Ann Patchett: Commonwealth

Fix Keating was standing in the doorway, watching him like he knew exactly what he had in mind. “Dick said I was on duty,” Fix said. The cop wasn’t such a big guy but it was clear that his spring was wound tight, that he spent every day looking for a fight to throw himself into. All the Irish cops were like that.

“You’re the host,” Cousins said. “You don’t need to be stuck back here making juice.”

“You’re the guest,” Fix said, picking up a knife. “You should be out there enjoying yourself.”

But Cousins had never been a man for a crowd. If this had been a party Teresa had dragged him to he wouldn’t have lasted twenty minutes. “I know what I’m good at,” he said, and took the top off the juicer, stopping to rinse the buildup of pulp from the deep metal grooves of the top half before pouring the contents of the juice dish into a green plastic pitcher. For a while they worked next to one another not saying anything. Cousins was half lost in a daydream about the other man’s wife. She was leaning over him, her hand on his face, his hand going straight up her thigh, when Fix said, “So I think I’ve got this figured out.”

Cousins stopped. “What?”

Fix was slicing oranges and Cousins saw how he pulled the knife towards himself instead of pushing it away. “It was auto theft.”

“What was auto theft?”

“That’s where I know you from. I’ve been trying to put it together ever since you showed up. I want to say it was two years ago. I can’t remember the guy’s name but all he stole were red El Caminos.”

The details of a particular auto theft were something Cousins wouldn’t remember unless it had happened in the last month, and if he was very busy his memory might go out only as far as a week. Auto theft was the butter and the bread. If people didn’t steal cars in Los Angeles then cops and deputy district attorneys would be playing honeymoon bridge at their desks all day, waiting for news of a murder. Auto thefts ran together — those cars flipped exactly as they were found, those run through a chop shop — one theft as unmemorable as the next but for a guy who stole only red El Caminos.

“D’Agostino,” Cousins said, and then he repeated the name because he had no idea where that particular gift of memory had come from. That’s just the kind of day this was, no explanation.

Fix shook his head in appreciation. “I could have sat here all day and not come up with that. I remember him though. He thought it showed some kind of class to limit himself to just that one car.”

For a moment Cousins felt nearly clairvoyant, as if the case file were open in front of him. “The public defender claimed an improper search. The cars were all in some kind of warehouse.” He stopped turning the orange back and forth and closed his eyes in an attempt to concentrate. It was gone. “I can’t remember.”

“Anaheim.”

“I never would have gotten that.”

“Well, there you go,” Fix said. “That was yours.”

But now everything was gone and Cousins couldn’t even remember the outcome. Forget the defendant and the crime and sure as hell forget the cops, but he knew verdicts as clearly as any boxer knew who had knocked him down and who he had laid out cold. “He went up,” Cousins said, deciding to take the bet on himself, believing that any crook stupid enough to steal nothing but red El Caminos had gone up.

Fix nodded, trying not to smile and smiling anyway. Of course he went up. In a certain stretch of the imagination they had done this thing together.

“So you were the detective,” Cousins said. He could see him now, that same brown suit all detectives wore to court, like there was only one and they shared it.

“Arresting,” he said. “I’m up for detective now.”

“You’ve got a death card?” Cousins said it to impress him without having any sense of why he would want to impress him. He might be a grade-one deputy DA but he knew how cops kept score. Fix, however, took the question at face value. He dried his hands and pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, fingering past a few bills.

“Fourteen to go.” He handed his list to Cousins, who dried his hands before taking it.

There were many more than fourteen names on the folded piece of paper, probably closer to thirty, with “Francis Xavier Keating” printed at the bottom, but half the names had a single line drawn through them, meaning Fix Keating was moving up. “Jesus,” Cousins said. “This many of them are dead?”

“Not dead.” Fix took back the list to check the names beneath the straight black lines. He held it up to the kitchen light. “Well, a couple of them. The rest were either promoted already or they moved away, dropped out. It doesn’t make any difference — they’re off.”

Two older women in their best church dresses and no hats leaned against one another in the frame of the open kitchen door. When Fix looked over they gave him a wave in unison.

“Bar still open?” the smaller one said. She meant to sound serious but the line was so clever she hiccupped and then her friend began to laugh as well.

“My mother,” Fix said to Cousins, pointing to the one who had spoken, then he pointed to the other, a faded blonde with a cheerful, open face. “My mother-in-law. This is Al Cousins.”

Cousins dried his hand a second time and extended it to one and then the other. “Bert,” he said. “What’re you ladies drinking?”

“Whatever you’ve got left,” the mother-in-law said. You could see just a trace of the daughter there, the way she held her shoulders back, the length of her neck. It was a crime what time did to women.

Cousins picked up a bottle of bourbon, the bottle closest to his hand, and mixed two drinks. “It’s a good party,” he said. “Everybody out there still having a good time?”

“I thought they were waiting too long,” Fix’s mother said, accepting her drink.

“You’re morbid,” the mother-in-law said to her with affection.

“I’m not morbid,” the mother corrected. “I’m careful. You have to be careful.”

“Waiting for what?” Cousins asked, handing over the second drink.

“The baptism,” Fix said. “She was worried the baby was going to die before we got her baptized.”

“Your baby was sick?” he asked Fix. Cousins had been raised Episcopalian, but he had let go of that. To the best of his knowledge, dead Episcopal babies were passed into heaven regardless.

“She’s fine,” Fix said. “Perfect.”

Fix’s mother shrugged. “You don’t know that. You don’t know what’s going on inside a baby. I had you and your brothers baptized in under a month. I was on top of it. This child,” she said, turning her attention to Cousins, “is nearly a year old. She couldn’t even fit into the family christening gown.”

“Well, there’s the problem,” Fix said.

His mother shrugged. She drank down her entire drink and then waggled the empty paper cup as if there had been some mistake. They’d run out of ice, and the ice had been the only thing to slow the drinkers down. Cousins took the cup from her and filled it again.

“Someone’s got the baby,” Fix said to his mother, not a question, just a confirmation of fact.

“The what?” she asked.

“The baby.”

She thought for a minute, her eyes half closed, and nodded her head, but it was the other one who spoke, the mother-in-law. “Someone,” she said without authority.

“Why is it,” Fix’s mother said, not interested in the question of the baby, “that men will stand in a kitchen all day mixing drinks and juicing oranges for those drinks but won’t so much as set a foot over the threshold to make food?” She stared pointedly at her son.

“No idea,” Fix said.