Standard Deviation: ‘The best feel-good novel around’ Daily Mail. Katherine Heiny

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СКАЧАТЬ look here,” Clayton said. “This isn’t the YMCA, where any sort of riffraff can walk in and join. We have standards. We’re exclusive. Like White’s in London.”

      “Or the Marines,” Graham said. The few. The proud.

      “Oh, hey now, I don’t hold with any sort of military action,” Clayton said hotly. “I’m a pacifist and the club is strictly nonpolitical.”

      “Yes, of course,” Graham murmured, wondering if it was even possible for an origami club to be political. What were they going to do—fold a fleet of paper airplanes and invade Libya?

      “All right, before we can even consider Matthew as a member, I have a few questions,” Clayton said.

      Graham, like all parents of special-needs children, had a range of stock phrases that he used when talking about Matthew to other people. The phrases ranged from polite euphemisms (“We prefer to think of him as reserved”) to gentle sidestepping (“He can be very independent in the right circumstances”) to outright lying (“Matthew loves new experiences!”). But the odd thing was that, in this conversation, Graham didn’t need to use any of those phrases, not a single one.

      “I assume Matthew can do a general swivel fold,” Clayton said.

      “Oh, yes.”

      “An open sink?”

      “Yes.”

      “What about an open double sink?”

      “That too.”

      Clayton made a reluctant impressed sound. “And a closed sink?”

      “I think so,” Graham said, frowning. “He spent weeks learning something called an unsink, or maybe a closed unsink. I can’t remember.”

      “Well, there’s a tremendous difference,” Clayton said tartly. “We’re not talking about making omelets here, where you can by guess and by golly. A closed unsink is a very difficult fold.”

      “I believe he was making something called a—a tarantula?” Graham said. “Lang’s Tarantula?”

      Silence on the other end of the line, except for a slight noise that could have been a pencil tapping. “Is Matthew free this Sunday?” Clayton said at last. “We’d like to meet him.”

      “Yes, he is,” Graham said.

      Clayton gave him his address and told him to have Matthew there by nine.

      Graham hung up feeling absolutely confident that Matthew would dazzle them. He would never admit it, not even to himself, but it was a wholly new sensation.

      War is hell, yes; but so is Cub Scouts. Or at least being the parent of a Cub Scout is. A subtler kind of hell where the people have no sense of irony, and they make you go camping in cold weather, and you have to carve small race cars out of blocks of wood, and sing songs that have a lot of verses, and attend den meetings, and help your child obtain all sorts of useless (and nearly unobtainable) badges. And then, after years of encouraging your kid to like Cub Scouts, you have to quick discourage him from liking it around age twelve so it doesn’t adversely affect his social life. Plus, they ban alcohol.

      And now Audra wanted to attend the Cub Scouts party!

      “It’s not an official Cub Scouts party,” she said to Graham. “It’s just for adults.”

      “Why would we want to go if Matthew isn’t even invited?” Graham asked. Matthew wasn’t invited much of anyplace. It was something that worried him.

      “Think of it as networking,” Audra coaxed. “Almost everyone there will be the parent of a boy in Matthew’s class. This is a great way to get to know people and make him feel more a part of things. Besides, I already promised Matthew’s Akela we would go.”

      This was another thing about Cub Scouts: you started out using all these scouting terms ironically—Akela, Webelo, woggle, camporee, Okpik—and you ended up using them sincerely. Before you knew it, these words had crept into your vernacular and you said them to prospective clients or sex partners.

      So they went to “network,” leaving Matthew with Bitsy, and walking over to the Akela’s very nice eight-room apartment on 108th Street. (The Akela was married to an investment banker.)

      The Akela herself answered the door. She was a tall, large-boned woman with sharp blue eyes and blunt-cut blond hair. Graham was used to seeing her in the ill-fitting and unbecoming khaki Scout uniform, but the long red velvet dress she wore now was no more flattering. And what’s more, she had the slightly sweaty, shaky look of someone hosting a party. Graham’s heart went out to her at once.

      “Graham! Audra! Welcome!” she cried, and Graham realized he had no clue what the Akela’s name actually was.

      “Maxine,” Audra said. “Thank you for having us.”

      The Akela was carrying a wineglass—the sight of it lifted Graham’s spirits like a scrap of paper tied to a weather balloon; alcohol wasn’t banned at this party!—which she used to gesture vaguely down the hall. “Just help yourselves to a drink … we have, you know, whatever … and I’ll introduce you …” She trailed off as the buzzer sounded again and took a big swallow from her glass before she answered.

      Graham and Audra walked into the living room in search of drinks. Indeed, alcohol was in abundance; in fact, there wasn’t even food. The long white-clothed table in the living room held a huge punch bowl of ruby-red rum punch swimming with raspberries, a tray of frosted tumblers filled with mojitos as cool and green as a shady lawn, another tray of sugar-rimmed cocktail glasses of margaritas garnished with mint, a dozen pineapples cut in half and filled with creamy piña coladas, three fruit-clogged pitchers of sangria, long lines of bubbling champagne glasses, and a towering pyramid of small plastic cups of red Jell-O with a small sign that read Vodka Shots! in a cheerful handwriting propped in front.

      Audra helped herself to a margarita and squeezed Graham’s arm. “Network,” she whispered, and slipped away into the crowd.

      Graham took a glass of champagne and backed up until he was standing against the sideboard. A large man with wide flat hips was standing there, too, talking to another man about how his GPS was getting frustrated with him.

      “So it’ll say, ‘When possible, make a legal U-turn,’” the man said. “And if, for some reason, I don’t make a U-turn, it says it again, but with, you know, this little pause, like, ‘I said, when possible, make a legal U-turn.’ It sighs at me.”

      The man stepped forward to get another champagne glass and Graham gasped, because the man’s midsection had completely hidden another bar set up behind him, which featured the largest bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label whisky Graham had ever seen in a private residence.

      Graham set his untouched champagne aside with a brief apology to the poor starving children in China (or whoever suffered when you wasted alcohol) and filled a cut-glass tumbler with ice. It took both hands to lift the Johnnie Walker bottle, but Graham held it steady as he poured the whisky into the glass. It glowed a soft amber, as fine and warm as your best childhood memory. His respect and admiration for the Akela was growing by leaps and bounds.

      Graham СКАЧАТЬ