Chapter 23: The Postdoc

Margie didn't move out of the doorway.

"You cut her cable," she said.

"I know."

"You laughed at her in front of the donors."

"I know," he said again. "Can I come in? Please. It's raining on my neck."

Margie looked back at me.

I nodded.

She stepped aside, and he came into the kitchen dripping, and stopped dead.

Jet was sitting at the table in Margie's ex's flannel shirt with his hair down.

His ears stuck out of it, pale and pointed, in the full light of the bare bulb.

Minnow sat beside him in the bathrobe with a slice of pizza in each hand.

She waved one of them.

"Hi," she said. "Are you the one who cuts things?"

The postdoc made a sound.

"Sit down," Margie told him. "Before you fall down."

He sat.

He put the flash drive on the table next to the yellow hose, very carefully, and didn't take his eyes off Jet.

"You're real," he said.

"Yes," Jet said.

"You were in the tank. You were the tail."

"I was very bored in the tank."

The postdoc laughed once, high and shaky, and put his face in his hands.

I waited.

So did everybody else.

"He told me," the postdoc said into his hands. "In March. At the bar in Rockland, after the foundation dinner. He'd had four scotches."

"Told you what?"

He lifted his head.

"That he cut your line. He said it like a joke. He said, 'Best decision I ever made, and the girl's fine, look at her, she's a lobsterman.'"

Margie put her coffee mug down hard enough to slop it.

"I thought he was drunk and bragging," the postdoc said. "Then you played that card in the lab, and I watched his hand do it."

"And you didn't call anybody," I said.

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