The Dismantling by Brian Deleeuw Page A

they’re going to ask. You’ll be fine.”
    â€œAnd if I pass?”
    â€œ
When
you pass, they’ll schedule the surgery. It’ll be no more than a few days later. They don’t see the point in waiting.”
    She nodded. He could see her counting off the days in her head: less than two weeks until payday. “What about you, Simon?”
    â€œWhat about me?”
    â€œHealth Solutions. It’s not your company, is it? You’re not the one running the show.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œYou’re too young, for one thing.”
    â€œI’ve heard that before. Anything else?”
    â€œIt just doesn’t seem like the kind of business you’d want to build for yourself.”
    This sounded like flattery. “That’s a strange thing for someone in your position to say.”
    She shrugged. “So then tell me: how did you end up doing what you’re doing?”
    â€œWe’re not having this conversation.”
    â€œI’m not supposed to ask questions?”
    â€œDonors ask all sorts of questions. Just not about me.”
    She shrugged again. “I’m a curious person.”
    â€œAnd this is my dream job.”
    â€œUh-huh.” She smiled, and there was the tooth again, like a chip of concrete wedged into her gum.

T HAT evening Simon rode the A train out to the Rockaways for his biweekly dinner with his father, during which he would continue to spin out the lie that he was still enrolled in medical school. He’d kept this up for nine months now. The first time he’d seen his father after his official withdrawal from school, they’d sat around the kitchen table, eating pork chops and red onions grilled on the rusty outdoor Weber, drinking bottles of Stella, and talking about the rapidly tanking stock market. Simon had felt at each successive moment as though he was going to make his announcement, but then that moment would pass by unexploited, and the next and the next, and soon enough they’d finished their dinner, and Simon found himself on the train back to Roosevelt Island, entirely sure that during the following visit he would speak, that at the next dinner he would unburden himself and offer a full and convincing explanation. Of course no such thing happened, not that next visit and not on any other visit either. But still there was no avoiding the dinners. The simple truth was that his father did not have anyone else, and although Simon had to admit he was now a liar, he refused to be a delinquent son.
    The ride out to the Beach 116th Street station was as interminable as it had always been, the train wending its way under the entire borough of Brooklyn before crossing Jamaica Bay and delivering Simon onto the spit of the Rockaways. It was on this train ride—it was
because
of this train ride—that he had first come to distrust his father’s decisions. He’d just turned twelve when Michael Worth determined that a stretch of promenade above the FDR Drive would be the best place to inform his two children that their small family was moving from Yorkville to the farthest reaches of southeastern Queens. Exley Chatham, the brokerage firm at which Michael was a vice president, had imploded in tandem with the Japanese currency market a few months before. Simon remembered his father looming like a scarecrow as he outlined in his mild North London accent why his children would be required to take the subway for an hour and a half to get to school that fall. Michael’s chest and arm hair were white as milk, and when the sun slipped out from behind one of the East End apartment towers to backlight him, the fuzz on his body glowed as though he were swaddled in tiny white-hot filaments. He was, as usual, wearing a pastel Polo shirt open at the neck—this one, Simon remembered, lime green—and, also as usual, smoking a Parliament, and all of this—the fiery hair, the shirt, the cigarette, the accent, the