Chapter 19

The windows were his self-given Saturday morning chore and meditation. Quinn had come to think of them that way. Some kinds of activity just lent themselves to a quiet mind. His morning runs did it. Window washing did it as well. The squeegee's clean arc and the glass sparkling clear afterwards, gave him a solid sense of accomplishment.

The morning was cold and bright. He'd done the library windows from the outside, then the sitting room, working his way methodically around the building's south face. He was at the front of the house with the extension pole, the upper windows requiring the full reach of it.

He was thinking about Tocqueville's call for intellectual diversity and debate.

The Colonel had assigned it to him to re-read. He had written in the margin of the first chapter in his clear, firm hand: What has changed since your first reading? Quinn had been sitting with it for three days, reading and rereading and trying to uncover the changes in his understanding between the first time he'd read it and this one.

He was thinking about it when the car came through the gates. It had diplomatic plates. A black Toyota Century. It came up the drive at a measured pace and stopped neatly at the front entrance.

Quinn was on the ladder. He watched them get out.

The man was fiftyish, trim and precise, a Japanese in a dark suit. He carried himself with the contained quality of wealth and status. The woman beside him was elegant in the way that some Asian women are elegant, not as performance but in posture and bearing. They moved toward the door with coordinated ease.

Quinn came down the ladder.

He ran through what he knew -- the diplomatic plates, the bearing-- and made a reasonable assessment. Then he ran through what greeting he should give. He acted because standing on a ladder holding a squeegee while guests arrived was not how a guest was recieved at the Colonel's house.

He set the squeegee on the bucket, came around the foot of the ladder, and arrived at the foot of the steps at the same moment they did.

He performed the bow -- the correct thirty degrees, the way one met someone for the first time in a formal context. He'd practiced against the bathroom mirror for two months last year to pass his Japanese final.

"Konnichiwa. Hajimemashite. Quinn_Norman_moushimasu. Yoroshiku onegaishimasu."

He'd considered the name issue for a fraction of a second -- the Colonel's name was what was relevant here, not his -- but introducing himself was what the phrase required, and it was the honest thing, so Quinn Norman it was.

They responded in kind, their Japanese considerably faster than his. The woman, with particular grace, moderated her speed in the way of someone who has encountered second-language speakers before and knows how to make the exchange comfortable.

Then the door opened and Sullivan was there.

He took in the scene with the comprehensive, instantaneous assessment that was his standard operating mode -- the guests, Quinn, his bow, the exchange that had apparently just occurred. His face did the thing it did, the almost-thing, the barely-there movement.

"As you can see," he said in English to the couple, "the Colonel has hired a greeter." A pause, precisely timed. "Who also does windows."

The man laughed -- a genuine laugh, surprised out of him.

Quinn stood on the bottom step and felt a clean, uncomplicated delight at Sullivan making an actual joke.

He grinned in delight.

Sullivan met his eyes for a fraction of a second with an expression that communicated something in the private language they had been building for a year and a half. A well done that neither of them would ever say out loud. Then he escorted the guests inside with his customary efficient courtesy. Leaving Quinn alone by the front step.

He laughed again.

Sullivan made jokes so rarely that each one was a significant event, filed and dated. He went around to the back of the house to finish the kitchen and dining room windows and laughed again while he worked.

He was still thinking hard about Tocqueville and what the Colonel's margin note was actually asking when the Colonel found him in his room after lunch.

"The Yamamoto family," he said without preamble, "Kenji Yamamoto has been assigned to the Japanese consulate. They arrived last week. They have a daughter your age who will attend St. Crispin's beginning Monday."

Quinn processed this. "Okay."

"I'd like you to show her around." The Colonel looked at him with the level assessment that still, after eighteen months, carried its full weight. "She'll be navigating an unfamiliar system in a second language in a new country. You understand that experience."

He did understand that experience.

"Yes, sir."

"Her English is good," the Colonel said. "Her French is also good, from what I understand. "I'm sure she has become accustomed to starting at new places. Her father's career has required it. But starting over in a new school is still starting over, regardless of preparation."

