standing hip-deep in dung, polishing Satan’s boots.
Her mood changing, Viola pushed her chair back from the table, got up,
and stepped to the edge of the patio. She plucked a weed from a large
terra-cotta pot full of begonias, baby’s breath, and copper-yellow
marigolds. Absentmindedly rolling the slender weed into a ball between
the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, she stared thoughtfully out
at the park-like grounds.
The woman was silent for a long time.
Holly worried that she had said something wrong, unwittingly revealing
her duplicity. Second by second, she became more nervous, and she found
herself wanting to blurt out an apology for all the lies she’d told.
Squirrels capered on the grass. A butterfly swooped under the patio
cover, perched on the edge of the lemonade pitcher for a moment, then
flew away.
Finally, with a tremor in her voice that was real this time, Holly said,
“Mrs. Moreno? Is something wrong?”
Viola flicked the balled-up weed out onto the grass. “I’m just having
trouble deciding how to put this.”
“Put what?” Holly asked nervously.
Turning to her again, approaching the table, Viola said, “You asked me
why Jim. . . why your brother quit teaching. I said it was because he
won the lottery, but that really isn’t true. If he’d still loved
teaching as much as he did a few years ago or even one year ago, he
would’ve kept working even if he’d won a hundred million.”
Holly almost breathed a sigh of relief that her cover had not been
penetrated. “What soured him on it?”
“He lost a student.”
“Lost?”
“An eighth-grader named Larry Kakonis. A very bright boy with a good
heart-but disturbed. From a troubled family. His father beat his
mother, had been beating her as long as Larry could remember, and Larry
felt as if he should be able to stop it, but he couldn’t. He felt
responsible, though he shouldn’t have. That was the kind of kid he was,
a real strong sense of responsibility.”
Viola picked up her glass of lemonade, returned to the edge of the
patio, and stared out at the greensward again. She was silent once
more.
Holly waited.
Eventually the woman said, “The mother was a co-dependent type, a victim
of the father but a collaborator in her own victimization. As troubled
in her own way as the father. Larry couldn’t reconcile his love for his
mother and his respect for her with his growing understanding that, on
some level, she liked and needed to be beaten.”
Suddenly Holly knew where this was going, and she did not want to hear
the rest of it. However, she had no choice but to listen.
“Jim had worked so hard with the boy. I don’t mean just on his English
lessons, not just academically. Lary had opened up to him in a way he’d
never been able to open to anyone else, and Jim had been counseling him
with the help of Dr. Lansing, a psychologist who works part-time for
the school district. Larry seemed to be coming around, struggling to
understand his mother and himself and to some extent succeeding. Then
one night, May fifteenth of last year–over fifteen months ago, though
it’s hard to believe it’s been that long-Larry Kakonis took a gun from
his father’s collection, loaded it, put the barrel in his mouth. . . and
fired one bullet up into his brain.”
Holly flinched as if struck. In fact she had been struck, though the
blows -two of them-were not physical. She was jolted, first, by the
thought of a thirteen-year-old committing suicide when the best of life
lay ahead of him. A small problem could seem like a large one at that
age, and a genuinely serious problem could seem catastrophic and
hopeless. Holly felt a pang of grief for Larry Kakonis, and an
undirected anger because the kid had not been given time enough to learn
that all horrors can be dealt with and that, on balance, life offered
far more joy than despair. But she was equally rattled by the date on
which the boy had killed himself: May 15.
One year later, this past May 15, Jim Ironheart had performed his first