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  If it were legal to carry a handgun, he would brandish his now and happily pull the trigger. But then he’d get life without parole, and then where would Toby be? Laws were good.

  Billy Horn’s very blond, very well-proportioned second wife, Deanna, sidled over to him. “Haayyyyy!” she squealed, and punched Sean’s shoulder playfully. She was wearing one of her trademark low-cut sweaters that highlighted her best attributes. “How are you? Fun party the other night, huh?”

  What did she mean by that? Did she know something? “It was pretty good, yeah.”

  Isaac’s mother saw another victim across the room and pounced, leaving him alone with the hottest—and most mind-numbingly boring—woman in the room. Making conversation with Deanna proved difficult on a good day, but he had no choice. “So,” he tried. “How’s it going?”

  “Really super,” she said. “I just came from my Zumba class. Have you ever tried it?”

  “Uh, no.” At the chorus concert earlier in the year, he’d lost an hour of his life listening to her drone on about the bran muffin she ate for breakfast, the new flip tops on toothpaste that “made a big mess on the sink,” and the pros and cons of DVR.

  “I’ve already lost five pounds.” She patted her hips. Her boobs jiggled in an intriguing way. “Those Latin rhythms really get you going.” He scanned the crowd for a way out, but various mom gangs surrounded him, blocking every escape. To the right, the Power Brigade gesticulated madly. They were the Ivy Leaguers who’d quit their law and finance jobs to do the mommy thing but still led their lives with the aggressiveness they’d cultivated over decades of training. They scared the shit out of him. So did the Grannies, the clique-ish post-career mommies whose adopted Chinese, Vietnamese, and Romanian children made up a good percentage of the school’s diversity. The Caribbean nannies clumped together looking disdainful and bored. He’d tried to speak to them a few times, but they always shut up when he got too close. And, near the bust of some hairbrush heiress who founded The Bradley School, were the Chanel-wearing stay-at-home moms in full makeup, who used lunch as a verb and devoted their waking hours to the gods of high-end retail, comparing thousand-dollar handbags while they waited.

  Then he spotted Cheryl. She was eyeing him as if he were a piece of beef jerky. He’d always wanted the power of invisibility when he was a kid. How could he have known it would prove even more useful as an adult? His stomach clenched. He forced an awkward smile. Maybe if he waved it would make the whole situation less horrible. He waved.

  Cheryl flashed him a half smile. She was pretending to decide whether or not to rescue him from Deanna’s grasp. Maybe Deanna wasn’t so bad after all. For one thing, he’d never had drunken bathroom sex with her at a parent social. He turned back to Deanna. He’d try really hard to make conversation. His mind went blank. “Cold out there, huh?” It was lame, but it was something.

  “Oh yeah,” Deanna said. “Brrr.” She crossed her arms, which squeezed her breasts together. “My dad moved to North Carolina. I like that weather. You know, coat weather, but not gloves and hat weather. Hats just do not work on me. No one from Florida can wear hats. We’re just not designed for them.” She took a breath. “The other night at the party, my hair was just a smooshed mess because of that darn hat. I felt like I spent the whole night trying to poof it up.”

  He was glazing over when he realized Cheryl had made her way through the crowd and was heading toward them like a heat-seeking missile. A moment later, she thrust her body against his, pretending to bump him accidentally. “God, what a klutz I am!” she said. Her hand brushed his ass and lingered.

  His reaction had to be just right. It would set the tone. “Not a problem,” he said, as casually as he could. He put some distance between his ass and her hand. He gestured to Deanna. “You two know each other, right?”

  “We sure do!” Deanna said perkily. “We did checkout at the book fair together. All that math!”

  “Nice to see you,” Cheryl said. Her voice was different when she spoke to women. Less throaty.

  “We were just talking about the party,” he said, hoping this was the way to go.

  “It was super.” Deanna nodded vigorously.

  “I had a very nice time,” Cheryl said. She locked eyes with Sean. “It was such an intimate gathering.” Cheryl cocked her head, coquettishly. “And I’m sure the next party will be even better.”

