Arthur watched him. The boy had the look of someone who had been asked the question before and had over the course of being asked it developed several different answers depending on who was doing the asking and was now trying to decide which of those answers would lead to which outcome. "I live with my aunt," he said finally. She works at the laundromat on Pearl. She is at work right now.
"What is her name?" "Bernadette." "Bernadette what?" A small hesitation. "Bernadette Callaway."
"And where do you live with your aunt Bernadette, Ren?" "Apartment 4 above the laundromat." There is a door on the side of the building. You go up the stairs. Officer Ray wrote this down.
Arthur watching her face understood that she did not entirely believe it. He understood also that she was not going to say so in front of the child. She finished writing and she stood up and she looked at Arthur with an expression that contained a question she was not going to ask in front of the boy either. "Sir," she said, "would you mind staying for a few more minutes?" I'd like to make a couple of calls before we wrap this up.
"Of course," Arthur said. She walked a small distance away. Arthur watched her dial. He could not hear what she said, but he watched her face, and her face told him everything he had already begun to suspect. He turned to the boy.
The boy was sitting on the step beside him now, the granola bar held carefully in his lap, unopened. "You can eat that, you know," Arthur said quietly. The boy looked at the granola bar. ""I was going to save it for later."" ""How much later?" "Tonight, maybe. Or tomorrow morning."
Arthur was quiet for a moment. He had spent the morning before any of this on his way to a meeting at his attorney's office about the disposition of an estate that had grown over the course of 40 years of careful work into something he had never quite figured out what to do with. He had been irritated walking to that meeting by a number of small things. The lateness of his usual taxi, the fact that the man who delivered his newspaper had once again left it on the wrong side of the door. The cost of a particular consultancy he had been billed for in a quarter.
He did not believe the consultancy had done any actual work. He had been, in short, the kind of irritated that a comfortable man becomes when nothing in his life is actually wrong and he has run out of larger things to be irritated about. He looked at the boy. The boy was rationing a granola bar. "Ren," Arthur said, "When did you last eat something that was not given to you in the last hour?"
The boy looked at him sideways. It was the look of a child trying to assess whether the question was a trap. "Yesterday." "Yesterday when?" "There is a place on Hadley where they put the bread out at night when they close.
If you get there early before the man comes with the cart, you can take some. I got there early yesterday. "Yesterday morning or yesterday evening?" "Evening." Arthur did the arithmetic. somewhere around 20 hours, give or take, possibly more.
The boy had been awake at least since dawn, judging by the state of his shoes and the small scrape on his knee that had not yet scabbed over. ""And the aunt?"" Arthur said carefully. "Bernadette at the laundromat. "Does she feed you when she comes home?"" The boy was quiet. "Ren, there is no aunt Bernadette," the boy said. He did not look up when he said it.
He said it to the granola bar in his lap. ""I thought as much." "Are you going to tell the lady?"" Arthur considered the question. He considered Officer Ray, who was still on the phone a few yards away, and who was, he could see now from the angle of her shoulders, getting answers she had expected to get. He considered the boy, who had pulled him backward by the wrist 1four minutes ago with a strength, a malnourished 8-year-old should not have possessed, but had clearly summoned from somewhere. He considered the fact that a child who told a careful and well-rehearsed lie about a laundromat aunt, was a child who had learned the cost of telling the truth to the wrong adult.
"I am not going to tell the lady," Arthur said. But the lady will find out. The lady is on the telephone now finding out. So we have, I think, perhaps two more minutes in which you can tell me the things you would rather she did not hear first. The boy looked at him for the first time since the question about the ant.
His eyes were a peculiar color, somewhere between gray and green, like the color of a river in a season that could not decide whether to be winter or spring. "Why?" the boy asked. Why? What? "Why do you want to know first?"
Arthur thought about this. He was, as a rule, an honest man in the small ways and in some of the larger ones. He had built his life and his fortune on a particular kind of honesty, which was the honesty of saying what he meant and meaning what he said in rooms where most people did neither. It had cost him things over the years. It had also bought him things.
On the whole, he believed it had been a good trade because in about two minutes, he said, a woman in a uniform is going to start making decisions about your life and those decisions are going to be made on the basis of whatever information she has at that moment. The information she has at that moment is going to be incomplete. I would like, if you will let me, to make sure it is less incomplete than it would otherwise be because the decisions she makes are going to matter. Ren, they are going to matter for a long time. The boy looked at the granola bar.
He looked at "Arthur." He looked back at the granola bar. "My mom died when I was five," he said. "My dad before that, I do not really remember him. I lived with my grandmother until she died, too.
That was last winter. After that, I was at a place with other kids for a while, but I left." ""You left?" "They were not nice."" "Not nice, how?" Arthur asked. The boy did not answer right away.
He turned the granola bar over in his lap. He turned it over again. Arthur watched him do this, and he understood that some questions were too large for an 8-year-old to answer in the four minutes he had been given to answer them, and that the polite thing to do was to stop asking and to wait for the answers to come on their own time, if they ever came. "You do not have to tell me now," Arthur said. You do not have to tell me ever.
I'm only asking because I would rather know than not know, but the not knowing is also all right. The boy nodded once. The nod was very small. "How long have you been on the street, Ren?" "Since March."