LITMIR.BIZ

       WILLIAM HURST

      “CAN I GET you a Coke?” Douglas asked without looking at Will directly. They were at his office, and he was powering up one of three desktop computers, the login screen prompting him for a password.

      Will flinched, then tried to cover his shock. Josephine had always forbidden him soda, and as a result, he’d never developed a taste for it. Everything about Coca-Cola—the smell, the excrement color, the carbonated hiss—made vomit rise in Will’s throat.

      “No, thanks,” Will said. “I’m not thirsty.”

      Will tried to peer over the desk and track his dad’s fingers as he typed his password. But Douglas was fast. Too fast. In less than a second, he was logged in. The striped IBM logo glowed bright on his monitors.

      Will couldn’t help noticing that his dad was different at work. He seemed to be witnessing a complete personality transplant. Before, Will had worried that his father had a parallel life, but the reality was something even more disturbing: his father seemed to have a parallel identity.

      The Douglas of Old Stone Way—the evasive guy who had spent all day Sunday glumly going through the motions of church and an IHOP breakfast until he could slip away to the “gym” for close to five hours—was gone. He’d been replaced by the Douglas Hurst of IBM, the kind of chummy blowhard who made people flash squeamish smiles and avert their eyes. He wasn’t confident, exactly, but he had a fine-tuned schtick, composed of business-management-speak and comedic timing.

      Will briefly wondered which persona was real, and decided on neither. For a moment, he tried to look at his father from an outsider’s perspective—to see him as Douglas instead of Dad—but all he saw was an aging nerd with thick graying hair and his work shirt buttoned too high on his Adam’s apple. Will didn’t have the first inkling who his father was beyond the surface of his faintly smudged glasses.

      Maybe Douglas felt shy and awkward in Will’s presence too. He started rambling abruptly, out of nowhere. “Years ago, we had this PA who never liked to wear the same thing twice … She was obsessive about it. So you know what I did? I built her a program that would help her track her outfits. She’d just input whatever she wanted to wear—polka-dot blouse with a tan blazer, you name it—and the computer would go ballistic and tell her she’d worn the same thing back on the fifth of December.” Douglas laughed and took a slug from his travel mug. “Will, don’t ever let anyone tell you that tech geeks don’t know a thing about women. We’re not all social pariah types. Well … with the exception of Don, here, of course.”

      Don, the co-worker who’d been leaning in the doorway, laughed a little too heartily and walked away clutching his chest as though he’d been shot.

      Women. That one word hit Will like a glass of ice water in the face. It brought him back to his real objective. Officially, the ringed notebook in his lap was for taking notes (his mother expected him to write a report about “Multinational Technology and Consulting and What It Means to Me”), but, unofficially, Will was using it to log his father’s interactions with the opposite sex. At 8:49 a.m., Douglas had held the elevator door open for a blond woman (Cindy) who was reasonably pretty, despite her wake-me-when-we-get-there eyes. Ten minutes later he had stopped mid-hallway to chat with another female (Marnie) who had a sagging, anxious face and curly gingersnap-colored hair that made Will imagine her in Ronald McDonald’s yellow jumpsuit.

      Yesterday, when Josephine had slipped away to the bathroom during a MathBusters computer lesson, Will had sneakily used the Internet to image-search the word mistress. He’d wanted to acquaint himself, in case he was looking for a certain type of woman, in case all home-wreckers looked the same. The results (Will had only ever seen cleavage, not actual unabashed breasts) gave him a guilty feeling in his stomach. But they also made him think he was looking for a very particular sort of cat-eyed woman encased in black latex. He had spent nearly every moment since trying to suppress visions of his father naked and shackled, licking some snarling woman’s feet.

      The phone on his father’s desk trilled.

      Douglas answered it with a jab of the speaker button. “Yes?”

      It was strange to hear the voice of his father’s secretary in stereo, coming at once through the phone and through the open office door. “Carrie’s on the line,” she said.

      For a fraction of a second, his father flushed.

      Carrie. The familiarity of that statement was not lost on Will. The fact that the secretary hadn’t used a last name meant this was a frequent caller. He scribbled the name, very discreetly, in his notebook and marked it with a star.

      Holding the receiver in one hand, Douglas fished in the pocket of his khakis with the other. “Here,” he said, opening his wallet and thrusting some singles at Will. “Take a walk to the vending machines and get yourself a snack.”

      “I just ate breakfast. And I’m supposed to shadow you for the whole day. I have a report to write. What’s Mom going to say when I tell her that you wouldn’t let me do my work?”

      Douglas’s cheeks were pinkening. He looked flustered.

      “Your

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