  The next party. If she was talking about a next time, then he must’ve done all right. He stood a little straighter.

  Deanna waved vigorously to someone behind him. A moment later, Walt Renard was standing next to her. “And how is everyone on this bitterly cold day?” Walt was rubbing his hands to warm them.

  “Fantastic,” Deanna said with a wink. “As always.”

  “What an excellent answer.”

  “I try.” She flashed him a flirtatious smile.

  “You’ll all be at the auction, right?” Walt looked expectantly at Sean.

  “The auction,” Sean repeated. He’d gone to the auction once. Ellie had won a family portrait session with Annie Leibovitz for eight hundred dollars, which they’d never used. A weekend on a private island in Greece had gone for ninety grand. “Depends on whether I can get a sitter.”

  “I’m the emcee this year,” Walt said. “Don’t know if that makes it more or less appealing.”

  “Oh I’ll be there.” Cheryl made it sound like a dare, somehow. “I’m on the committee. I have no choice.”

  Walt checked his watch, which looked expensive. “Oh boy,” he said. “Late again. Gotta go!” He gave a bow and took off into the crowd.

  “I just love him,” Deanna said. “What a nice guy.”

  “And loaded,” Cheryl added. “He’s given more money to the school in the last five years than any other donor. And that’s a lot of money.”

  “Didn’t his son graduate last year?” Deanna asked.

  Cheryl nodded. “I’m pretty sure he’s going to an Ivy League.”

  “But …” Sean couldn’t get his mind around this new bit of information. “If his son’s graduated, why’s he always around?”

  Deanna made an expression that indicated she was thinking. He hadn’t seen it before. “He’s Chairman of the Board, right?”

  “I don’t think he’s the Chairman,” Cheryl said. “But I might be wrong. He also does some pro bono work for the school. I know he’s got his own environmental law practice.”

  Sean watched the kids shaking hands with their teachers. “Shall we?” Cheryl said, leading the way.

  He retrieved Toby and was almost out the door when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “Sean,” Bev Shineman said. Her down coat was unzipped, revealing a green cardigan that strained at the buttons. “Do you have a minute?”

  “Is there news? About Calvin?”

  “Can we talk in my office?” She smiled. “I’m sure Toby won’t mind waiting in the library.”

  Shineman’s office was tiny and cluttered. There wasn’t a clear surface anywhere. “So how’s Calvin? What’s going on?”

  “He’s hanging in there.”

  He waited, expecting more. “Is he conscious?” Pulling teeth would have been easier than getting information from her.

  Shineman took a deep breath and let it out ominously. “I should respect the privacy of the family.”

  He wanted to shake her. “Come on, I was there. Tell me what’s going on.”

  She considered this a moment. “It’s touch and go right now. He went into cardiac arrest last night, but they got him going again.”

  Touch and go. For the first time since it happened, he realized Calvin could die. Really die. “What happened? Why? How?”

  She hesitated, as if she wasn’t sure whether to confide in him. “It turns out Calvin had developed a severe nut allergy.”

  “Calvin didn’t have any allergies,” Sean said.

  “He’d never had a reaction until … well, until the other day.” She shook her head again. “Kids g
row out of allergies all the time. And sometimes they grow into them. Someone must have brought in a snack made with peanut oil that set it off. It’s just unfathomable that this could have happened.”

  “If the paramedics had known …” His head was spinning. “About the allergies …”

  “It might have made a difference in the way they treated him,” she said. “I know … It makes you feel so helpless.”

  Calvin might die because he developed an allergy no one knew about. Talk about life not being fair. This was criminal. How could Calvin die? And how was he going to tell Toby if that happened?

  Shineman sighed loudly in an attempt to leave the awful topic behind. “But that’s not why I wanted to talk to you.” There was a shift in her tone. “I wanted to talk to you about an incident in the classroom today.”

  “With Toby?” Incident could mean anything from a playground tussle to projectile vomiting. Once in preschool it had meant that another child bit Toby on the nose and had drawn blood. “Is he okay? What happened?”

