Page 16 - WTP Vol. VIII #4

Hard Evidence (continued from preceding page)
reprimand from Anastasia just for following protocol, for insisting on a job order before beginning work on a new launch.
Laughter is erupting from corners of the room where people have been drinking real wine for an hour
at least. Feeling awkward, Joanna rises from her crouched position and looks around for a trash can to throw out the wet, crumpled napkin, but there is nothing nearby, so she cups it in her palm.
“Well,” says Joanna, “I think I’ll call it a night. I have to get back before my father’s shuttle bus arrives.”
Anastasia thanks Joanna for coming as if it were her own private party. “It’s good to see you here thinking- g like a team member.” Calm, Joanna thinks, stay calm.
From beneath a pile of puffy jackets with fur hoods, she ferrets her good woolen coat and shoulders into it. There is a white-paper-only recycling bin parked near the coat rack. She throws the dirty napkin into it. Let them sort it out. She leaves the dead brownies and her platter behind.
Her drive home isn’t as dark as normal. The workday had gone on for nine hours instead of the usual ten, thanks to the party, so there is still a thin rim of radiance along the horizon. Fearing she’ll be late to receive her father from the bus, she speeds a couple of miles above the limit. It isn’t like her to bend the rules. “Persnickety,” Anastasia had called her in the reprimand. Slowing down, Joanna surrenders to the clot of Christmas-shopping traffic near one exit and the hemorrhage of cars that issues afterward, keep- ing to the right lane so that less cautious drivers can move around her. In the distance, masses of cloud float like violet and umber castaway islands. Some nights driving home, she can pick out a few stars, planets and constellations. Venus, of course, Orion, Ursa Major, Vega— but tonight there are just these darkening illusions.
Joanna normally takes a ramp off the highway that brings her closer to home, but this evening she es- capes down an exit that cuts through town, up a hill leading to the local university. Its campus is a glowing kingdom of 19th century buildings improbably mar- ried to Bauhaus cubes. Scott is in one of them, taking his final exams. Which one, she cannot determine, but it doesn’t matter; the detour through his campus suf- fices. It’s like a chocolate high, harmless, yet she has to admit, furtive, the impulse of addiction. She passes several elegant Greek Revival facades, then turns right up a hill bordered by a library and lofty brown-
stone academic halls to which she is an outsider. She stops for students who cross without looking, secure in their anonymous winter outerwear. She’s glad Scott isn’t among them; he might feel that his bound- aries are being violated by a mother too invested in his talents, his brilliant mind, his resemblance to a father he seldom sees. The thought makes her flush, but she justifies herself: Scott’s tuition is one of the reasons for a deferred life in a job she would other- wise leave.
When she arrives home, the shuttle bus is idling in the parking lot. In the bus’s harshly lit interior, her father is hunched over in conversation with the seated driver, who is not, Joanna realizes, the old leprechaun. The new driver appears to be female, fresh and pretty, wearing a Santa cap over an abun- dance of wavy reddish hair. When she sees Joanna, she retracts the bi-fold bus door like a fan. Still dressed in his vivid pajamas from that morning, Jo- anna’s father is laughing over something the girl has said, or perhaps a joke he’s tried to tell, an unequal yet harmless exchange.
“Hi, Dad,” says Joanna, looking up at him.
He turns, peering at her darkly at first, then his eyes light up. “Did I ever introduce you to Beryl?” He removes the cap from his head and his insubstan- tial white hair drift ups like a wing of down. “This is Beryl, my new, my new—“ His eyes tilt away from Joanna toward something out of view and she has an ominous thought. He doesn’t recognize me.
“Your new driver.” Beryl supplies the missing word. She looks at Joanna. “I just started today. Your father is very sweet.” Her laugh is charming, silver, detached.
“Well,” Joanna clears her throat. “Sorry about being late. Usually my son is here, but tonight he has a final exam.” She clears her throat again. “He’s a biochem- istry major.” She watches her father, who is watch- ing Beryl. His head is large, like Joanna’s head and Scott’s, housing substantial, well-defined features that have sharpened in places and slackened in oth- ers. Facially, her father resembles the poet Robert Frost, the wide brow, the dark, austere gaze, pursed prominent lips, the physiognomy of loneliness. And that resemblance may not be superficial either, Joanna has often thought, if what she has read about Frost’s temper is true. But there isn’t a splinter of poetry on her father’s side of the family tree, which is heavily laden with accountants, engineers; her father had been an electrical engineer. It had been the other side, her mother’s, that contained the hidden hollow,
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