‘No one understands men better than Russo, and no one is more eloquent in explaining how they think, suffer and love. At a rough time for masculinity, Russo’s flawed but always decent characters are repositories of the classic virtues of their gender… [Chances Are] blends everything we love about this author with something new. Yes, this is a novel about male friendship, fathers and sons, small-town class issues and lifelong crushes, and it provides the familiar pleasure of immersion in the author’s distinctive, richly observed world and his inimitable ironic voice. But this is also a mystery about a 1971 cold case.’
Kirkus Reviews (starred)
‘Russo’s first standalone novel in a decade mixes his signature themes—father-and-son relationships, unrequited love, New England small-town living and the hiccups of aging—with stealthy clue-dropping in a slow-to-build mystery … In the final stretch, surprising, long-kept secrets are revealed. This is vintage Russo.’
Publishers Weekly
ALSO BY RICHARD RUSSO
Mohawk
The Risk Pool
Nobody’s Fool
Straight Man
Empire Falls
The Whore’s Child
Bridge of Sighs
That Old Cape Magic
Interventions
On Helwig Street
Everybody’s Fool
Trajectory
The Destiny Thief
First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Allen & Unwin
First published in the United States in 2019 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
Copyright © 2019 by Richard Russo
The moral right of Richard Russo to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.
Allen & Unwin
c/o Atlantic Books
Ormond House
26–27 Boswell Street
London WC1N 3JZ
Phone: 020 7269 1610
Fax: 020 7430 0916
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com/uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN 978 1 91163 036 4
Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 91163 037 1
E-Book ISBN 978 1 76087 196 3
For those whose names are on the wall
For a second there we won.
Yeah, we were innocent and young.
“Miss Atomic Bomb,” The Killers
Prologue
The three old friends arrived on the island in reverse order, from farthest to nearest: Lincoln, a commercial real estate broker, practically cross-country from Las Vegas; Teddy, a small-press publisher, from Syracuse; Mickey, a musician and sound engineer, from nearby Cape Cod. All were sixty-six years old and had attended the same small liberal arts college in Connecticut where they’d slung hash at a campus sorority. The other hashers, mostly frat boys, claimed to be there by choice, because so many of the Thetas were hot, whereas Lincoln, Teddy and Mickey were scholarship students doing the job out of varying degrees of economic necessity. Lincoln, as good-looking as any of the frat boys, was immediately made a “face man,” which meant donning a scratchy white waist-length jacket to serve the girls in the sorority’s large dining room. Teddy, who’d worked at a restaurant during his junior and senior years of high school, became a cook’s helper, making salads, stirring sauces, plating entrées and desserts. Mickey? They took one look and escorted him over to the sink where a mountain of dirty pots sat piled alongside a large cardboard box of off-brand steel scrubbers. Such was their freshman year. By the time they were seniors, Lincoln had been made head hasher and could offer both his friends positions in the dining room. Teddy, who’d had enough of the kitchen, promptly accepted, but Mickey said he doubted there was a serving jacket big enough to fit him. Anyway, he preferred remaining a kitchen slave to making nice with the fancy girls out front, since at least the galley was his own.
Converging on the island forty-four years later, all three were grateful for the educations they’d received at Minerva, where classes had been small, their professors available and attentive. To the naked eye, it had looked like most other colleges did in the late sixties and early seventies. The boys had long hair and wore faded jeans and psychedelic T-shirts. In dorm rooms kids smoked dope, covered the smell with incense, listened to the Doors and Buffalo Springfield. But these were mere matters of style. To most of their classmates, the war seemed a long way off, something that was going on in Southeast Asia and Berkeley and on TV, not coastal Connecticut. Editorials in the Minerva Echo were forever lamenting the lack of any real activism. “Nothin’s happenin’ here,” one said, riffing on the famous song lyrics. “Why that is ain’t exactly clear.”