  “He’s fine. But another student was sent to Nurse Astrid with quite a scratch.”

  “Toby scratched someone?” Toby liked to play around, but he was not a scratcher. Never had been.

  “He didn’t scratch the child. He pulled a chair out from under her during social studies.”

  “Who was it?”

  “She scraped her back on the corner of the chair when she fell,” Shineman said. They never identified the victim. “I wouldn’t ordinarily talk to a parent over one isolated event, but it seems that Toby’s behavior is becoming an issue.”

  “His behavior?”

  “He’s got to stop horsing around.” She paused. “What do you think would drive him to do a thing like that?”

  “Come on,” he said. “Seriously? Why would an eight-year-old boy pull a chair out from under an eight-year-old girl? You don’t need a degree to figure it out.”

  Shineman didn’t see the irony and expressed that with an unamused stare.

  “You’ve got a child unconscious in the hospital—a child who might die.” He hadn’t meant to yell. He tried to reel it in. “And you’re giving me grief about a scratch? A stupid prank?”

  “Could you please keep your voice down?” Shineman scolded in a strict whisper. “I know Toby didn’t mean to hurt anybody.”

  She didn’t know anything about his son.

  “But this kind of behavior problem is a distraction to the rest of the class.”

  “Toby does not have a behavior problem.” He didn’t care if everyone in the building heard.

  Shineman sat quietly with her hands folded in her lap. Was she waiting for him to calm down? Because that was only infuriating him more. “You’re not helping him, you know.”

  “Everything I do is to help him.”

  “I’ve seen a lot of kids, Sean. Toby is easily distracted. It’s going to be hard for him to keep up with the other children academically. Which is going to prove to be a major issue for him if we don’t do something to help him now.”

  He pushed himself up from the chair. “I’ve got to get Toby to tutoring,” he said, before she could launch into her medication rant again. She’d hit him with it three weeks ago and then again via Ellie, and he had no desire to go for a third round. “Wouldn’t want to be late for that.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  GETTING DOWNTOWN FOR TUTORING WASN’T SO BAD. EVEN THOUGH the East Village was a different world, the trip only consisted of a handful of stops on the Lexington line. Getting back to the Upper West Side during rush hour was less fun. More than once, he’d considered finding a more geographically desirable tutor, but the uptown tutors charged double Noah’s fees. A hundred bucks an hour was pricey enough, plus Toby had liked Noah instantly, and Sean couldn’t put a price on that.

  Noah had several advanced degrees in education and was probably just a few years younger than Sean, but he exuded that just-out-of-college slack—threadbare jeans that hung off his hips, limp hair smoothed behind his ears. He threw “dude” around for good measure. Unlike the school, Noah had not been concerned when Toby was stumbling over his reading last year. “Kids learn this stuff at different speeds,” he’d told Sean. “We can crank it up for Bradley’s sake, but don’t let them get to you. It’s all good.” As a rule, Sean hated the phrase it’s all good, but he focused on the fact that it meant Toby was fine.

  Now, sitting with Toby on the downtown 6 train, Sean knew he was supposed to bring up the incident. Part of him wanted to just let it go. But Shineman had Toby in the crosshairs.

  “So I heard about what happened in Social Studies,” he said.

  Toby took a heavy breath.

  “Spill it.”

  “It was just a joke,” Toby said. “Kayla pushed a bouncy ball out from under me at roof-play and everyone laughed. So I did it back to her in the classroom.”

  Tit for tat. Reasonable. “You can’t do that kind of stuff, Tobe.”

  “I didn’t mean for her to get cut,” he said. You could tell he felt bad about it. “I took her down to the nurse. I think she’s going to be okay.”

  Sean smiled even though he knew he should use the Serious Dad face he’d practiced for moments like this. He tried frowning a little, hoping that would do the trick.

  “We’ve had this talk, Tobe. You can’t be silly in school.”

  “It’s not fair,” Toby was whining now. “Kayla never gets in trouble. She pushes in line and the teacher yells at me. She makes funny faces in music and I get in trouble for laughing.”