Quinn nodded. "I'll be at the front steps when she arrives."

The Colonel looked at him for a moment. "Good," he said, and went back to the library.

Monday morning was clear and cold. Quinn waited at the front steps of St. Crispin's at seven fifty, with his hands in his jacket pockets and his breath showing in the air. He'd thought about what the morning might require. A girl new to the country, new to the school, being deposited at an unfamiliar institution by parents who had their own first day at a new posting to navigate. The particular vulnerability of that, regardless of how well-prepared you were.

He watched the cars arriving and leaving.

Finally, a black limo with diplomatic plates pulled up at eight ten. Quinn watched it arrive and noted the way the students nearest the steps clocked it, the involuntary attention that limos command.

The door opened.

Whatever he'd been expecting, Keiko was not it.

He'd had an image of her: diplomat's daughter, transferring mid-semester, probably very quiet and shy.

The person who stepped out of the limousine was not that.

She was slight, tall for a Japanese, with the comfortable posture of someone who has been taught how to enter rooms. Her uniform was correct--navy blazer, white shirt, the St. Crispin's standard. She wore her skirt shorter than usual. She had a bag over one shoulder. He decided she had smart eyes. She looked at the school's façade for a moment, then at him, reading the environment, filing the information, preparing to navigate.

Her eyes told him this girl was no shy wallflower.

He watched while she got her bearings. She met his gaze with a friendly questioning look that asked if he was the person assigned to meet her.

He said, in Japanese: "Yamamoto Keiko-san desu ka? Hajimemashite."

She grinned and shook her head slightly.

"Thank you," she said, in English that was fluent, accented but clear. "But English, please." The eyes had a layer of amusement in them. "I need practice. My written English is good, but my conversation needs perfecting."

"Fair enough," Quinn said. He introduced himself properly, giving his name and mentioning that the Colonel had asked him to show her around.

She nodded, taking it in. "I've met the Colonel; he is your..." She searched for the word.

"My uncle," Quinn said.

"Ah. He is" She stopped.

"Formidable?" Quinn offered.

The mischief arrived in her eyes again. "Yes," she said, with exact emphasis. "That is the correct word."

Quinn thought: Katherine and Sheila. Immediately.

He showed her around the building.

She asked the usual questions: which teachers were genuinely good and which to avoid, where the library was, and what its hours were.

She asked about languages.

"There are several; I took Japanese," Quinn said. "I tested out of Spanish."

She looked at him. "You speak well," she said, meaning the greeting on the front steps. "Your form was correct."

"The angle of the bow; last year I had trouble with that."

"Yes." Something in her expression. "Most non-Japanese people either don't know or overdo it."

"Overdoing it is worse than not doing it," Quinn said.

"Yes," she said. "My father will have made note of it. The bow. He notices these things."

They were moving through the second-floor corridor when Quinn saw Katherine first -- at her locker. She saw Quinn and then noticed the girl beside him. Her nose wrinkled with instant curiosity.

Sheila appeared beside her a moment later. She looked Quinn with an expression that demanded a response.

He made the introductions: the brief version, bland facts. Keiko, first day, from Japan, diplomats, needed orientation. Then watched the three of them in the moment of first contact; three girls determining quickly and efficiently whether they were going to be friends or enemies.

Then Sheila spoke, with the full performance of her current theatrical phase: "Oh, you poor girl. Has he been following you everywhere? What must you think of us?"

Keiko's response was immediate, her eyes doing the mischief thing. "He has been very kind. But perhaps" -- a fractional pause, the pause of someone selecting an English word with care -- "a trifle overprotective?"

Quinn started to say something. Sheila raised one hand with the imperious authority of the princess she was playing in the school play.

"Begone, you wretched man," she said grandly. "We three have private business."

Katherine was laughing, her real laugh, not the social one, and Keiko's tinkling laugh arrived simultaneously, light and genuine. In the space of those thirty seconds, the three girls recognized each other as friend material.

