Someone I have never seen sets down a bowl of steaming soup in front of me. I turn to the woman, short, round, eyes-down.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Thank you, sir,” she says immediately, her voice quiet, before disappearing out of the door.
“Who is that?” I ask.
Glass clears his throat. I look at him, see the bright purple welt on his forehead, and the dark line of his split lip. Unconsciously, my hand goes to my own face, where I run over the slight swelling at the side of my jaw.
It was a good sparring session. I won, but he surprised me for an old man.
“That’s Susan,” Glass says irritably. “She’s on my staff, forget about her.”
Forget about her.
He just treats people like disposable things, even the people who work for him.
I turn to Deidre, sitting opposite me along the lengthy, narrow table. She doesn’t meet my eyes, and instead looks down at her soup.
“Well, what the fuck are you waiting for?” Glass growls, and when I snap my head to him, I notice he’s staring angrily at Deidre.
“Glass,” I say, pulling his attention away. “What was that move, you spun on your heel, like a pivot, but it was a fake, you bounced off and went the other way.”
He grins at me, slurps soup off his spoon. “I came up with that.”
“Yeah? It was good.” I rub my jaw, sell it. “You got me good.”
“Damn right I did, boy. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow, we don’t talk about work at the table.”
But now his mood has lightened, and I look at Deidre, and her eyes are on me.
We all drink our soup in uncomfortable silence.
“Excuse me,” Glass says after a moment, as if unable to bear it any longer. “I have to make a telephone call.”
He exits the dining room, and once the door is closed, Dee says to me, “Oh my God, did you do that to his face?”
I nod at her. “Yeah, but we were wearing padded helmets. Is he always like this at dinner?”
“Yeah.”
“Does he always get on you?”
She nods slowly.
Distantly, through the heavy wooden doors we can hear his angry voice shouting on the phone.
“Does he always do business during dinner?”
“We haven’t had an uninterrupted dinner in years,” Dee tells me. “Not that I mind. It’s not like we talk.”
“Why not?”
She frowns, bristles almost. “How the hell should I know? He’s just a prick.”
“You shouldn’t let him push you around. He’s a bully.”
“He’s my father.”
“So?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
I set down my spoon. “What do you mean?”
“You didn’t have a father.”
“Yeah, but there were plenty of bullies in my life.”
“You just joined this family,” she says. “Don’t think you understand how it works.”
“So how does it work?”
“Not the way you say it does. I can’t just push back.”
“Why not?”
“He loses his temper.”
“Does he hit you?”
Her spoon clinks against her bowl. “No.”
“But he shouts at you.”
“Yes. Can you stop asking me these questions?”
I let out a slow breath, look briefly toward the door, then back at Dee. She looks haunted by these questions, and is no longer meeting my eyes.
“Dee,” I say, and I tap her foot under the table with mine. I see the flash of a smile, but otherwise nothing. “Dee,” I say, doing it again.
“What are you doing?” she asks, failing to hide the same smile. She kicks my foot back.
“There’s been something on my mind.”
“What?”
“It’s going to sound weird.”
“Just as long as you don’t ask me about Dad anymore. I’d rather not think about him.”
“No, it’s not that.”
“Then what?”
“It’ll make me look stupid.”
“How do you know you don’t already look stupid? After all, you climbed into that car with Dad.”
“Ouch.”
She lifts her spoon, points it at me. “Don’t play with fire, I’m your only ally in this house.”
There’s a certain truth to that, I’m sure.
“Well, go on, ask me.”
“How exactly do you spell your name?”
There’s a space, just a pause of time where we grin at each other, where our eyes meet, and it’s like we’re transported somewhere else.
At least, that’s what it feels like to me.
And then she looks down, laughing a little, shaking her head. “I forgot about that.”
“Did I get it wrong?”
“Very wrong. It’s D-E-I-D-R-E.”
“Huh,” I say. “I would never have guessed.”
“That’s what you get for skipping school.”
“It’s not exactly the most common name.”
“Common enough,” she fires back, “To know how to spell it.”
At that moment Glass bursts back into the room, and at once blankets the mood with his own.
“Get up, Duncan.”
I frown. “Why?”
