Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford Page A

eagerly. It wasn’t going to be a barrel o’ laughs climax, I guessed. Ms. Pines had said so already.
    â€œYes,” Ms. Pines said. “There is a climax.” She raised the orangish fingertips of her un-injured hand up to her shining, rounded cheeks and touched the skin there, as if her presence needed certifying. A gesture of dismay. I could smell the skin softener she used. “What do you hope for, Mr. Bascombe?” Ms. Pines looked directly at me, blinking her dark eyes to invoke seriousness. Things had worked their way around to me. Possibly I was about to be assigned accountability for something.
    â€œWell, I try not to hope for too much,” I said. “It puts pressure on the future at my age. If you know what I mean. Sometimes a hope’ll slip in when I’m not paying attention.” I tried a conspiratorial smile. My best. “. . . That I’ll die before my wife does, for instance. Or something about my kids. It’s pretty indistinct.”
    â€œI hoped that about my husband,” Ms. Pines said. “But then we divorced, and I wasn’t always sure. And then he died.”
    â€œI’m divorced,” I agreed. “I know about that.”
    â€œIt’s not always clear when your heart’s broken, is it?”
    â€œIt’s a lot clearer when it’s not.”
    Ms. Pines turned and unexpectedly looked both ways around her, as if she’d heard something—her name spoken, someone entering the room behind us. “I’ve over-worked your hospitality, Mr. Bascombe.” She looked at me fleetingly, then past, out the sliding-door windows at the misty snow. She frowned at nothing I could see. Her body seemed to be about to rise.
    â€œYou haven’t,” I said. “It’s only eleven thirty.” I consulted my watch, though I eerily always know what time it is—as if a clock was ticking inside me, which it may be. “You haven’t told me the climax. Unless you don’t want me to know.”
    â€œI’m not sure you should ,” Ms. Pines said, returning her gaze solemnly to rest on me. “It could alienate you from your house.”
    â€œI sold real estate for twenty years,” I said. “Houses aren’t that sacred to me. I sold this one twice before I bought it myself.” (In arrears from the bank.) “Somebody else’ll own it someday and tear it down.” (And build a shitty condo.)
    â€œWe seem to need to know everything, don’t we?”
    â€œYou’re the history teacher,” I said. Though of course I was violating the belief-tenet on which I’ve staked much of my life: better not to know many things. Full disclosure is the myth of the fretting classes. Those who ignore history are no more likely to repeat it than anyone else but are more likely tofeel better about many things. Though, so determined was I to engage in an inter-racial substance-exchange, I clean forgot. It wouldn’t have been racist, would it, to let Ms. Pines leave? President Obama would’ve understood.
    â€œWell. Yes, I certainly am,” Ms. Pines said, composing herself again. “So. Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1969 . . .” (neuropsychically, a spiritual dead zone, when suicides abound like meteor showers) “. . . something disrupting apparently took place between our parents. I possibly could have found out what. But I was young and simply didn’t. My brother and I didn’t talk about it. It could have been that our mother told our father she was leaving him and going away with the music teacher. Mr. Senlak. I don’t know. It could have been something else. My mother could be very dramatic. She could have said some wounding and irretrievable thing. Matters had gotten bad.”
    For the first time since Ms. Pines had been in my house, I could feature the lot of them—all four Pines—breathing in these rooms, climbing