He looked at Sheila. "Don't break her," he said. "I'll see you guys at lunch."

"We will not be ruled by you," Sheila said airily. "Begone."

"As you wish, my princess," Quinn said, a properly humble servant.

Keiko looked at him with the mischief fully present and said, very correctly, "Thank you for your assistance, Quinn-san. You have been most helpful."

He laughed, the laugh of someone whose tables have been neatly turned around. "Dou itashimashite."

Keiko's eyes reacted to his tone. Then Katherine linked her arm with hers, and off they went toward something that required their immediate attention, Sheila providing running commentary in the voice she'd developed for the school play. The three moved down the corridor, around the corner, and were gone.

Quinn stood and watched them walk away.

Keiko-san is going to be fine.

He went to homeroom.

By lunch, the girls were already united.

He saw it from across the cafeteria -- the three of them at the table, the conversation already running on its own engine. Sheila with her hands making the animated shapes of her current theatrical phase and Katherine, with her chin in her palm, listening with the quality she had when something was genuinely interesting to her. Keiko had her head tilted slightly in the posture of careful listening.

Peter was there as well. James and Will arrived a moment after Quinn.

Quinn put down the lunch Maria had made for him and looked at Keiko, who looked back with the mischief resting comfortably in her expression.

"How was the tour?" he asked.

"Very educational," she said.

Sheila said, "We showed her the library."

"She stayed for twenty minutes," Katherine said.

Quinn looked at Keiko.

"I quite like libraries," Keiko said, with a slight quality of apology for her own enthusiasm that was endearing.

He unpacked Maria's lunch and gave it the attention it deserved a let the conversation move on around him. Everyone was already including Keiko in the group.

Quinn ate his lunch and listened to Sheila explain the school play to Keiko in passionate detail. Keiko listened with genuine interest while Katherine mediated with the dry accuracy of someone providing the objective account alongside the advocacy.

Quinn, meanwhile, was thinking about Thanksgiving, wondering what Maria would make for the occasion. Thanksgiving, for him, was a special holiday, much more so than Christmas. Thanksgiving was about family. There was that word again.

Thanksgiving with my family.

Across the table, Keiko said something in response to Sheila that made Katherine laugh and Sheila clutch her head dramatically while Peter looked up from his book with the involuntary attention of someone whose focus has been broken by something genuinely amusing.

Quinn sat in the middle of it and let it be exactly what it was.

Look where you live, he thought. Look at your life, dude.

Chapter 20

Katherine sent her friend Amy Kowalski to him.

Quinn had seen through her right off. He'd been tutoring long enough now to recognize the types accurately. Amy hid her intelligence behind a wall of helplessness. She was seventeen, pretty in a pixyish kind of way. Her helpless act had been a part of her for so long that she probably didn't fully notice herself doing it anymore.

He'd built her geometry program the way he'd built Katherine's: the foundation first, proofs before practice.

This was the approach that got the most resistance because every kid he'd worked with had been trained to learn the what rather than the why. Changing required them to recognize what they didn't know.

Amy's resistance had been elegant. She'd used her face, her body, and her helplessness. Quinn ignored that and patiently pointed to the theorem on the whiteboard, saying, "Try again, look closer; you've almost got it." He spoke with the absolute confidence that she could do it.

She'd gotten it the second time.

He'd seen the moment it clicked -- the involuntary straightening, the expression of a person who had found something they didn't know they were looking for. He'd said nothing, just moved to the next theorem. She'd been six inches further forward in her chair for the rest of that session. Now, eight sessions in, she was doing the flashcards.

He held them up one at a time, each one presenting a problem that required the application of a theorem. She worked them out in the notebook with the focused, excited attention of someone who had finally understood it. She got seven in a row and tapped her pen on the table once, hard, in celebration.

"Okay," Quinn said.

"I hope you're not going to say 'good job,'" she said. "I hate when people say 'good job' like I'm a dog who sits on command."

"I wasn't going to," he said. "I was going to say the next one is harder."

She looked at him. "Bring it."

