PULLING THE BLUE WIRE
Phillip drank his glass of ice water in three gulps, fast enough that Brenda was barely done filling Jamie's and Lee's when he set it down again. She laughed and filled it once more, then slid a trio of menus across the table and said she'd be back in a few minutes with their other drinks.
"It's not that hot out," Jamie said, smirking.
"I'm parched," Phillip said. "That stupid sunburn is sucking every last ounce of water out of me." He poked gingerly at his upper arm, which glowed red under the hem of his sleeve.
"Your mom's going to be thrilled with that," Lee said, wryly, though his own skin prickled across his back. "Not to mention your knee."
"My knee is fine, it's just a scratch."
Lee felt his brow inch up toward his hairline. Just a scratch with a huge gauze pad taped over it, thanks to an unfortunate collision with the dock the day before. He'd thought Phillip might need stitches but things seemed to have settled down and they'd avoided a trip to the tiny hospital near their hotel.
They were headed back from their second annual road trip. This time they'd planned three days camping and three beach days, and while they were cleaner than they had been when they arrived at the hotel, everything they owned had sand in it in some capacity. Especially the back of the Wagoneer. He'd put down a tarp this year but it hadn't really mattered – not after Jamie had caught the edge of it with his bag the day before and flipped sand all over the place. Lee could almost hear Amanda's good-natured sigh when she saw the state of her vehicle.
He missed her. It seemed silly on one level because he and the boys had all been excited about this thing, their thing that Jamie jokingly called the Annual Pilgrimage, but he did. Especially when Phillip had come up out of the water and staggered back to their towels, blood running down his leg after getting too close to the dock with his rented jet-ski. He'd left a trail of it along the white sand of the beach, little drops everywhere. Jamie had followed, eyes big, face green.
"We are not telling Mom," Phillip said as Lee wrapped his leg. "She'll just freak out."
"She won't freak out," Lee muttered, even as he was thinking the same thing. "She'll probably ban you from jet-skis though."
"Are you really gonna learn to drive a car next month?" Jamie asked, from his spot on the towel beside them.
"Yes, doofus, I am."
"How do you know how to treat a wound like that, Lee?" Jamie had asked, watching him wrap a bandage around Phillip's leg to keep pressure on the wound.
Lee had paused, his eyes on his task. "We have to take a lot of first aid at work for insurance purposes."
"Huh," Jamie had said, hugging his knees. Lee had waited for a follow-up question, because sometimes there were follow-up questions, but there hadn't been one because the beach lifeguard had come to check in on them and tell Lee that the jet-ski was fine, even if Phillip's leg wasn't.
Phillip spent the rest of the trip parked on the beach, which is how he'd gotten the sunburn. He laid on the towel, periodically flipping himself like a steak on a grill, and waved Lee away when he'd suggested a hat or a tee shirt or sunscreen. And now here he was, tomato red.
Jamie looked at the clock on the wall above the cash counter. "Is Mom at work today?" he asked, "or is she gonna be home when we roll the Sandmobile into the driveway?"
Lee chuckled. "She's at work until five. She had an afternoon of meetings downtown."
"So we have time to vacuum it out," Jamie said.
"I have it booked in for a detail tomorrow," Lee told him. "But we can air out the tent and sleeping bags and get our laundry started."
"I hardly have any laundry," Phillip said. "Bathing suits."
"Those hiking shoes could probably use… something," Lee said.
"A bonfire, you mean," Jamie said, laughing. Phillip landed a good-natured punch to his shoulder.
"I need a new pair anyway," Phillip said. "So yeah, maybe we should've just burned them."
"I know Mom likes hand-me-downs but there's no way I'm wearing those," Jamie said. "Not ever. They're a social disease." He reached to push his glasses up his nose, which had started to peel. Sunburn, day one, earned on a longer-than-anticipated hike.
Lee laughed into his water glass and tried to get the boys to focus on their menus. Breakfast — obviously stale doughnuts from a tiny gas-station grocery store — seemed a million years ago.
