George Pelecanos - The Way Home

After a long shower, Chris dressed in Levi’s and an Ecko Unlimited button-down shirt, which he had purchased from the Macy’s up in Wheaton. Most of his peers from the neighborhood he’d grown up in shopped at Bloomingdale’s and Saks in Friendship Heights, or the Rodeo Drive-like stores that lined a block of Wisconsin Avenue across the Maryland line. Chris did not have the money to shop in those places, nor was he particularly cognizant of trendy fashion. The Macy’s where he shopped seemed to market to their black and Hispanic base in the Wheaton location, and he was cool with that. More accurately, he made do with what they offered. He could afford to shop there.

Chris drove the van over to PG County. It still held the old roll and padding, fitted between the buckets so that the rear doors would close, from the Bethesda job. He was headed to pick up Katherine at her parents’ home in University Park, a township of colonials and restored bungalows south of College Park.

Katherine’s father, James Murphy, was a tenured professor in arts and humanities at the University of Maryland. Her mother, Colleen, worked at a downtown think tank specializing in energy policy. Both were brilliant and perhaps overeducated to the point of social retardation. Their son had earned a bachelor’s degree but had no desire to go to graduate school and was working in New York as a boom operator on feature films. He was respected in his field, but his parents felt he had underachieved.

Their daughter, Katherine, had disappointed them completely. After graduating in low standing from Elizabeth Seaton, the Catholic girls’ high school in their area, she had floundered in PG Community College, dropped out, and had been working in the office of a warehouse for the past year. And now she was dating a man who installed carpet for a living and apparently had been incarcerated in his youth.

Chris understood their negativity. They were basically good people and in other circumstances they might have welcomed him into their home, but they wanted the best for their daughter. Admittedly he was not an exemplary prospect, but he cared for Katherine, respected her, and would protect her. He worked with his hands, but he worked hard and honestly. None of this was reassuring to her parents, but he was who he was, and for now it was the best he could do.

He stood on the stoop of their house and rang the doorbell.

Colleen Murphy answered. She was a tall brunette whose perpetually serious nature had taken a toll on her looks and spirit. Katherine had gotten her fair complexion and reddish hair from her father.

“Hey, Mrs. Murphy. How you doin?”

“I’m fine, Chris.”

“Is my friend ready?”

“Yes, just about. Would you like to come in?”

“Nah, this is fine.”

Chris had called Katherine from his cell when he was a few minutes away from the house, hoping she’d be waiting when he arrived, hoping to avoid this.

Colleen Murphy stared at him, looking down on him slightly because she was up a step in the door frame. He moved his eyes away from hers and looked around at the old-growth trees on the property, the azaleas framing the stoop, and a large triple-trunk crepe myrtle with scarlet blossoms. A Sunfish sailboat, covered by a tarp, was set on a trailer beside the house.

“Nice yard,” said Chris lamely.

“Yes,” said Colleen Murphy.

“Does Mr. Murphy sail?”

“Occasionally.”

Thankfully, Katherine came down the center hall stairs. She wore a green-and-rust shift with green T-strap sandals, and she had one of those black band things in her strawberry blonde hair. She brushed past her mother and met Chris outside the door.

“See you, Mom,” said Katherine.

“Take care, Mrs. Murphy,” said Chris, saluting stupidly, immediately wishing he hadn’t. Katherine kissed him on the cheek and took his hand, and they walked across the yard to his van. Chris thinking, Her mom hates me.

Colleen Murphy watched as her daughter and Chris Flynn got into the van. At that moment, she had no animosity in her at all. She was thinking of a time when her boyfriend, Jimmy Murphy, had picked her up from her own parents’ house in Burke, Virginia, back in the midseventies. How they had laughed and held hands on the way to his car, a gold Ford Pinto station wagon with synthetic wood-paneled sides. How tall he was, how strong his hand felt in hers, how she couldn’t wait to have those hands on her breasts and ribcage.

She turned and went back inside her house. James Murphy would be in his office, working. They would have a quiet dinner with little conversation. She would turn in early, and he would come to bed after she had gone to sleep.

In the van, around the corner from her house, Katherine told Chris to pull over to the side of the road.

“Where?” said Chris.

“Here. That house has been unoccupied for the last six months.”

“So?”

“Just do it.”

“Okay.”

When he put it in park, she leaned across the carpet and padding and kissed him deeply.

“What’s that for?” said Chris.

“My apologies. For keeping you waiting.”

She rubbed the crotch of his jeans. He placed his hand on her muscled thighs, and she opened her legs as she unzipped him and pulled him free.

Chris laughed. “Right here?”

“There a problem?” she said, working him until he could take it no longer. He moved her hand away.

“ Damn, girl.”

“What?”

“I’m about to bust.”

“You afraid you’re gonna mess up the seats?”

“More like your hair.”

“Quit boasting.”

“I’m sayin, I’m a young man. I got velocity.”

“C’mon, let’s get in the back.”

“For real?”

She kissed him. “Come on, Chris.”

Afterward, they went to dinner at a pho house in Wheaton, because they liked the soup and it was cheap. The restaurant was in a commercial strip of Laundromats and Kosher and Chinese grocers. The diners sat communally at tables similar to those found in school cafeterias. Except for Chris and Katherine, all of the customers were Vietnamese. No one talked to them, or seemed to notice the sweat rings on Chris’s shirt or Katherine’s unkempt hair. At the end of the meal, Chris bought an inexpensive bottle of Chilean red at the deli next door, and they drove back to his place in Silver Spring.

They made love properly, but no less energetically, in his bed. Chris had lit votive candles around the room, with his small stereo set on WHUR, playing the old EWF tune “Can’t Hide Love.” The candles and the music were on the corny side, but Chris was a D.C. boy all the way, and Quiet Storm was in his blood. His parents had listened to Melvin Lindsay, the originator, spin Norman Connors and Major Harris when Thomas and Amanda Flynn were young and making love on hot summer nights just like this one.

Katherine, lying naked atop the sheets beside Chris, reached over and traced her finger down the vertical scar above his lip.

“Your dad finally talked to me today,” said Katherine. “Susie sort of made him. In her own sloppy way, she let him know that you and I were together.”

“Did he call you honey or sweetheart?”

“I think it was ‘darling.’ ”

“That’s my pops. He has trouble remembering names. Odd for a salesman, but there it is. He’ll remember yours now, though.”

“Why’s that?”

“My parents had a baby named Kate who died before I was born. Dad still talks about her. Like she’s going to come back and be everything that I’m not.”

“Your father cares about you, Chris.”

“Like you care for a lame dog. You know Champ is never gonna win a show or a race. But you look after him anyway, out of the kindness of your heart.”

“It’s not attractive when you feel sorry for yourself.”