Blame: A Novel by Michelle Huneven Page A

Catherine’s, her high school, and lolling around with the boarders there, eating cookies by the sackful, smoking cigarettes leaning out of windows. Prison, she thought again, was not unrelated to milder institutions. Those small-town rich girls, like her dorm mates at Bertrin, had also mocked her intelligence.
    Not until she got to Berkeley had she found kindred minds, male and female. She’d met her first Jews too, who were city-bred, cultured, political, as exotic to her as royalty. She’d vowed to marry a Jewish intellectual. How they’d talked and argued, mostly about books. And how everybody drank. Closing bars. Straggling up Telegraph, University, in the fog-socked dawn.
    Even then some said, We can’t keep up with you, Patsy.
    The story of her life: nobody could keep up.
    She’d always balanced her excesses with hard work. She held it together, or thought she had, until she applied for jobs. Neither of the two tenure-track positions she’d been asked to apply for had come through. Pomona had courted her so assiduously, she’d gone apartment hunting while interviewing. But the offer never arrived. She had no idea what happened until last April, a few weeks before the accident, when she’d run into one of the search committee members at a conference in Irvine. He admitted that during her candidating, she’d been a little too . . .
hilarious
with a waiter. You know, on the social night, he said. When they take you out and get you drunk to see what you’ll do? No, no, you weren’t inappropriate, not exactly, but maybe not so appropriate either, not for an interview. Later, if you were already on board, nobody would’ve taken issue . . .
    Something similar must have happened at ASU, since the facultychair there said that her lecture on Jim Crow was the most incisive she’d ever heard. Patsy’s third choice, UMass, had passed on her as well, but that was expected, she wasn’t really nineteenth century, as they’d specified and eventually hired. She ended up at her fourth choice, the small, second-rate trade school turned liberal arts college in Pasadena, where the department was so pleased to get her, they knocked a class off her schedule.
    Good old pedestrian Hallen College. Her department chair, Wes, said they would take her back when she came out. They had no clause forbidding felons. A couple profs in criminology had done hard time, he said, and that had only added grit and weight to their teaching. Of course Wes had heard the legal version, that she’d swung into her driveway too fast at dusk, the hard-to-see time, and accidentally killed two people, a tragedy that could happen to anyone.
    •
    I’m having a hard time with the note, she told Benny.
    Just send him the damn questionnaire, he said. It’s been months already.
    I should write something. Or it comes across as too cold.
    You know, Patsy, you don’t have to see him.
    It’s the least I can do. Even if he just wants to yell at me.
    He won’t yell, said Benny. He just wants to talk about what happened. And I think he’s concerned about you. That’s the impression I get.
    He’s concerned about me?
    Well, Jesus, Patsy, who isn’t?
    •
    What if she and Mark Parnham met and fell in love? What if they already were, a little? She imagined them collapsing into each other’s arms, blindly burrowing into each other’s bodies, love neutralizing grief, extinguishing guilt. Could they make a life from that?
    Even she would have to say, Impossible.
    •
    Please know that I’ve stopped drinking and am active in a program to help me maintain my sobriety so that I will never drive drunk again.
    That could only be cold comfort to him.
    I grieve for them. I hope to lead my life in a way that somehow pays homage to their lives.
    Me me me. Too much about me. She crumpled the paper, lobbed it into the brown sack she used for trash, her aim improving.
    The mother and daughter hovered right where her peripheral vision ended. So what should I say? she