He was aware of Keiko and Katherine at the other end of the table.

They had arrived twenty minutes into the session with their homework. Keiko was engrossed in what appeared to be a Japanese novel. Katherine had her history homework. They'd both registered Amy with precise assessment.

Amy was aware of them in the way that she was aware of most things that might be relevant to her presentation. She'd glanced at Keiko once with the particular attention that a new face received in this school, especially a new girl who was friends with Quinn. She returned to the flashcard with a slightly increased focus that he figured had a competitive quality to it, though he kept this observation to himself.

He held up the harder card.

She worked it out. It took four minutes, and she went down one wrong path and corrected herself without prompting, which was the important part -- the correction coming from inside the system rather than from him, which meant the system was now running on its own.

When she finished, she sat back and looked at the answer with the expression he'd come to recognize as her real face, the one that arrived after the performance had run out of material -- unguarded, pleased with herself.

"When's the test?" he said.

"Friday."

"You're ready," he said. "You're going to do well." This was their last session.

She started packing up her notebook.

She looked up at him; then her expression changed. She looked wistful.

"Thank you," she said.

"You're welcome. Good luck on the test," Quinn said.

She left.

"She likes you," Katherine said, without looking up from her book.

"She's a client," Quinn said.

"These are not mutually exclusive states," Katherine said. "You're looking at this wrong, according to Sheila, who is the foremost expert on you."

"Sheila needs to MYOB."

Katherine turned a page. "Amy Kowalski has mentioned you on three separate occasions. All you have to do is ask her out, something even an idiot like you can do."

Quinn looked at her.

"I'm just saying," Katherine said. "Keiko, do you want to weigh in?"

Keiko looked up from her novel. "She arrived ready to be charming," she said thoughtfully. "She left disappointed but knowing the material."

"Thus," Quinn said, "the point of the tutoring."

"Well, there are other girls you could date. You're not tutoring everybody."

He thought, not for the first time, about dating. No driving, no dating. He had two months before he'd be eligible for his license.

"I'm not going on a date where I have to have Sullivan drive me around. That's even if he would agree to do such a thing. I'm going to wait till I get my license. The guys taught me to drive when I was in Montana."

Keiko asked about the ranch.

He told them about the fence line and digging post holes in hardpan. The guys he worked with and had so much fun with. They had been appalled that he didn't know how to drive. They had been driving farm vehicles since they were little kids. He told them about their lessons driving an old Army jeep on the dirt road to the highway, with lots of laughter and comments when he stalled it. He told them about skinny dipping in the pond in August and going to the barn dances.

Keiko and Katherine listened and asked questions, particularly about the barn dances.

"I want to go back this summer," he said. "I'm looking forward to it more than I realized."

"The Thanksgiving holiday first," Keiko said.

"Yeah." He looked at her. "What are you doing for Thanksgiving?"

She was quiet for a moment -- the pause of someone who is happy to have been asked and is organizing an answer that has some complexity to it. "My parents are going to Washington for the diplomatic reception," she said. "I will -- " She stopped. "I'm not certain. Thanksgiving is a complicated holiday to understand from the outside."

Quinn thought about this. He thought about the Colonel's table and the quality of the household during the holidays, which he was still learning. He thought about the warmth of Maria's kitchen.

He was formulating something when the library's side door opened.

Keiko's driver appeared. He was a quiet man in a dark suit who moved with the studied restraint of someone whose job was to be present and unobtrusive simultaneously. He found Keiko's eyes, then waited with the practiced patience of someone who does a great deal of waiting as a profession.

They all gathered their things and moved through the library toward the door.

Katherine fell into step beside him. "She's coming to my house for Thanksgiving," she said quietly.

He looked at her.

"Sheila and I decided yesterday. Sheila and her parents are coming too."

"Good," he said.

Katherine looked at him. "You were going to invite her, weren't you?"

"I was thinking about it."

"To the Colonel's house."

"I needed to ask Maria first," he said.

"You're always too slow," she said comfortably. "This is why you need us."

