I'd Rather Be in Philadelphia by Gillian Roberts

you—” My agitation was giving her pleasure. I settled for what I hoped was a seething glare and flounced out. The phones in the main office were in the Helga zone, so teachers tended to buy privacy at the pay phone meant for student use.
    At the moment, it was occupied by Neil Quigley, looking pasty and agitated. If it hadn’t seemed crucial to find out the reason for Martha’s call, I would have left the tortured man in peace, but he hung up right then, and I thought it was as good a time as any to ease his worries about my involvement with TLC.
    “Neil,” I said. “Wait a second. I have to make a call, but I want to talk to you about TLC.”
    He looked startled, although I’d been standing two feet away. He also looked as ready to cry as an unweepy man is likely to.
    “Please,” I said. “I’ll be a second.” He nodded, like a lost child deciding to trust the helpful stranger.
    I went into the booth and dialed, fingers crossed once they weren’t pushing buttons, hoping she was still at home.
    She was. As soon as I identified myself, she whispered, “Dearest? I feel dreadful. Ashamed of myself, as well I might because, oh my…I lied.”
    “About what?” I asked softly, although of course, there was only one topic available for lying.
    “About your question. You know.”
    Euphemism heaven was where I had landed. Why couldn’t any of us say what this was about? I thought of Sasha’s bruised relative and the silence surrounding her, the bad taste of mentioning reality, and decided that not much had changed. We spoke in code, averting our eyes. “I’m listening,” I prompted.
    “Not now,” she whispered. “Oliver’s in his study and I’m here in the hallway. It’s so complicated and humiliating. Please, could we meet? Somewhere else?”
    “You did donate a book, didn’t you?” I said.
    “Yes,” she whispered. “I did.”
    We made a date for an hour later. A strictly kosher deli that didn’t seem a likely haunt of her fellow congregants. I hung up, so absorbed by the happy tap-dancing grandmother’s dark secrets that I almost forgot Neil, still waiting, still looking agonized, outside the booth.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Has something else happened?”
    “What else could?” he asked. Our voices echoed off the marble floor and staircase into the acute emptiness of a studentless school. And into Helga’s waiting ears. I guided him past the office, into a room that was probably where bad servants had been sent back when this building was a private mansion. Now the cell was, ironically or not, the faculty lounge, although stretching, let alone lounging, was hardly possible in it.
    Neil behaved as if my fingers on his elbow were a tugboat pulling him. He seemed to have no motor of his own. I suspected that if I hadn’t led him, he’d have stood in the foyer until students trampled him next morning.
    “Ruined,” he said. “I’ll have a baby and debts and nothing else. Nothing. What am I going to do?”
    He was still in shock about the fire, I realized. “Neil,” I reminded him, “they’re insured. They’ll rebuild the center and find a place for you meanwhile.”
    “You don’t understand.”
    I was getting sick and tired of people saying that to me.
    “They can’t rebuild burned records. My proof.”
    “Of what?”
    “And Schmidt still insists I owed them money! It’s a scam. Tutoring legitimizes it, that’s all. They’re loan sharks. The whole thing is to get us to slow-own—that’s their word—a center. You ever look at your mortgage?”
    “I rent,” I whispered. I thought he had gone mad, or was definitely about to.
    “In the end, you pay two, three times what the house costs. Same goes for the center. Plus advertising and promotion and initial consultations and God knows what else, and try and find a profit when you’re doing that. Rebuilding makes it all okay for them, but not for me!”
    “Why don’t you sit down?”
    He looked around, took a while to