Page 17 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

“Whatever’s doing it,” he says, “protect it.” Then somebody in a tux needs him, because somebody in a tux always needs him, and he goes.

The speech is one I’ve given, in some version, three years running: Nora’s name, the ward we funded, the nurse whose salary the room is about to pay for, the ask. I know where the laugh goes and where the pause goes. I hit the laugh and I hit the pause. Two hundred people look at me the way they’ve looked at me for three years — like grief did something flattering to my face — and they give, which is the point. It works. It always works. Somewhere in the middle I hear Nora saying Gus, enough. I push the thought down and finish, and the pledge cards go around the room.

Afterward there’s the door line: every donor gets a hand, a name, a thank-you with something specific in it. I’m the last thing they touch on the way out, and I make it worth the ticket. Near the end of the line, a small woman in her eighties takes my hand in both of hers. “My Walter watched every game you ever played.”

“Row K,” I say. “He liked the corner glass. I hope you bid on the trip, Eleanor.”

“I bid on two.” She pats my hand and goes out delighted. That one was real. It takes the same amount out of me anyway.

The whole line takes fifty minutes. By the end my face aches in the two spots it always aches. The event manager is crying a little, which happens every year, and the room is down to staff and stacked chairs.

June is standing by the doors with my coat over her arm and her book closed on one finger. She doesn’t say a word until we’re in the car.

The parking garage is quiet. The city goes by. I loosen my tie at the first red light, and it’s a long minute before she speaks.

“You have a different voice for the public stuff,” she says, looking out her window. “You used it all night in there. You’re not using it now.”

I look over at her. She’s watching the closed shops go past like they’re worth watching.

“Most people don’t hear a difference,” I say.

“Most people were at the party. I was working it. You watch different things from the staff table.” She lets that sit for half a block. “Take the next left. There’s a drive-through burger place open till midnight, and you didn’t eat anything at your own dinner. I was watching. You never once had a plate in front of you.”

At the speaker box she leans across me like we’ve done this a hundred times. “Two cheeseburgers, a large fries, and a shake.” She looks at me. “Chocolate or vanilla?”

“I’m in a tuxedo.”

“He’ll have chocolate,” she tells the speaker.

So that’s how the Foundation’s biggest night of the year ends: a drive-through line, a tuxedo, a paper bag handed over by a teenager who doesn’t recognize me. We eat in the parking lot with the engine off. She takes the pickles off her burger and puts them on mine without asking. Neither of us mentions it.

The dome light is on. There’s salt on her lower lip and a curl come loose against her neck, and for exactly one second I look too long at both. Forty-nine years old, in a tuxedo, in a parking lot, noticing that my kids’ nanny is beautiful. I hand her the fries and put my eyes back on the windshield where they belong.

“It was a good speech,” she says, when the food is mostly gone. “The part about the nurse.”

“It’s a good speech three years running.”

“That’s not what I said.” She balls up the wrapper. “Your speech is good. The fifty minutes at the door after — that’s the part that wears you down. Anybody can see it, if they look at you for one entire evening instead of one handshake.” She says it the way she’d report the garage light being out. Then she gathers the trash, because she cannot sit still next to a mess. “I’m not saying stop. It raised a lot of money for sick kids. I’m just saying I saw what the whole night took out of you. Somebody in your life should see that part.”

I’ve been looked at my whole adult life. Being seen is a different thing, and I don’t know what to do with it, so I start the car.

She’s quiet the rest of the way, and there’s nothing uncomfortable in it. At home she goes in ahead of me, hangs her coat on the far peg, does her last pass of the kitchen — stove off, back door locked, one light on over the sink — and goes up. I do the doors and the headcount. Both kids down. Her light on, then off.

I sit at the kitchen counter for a while in my undone tie, and I count the people who have ever caught the difference between my voices. Nora, who died with that knowledge. A stranger on the internet, once, who typed you sound tired tonight into a chat window in the middle of the night and was right. And now the woman at the end of the upstairs hall, who heard it across a ballroom and then bought me a burger about it.

Three. Two of them I lost.

I turn off the kitchen light and go up, and I don’t look at the laptop at all.

June

Bex is already in the booth when I get to the diner. She’s ordered me coffee and stolen my jelly packets, which means she’s been here long enough to get territorial.

“Report,” she says, before I’ve got my coat off. “You promised a full report three Sundays ago. I have been extremely patient and I want you to say so.”

“You’ve been extremely patient.”

“Thank you. Report.”