  Maybe it was time for the Life’s Not Fair speech? “Do me a favor,” he said. “For the next few weeks—until Christmas vacation—try extra hard to be good. That means no pranks, no giggling, no matter who’s making funny faces, and doing whatever the teacher tells you to do.”

  “But dad—”

  “Okay?”

  An extra-wide Hasid with perfect ringlets that grazed his shoulders sat in the two seats next to Toby. When Toby had been three, he’d seen a man wearing the same black orthodox-issue hat. “Look dad,” he’d exclaimed, happily—and loudly, “a real live cowboy.” The memory made Sean smile, in spite of his efforts to keep his Serious Dad face intact.

  “Okay.” Toby sighed, now sullen and tween-like. He avoided Sean’s gaze and started shading in a drawing of a superhero he’d started earlier. It was good. The muscles rippled under the suit and he was fighting some creepy-looking wolf-dogs.

  “I hate going to Noah.”

  “No you don’t. You like it,” Sean responded, in a brilliant moment of parenting.

  “I can read already. Can’t we skip it? Just today?”

  He shook his head. “Negativo.” He couldn’t believe now that he was a father he said things like negativo.

  “Only stupid kids go to tutoring.”

  “Who said that?”

  Toby shrugged. Not telling. But he was sure it was Isaac. Isaac had actually started out okay. He and Toby were buddies that first year, but by the time he was seven, Isaac was rolling his eyes and calling kids morons when they gave the wrong answer in class. Interesting, Sean thought, that if a sweet, intelligent Bradley third grader was at third-grade reading level it was a major disaster. But if a malicious, condescending Bradley third grader happened to have a genius IQ the school wrote off the bratty behavior as a personality quirk. In any other school in any other city, this kid would be pummeled on a daily basis. At Bradley, he’s the bully.

  “Hey. You’re incredibly smart,” he said. “You have a creative mind and you can think for yourself.” As soon as he said it, it sounded like a consolation prize. “Besides, everyone can use help with something. I’d like to see Isaac try to draw a superhero like that.”

  Toby shrugged. Wouldn’t look up. “When’s Calvin coming back?”

  “I don’t know, Tobe,” he said. “Soon, I hope.” Later in life, on the couch, Sean was pretty sure some therapist would refer to this period as The Year Everyone Disappeared. There was nothing
he could do about it. Except stick around.

  He rested a hand on Toby’s shoulder as they emerged from the subway into the East Village. After the buttoned-up, low-density Upper East Side, it was like landing on another planet. It was also the reason Sean didn’t mind the schlepp down here: to show Toby that they weren’t the only ones who lived in New York without a chauffeur-driven SUV and a fully-staffed townhouse. Down here, New York lifers and art students with pink hair and pierced tongues went about their business as if nothing—or at least nothing important—existed above Fourteenth Street. A six-foot transvestite in full makeup, mini dress, and what looked like size-thirteen heels, strutted back and forth in front of Lucky Chang’s. Toby’s eyes widened as they passed. He hadn’t asked yet, but it was only a matter of time. Sean really should have a good explanation ready to go.

  Noah greeted them in front of the door of his fourth-floor walk-up with a basketball under his arm. “Toby, dude, what up?”

  Toby gave him a half smile and a high five as he entered what Noah called the “Arena.”

  “Catch,” Noah said, and sent him a low bounce pass. Toby caught it, dribbled on the scuffed wood floor, and took a shot on the regulation-size hoop. Sometimes he and Noah shot baskets between reading drills. Three bar stools at the dinette counter constituted the entirety of Noah’s home furnishings. Sometimes Noah would make Toby spell vocabulary words as he took free throws. Sometimes he’d have Toby read a story, then ask him comprehension questions while he dribbled.

  “I’ve got some good stuff planned for today,” Noah told Toby. “You’re gonna like it.”

  This was Sean’s cue to give a quick wave and disappear for an hour while Noah worked his magic. “Do you have a minute?” he asked instead.

  They stepped into the fluorescent light of the stairwell and he could hear Toby dribbling inside. The downstairs neighbors had to be deaf not to hear, too.