"Okay," he said, when their food — plates piled high with The Pie Plate's substantial burgers, fries, and onion rings — arrived. "Postmortem."
"Post what?" Phillip asked around a mouthful of fries.
"Postmortem. We do it at the end of every project. What went well? What should we do again and what should we skip next time?"
Jamie reached for the ketchup. "Maybe next time one of us can skip colliding with the dock."
"Hey," Phillip said, scowling. "Maybe the other one of us can skip the passive-aggressive digs."
"We can skip both those things," Lee said. "I'm being serious. If we're going to do this every year we should keep the parts we like and not the ones we don't."
"I liked all of it," Phillip said. "I mean aside from the bandages."
"Really?"
Phillip shrugged. "Yeah. Didn't you?"
Lee paused before taking a bite of his sandwich. "The hotel wasn't that great," he said finally. They'd picked it from a guide book, based on its proximity to town and one thumbnail-sized photo of a generic room that Phillip later joked must have been the penthouse suite, because the green carpet and wood paneling in their room dated back to the Johnson administration.
"Fair," Jamie said. "The TV didn't work. And I bet there are places closer to the beach."
"Okay I've got something," Phillip said after a minute. "I liked the town further down the beach better. The one we went to the first afternoon. It had better stuff."
"It had a better arcade, you mean," Jamie said, laughing.
"Yeah. And that diner was good, too. Like this place."
"That's true," Jamie said. He sipped a French fry in a puddle of ketchup. "I think we should skip camping next year and just go to the beach."
"Really?" Phillip frowned.
"I thought you liked it, Jamie," Lee said, surprised.
"I do. But here's the thing. You kind of don't, right? Like, it's not your favorite."
"I, uh…" Lee wasn't sure what to say. He hadn't minded it, not like he thought he would have. He hadn't minded it the year before, either. The boys knew what they were doing so it wasn't as much work as he'd thought. They even cooked. The campsite had been pretty and quiet — tranquil, and he'd even managed to have a nap in a hammock one afternoon, something he'd never actually done before in his life in spite of always wanting to. He didn't mind the outdoors so much when he wasn't being chased through it by enemy agents or domestic crackpots. "I like going with you guys. I just haven't gone that much."
"We should go with Mom sometime," Phillip said. "She's really good at it."
"Not that you aren't," Jamie rushed to add.
Lee laughed. "I think I know what Phillip is saying. Your mom has a special touch with some things. And she can start a fire with a single match. I've seen her do it."
"You have?"
"Yeah." Lee hesitated. "Our car broke down once on location in the country and she did it while we waited for a tow."
Phillip shot him a look that said he didn't quite believe that story, but Lee wasn't going to bite. There'd been a lot of that lately, Phillip looking as if he didn't believe their claims about what they did for a living, and he and Amanda had talked about whether to tell them, and what to tell them, and how to tell them.
Amanda thought they were getting to the age where they needed to know. He knew she thought the boys should be as prepared as they were, and that she was tired of keeping this last secret from them. Her mother knew, Joe knew — she felt they should know, too. Especially now that their jobs were less dangerous than they had been.
But he wasn't ready.
He couldn't explain it, the strange hesitation he felt about coming clean with them. He wasn't sure they'd understand. He wasn't sure they'd take it seriously. And they needed to take it seriously.
"If we don't tell them they're gonna come to us like Mother did. And do you want that again?" Amanda had asked.
Of course he didn't. Even thinking about that made his heart rate increase. Dotty's interrogation had ended far better than he'd ever imagined it would, because she had, in the end, understood the implications of their jobs and forgiven them both. But he wasn't sure Phillip and Jamie would. Forgive them, maybe, but understand?
Jamie was studying him across the table, his brown eyes wide and serious behind his glasses. Lee shifted in his seat.
"Mom told us that story," Jamie said. "Was that the time I threw out her note by mistake and Grandma got really mad?"
