Aye, daddy. You have a new book out!
This is T.C. Boyle’s 9th short story collection. Here’s an excerpt from the first story, “Balto.”
There were two kinds of truths, good truths and hurtful ones. That was what her father’s attorney was telling her, and she was listening, doing her best, her face a small glazed crescent of light where the sun glanced off the yellow kitchen wall to illuminate her, but it was hard. Hard because it was a weekday, after school, and this was her free time, her chance to breeze into the 7-Eleven or Instant Message her friends before dinner and homework closed the day down. Hard too because her father was there, sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, sipping something out of a mug, not coffee, definitely not coffee. His face was soft, the lines at the corners of his eyes nearly erased in the gentle spill of light—his crow’s-feet, and how she loved that word, as if the bird’s scaly claws had taken hold there like something out of a horror story, Edgar Allen Poe, the Raven, Nevermore, but wasn’t a raven different from a crow and why not call them raven’s-feet? Or hawk’s-feet? People could have a hawk’s nose—they always did in stories—but they had crow’s-feet, and that didn’t make any sense at all.
“Angelle,” the attorney said—Mr. Apodaca—and the sound of her own name startled her, “are you listening to me?”
She nodded her head. And because that didn’t seem enough, she spoke up too. “Yes,” she said, but her voice sounded strange in her ears, as if somebody else were speaking for her.
“Good,” he said, “good,” leaning into the table so that his big moist dog’s eyes settled on her with a baleful look. “Because this is very important, I don’t have to stress that—”
He waited for her to nod again before going on.
“There are two kinds of truths,” he repeated, “just like lies. There are bad lies, we all know that, lies meant to cheat and deceive, and then there are white lies, little fibs that don’t really hurt anybody”—he blew out a soft puff of air, as if he were just stepping into a hot tub—“and might actually do good. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
She held herself perfectly still. Of course she understood—he was treating her like a nine-year-old, like her sister, and she was twelve, almost thirteen, and this was an act of rebellion, to hold herself there, not answering, not nodding, not even blinking her eyes.
“Like in this case,” he went on, “your father’s case, I mean. You’ve seen TV, the movies. The judge asks you for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and you’ll swear to it, everybody does—your father, me, anybody before the court.” He had a mug too, one she recognized from her mother’s college days—B.U., it said in thick red letters, Boston University—but there was coffee in his, or there had been. Now he just pushed it around the table as if it were a chess piece and he couldn’t decide where to play it. “All I want you to remember—and your father wants this too, or no, he needs it, needs you to pay attention—is that there are good truths and bad truths, that’s all. And your memory only serves to a point; I mean, who’s to say what really happened, because everybody has their own version, that woman jogger, the boy on the bike—and the D.A., the District Attorney, he’s the one who might ask you what happened that day, just him and me, that’s all. Don’t you worry about anything.”
But she was worried, because Mr. Apodaca was there in the first place, with his perfect suit and perfect tie and his doggy eyes, and because her father had been handcuffed along the side of the road and taken to jail and the car had been impounded, which meant nobody could use it, not her father or her mother when she came back from France or Dolores the maid or Allie the au pair. There was all that, but there was something else too, something in her father’s look and the attorney’s sugary tones that hardened her: they were talking down to her. Talking down to her as if she had no more sense than her little sister. And she did. She did.
***
Read more here.