They came out the front entrance into the late afternoon as a group: Quinn, Katherine, Keiko, and Sheila, who had materialized from the direction of the theater building, buzzing with the electric excitement she carried out of rehearsals.

The limousine was at the curb. The driver opened the rear door with the same efficient quiet.

Sheila stopped at the car door and turned to Quinn with the full deployment of whatever character she was currently inhabiting, one hand extended toward the limousine in the gesture of a person of considerable importance indicating a conveyance.

"That will be all." The voice of an eighteenth-century aristocrat managing a household servants with an iron hand. "See that you're waiting for us in the morning."

"As you wish, princess."

Keiko got in the car with the tinkling. Katherine followed, shaking her head with the fond exasperation of someone who has already accepted that this is her life now.

Quinn laughed. He stood on the front step of St. Crispin's in the cold November afternoon and laughed at Sheila, who maintained the character for exactly the right duration and then broke it herself, the real laugh arriving, the unchanged one from when she was nine.

"You're going to be great in that play," he said.

"I know. I'm going to be magnificent," she said serenely and got in the car.

The door closed. The limousine pulled away from the curb with the measured precision of professional driving, and Quinn stood on the step and watched it go, then set out on foot.

The walk home was the same walk it had always been -- the residential streets, the landmarks in order, the church spire appearing right where it always had in the third-from-last turn.

The afternoon had gone from cold-bright to cold-dim; the streetlights came on before he was halfway home. His breath formed small clouds. He had his hands in his jacket pockets, his pack on his shoulder, and the geometry flashcards in the front pocket because he was going to review them tonight, not for himself but to think about whether there were better ones, whether the sequence could be improved.

Chapter 21

The holidays arrived. Quinn moved through them carefully.

That was the word for it: carefully, the attention you bring to something that could break. He had not expected to feel the way he felt about Thanksgiving and Christmas in the Colonel's house; he had not prepared for it the way he prepared for other things because he hadn't known to prepare for it.

The actual experience turned out to be significant.

Thanksgiving in Maria's kitchen was full of frantic operations that started two days before. Delicious smells arrived in layers as the day approached -- the stock for the gravy coming first. The dressing came next. The house filled with a deep, rich smell that Quinn, to the end of his days, would always connect with Maria.

Quinn moved through the house in a daze. The big day came, and the Colonel's table had six people at it -- the Colonel, Sullivan and Maria, Ms. O'Toole, Yaakov, and a shy woman named Shira, whom he introduced as his wife with the pride of a man utterly in love with his woman.

Quinn sat down at the table in his chair and looked at the length of it -- the big turkey bird and all the rest of the feast, along with the laughter of the guests, and felt an unexpected thing.

This was what family was.

The feeling had all the warmth of the kitchen, the weight of Maria's arms when she hugged him, and the Colonel's handwriting on the margins of his books. It arrived with the full weight of everything those things meant.

He had grown up carefully not wanting anybody or anyplace. The logic had been proven repeatedly: people and places always get taken away. You made sure nothing was so important that its loss would break you.

And now here he had family. Maria's voice singing Puerto Rican songs in the kitchen, the Colonel's questions, Sullivan's almost jokes, the library with its walls of books, Sheila's unchanged laugh, Keiko's mischief, and Katherine's sly digs.

The certainty he was going to lose it all made him anxious. He sat with the anxiety the way Epictetus had described sitting with discomfort -- not feeding it, not fleeing it, just acknowledging it as information.

So, he was quieter than usual.

He hid it as best as he could. He didn't want to ruin things for everybody.

Sullivan noticed. Quinn could tell he did, but he didn't remark on it. This was, Quinn had come to understand, his form of respect -- the noticing without intervention.

He was grateful for that.

Christmas was smaller and warmer. The Colonel gave him a first edition of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in four volumes, which arrived in a wooden box with a card in the Colonel's handwriting that said only: For your library. Quinn later found himself in his room with the first volume open in his hands, the smell of old paper wafting from it. He felt the crack in his armor widen.

