Her Good Name

After eighteen months in Spain, Rita Vogel returned to the United States with her ten-year-old sons, Andrew and Colin, and the body of her husband, Bruce Mehta. They flew to Minneapolis, where she buried her husband; then she found a house in the old Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul, hired an overweight contractor, Walt Duggan, to help her renovate the American foursquare's awkward, decaying kitchen and skuzzy bathroom, and enrolled her boys in public school. She didn't stop, she didn't even slow down until she started looking for a job, and then it felt to her as if she'd plowed head-on into a mountain of wet cement.

"Jesus!" There'd been a crash, and heavy demolition seemed to be going on right above her head. She dropped the kitchen phone and ran up the stairs and tried to open the twins' bedroom door, but it pushed back, knocking her off balance. The old door rattled and quivered in its frame as the boys bashed against it, grunting with the impact of their wiry bodies pounding each other. This time she didn't bother shouting at them to stop it. She forced her way into the room, grabbed the one on top, Andrew, yanked him away, and tossed him onto a bed, then put her bare foot against Colin's thin, sweaty chest and held him down till he stopped squirming and lay there panting in harsh gasps. She dragged him to his feet, and without her saying anything he headed down the hallway to her bedroom and slammed the door behind him. Andrew was sitting cross-legged on Colin's bed, breathing hard and fingering the side of his neck, exploring a long scratch that was just starting to welt and bleed. Rita stood there, waiting for her own heart to stop pounding. "Jesus Christ."

Bruce's insurance policy and the pension left over from his years at 3M had turned out to be smaller than Rita would have guessed, had she ever thought about it, but it was not financial straits so much as the fugitive's conflicting needs to find cover and to keep moving that had set her looking for a job as soon as her explosive, mysterious sons were enrolled in school.

Before she and Bruce decided to move to Spain to pursue their old dream of starting an English language academy abroad, she had been assistant principal at two St. Paul junior high schools and one senior high. She had never loved being a public school administrator, but she'd been successful at it, as successful as anybody could be who spoke her mind in a bureaucracy, and she had always assumed she could step back in if she ever wanted to. It was a big district, she wasn't picky about the school, and she would have been willing to go back into the classroom until an administrative position opened up. But there had been a lot of turnover in the central office, and the people she dealt with now were strangers, even those she remembered from before, and she got nowhere. It didn't make sense to her.

She closed the twins' bedroom door behind her, picked up the hallway phone, and listened for a moment to the dead sound of a broken connection. It had been somebody with a thick southern accent, starting to introduce himself. She went back downstairs and hung up the kitchen phone, which she'd just answered when that fraternal violence had broken loose on the second floor. Maybe it was the distraction of Andrew and Colin's violent absorption with each other that was keeping her from thinking clearly about finding a job. When they weren't fighting, they were obsessively watching television, "American television," they'd always say, digging it in that she'd removed them from its pleasures for a year and a half, an unnatural deprivation that had ended with the loss of their father.

They still wouldn't talk to Rita about Bruce's death and shrugged off counselors like flies. Imperceptible slights or challenges hurled...