Andrew Klavan - Empire of Lies

I shrugged.

"I can't believe anyone I used to fuck is a Republican. Oh, but maybe I can't say 'fuck' to you now."

"You can say anything you want."

"You mean because I'm going to hell anyway."

"Right, Lauren. That's what I mean." Hoping to deflect the onslaught, I pointed to the mantelpiece, to the framed photos. "What about you? You take these? You still doing photography?"

"Shit, no. I don't have time. One day…"

"That's your daughter, though."

"Serena, yeah."

"She's beautiful. Serena. Very pretty name. She go to school?"

"High school. She's a sophomore." Her answers were curt and grudging like that. She didn't want to be distracted from the business of attacking me. She stuck her tongue in her cheek, looked me up and down again, shook her head again. "Man, look at you. I can't get over it." There was a drooping tube of ash on her cigarette now. She flicked it violently into the tray. "If they only knew, right? Your wife and kids. The sort of evil shit you used to get up to. Does your priest know? Your reverend or whatever he's called. What the hell? You should tell him, Jason. Might put a little excitement in his day." She made a sound like a laugh. Not a laugh, really, but a sound like a laugh. "The Scene. Right? Don't you ever miss it?"

"No."

"Liar."

"Why? Do you?"

"Not really. But it didn't come as naturally to me."

I shrugged again and waved her off. I didn't want her to think she was getting under my skin.

There was a dining alcove off one end of the room. A little space by the kitchen with an oval table and four wooden chairs-the kind of furniture that comes in boxes and you slap it together. I wandered in there as if to take a look around. I was really just trying to put some distance between us, maybe slow her down. Behind the table, there was a glass door. You could see through it into a postage stamp of backyard and on through a diamond-link fence into the backyard of the house on the next street over. There was a woman in the far yard, a woman in her forties but too soon old. She was slumped in a flannel nightgown. Holding a plastic bag full of trash. I watched her carry it to a can standing against the side of the house. What a depressing place this was.

"You know, I've been trying and trying to figure out why you called me," I said. "I mean, why you need help so urgently and why I would be the one you'd call for it after all these years."

I glanced back over my shoulder at her. She was still standing there the same as before. In her little cloud, her cigarette upraised. Still appraising me with that combination of mockery and rage.

"Maybe I just decided I need Jesus," she said. "I mean, when the spirit hits you… Right? There's no time to lose."

"I figured it was money," I said, keeping my voice even. "That was the only thing I could come up with that made sense."

There was a long silence. Then finally, I sensed the assault was over. She chewed on her lip and I could see in her eyes that she'd grudgingly called cease-fire. "You want some coffee?" she said.

We sat at the table in the alcove. She gave me coffee in a mug with a slogan printed on it: "I'm having my coffee, so fuck off!" She brought one of the pictures to the table too, one of the framed photos from the mantelpiece. It looked like it was taken for a high-school yearbook. It was posed and glossy, gauzy and sentimental.

The girl-Serena-didn't look like Lauren much. She had lighter hair and softer, rounder features, sweeter features than Lauren had ever had. A small, pouting, uncertain mouth. Serious brown eyes-even in the photo, I could look into them and see that she was hurting and lost.

"Men suck," said Lauren. She had a mug of her own with a slogan of her own: "Party Girl." She had a fresh cigarette going. "They really do. I mean, when I got pregnant, Carl was all, like, 'Oh, you're so beautiful, you're having my baby, I'll never stop loving you.' It was like we were in some commercial-free hour of crap music on AM radio. Then he hangs around long enough for Serena to love him. You know, girls-they just love their daddies. And he's, like, a Wall Street guy, so we had money, and I got to stay home and take care of her, so she got used to that, too. And I got used to it."

"You married a Wall Street guy?" I said.

"I met him on his day off. He was cooler then."

"Ah."

"Anyway, it was right after you and I broke up, so I was on the rebound, I guess. But he was nice to me, too. I gotta say that for him, to be fair. Men suck, but at least Carl was nice for a while before he sucked."

I hid my corkscrew smile in my coffee. It was pretty easy to guess where this story was going. A successful young guy like Carl with a sharp-tongued harpy like Lauren. It was only a question of what he'd leave her for: young tail, freedom, peace and quiet, the right to hang on to his own money. Or maybe just some girl who knew how to string together ten minutes of tenderness and respect and admiration to take his mind off his itching dick.

As it happened, it was a little of everything. The young tail came first. A girl at the office. Then, another girl someplace else. And so on until Lauren caught him one too many times, and it ended with him slamming the door in her screaming face as he stormed out. After that, he had a few party years on his own, so that took care of the freedom. And now he had the peace and quiet off in Arizona somewhere, living with a Life Partner type, the two of them running a homegrown investment firm together: lots of money and no kids.

"Fucking son of a bitch!" Lauren tore smoke out of her cigarette with her teeth. "He set this mad-dog lawyer on me. They threatened to have me declared an unfit mother, take Serena away from me. I ended up, I hardly even got child support-which he hardly ever pays, anyway. Never comes to see her. Sends her fucking birthday cards. When she was little, she used to sleep with them under her pillow. How pitiful is that?" I had set the picture of the girl down on the table. Lauren picked it up now, looked into her daughter's face. "I thought she'd gotten over it," she said plaintively. "I thought she was doing great."

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I thought. Single moms. Divorce dads. They always think the kids are doing great. Cathy and I hear it all the time, in church, in our children's schools. How're the kids doing? They're doing great! They're always doing great. Until they're not doing great, until suddenly they're in rehab or on medication or off at some special camp for suicidal teens or whatever. Divorce fucks kids up.

"What happened?" I asked her.

She laid the photo down again. "She's gone."

"Serena is gone? You mean she ran away?"

She waved the cigarette in circles. "Moved out."

"Moved out? She's a sophomore, you said. She's-what?-sixteen? Call the cops; make her come back."

"I did that. She just leaves again. What am I gonna do? Chain her to the radiator? After a while, you know, you keep calling the cops, they set Child Protective Services on you. I'm not gonna let them put her in some foster home…"

I sighed, rubbed the back of my neck. "Well, where is she?"

"I don't know. She stays with friends, one friend, then another. I don't even know most of them."

"Friends like other kids? Kids with parents? Is she staying with other families?"

"Sometimes. I don't know. No. No, I don't think so." She averted her eyes the way people do when you press them for details and they don't want to talk about the details because then they'll have to face them straight on themselves. Holding her cigarette between two fingers, she massaged her forehead with her pinkie and thumb. "She gets involved with these characters. They get their claws into her…"

Oh, wonderful, I thought. These characters… with their claws in her… I had to fight down a flash of irritation. People make such messes for themselves-for themselves and for their children, too. And yes, I knew I shouldn't've passed judgment on her. And yes, I did feel bad for her, too. Poor woman, the way she looked, her face all swollen and pocked as if every day since I'd seen her last had been a punch in the jaw. For all her smart mouth and her bravado, Lauren had always needed someone to take charge of her, someone to lead her to a better place. Guys took advantage of that-guys like Carl-guys like me, like I was back then. She wanted leading? We led her, all right. We led her where we wanted to go, and then dumped her when we wanted to go somewhere else. Him off in Arizona, me on the Hill. And her left behind, looking like this. So, aside from all the petty stuff-you know, my smugness at having a good life, my satisfaction at doing better than an old girlfriend-I really did feel bad for her and guilty, to some degree. All the same, she'd sure made a mess of things, a mess for herself and a mess for her daughter. And it irritated me, I have to confess.