He gave the Colonel a diary he had found at the ranch, written by the original homesteader's wife, a woman named Judith Ascot, who had come west from Philadelphia to marry a man she had never met, a homesteader named Silas Svenson. It was barely legible, but it was a fine link to the past.

He'd been anticipating the Colonel's response to the gift ever since August. After all, what do you give the man who has everything?

Maria got a cookbook. Sullivan got an annotated copy of The Art of War. He gave Mrs. O'Toole a coffee table book of fine china and tableware.

It was fun, and he almost forgot his fears.

Almost.

Chapter 22

Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones arrived the day after Christmas.

Quinn came downstairs at his usual time and found them in the kitchen talking and laughing with Sullivan and the Colonel. Each of them had a cup of Maria's coffee in front of them. There was a plate of her blueberry muffins in the middle of the table.

The men were both in their thirties or early forties, heavily bearded and dressed in identical gray sweatshirts and Levis. Quinn thought they looked remarkably like bandits just out of the hills.

Mr. Smith was a black, lean and angular, with an air of sustained alertness. His eyes were constantly in motion, flickering from the doorway to the windows to the hallway.

Jones was the bigger of the pair--calm and quiet, a listener--much more serious than Smith, who was laughing and joking with Sullivan, whom he called Gunny.

"Quinn," the Colonel said, "I'd like you to meet Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones." He pointed to each man. They looked at him and gave him mock salutes.

Quinn nodded to each man.

"You will be going with them. They're going to teach you how to shoot and drive."

"Yes, sir," Quinn said. His first thought was, sweet, this is going to be fun. He figured they would be going to a shooting range for a couple of hours.

He glanced over at Maria. She hadn't responded to his good morning. She was at the stove, stiff with disapproval. Odd. Maria did not lack for opinions and did not hold back from expressing them. But she had a line she would not cross, and apparently, this pair were on the other side of that line.

"You will be with them until they feel you are competent." The Colonel handed him a book. "This contains volumes 1-6 of Euclid's Elements. I want you to immerse yourself in this. I expect four letters discussing your understanding of the material--one every Friday for as long as you are there."

Okaayy, so a lot longer than a couple of hours at a shooting range.

"Yes, sir."

The Colonel shook hands with the men and walked back to his office.

"What should I bring?" he said to Mr. Smith.

"You're good just the way you are. We have everything you will need at the range," Smith said.

Quinn gulped the last of the ham and eggs that Maria fixed for him, gave her a quick hug, and got ready to leave.

Sullivan called him out of the room. His expression was serious, even for him.

"Quinn, this is not going to be a cakewalk. This will be maybe the hardest month of your life. And if you do it right, there will come a time when you'll be grateful for every miserable second of it. These men have forgotten more about violence than most will ever see. Don't perform for them. Just pay attention, listen, and learn."

They drove for six hours, with Smith and Jones in the front seat with Quinn quietly sitting in the back. The men talked occasionally, not about the work, just the peripheral conversation of men who know each other well.

Sullivan's parting comments were worrisome. Quinn looked out the window at the landscape and wondered what the hell he was getting into.

The "ranch" was located thirty minutes out of Reno in high desert country that reminded Quinn of eastern Montana. Sagebrush prairie.

The main building was a big log house. The surrounding structures included a couple of barns and six cabins of various sizes. There were vehicles of various types parked alongside.

There were other men there, too.

He'd been told not to speak to them, so he didn't. They, in turn, ignored him. The logic of this was clear enough--whatever they were there to do was none of his business.

But he watched them with the attention he brought to all environments. They were older than him, all of them, by at least fifteen years. They were all bearded and gave the impression that they were comfortable in this environment. They looked at him once, with the brief, comprehensive assessment of experienced people sizing up an unknown quantity and then ignored him.

He was issued underwear, fatigues, and boots. The boots were lightweight, fastened with a side zipper, and fit well. They pointed him to a bunk in a little room on the second floor of the log house and left him on his own until suppertime.

Quinn started the Colonel's assignment. He could hear gunfire from the ranges.