"Uh, yeah, I think so."
"They barely talked for a whole week," Jamie said. "It was the only time ever that Grandma was like that. She was so mad, even when Mom said she'd left a note, because she said Mom was working too many weird hours."
"Well she was," Phillip said. "Remember, she missed that play?"
Lee swallowed a gulp of Coke and tried to keep his expression neutral. He remembered that day all too clearly — how guilty Amanda had felt over the whole thing, how they'd spent hours in a hidden penthouse trying to get Billy back.
"Yeah, she apologized for two weeks," Jamie said. "That's how you got your new skateboard."
Phillip smirked, his mouth full of cheeseburger. "She shouldn't have felt so bad," he said, swallowing. "I didn't really care about the stupid play anyway. I kept telling her that, but she didn't believe me."
"Why didn't you care about it?" Lee asked, polishing off the last of his onion rings. He almost never got onion rings but vacations were for trying different things, and until they pulled up in front of the house they were still on vacation.
Philip shrugged. "I didn't want to be in it. My teacher made me."
"What? Why?"
"Because she knew Mom and Grandma would make a costume."
Lee chuckled. "And did they?"
"Yeah." Jamie rolled his eyes. "And they acted like he was Alec Guinness or something." Lee knew enough to credit that reference to Star Wars and not Bridge on the River Kwai or some other classic.
"They were just being supportive," Lee said, though he had no trouble imagining how enthusiastic Dotty and Amanda would have been. Embarrassingly so to Phillip, he was sure, even as he felt a little flutter of jealousy that he'd never had someone in his corner that way as a kid.
"Well, anyway. I didn't care so much that she'd missed it." Phillip popped a fry in his mouth. "It wasn't like she'd missed a basketball game or a track meet or something."
"Maybe it was important to her," Lee suggested. He knew it had been, he'd thought she was going to cry when they'd gotten back to the Agency and finished writing up their reports. He'd walked her out to her car and they'd stood in what was by then the midday sunshine, both exhausted, and she'd made a comment about going home to face the music, but it hadn't been with her usual good humor.
"I guess," Phillip said.
"You don't work those weird hours anymore," Jamie said suddenly. "How come?"
Lee shrugged. "We wanted to be around more for you guys," he said, trying to keep it light.
Jamie just looked at him across the table, silent. Lee knew that look. He'd seen it on Amanda's face a thousand times, calculating, turning a situation over and over as if it were a puzzle. He gulped his water and stole a glance at Phillip, who was watching his brother with open curiosity.
They had to tell them. Watching Jamie was like watching a clock running out. He thought briefly of a timeclock attached to a bomb, then dismissed that as overly dramatic. But still. He knew now that the next time the topic came up Jamie would have two questions, not one, and Phillip would, too, and Amanda was right — someone needed to pull the blue wire. Quick.
Unbelievable how everything came down to him being chicken in the end. Lee Stetson, who could face down the world's most-wanted without batting an eyelash, transformed into a world-class fraidy-cat when he came up against tough questions from two teens.
'Why don't you work as much?' wasn't even a tough question. It was a normal question. It wasn't like Jamie had asked what Lee kept in the safe at the back of the closet (he was sure that question was coming one day) or why the phone company and the electric company and Bob's Plumbing and Heating seemed to pay them an awful lot of visits (they swept the house for bugs twice a month and were almost never done before the boys got back from school because Agent Janice Jarvis was excruciatingly thorough). But those questions were coming. He could see them on the horizon, growing closer with every night of overtime or weird blip in their routines.
He wasn't going to do it by himself, though. They'd agreed. So all he had to do was get through this lunch and distract them with laundry and clean-up and make it to five o'clock, when Amanda got home and he told her the clock was running dangerously close to zero. And he knew, like any good agent knew about his opponent, exactly what to do to derail this line of questioning.
"Anyway," Lee said, pushing away his empty plate. "Who wants dessert?"
