Adam Johnson - Fortune Smiles - Stories

“What are you doing?” Nonc calls to her. “We’re going to be right back.”

Grunting, Relle says, “I don’t go anywhere without my sewing machine.”

Dr. Gaby looks up at Nonc. It’s the look the old ladies at the church gave him.

“What?” he asks.

She keeps looking at him. “Nothing,” she says.

Nonc goes to the van to get Geronimo’s yellow boom box and the rest of his stuff, which is still in the same bag Marnie used. It feels like there should be a bunch of things Nonc has to do to prepare for the trip, but really, there isn’t. He comes back and sets the gear on the porch. Geronimo is sitting on the ramp with his feet hanging off the side, holding up the binoculars. He’s only looking through one lens, so Nonc can look through the other.

“Big bird,” Geronimo says to him.

Nonc lowers himself to the boy. “Nonc’s got to go,” he tells him. “But he’ll be right back. Nonc always comes back, remember that.” Then he takes his DIAD and hands it to Geronimo. “This thing has a GPS chip in it. No matter where you go or what happens to you, I can find you with this thing. If anything goes wrong, I’ll talk to my friends at UPS, and this is how I’ll track you down.” Nonc kisses the boy on the forehead. “You remember that Nonc’s your real father,” he says. “And that he’ll be right back.”

Before he can say goodbye to Dr. Gaby, she wheels inside.

When Nonc climbs in the van, Relle is already sitting shotgun. She unhooks the bouncy chair that hangs between the seats, then pulls out lots of material she’s downloaded from the Internet. One printout is called “The L.A. Apartment Hunter’s Bible.”

“What?” she says when he looks at it. “You can’t sleep in a van in L.A.”

Things are going okay, Nonc thinks as he fires up the rig. This part went easier than he’d figured. Nonc was afraid that saying goodbye to Geronimo would flatten him, that the boy would fall apart, and then he would fall apart and everything would start off wrong. But things are working out. “We got to make some time,” he says as they pull out of the drive. Nonc gives a last wave out the window — the dream team observes him without judgment, without response; his boy looks back at him with one eye. Through those binoculars, Nonc thinks, he must be magnified, he must be the boy’s entire field of view.

They turn onto Lake Street, and the plan is in motion. For once, instead of things happening to Nonc, Nonc is making things happen, and that is a new feeling, a good one. The plan is going to take his best, he knows that. It’s going to take everything he’s got.

Relle starts changing the presets on the van’s radio. “Some people say New York is the fashion capital,” she tells him. “But really, it’s L.A.”

Nonc is thinking about the one time he went with Relle to her father’s property. He kept visualizing where all the dogs were buried. He could imagine a bubble of greyhounds below his feet wherever he walked. But he’s got to change that kind of thinking. They have those A-frame lodges that come in a kit, you set them up anywhere you want. He’s got to be visualizing that kind of thing.

“You know who would make a good chef,” he says. “Donny Trousseau’s brother. That guy can cook anything.”

“Yeah, that guy’s great,” Relle says. She opens the cooler and takes out two sodas. Then she grabs the sandwiches. “I have eaten a thousand of these,” she says, and throws them onto the road.

Nonc watches them tumble in the rearview mirror. He suddenly remembers that he was going to make a vocabulary sheet for Dr. Gaby. “Aw, shit,” he says. “I was going to write down instructions for the boy.”

“Don’t worry,” she says. “Dr. Gaby’s a pro.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Of course I’m right,” she says. They hit the on-ramp for the I-210 bridge. “And you got to relax a bit, okay? Ease up on yourself. Your dad’s not going to mess with you — he’s almost dead. And it doesn’t matter if we’re a day late coming back or even a week. What’s Dr. Gaby going to do, roll the boy up in a carpet and put him on the curb? No, she loves him. So if something comes up, everything will be okay. If I got to make a pit stop in Denver, everything will be okay.”

“You got to make a pit stop in Denver?”

She takes his hand. “See, you’re not relaxing.”

Climbing the Lake Charles Bridge, Nonc can see the muscles and elbows of the petrochemical plants, their vent stacks blowing off maroon-blue flame. Below are the driven edges of a brown tide, and everywhere is the open abdomen of Louisiana. At the top of the bridge, there is no sign of what happened here, not a sippy cup in the breakdown lane, not a little shoe. Nonc looks out on the city. It looks like one of those end-times Bible paintings where everything is large and impressive, but when you look close, in all the corners, some major shit is befalling people. Nonc shifts into fourth, and even doing that feels like a development, like it’s the first step in a plot so big you can’t imagine. The smallest thing now feels like a development, a turn signal. You kiss your son on the crown of his head, and no doubt, no denying, that’s a serious development. You turn the ignition and drop the van in gear, and you know this is no ordinary event. You crest the Lake Charles Bridge, headed west with the wind in your eyes, and even flipping down your sunglasses feels charged with forever.

Interesting fact: Toucan cereal bedspread to my plunge and deliver.

It’s okay if you can’t make sense of that. I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t grasp it, either. The most vital things we hide even from ourselves.

The topic of dead wives actually came up not too long ago. My husband and I talked about it while walking home from a literary reading. It was San Francisco, which means winter rains, and we’d just attended a reading from a local writer’s short-story collection. The local writer was twentysomething and sexy. Her arms were taut, her black hair shimmered. And just so you’re clear, I’m going to discuss the breasts of every woman who crosses my path. Neither hidden nor flaunted behind white satin, her breasts were utterly, excruciatingly normal, and I hated her for that. The story she read was about a man who decides to date again after losing his wife. It’s always an aneurysm, a car accident or the long battle with cancer. Cancer is the worst way for a fictional wife to die. Anyway, the man in the story waits an appropriate amount of time after his wife’s loss — sixteen months! — before deciding to date again. After so much grief, he is exuberant and endearing in his pursuit of a woman. The first chick he talks to is totally game. The man, after all this waiting, is positively frisky, and the sex is, like, wow. The fortysomething widower nails the twentysomething gal on the upturned hull of his fiberglass kayak. And there’s even a moral, subtle and implied: when love blossoms, it’s all the richer when a man has discovered, firsthand, the painful fragility of life. Well, secondhand.

Applause, Q&A, more applause.

Like I said, it was raining. We had just left the Booksmith on Haight Street. The sidewalk was littered with wet panhandlers. Bastards that we were, we never gave.

“What’d you think of the story?” my husband asked.

I could tell he liked it. He likes all stories.

I said, “I sympathized with the dead wife.”

To which my husband, the biggest lunkhead ever to win a Pulitzer Prize, said: “But…she wasn’t even a character.”