Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“She, like, called right after you left and talked to Jill and said she’d be late because there were some issues with dumb-fuck whatever. Thom.”

“Tell me what issues.” Atlantic City’s eighty miles south. I can be there in a twinkling (and be glad to go).

“She didn’t say. Then half an hour later she called back and asked to talk to you, and you were gone, I guess.”

“Yeah. So? What’d she say? What’s this about?”

“I didn’t know then. She asked for Mom’s cell and I gave it to her.” Paul isn’t used to being the bearer of important news that doesn’t seek its source from his everlasting strangeness. For that reason, he’s reverted to talking like a halting seventeen-year-old.

“Is that it?” It. It. It. And why am I hearing about it on the deck and not twenty minutes ago instead of “We’re Pregnant”? My fists ball up hard as cue balls. I’ve gratefully lost the urge to piss, though I might’ve pissed and not noticed. That’s happened. Little Gretchen’s still staring at me, dish towel in hand, as if I’m an intruder wandered in off the beach. “Is that it ? Is there anything else to the fucking story? About your sister ?”

“Okay.” Paul blinks hard, as if he’s recognized I might do something he might not like. I may look frightening. But what I am is scared — that my son is about to calmly mention, “Well, like, um, I guess Clarissa got decapitated. It was pretty weird.” Or “Um…some guys wearing hoods sort of kidnapped her. One guy, I guess, saw her get shot. We aren’t too sure—” Or “She was, I guess, trying to fly off the thirty-first floor. But she didn’t really get too far. Except like down.” This is how real news is imparted now. Like reading ingredients off the fucking oatmeal box.

“Would that ‘okay’ be the same ‘okay’ as the first ‘okay’ that meant not okay?” I say. I’m staring a hole in him. “What the fuck’s the matter with you, Paul? What’s happened to your sister?”

“She’s in Absecon.” His gray eyes behind his lenses roll almost out of sight in their sockets, as if under slightly different circumstances this information could be hilarious. Paul sways back on his heels and drops his hands to his sides.

“Why?” My heart’s going thumpa-thumpa.

“She and Thom got into some kind of fight. I don’t know. Clary took his keys and went and got his car”—the Healey—“and started driving back up here. But then shit-for-brains called the police and said it was stolen. And the police in Absecon, I guess, tried to pull her over. And she panicked and drove into one of those lighted merge-lane arrows on a trailer at Exit Forty, and knocked it into a highway guy and broke his leg.” Paul runs his left hand back through his mullet, and for an instant closes his eyes, then opens them as if I might be gone, suddenly, blessedly.

“How do you know this?” My chest is twittering.

“Mom told me.” His hands slip nervously down into his baggy plaid suit-pants pockets.

“Is she in Absecon, too?” Where the fuck is Absecon?

“I guess. Yeah.”

“Is your sister hurt?” Thumpa-thumpa-thump, thump.

“No, but she’s in jail.”

“She’s in jail ?”

“Well. Yeah. She hit that guy.” Paul’s gray eyes fix on me as though to render me immobile. They blink. He coughs a tiny unwarranted cough and begins to say something else, his hands in his pockets.

But I’m already moving. “Well, Jesus Christ—”

I shoulder past him into the kitchen, past Gretchen and go for the stairs, skinning off my block-M, already contemplating how I will portray myself as a good, solid, not-insane-but-still-distressed father to all of ranked Absecon officialdom justifiably angry about one of their own being mowed down by my daughter. Ann, I absolutely know, will bring a lawyer. It’s in her DNA. My job will be simply to get there — down there, over there, wherever.

S tanding shirtless in my closet, I immediately understand that regulation realtor clothing’s what’s called for — attire that causes the wearer to look positive-but-not-over-confident, plausible, capable but mostly bland on first notice; suitable for meeting a client from Clifton, or the FBI. In the real estate business, an agent’s first impression is as an attitude, not a living being. And for that, I’m well provided. Chinos (again), pale blue oxford button-down, brown loafers, nondescript gray socks, brown belt, navy cotton V neck. My uniform.

From inside my closet, I can hear the high-pitched nazzing, ratcheting, gunning, insect-engine noise of a dirt bike out on the beach. Local ball-cap hooligans, younger siblings of the prep school kids from yesterday, freed up — due to relaxed holiday police staffing — to go rip shit over our fragile shore fauna and pristine house-protecting dunes. If I weren’t on a dire mission, I’d call the cops or go put a stop to things myself. Possibly they’ll drive into Paul’s time-capsule bunker.

As I tie my shoes, I meditate darkly (and again) upon the very model of young manhood I once had in mind for my daughter — not to marry necessarily, or run away with, but to seek out as a good starter boyfriend. There was just such a staunch fellow when she was at Miss Trustworthy’s. A small, wiry, bespectacled, slate blue — eyed, blinking Edgar-of-Choate, who went on to read diplomatic history at Williams and Oxford but chose the family maritime law practice on Cape Ann, who coxed the heavyweight eight, could do thousands of knuckle push-ups, had an intense, scratchy, yearning voice, dressed more or less like me, and who I liked and encouraged (and who Clarissa humored and also liked), even though we all knew she was destined for a sage older man (who also remarkably resembled me), a fact that young Edgar didn’t seem to mind the hopelessness of, since a chassis like Clarissa Bascombe was way beyond the planet Pluto in terms of his life’s hopes. All seemed safe and ideal. Clarissa would begin adult life believing men were strange, harmless beings who couldn’t always be taken completely for granted, needed to be addressed seriously (now and then), but ultimately were hers for the taking — low-hanging fruit for a girl who’d seen some things. Edgar is now a hang ’em high prosecutor out in Essex County in Mass. — and a Republican, natch. I hardly have to say that a perilously bogus over-oiled character like van Ronk-the-equestrian is not the safe finish line for which good, solid Edgar was ever the starting gate. Beware when you have children that your heart not be broken.

Outside, the bracking, whining dirt-bike racket hasn’t stopped, has, in fact, seemed to migrate down through the space between my and the Feensters’ houses (where I observed Nick having his secret phone rendezvous two nights ago). The ruckus carries out to the front, where the vandals, I’m sure, are whipping out toward 35 before the police can trap them. “The March of the Siamese Children” is still blaring off the Feensters’ deck. As I finally take my long, jawclenching piss, I’m able to think that Absecon and whatever yet transpires there may offer the only relief and achievement the holiday will deliver to me. Although, did I not hear my son say that Sally would arrive? Tomorrow? A good sign.

Jill, large and green-suited, Paul, fidgety and zoot-suited, loiter in the front foyer, waiting on me like scolded servants. Jill’s hands are clasped behind her, schoolmarm-style — a habit. Both are grave but seem confident there’s nothing they can do. Our decommissioned and paralytically expensive Thanksgiving feast lies cooling, inedible and uncelebrated on the dining room table. The Men’s Ministry at Our Lady can come for it in a panel truck — and throw it in the ocean if they want to. Minuscule white-suited Gretchen is nowhere in sight. She may have been smart enough to leave.