The only time he ever got any information about her was on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The rest of the week, without Paula, they worked together in the uninterrupted professionalism he’d established the first week of her employment. It was as if she never stood in his living room or giggled in Spanish with his daughter. He often hoped that Paula would bring up Kate’s name in the evenings, let something slip about her he didn’t know, but she never did. She spoke instead of teachers, friends, projects, a concert she wanted to go to. In history she was studying Watergate, and she wanted to know what he knew about it. His friend Aaron had been an intern in DC that summer of the hearings, the summer before Mitchell saw the hard node on his spine. He and Aaron had talked on the phone a lot, sometimes until two or three in the morning, passionate talk about the implications of impeachment and then, that hot August, the resignations. Paula waited for Mitchell’s version of the events, but what he remembered most now about Watergate was the feeling of being nineteen in a one-room apartment and the sound—though it had been silent for so many years now—of Aaron’s hyena laugh.

Finally, when he began to describe the break-in, Paula said she already knew all that, and when he said that it was the end of an era, the government’s undeniable breach of faith with its people, she said her teacher explained that, too. So he told her about his one-room apartment and how Aaron’s laugh nearly broke his eardrums, and she was inexplicably satisfied.

On the third Tuesday, as Kate was leaving, the phone rang. Paula ran to answer it. It was for her, of course, so Mitchell walked Kate to the door alone. She was dressed up again; she had put her coat on carefully so as not to wrinkle her soft ivory shirt. She had thin, straight hair that she’d probably complained about (as Paula had about hers) all her life but that was clean and shiny and soft looking. Again he wanted to say how nice she looked but instead said that he hoped she was keeping a careful record of her tutoring hours. She nodded that she was and told him he didn’t have to keep reminding her. He was embarrassed. It was his default line; it came out of his mouth when he wanted to say other things to her.

He watched her walk to her car, which, during the lesson, had received a light coating of snow. He wondered if she’d brush off all the windows or just the front and back. She didn’t do any of them. She just got into the car, put on the wipers, and, without looking sideways to see him standing unconcealed at the window, drove away.