Defending Jacob Read Online Free PDF Page B

not worth the effort that real conversation required. Wendy was divorced, the only divorcée or single mom in their little group, and she was prone to imagine that others studied her for defects.
    Toby tried to lighten the mood. “You know, we spent all those years keeping these kids away from toy guns and violent TV shows and video games. Bob and I didn’t even let our kids have water guns, for God’s sake, unless they looked like something else. And even then we did not call them ‘guns’; we called them ‘squirters’ or whatever, you know, like the kids wouldn’t
know
. Now this. It’s like—” She threw up her hands in comic exasperation.
    But the joke fell flat.
    “It’s ironic,” Wendy agreed somberly, to make Toby feel heard.
    “It’s true.” Susan sighed, again for Toby’s benefit.
    Laurie said, “I think we overestimate what we can do as parents. Your kid is your kid. You get what you get.”
    “So I could have given the kids the damn water guns?”
    “Probably. With Jacob—I don’t know. I just wonder sometimes if it ever really mattered, all the things we did, all the things we worried about. He was always what he is now, just smaller. It’s the same with all our kids. None of them are really all that different from what they were when they were little.”
    “Yes, but our parenting styles haven’t changed either. So maybe we’re just teaching them the same things.”
    Wendy: “I don’t have a parenting style. I’m just making it up as I go.”
    Susan: “Me too. We all are. Except Laurie. Laurie, you probably have a parenting style. Toby, you too.”
    “I do not!”
    “Oh, yes, you do! You probably read books about it.”
    “Not me.” Laurie put up her hands:
I’m innocent
. “Anyway, the point is, I just think we flatter ourselves when we say we can engineer our kids to be this way or that way. It’s mostly just hardwired.”
    The women eyed one another. Maybe Jacob was hardwired, not their kids. Not like Jacob, anyway.
    Wendy said, “Did any of you know Ben?” She meant Ben Rifkin, the murder victim. They had not known him. Calling him by his first name was just a way of adopting him.
    Toby: “No. Dylan never was friends with him. And Ben never played sports or anything.”
    Susan: “He was in Max’s class a few times. I used to see him. He seemed like a good kid, I guess, but who ever knows?”
    Toby: “They have lives of their own, these kids. I’m sure they have their secrets.”
    Laurie: “Just like us. Just like us at their age, for that matter.”
    Toby: “I was a good girl. At their age, I never gave my parents a thing to worry about.”
    Laurie: “I was a good girl too.”
    I said, intruding, “You weren’t
that
good.”
    “I was until I met you. You corrupted me.”
    “Did I? Well, I’m quite proud of that. I’ll have to put it on my résumé.”
    But the kidding felt inappropriate so soon after the mention of the dead child’s name, and I felt crude and embarrassed before the women, whose emotional sensibilities were so much finer than mine.
    There was a moment’s silence then Wendy blurted, “Oh my God, those poor, poor people. That mother! And here we are, just ‘Life goes on, back to school,’ and her little boy will never, never come back.” Wendy’s eyes became watery.
The horror of it: one day, through no fault of your own
—
    Toby came forward to hug her friend, and Laurie and Susan rubbed Wendy’s back.
    Excluded, I stood there a moment with a dumb, well-meaning expression—a tight smile, a softening around the eyes—then I excused myself to go check on the security station at the school entrance before things devolved into more weepiness. I did not quite understand the depth of Wendy’s grief for a child she did not know; I took it as yet another sign of the woman’s emotional vulnerability. Also, that Wendy had echoed my own words from the night before, “Life goes on,” seemed to align her with Laurie in a tiff that had only