Peter Spiegelman - Thick as Thieves

“You’re sunburned,” Arthur Carr says. “How do you manage that from behind a desk? Or do they have you in the field now?” Still the Ivy League drawl, but higher-pitched now-an old man’s voice.

Carr isn’t sure which they his father means. He’s left his employment status vague since being fired from Integral Risk, adopting Declan’s usefully elastic consultant when pressed. It’s been months since his father has pressed. “I had some vacation time,” he answers.

“Well, don’t waste it here,” his father says. He points a long finger at the dining room window and the neon yellow form of Eleanor Calvin standing on the porch. “I told her not to bother you, but she gets so damned dramatic.”

“It was no trouble-I’d planned to come next week. I just moved things up a little.”

Arthur Carr turns back to his newspaper, rattling the page. “At any rate, you must be glad to get out of that sewer.”

Carr has been vague about his living arrangements too. His father believes that he’s still in Mexico City. “It’s not so bad,” Carr says.

His father snorts. “Long as you don’t need to breathe the air, or drink the water, or drive ten blocks in under an hour. I don’t know how you stand it.”

“It’s not so bad,” Carr says again.

“ Not so bad? You don’t know what you’re talking about. Twenty years down there, I could never stand it.”

Noxious shitholes was the phrase his father favored, and he used it often-more often with a few drinks in him. Carr remembers him red and fuming, a glass in one hand, the other gesturing at a broad window, and the low, smudged skyline-of what city Carr can’t recall-that lay beyond, hunched under a shelf of smog. He remembers his mother too: pale and still and quiet before his father’s wave of complaint, always in a dress and heels, always with a cigarette. He doesn’t remember the details of his father’s rants, but the broad strokes were all the same: the wrong political connections, the wrong family ties, the wrong school ring; the inept boss, the paranoid boss, the vengeful boss; favors and grudges; being passed over, and passed over again. Thwarted. And so it went in Lima, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Asuncion, Quito, San Salvador, Managua, Ciudad Juarez, and Mexico City.

Carr remembers his father’s rising voice, his mother’s massive silence, and his own clenched dread. It was a swooping, taloned thing that seized his chest, seized his voice, and chased him through the houses that blended one into the next.

They were different, it seemed, only in their addresses. Always walled and gated, with leafy courtyards and burbling fountains, their rooms were cool and quiet, their furnishings heavy, dark, and carefully arranged-like store displays, and just as lifeless. Carr can still recall the sour odor of spilt wine that lurked in the sofa cushions, and the smell of singed fabric-the remnants of one of his parents’ parties, or maybe of a prior resident’s. Not their sofas, of course, and not really their houses: they were just the latest in a long line of temporary lodgers-in and out in two years, maybe three. The attendant cooks and gardeners and maids, always dark and wary, had greater claims on those places.

He made friends from time to time, other Foreign Service brats, and he remembers his quiet envy of the houses that they lived in. Not very different from his own in shape or size, they’d been transformed by an alchemy unknown to his family from anonymous showrooms into homes, with photos on the mantel, bicycles in the drive, and a carved pumpkin at Halloween. They made wherever he was living seem like a rented van.

Arthur Carr wasn’t an ambassador; he wasn’t even close. The highest he’d climbed in nineteen years was to the number three spot in the Economic Section of the embassy in Mexico City. That was his final posting, and he’d lasted barely ten months.

His father is up now, leaning at a sideboard that is littered with white plastic grocery bags. A flock of ghosts, Carr thinks, and they make a noise like dry leaves as his father brushes them aside to find a rocks glass. Carr checks his watch as his father pours an inch of scotch and swirls it around.

“You look like your mother when you look like that,” Arthur Carr says.

“A little early, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” his father asks, and lets his reading glasses fall to his nose. “And just what the hell do I have to wait for?”

The rain has lightened to a mist when Carr returns to the porch, and the air is warmer and more cloying. Eleanor Calvin is staring at the treetops and the leaden sky.

“There’s a salad for lunch,” she says. “There should be enough for both of you. And there’s roast chicken for dinner, and some new potatoes.”

“I booked a room at the Red Lion,” Carr says. “I can eat there.” Eleanor Calvin sighs, still looking up. She’s waiting for something. “Do you need a lift home?” Carr asks.

She shakes her head. “It’s just a mile, and hardly raining.”

“It’s no trouble, Mrs. Cal-”

“Do you remember my daughter, dear?”

Carr recalls a rangy blond girl, a few years younger than he. A rider, he remembers. “Annabeth, right? She went to law school down south.”

“She’s still there, in Atlanta. She had a baby six weeks ago, her second little girl.”

Something frozen drops into Carr’s gut. “Another granddaughter-I had no idea. Congratulations.”

Eleanor Calvin takes a deep breath. She looks at Carr, who is looking at the floorboards. “She wants to go back to work, dear, and she needs help with the children. She’s got plenty of room, and she’s asked me to move in.”

Carr is focused on his breathing, fighting the light-headed feeling. He flexes his fingers, which are suddenly cold. “I had no idea,” he says again, softly. “Look, I know he’s difficult. If it’s the money, I could-”

Eleanor Calvin frowns. “It has nothing to do with money,” she says sadly. “You’ve been more than generous, dear. And you know how fond I was of your mother. But Annabeth and her girls need me now, and truth be told these winters get longer every year.”

Carr is still staring down, shaking his head slowly. “When?” he asks.

“Two or three months, I think. I’ve listed the house. I’ve got some cleaning up to do before they can start showing it, but I can go before it’s sold.”

“I need time.”

“Of course you do, dear. It’s a big change. It’ll be a big adjustment for your father.”

“That woman who filled in for you-the one who came when you went to Florida-could she come on full-time?”

A pained look crosses Eleanor Calvin’s weathered face. “But, dear, I thought you understood-your father needs more than home care now. Atlanta aside, I don’t know that I could do for him much longer. It’s getting more… complicated.”

“Complicated how?”

A blush spreads across her lined cheeks. “He’s… he’s starting to have bathroom problems, and last week the police picked him up at ten at night, a half mile down the road from here. He didn’t have shoes on and his feet were bleeding. I wish I could do more, dear, but really the ambassador needs a different sort of care.”

“He wasn’t an ambassador,” Carr says, but only to himself.

Eleanor Calvin gives him three months, and leaves Carr on the porch, figuring furiously. Some of his figuring is about timing: three months is bad. He has scheduled thirteen more weeks for the job, including a one-week contingency. Three months would fall at the endgame-the close of the third act. It couldn’t be worse, and he’ll have to beg or bribe her for an extra two weeks.

But most of his figuring is about money. His father has next to none, and Carr has been paying for his care for several years: every month an envelope stuffed with used hundreds to Eleanor Calvin. The arrangement works well for both of them: a tax-free income for her, and the anonymity of cash for him. But cash won’t fly with a nursing home. They will have forms to fill out, contracts to sign, and bank accounts, employment, and income to verify-and all in his actual name. Which is, of course, impossible.