Linwood Barclay - Fear The Worst

Last summer, when Syd and I were both working at the same place and she was riding in with me, Susanne and I had agreed to get her a car for nipping around Milford and Stratford. I took in a seven-year-old Civic with low miles on a trade and snatched it up for a couple thou before it hit our used-car lot. It had a bit of rust around the fender wells, but was otherwise roadworthy.

“No spoiler?” Syd cracked when it was presented to her.

“Shut up,” I said and handed her the keys.

Only once since she’d gotten this new job had I dropped her off at work. The Civic was in for a rusted-out tailpipe. So I drove her up Route 1, what I still thought of as the Boston Post Road, the Just Inn Time looming in the distance, a bleak, gray, featureless block on the horizon, looking like an apartment complex in some Soviet satellite country.

I was prepared to drive her to the door, but she had me drop her off at the sidewalk, near a bus stop. “I’ll be here at the end of the day,” she said.

Bob’s commercial over, I put the sound back on. Al Roker was outside mingling with the Rockefeller Center crowd, most of them waving signs offering birthday greetings to relatives back home.

I looked at my daughter, eating her breakfast. Part of being a father, at least for me, is being perpetually proud. I took in what a beautiful young woman Syd was turning into. Blonde hair down to her shoulders, a long graceful neck, porcelain skin, strong facial features. Her mother’s roots go back to Norway, which accounts for her Nordic air.

As if sensing my eyes on her, she said, “You think I could be a model?”

“A model?” I glanced over.

“Don’t sound so shocked,” she said.

“I’m not,” I said defensively. “I just never heard you talk about it before.”

“I never really thought about it. It’s Bob’s idea.”

I felt my face go hot. Bob encouraging Syd to model? He was in his early forties, like me. Now he had my wife and-more often than I liked-my daughter living under his roof, in his fancy five-bedroom house with pool and three-car garage, and he was pushing her to model? What the fuck kind of modeling? Pinup stuff? Webcam porn to order? Was he offering to take the shots himself?

“Bob said this?” I asked.

“He says I’d be a natural. That I should be in one of his commercials.”

Hard to pick which would be more demeaning. Penthouse or hawking Bob’s used cars.

“What? You think he’s wrong?”

“He’s out of line,” I said.

“He’s not a perv or anything,” she said. “A douche, yes, but a perv, no. Mom and Evan even kind of agreed with him.”

“Evan?”

Now I was really getting steamed. Evan was Bob’s nineteen-year-old son. He had been living most of the time with his mother, Bob’s ex-wife, but now she was off to Europe for three months, so Evan had moved in with his dad. This meant he was now sleeping down the hall from Syd, who, by the way, liked her new bedroom very much and had pointed out several times that it was twice the size of the one she had in my house.

We’d had a bigger house, once.

The idea of some horny teenage boy living under the same roof with Syd had pissed me off from the get-go. I was surprised Susanne was going along with it, but once you moved out of your own house and into someone else’s, you lost a bit of leverage. What could she do? Make her boyfriend kick his own son out?

“Yeah, Evan,” Sydney said. “He was just commenting, is all.”

“He shouldn’t even be living there.”

“Jesus, Dad, do we have to get into this again?”

“A boy, a nineteen-year-old boy, unless he’s your actual brother, shouldn’t be living with you.”

I thought I saw her cheeks flush. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Your mother’s cool with this? Bob and his boy telling you to be the next Cindy Crawford?”

“Cindy who?”

“Crawford,” I said. “She was-never mind. Your mom’s okay with this?”

“She’s not having a shit fit like you,” Syd said, shooting me a look. “And besides, Evan’s helping her since the thing.”

The thing. Susanne’s parasailing accident in Long Island Sound. Came down too fast, did something to her hip, twisted her knee out of shape. Bob, behind the wheel of his boat, dragged her a hundred yards before he knew something was wrong, the dumb fuck. Susanne didn’t have to worry about parasailing accidents when she was with me. I didn’t have a boat.

“You never said what you paid for the shades,” I said.

Sydney sighed. “It wasn’t that much.” She was looking at several unopened envelopes by the phone. “You should really open your bills, Dad. They’ve been there like three days.”

“Don’t you worry about the bills. I can pay the bills.”

“Mom says it’s not that you don’t have the money to pay them, you just aren’t very organized, so then you’re late-”

“The sunglasses. Where’d you get them?”

“Jesus, what’s the deal about a pair of sunglasses?”

“I’m just curious, is all,” I said. “Get them at the mall?”

“Yeah, I got them at the mall. Fifty percent off.”

“Did you save your receipt? In case they break or something?”

Her eyes bored into me. “Why don’t you just ask me to show you the receipt?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you think I stole them.”

“I never said that.”

“It was two years ago, Dad. I don’t believe you.” She pushed her eggs away, unfinished.

“You come down here in Versace sunglasses, you think I’m not going to ask questions?”

She got up and stomped back upstairs.

“Shit,” I said under my breath. Nicely played.

I had to finish getting ready to go to work myself, and heard her run down the stairs while I was in my bedroom. I caught her coming out of the kitchen with a bottled water as I came down to say goodbye before she headed out to the Civic.

“Being with you for the summer is going to suck if you’re going to be like this all the time,” she said. “And it’s not my fault I’m living with Evan.”

“I know, it’s just-”

“I gotta go,” she said, walking away and getting into her car. She had her eyes fixed on the road as she drove away, and didn’t see me wave.

In the kitchen was the receipt for the sunglasses, right next to the eggshell character she’d flattened with her fist.

I GOT INTO MY CR-V and headed to Riverside Honda. We were just this side of the bridge that crosses over into Stratford, where the Housatonic empties into the Sound. It was a slow morning, not enough people dropping in for my turn to come up in the rotation, but shortly after noon a retired couple in their late sixties dropped by to look at a base model four-door Accord.

They were hemming and hawing over price-we were seven hundred dollars apart. I excused myself, said I was going to take their latest offer to the sales manager, but instead went into Service and scarfed a chocolate donut from a box at the coffee stand, then went back and told them I could only save them another hundred, but we were going to have a custom pinstriper on site over the next couple of days, and if they took the deal, I could get the Accord custom-pinstriped for free. The guy’s eyes lit up, and they went for it. Later, I got a ten-buck pinstriping kit from Parts and attached it to the order.

In the afternoon, a man interested in replacing his decade-old Odyssey van with a new one wanted to know how much his trade was worth. You never answered that question without asking a few of your own.

“Are you the original owner?” I asked. He was. “Have you maintained the car?” He said he’d done most of the recommended services. “Has the vehicle ever been in an accident?”