Beginner's Luck. Kate Clayborn
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who’s in trouble.”
I roll my eyes. “We caught a kid busting up Dad’s truck today, and Dad set it up with Sergeant McKay that this kid can work off what he owes at the salvage yard. Starting tomorrow.” It’s this part of the thing, the timeline, that’s really getting to me. It was a fight yesterday when Dad announced he was having a chair delivered that would let him come along to work. It was a fight this morning when he kept trying to do work that would risk injuring him again. Now we’re adding something else to the plate?
“Oh, Henry,” Sharon says, turning toward the oven and peeking in. Jesus, something smells good. I need to hurry up and stop being so mad so I can stuff a bunch of food in my face and get on with the evening.
“It’s not going to be any problem,” Dad says, wheeling up to his place at the table. “Three days a week, and only in the afternoons. His mother’s got him doing some summer school in the mornings.”
“You aren’t getting it, Dad. Getting you better is the most important thing. You’ve got doctor’s appointments, physical therapy—”
“I said I’d get all that done!”
“No, I’ll be getting it done. I’m the one handling the yard, getting you back and forth to your appointments. And now I’m the one that’s going to be keeping an eye on a teenager with an appetite for destruction.”
“He’s exaggerating,” Dad says to Sharon. I want to bang my head against the nearest wall. Instead, I cross to the sink to wash my hands, then start grabbing silverware for the table.
“Go on and sit down, Ben,” says Sharon. “I’ll take care of it.”
“No, Sharon. You’re doing too much for us here already,” I say, but as I’m setting out forks, she pulls out my chair and points to it.
“Sit,” she says in that way she has, the way that makes you worry you’re about to get slapped on the back of the head.
So I sit, and my dad and I stare at each other across the table.
It’s lasagna, and thank God for the calming powers of cheese, because I start to relax over the course of the meal. Sharon’s taken up talking to Dad about how she’s changing out the electrical panel in her house, which distracts him, and soon enough the stress of the day feels a little less close, a little less compressing. I stand and clear plates, now that Sharon’s too wrapped up in debating the relative energy-saving virtues of sub-panels to stop me. While I’m loading the dishwasher, though, Dad wheels over and says, “Listen, I’m sorry about the kid.”
I slide another plate in, not sure what to say. River is going to be a complication, but if I’m even a little honest with myself, I didn’t want to see a kid that young going in either, and if I’m really honest with myself, I know damn well why my dad made so much of an effort. A kid like River gets us both where it hurts. “It’s fine, Dad. We’ll work it out.” When I look back at him, I have a quick flash of him in a courtroom, fourteen years ago, holding his old ball cap in his lap, turning and turning it as he watched me come in.
“All right, you two,” Sharon says, shuffling us into the living room. “There’s a ballgame on in fifteen minutes that we’re watching, so long as Henry can stay awake.”
“I can stay awake,” he grumbles, and that’s all it takes for us to be good again, because if there’s one thing Dad and I do well, it’s forgiving each other.
* * * *
I skip the ballgame in favor of holing up in my old bedroom with my laptop, catching up on work I have for Beaumont. I missed a conference call today that I’d wanted in on, a monthly reporting session on new contacts we’d sussed out for the polymers division, an email marked “Urgent” from Jasper. He’s pressing me for a progress report on Kit already, and I send him a quick reply, Still doing my research.
Last weekend I’d tracked down all of Kit’s publications and had been working through them as best I could in the time I had at night. Jasper’s better at the science itself—he double-majored in biochemistry and chemical engineering—but what I am is a good reader, good at picking out details that people overly focused on the data might overlook. When I’ve made it through eleven of Kit’s articles, I know the detail that matters most.
Like most other publications in her field, all of Kit’s papers are multi-authored. In the eleven I’ve read so far, and in the six more I have yet to get to, she’s never listed first. The seven most recent papers, I suspect, are written by the same person—that may seem as if it’d be impossible to tell, but there’s a quality to these papers that reads differently than most journal articles in the field, a sort of wry, subtle humor that glances at the limitations of other research without directly engaging. The common denominator in all seven?
E.R. Averin.
Even if I wasn’t sitting up in my bed with these papers, tangible evidence of her genius all around me, I’d know Kit was smart as all hell, just from being around her at the yard. She had a way of looking over what I’d brought her, a cataloguing curiosity in her expression, and I got the sense she didn’t miss anything. Whatever she was holding in her hands got her full attention, and she devoted her senses to the task—she’d run the edge of her fingertip along the filigree of a hinge, tap one of her short nails against a switch plate while she held it up to her ear, then she’d look it over, again, as if memorizing it. It was transfixing, the attention she paid to small things, and a little disconcerting too.
I’d bet all my savings on Kit having done the lion’s share of the work that’s represented in these papers, which means she’s seriously overqualified for the work she’s doing now. I know I need to draw her out a bit, to get her talking with me about what she does—it’s not going to be enough for me to exploit my connection to a salvage yard that she apparently finds fascinating. I need a way in to her work life—I need to get her talking.
I pick up one of the papers published a couple of years ago in one of the more obscure metallurgy journals out there. This one had presented detailed experimental data on samples of high performance steel, the kind Beaumont uses to manufacture some of its parts for the oil industry. Last year, though, our steel division had started looking into some new research from Nature that was supposed to change the kind of composite steel we were using. I do a quick search and pull up the article, scanning it quickly. The details don’t matter to me at this point, because I suddenly know how to get Kit talking.
I grab my phone off the nightstand and text her.
Read a paper in Nature that says there’s an eight-unit cell crystal in a high performance steel
I tell myself I’m only going to allow myself a minute to wait for a response. If there’s nothing, I’ll go out and watch the game with Dad and Sharon, see if she’s replied later. But it’s maybe thirty seconds before I see that she’s typing, her texts coming in quick succession, the first what I can only guess is a text-expression of outrage:
!!!
I’m smiling already.
But their samples were electropolished, and they didn’t know the position of the particle in the foil. How could they know if it was on the surface or in the middle or on the bottom of the foil? They didn’t account for the natural oxide layer that forms on the sample, either. They were probably measuring the crystal structure of a surface layer and not of their particle.
Two texts and I’m way outside my pay grade in terms of the science, but I don’t care. I’d read her texts about crystal structure all night—I’m that excited she’s talking to me. Another one, even before I start typing a response:
They did all this fancy modeling to back up what they saw on the microscope, but their model is incomplete. They didn’t account for the position of the crystal, the surface layers, amorphous layers, or the shape of the particle.
I’m typing back, telling her I’ve read her paper from two years ago, the one that’s dealing with the same stuff as the Nature paper, but before I press send her next