“I’ve got some things to handle tonight, so I need to get your measurements and vitals down first. You can have dinner later.”
I consider resisting, but when I see his angry eyes flick to Dee, I immediately say, “Okay, Glass.”
I get up, leave the room, cast one last look at her.
“It’s okay,” she whispers, and she starts to sip soup from her spoon, as if eating alone in the large dining room is completely normal for her.
Maybe it’s just me who is abnormal. Back in the home, we never ate alone. It was fifteen or twenty boys spread down a long steel table, each guarding their food, wolfing it down as fast as possible. In Thailand the whole village ate together in a communal dining hall.
I don’t think I can remember the last time I ate alone.
That image of her, by herself, somehow unnerves me.
I realize I’m standing in the doorway looking at her. Glass has walked off toward the gym, and Dee is paying me no attention.
“Don’t keep him waiting,” she says. “Trust me.”
“You eat alone a lot?”
She shrugs. “Pretty much every night.”
“What about Frank?”
“Dad doesn’t invite him in much.”
“You mean he waits outside in the car?”
“Yeah.”
I lick my lips. “What are you doing after dinner?”
“Homework, and then going to bed,” she says, as if it’s the most obvious thing ever.
I nod.
“You?”
“Probably get some weights in, then go for a run.”
“So your own homework.”
I grin. “Yeah.”
Glass’ voice booms through the house: “Duncan!”
“Go,” she says.
It’s so hard to drag myself away from her, but I do, jog toward the gym.
When I get there, Glass is waiting. He’s set up a bunch of testing equipment and measuring equipment. Height, wingspan, vertical jump, standing reach, weight, body fat percentage by caliper – which is unreliable – blood pressure, heart rate, and some other machines I don’t recognize.
“I’m going to need to take blood,” he says.
“Why?”
“I want to see your resting oxygen saturation.”
I realize there is a lot I have to learn, and for now, I hate to just have to blindly trust him. I don’t much like that.
“What do you need all this for?”
“You’ve got a great body but it’s not mature yet,” he says, patting me on my chest. “You’re hard, I know, low body fat, that’s good. But we need to get more weight on you, especially here,” he says, and he slaps my ass, and then my thighs. “You need lower body strength.”
“Right.”
“So these measurements will help me determine how to train you. McNamara will help us as well, he’s got a team of doctors on his staff.”
He pauses for a while as he sets up the equipment. “What do you think of my daughter, Deidre?”
I’m caught off-guard by the question. At first, I think he’s going to issue me a warning, but the look in his eyes tells me that is not the case.
“She’s seems smart.”
He smiles. “She is. Very smart.”
“Mature beyond her years.”
“She always was precocious.”
“Beautiful.”
“She takes after her mother, but she could drop a few pounds.”
“She doesn’t need to,” I say.
Glass flicks his eyes up to me, narrows them. “You don’t think so?”
“No, not that what I think is important. What she thinks is important.”
“Learn a lesson from me, boy,” he says, lifting a finger. “When you have kids of your own, you got to teach them how to think, or they’ll pick up all the wrong shit.”
“You can’t force your ideas into someone else’s head.”
“You can.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“That’s philosophy,” he says. “But if you can guide them down the right path, shouldn’t you?”
“Do you guide Deidre?”
“I try to, but she is resistant to me. Always has been.”
“Do you know why?”
“How the hell should I know?” Glass barks without an ounce of self-awareness.
I don’t emote. It was the answer I expected.
“Now come here and stand against the wall, I need to measure your height.”
“I’m six-three I say.”
“I need exact measurements.”
I shrug, do as he says, my mind on Dee for the whole time.
But when we’re finally done, and I go looking for her around the house, I see that she’s already gone into her room, already showered judging by the steam on the mirrors in the bathroom, and the lingering smell of shampoo and shower gel in the air.
So I shower, too, clean up, realize I have nothing to wear outside of a few pairs of new compression shorts Glass gave me to spar in. They were still in the wrappers, to my relief.
With no other choice I put them on, crawl into an unfamiliar bed, and instantly feel uncomfortable.
It’s the softest fucking bed I’ve ever been in.
I get out, throw the pillow onto the carpeted floor, drag the sheets down with me, and lie down there instead.
This is more like it.