No place on campus was less rebellious than the Theta house. A few of the girls smoked weed and went braless, but otherwise the sorority was a protective bubble. Yet it was here, far more than in their classes, that the real world began to reveal itself conspicuously enough that even nineteen-year-olds like Lincoln and Teddy and Mickey couldn’t ignore it. The cars parked out back of the Theta house were not only nicer than those in the regular student lots but also the faculty’s. Stranger still, at least to young men who didn’t come from wealth, the owners of the vehicles in the Theta lot didn’t feel particularly lucky to be at Minerva, or even to have parents who could afford the staggering tuition. Where they came from, Minerva was the natural extension of the first eighteen years of their lives. Indeed, for many, this had been a safety school, and they spent their freshman year getting over the disappointment of not getting into Wesleyan or Williams or one of the Ivies. Though they’d known the statistics on the grades and SATs required to get into such elite institutions, they were used to having other factors count, too, things you could neither talk about nor quantify but that still caused doors to magically open. Anyway, Minerva was fine. At least they’d gotten into the Theta house was how they looked at it. Otherwise, they might as well have gone to UConn.
On December 1, 1969, the evening of the nation’s first draft lottery, Lincoln convinced the house mother to let the hashers serve dinner half an hour early so they could all crowd around a tiny black-and-white TV in the back room where they ate their meals. Given that their fates hung in the balance, the mood was strangely buoyant, at least at the beginning. Of the eight hashers’ birthdays, Mickey’s came up first, 9th out of 366 possibilities, causing the others to break into a chorus of “O, Canada,” which might’ve gone over better if they’d known more than the first two words of the song. Of the three friends Lincoln’s came next at 189; better, but not safe enough, and impossible to make plans around.
As the lottery continued, a relentless drumbeat of birthdays—April 1st, September 23rd, September 21st—the mood in the room grew more somber. Earlier, while serving the girls’ dinner, they’d all been in the same boat, but now their birthdays made individuals of them, people with singular destinies, and one by one they drifted away, back to their dorm rooms and apartments, whe
re they would call their parents and girlfriends and discuss the fact that their lives had just changed, some for the better, others for the worse, their grades and SATs and popularity suddenly beside the point. By the time Teddy’s birthday finally came up, he and Lincoln and Mickey were the only guys left in the hasher room. Passionately opposed to the war, Teddy had told his friends earlier in the day that he would go to Canada or jail rather than get drafted, so to him the lottery was meaningless. But of course that wasn’t really true. He didn’t want to go to Canada and wasn’t sure that when push came to shove he’d have the necessary courage of his convictions to actually go to jail in protest. Distracted by these thoughts, by the time only twenty-odd unannounced birthdays remained, he was convinced that his had already been read out and he’d somehow missed it, maybe when they were adjusting the TV’s rabbit ears. But then there it was, 322nd out of 366. He was beyond safe. Reaching to turn off the TV, he realized his hand was shaking.
There were a dozen or so Thetas they counted as friends, but only Jacy Calloway, with whom all three were in love, was waiting outside the sorority’s back entrance when they finally emerged into the frigid dark. Once Mickey told her—with that big, goofy grin plastered on his face—that it looked like he was headed for Southeast Asia, she slid down off the hood of the car she’d been sitting on, buried her face in his chest, hugged him close and said, into his shirt, “Those fuckers.” Lincoln and Teddy, both luckier on a night when that—not smart, not rich—was what you wanted desperately to be, managed nevertheless to feel intense jealousy when they saw the girl of their collective dreams in Mickey’s arms, never mind the uncomfortable truth that she was already engaged to another young man entirely. As if Mickey’s good fortune in this brief moment somehow mattered more than the short straw he’d drawn an hour earlier. Then, as his birthday was announced, both Lincoln and Teddy had the same sickening reaction: that two years ago the people in charge had taken one look at Mickey and assigned him the shittiest hasher duty in the Theta house, and when he reported for duty, he would again be sized up at a glance and sent straight to the front lines, a target no sniper could miss.
Right this minute, though, with Jacy nestled in his arms, they couldn’t believe his incredible good fortune. This is called youth.
LINCOLN HAILED FROM Arizona, where his father was minority owner of a small, mostly played-out copper mine. His mother was from Wellesley, the only child of a once well-to-do family, though, unbeknownst to her, not much of that wealth remained when her parents were killed in a car accident while she was a senior at Minerva College. Another daughter might’ve resented how little was left of the family fortune after their debts were squared, but Trudy was too devastated by sheer grief for anything else to really register. A quiet, solitary girl who didn’t make friends easily, she was suddenly all alone in the world, untethered from love and hope, and terrified that tragedy might befall her as suddenly as it had her parents. How else to explain her decision to marry Wolfgang Amadeus (W.A.) Moser, a small, domineering man who had little to recommend him besides his absolute conviction that he was right about anything and everything.
