Page 41 of The Things We Never Say

Artie nodded while he chewed. He did not tell her how Danny had written on the wall outside his classroom. A haze of puzzlement overcame him; he would have told her about that in the past—in a heartbeat he would have told her. But he did not tell her. He put his sandwich down. And it came to him then: He had been taken away from his old world. Unable to tell anyone—or unwilling to tell anyone except Ken Moynihan—about Rob’s real father, he had somehow slipped the ties of the world that had been his for almost thirty years.

—

After a few moments of silence, Anne touched Artie’s arm and said, “My marriage sucks again.”

Artie looked at her. He was not aware that her marriage had ever, as she said, sucked. But he waited. Anne looked out the window and said, “You know, I thought, after that first affair twenty years ago, that Ed was through, but I’m not sure that’s the case.”

Artie said, “Oh Anne, I’m sorry.” He did not tell her that he knew nothing about that first affair.

She gave him a quick glance. “Don’t worry,” she said, straightening her shoulders. “I never should have bothered you about it.”

“You’re not bothering me,” Artie said. But she was. This was different from the woman he had been used to, or he thought it was, maybe it wasn’t.

She looked at him again and said, “But everything’s all right with you?” As though she expected a different answer this time.

“Yes, yes,” he said. “Everything’s fine.”

“Evie’s good?”

“Oh yeah, she’s great.”

“And Rob?”

“Fine.” Then he asked how her daughter was doing.

Anne said, folding the paper her sandwich had been wrapped in, “She’s doing well. That place was very helpful, and I think it might have done the trick.”

“That’s wonderful,” said Artie. He was not finished with his lunch, and he felt self-conscious as he sat there eating it.

Anne got up and put her paper bag in the trash can, and then she returned and sat back down. She said, “What a mess with Israel and Gaza.”

He looked at her, swallowing. “It sure is,” he said after a moment, adding, “The guy would be in prison if he wasn’t bombing the hell out of the Gazans. He’s corrupt.”

Anne said, “Ed says it’s more complicated than that.”

Artie felt uneasy. “Of course it’s more complicated than that. I’m just saying—”

“I know what you’re saying.” Anne brushed the front of her blouse with her hands. “What I’m saying is that I can’t stand it.”

Artie shoved the rest of his sandwich back into its bag and said, “I hear you, Anne. I do.”

“Also, I don’t know if you know this, but you have bad stuff being said about you on social media.”

Artie was startled for a moment, he never looked at social media, but then he remembered what Hoover had told him about Rick Roper. “It’s fine,” Artie said. “I don’t care.”

Anne looked at him with puzzlement. “Someone’s saying you have sex with dogs.”

So he told her about Rick Roper, though with little enthusiasm. He said, “I think he’ll take it down. Let me know if he doesn’t.”

And he stood then and walked his paper bag to the garbage as well, although he had not finished his lunch and he thought that she must not have either. They left the room together and went down the hallway. They said goodbye, and Artie turned in to his classroom.

—

But Artie worried that day that his relationship with Anne would be different from now on. (He was right, it would be, until the year he became ill.) And he thought that it was because he had been lying to her. He had not told her that he did not know what she was referring to concerning her marriage. She knew nothing about Rob not being his biological son, or Evie having lied to him for so many years, or his desire (so long ago, it seemed now) to have killed himself. Or the fact that he had been caught shoplifting. In a way, Artie was aware for the first time how much people lied to one another. Why had he not realized this before? Because he had not lied to people? He could not, in truth, remember now how much of his life he had been lying. He only knew that things were different for him now.

When Flossie called him these days—as she occasionally did—he knew that he was lying to her as well, just by not telling her what he now knew. In fact, he was not really that happy to hear from her.

About two weeks after Thanksgiving, Artie got a phone call as he drove home from school; he had just stopped at a stop sign when the phone rang. It was Rob, and Artie pushed the button on the screen in front of him and said, “Hello, son!”