said.

“You’re serious.”

He turned off the faucet.

His fingers bled slowly into the drain.

“I knew you’d be thrilled,” she said.

She wiped at her eyes, but then stared hard.

Tom felt she was looking through him.

“How long have you kept this secret?” he said.

“What does it matter?”

“How long?” he said. It was only now that he felt his fingers throbbing, going numb.

“You’re such a fuck,” she said.

That night, after they made love, Tom lay awake in bed. Rachel had fallen asleep, was snoring lightly. In the glow from the lamp on the stack