The Reconstructionist Read Online Free PDF Page A

brother. I hadn’t made the connection. I’m the idiot.’
    ‘My dad’s life did go pretty much straight to hell after that,’ Ellis said. Trying to give nothing away. He already knew Boggs’s position on the topic of children, through Heather, because he was conducting an affair with her.
    ‘I don’t know what an accident is, really,’ Boggs said.
    This – or a version of this – represented one of Boggs’s themes. And after the third or fourth time, Ellis had developed a standard response: ‘Everything’s got a name, but not every name’s got a thing.’ Or a version of this.
    ‘Everything,’ Boggs would say, ‘depends on the contingent and the adventitious, and if the meeting of two vehicles in an intersection can be called an accident, then what can’t be called an accident? Where my footsteps fall, where I place my hands, where I sit, where I stand, how I appear in the world, who I speak to, the kind of work I do, who I befriend, who I fall in love with?’ Boggs pouted. ‘
Accident?
’
    Some of these conversations occurred in Boggs’s office, and Ellis had grown exquisitely familiar with the backside of the photograph of Heather that stood on Boggs’s desk – the black cardboard, the little rotating latches, the triangular folding stand, the stainless-steel frame edge. But if he came around the desk to point out something on Boggs’s computer screen, he wouldn’t let himself glance at the photo. Instead he closed his attention on the computer screen, sometimes examining it pixel by pixel. He had an attitude of awe before his yearning toward her. And anger, because that yearning appeared so irrational and futile.
    Every few weeks, despite himself, he went again to the art museum and wandered. He could not deny his hope, which amazed him. Sometimes he paced a slow circle around the spot where he’d encountered Heather before, looking, smelling the air, as if he might find some evidence of her, as if by detecting her in the past he might summon her into the present.
    And years passed. Then, on a late-spring afternoon when Boggs was across the continent, participating in a mock trial that a client had arranged, Ellis’s phone rang. Boggs, in a growly tone, said, ‘Do me a favour?’ Heather – he said – was stranded in her father’s RV in a grocery store parking lot. The engine wouldn’t start. ‘Do you know what it costs to get an RV that size towed?’ Boggs asked. ‘And I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a bad connection at the battery.’
    Ellis went.
    The RV – a Coachmen Leprechaun, running a Ford V8 under the hood – lay at the edge of the parking lot, big and rectangular as a fallen megalith. The problem was just as Boggs had suggested. Ellis retrieved pliers and a wire brush from a hardware store down the street, cleaned the battery connections and tightened the leads, and the engine keyed on. Heather, in the driver’s seat, clapped. She climbed down and peered at the burbling engine. ‘All good,’ Ellis said.
    ‘Want some iced tea?’ she asked. ‘Want to come in?’ she added, in a satirical tone, gesturing at the RV’s fibreglass side door. She apologised several times for the mess before letting him enter.
    Marbles, toilet paper rolls, electrical wires in many colours, seashells, dryer lint, blackened sheets of aluminum foil, quartered tennis balls, Dixie cups, images of children cut from magazines, moulded plastic zoo animals – these were gathered in coffee cans and shoeboxes all over the floor. On the little dining table lay a large set of watercolours and an old anatomy textbook with holes drilled through and plastic flowers sprouting from it. She cleared a seat for him and poured iced tea in repurposed yogurt cups. He sat with anxiety bobbing inside. Beside her, loosely arranged on the bit of counter space beside the sink, stood a few strange objects. A pair of little alien creatures – assembled from pen caps, wires, pieces of cellphones, bits of shining