A Thousand Pardons Read Online Free PDF

Price Chopper, the middle school, the dry cleaner, the dump)—her neighbors and casual friends pretended not to see her, or to be busily on their way elsewhere across the street, not because they condemned or looked down on her but because the level of disgrace she’d been subjected to was so epic that they weren’t even sure how to acknowledge it and thus how to talk to her in the way that they used to. Only her closest friends made a show of everything being just as it was before, which was worse, in a way. There was now an element of performance to their friendship, even when no one else was around to see or be upbraided by their example, which brought home to Helen that it was really themselves these friends were performing for—burnishing their estimation of themselves as people who would not abandon an unjustly scandalized friend.
    And in truth it was that notion of herself as a victim that put Helen off too, that made her come up with excuses when friends called to invite her forcefully to lunch or to ostentatiously offer her a ride to the next Parents’ Coffee at school. She had genuinely no idea of the depths to which her husband had been descending over that summer, but did that exonerate her—having no idea? It had been well over a decadesince she’d had any job other than to maintain a happy home and family environment for their only child, and she had failed at that job rather decisively. So spectacular was her failure that the mushroom cloud over her happy home environment was featured in the newspaper every day for a week, not just at home in Rensselaer Valley, where there was never much going on, but even in Manhattan, where the destruction of some rich Brahmin at the hands of his own perverse compulsions was always a tabloid chestnut.
    Every day was a limbo, in which the house—a white, weathered, green-shuttered ranch with a finished basement, which everyone always said was more spacious inside than it looked from the outside—served as both prison and fortress. Ben had not contacted his wife and daughter since passing through the doors of Stages—quite likely he was forbidden to, for a while anyway, according to some twelve-step protocol—and Helen made no attempt to contact him. Though they’d never discussed it, or even said goodbye, it would not have surprised her terribly if she never saw him again. When eighth grade began for Sara a week or so after his departure, it was still much too soon for anyone there to have forgotten anything; at the end of the first day Helen asked her how it had gone, seeing her classmates again, and Sara gave the worst, most distressing answer possible, which was that she didn’t want to talk about it.
    Then there was the question of money. It hadn’t disappeared, exactly, but it was hard to trust that the seventy-five thousand posted for bail would ever grace their account again; and then a Manhattan judge, at the request of Cornelia’s lawyers, had taken the extraordinary step of freezing all of Ben’s assets, including the house, which prevented them from selling it, for financial or any other reasons. The lawyers argued that Helen and Ben’s pending divorce action was nothing more than a cynical attempt to shield themselves from future civil liability, and the judge, without deigning to ask Helen or anyone who knew her whether she was the sort of person who would break up her child’s home as a legal maneuver, agreed. Stages cost $850 a day, and there was no timetable for Ben’s discharge. Bonifacio’s retainer was sixty-two thousand dollars. Helen had a checking account with abouteight grand left in it. Her life was such that her only expenses were food and gas, but still.
    She would have to go back to work, and she had to do it somewhere other than Rensselaer Valley, because there were no jobs there outside the service industries and because they needed a fresh start anyway, out from under the dark umbrella Ben’s madness had opened up above their