Not that she was the only one he managed to bamboozle. Until his sixteenth birthday, Lincoln actually believed his father, whose outsize personality was in stark contrast to his diminutive stature, had done his mother a favor by marrying her. Neither attractive nor unattractive, she seemed to disappear so completely in large gatherings that people afterward couldn’t remember whether or not she’d been present. She seldom objected, even gently, to anything her husband said or did, not even after they returned from their honeymoon and he informed her that of course she would forsake her Roman Catholic faith and join the fundamentalist Christian sect to which he belonged. When she accepted his proposal of marriage, she’d taken for granted they would live in the small desert town of Dunbar, where the Moser mine was; but she’d also assumed they’d take vacations from time to time, if not in New England—which her husband confessed to loathing—then maybe California, except it turned out he had no use for that coast, either. He was a firm believer—as he explained it to her—in “learning to love what you have,” by which he seemed to mean Dunbar and himself.
To Trudy, everything about Dunbar and the man she’d married felt foreign, at least at first. The town itself, hot and flat and dusty, was unapologetically segregated, whites on one side of literal railroad tracks and “Mexicans,” as they were called, even those who’d resided there legally for over a century, on the other. Though it was, to her way of thinking, a nothing town, Dunbar seemed to have everything W.A. (Dub-Yay, to his friends) Moser required: the house they lived in, the church they attended, the shabby little country club where he played golf. At home he ruled the roost, his word law. Her parents had discussed things, so she was surprised to learn that her own marriage would operate on a different model altogether. They’d been married for several years before Lincoln came along, so it was possible they had argued occasionally about how things would play out—his father gradually bending Trudy to his will—but Lincoln’s impression was that while his mother might’ve been surprised by her new life, she accepted it from the moment she set foot in Dunbar. The first time he remembered her digging in her heels was when it came time for him to apply to colleges. Dub-Yay meant for him to attend the University of Arizona, his own alma mater, but Trudy, who’d gone to live in Tucson with a maiden aunt after her parents died and finished her degree there as well, was determined that their son would be educated back East. And not at a big state university, either, but a small liberal arts college like Minerva, the school she’d dropped out of a semester shy of her degree.
The argument began at the dinner table with his father proclaiming in his high, whiny voice, “You know, do you not, that for any such thing to happen, I would have to be dead?” A statement that was clearly designed to end this conversation, so Lincoln was surprised to see on his mother’s face an unfamiliar expression that suggested she’d contemplated her husband’s mortality with equanimity and was undeterred. “Nevertheless,” she said, and this in fact did end the discussion, at least for the time being. It resumed later in his parents’ bedroom. Though they kept their voices down, Lincoln heard them going at it in there through the thin wall that separated his room from theirs, and it continued long after his father, who always went to the mine early, was usually asleep. It was still ongoing when Lincoln himself finally drifted off.
The next morning, after his father, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep and unaccustomed domestic discord, headed off to work, Lincoln lay in bed mulling things over. What on earth had come over his mother? Why was she waging this particular battle? As far as he was concerned, the University of Arizona was perfectly fine. His father had gone there and several of his classmates were heading there, too, so he’d know people. After tiny Dunbar he was looking forward to life in Tucson, a big city. And if he got homesick, he could easily make the short journey back to Dunbar for the weekend. A couple other classmates would attend colleges in California, but nobody he knew was moving to the East. Did his mother imagine he wanted to be on the other side of the country, where he didn’t know anybody? And going to classes with kids who’d all graduated from fancy prep schools? Well, what did it matter? At some point after Lincoln fell asleep, his mother had no doubt come to her senses and realized the futility of openly opposing his father on this or any related subject of significance. Order, by now, had surely been restored.
So he was surprised again to find her in the kitchen humming a jaunty tune and not at all sheepish about what had transpired the night before. She was still in her robe and slippers, like most mornings, but also seemed to be in unusually high spirits, as if she were about to go on a long-anticipated vacation to an exotic port of call. It was all extremely disconcerting.
“I think Dad’s right,” Lincoln told her, pouring himself a bowl of cereal.
She stopped humming and looked him in the eye. “What else is new?”
Which brou
ght him up short. After all, it wasn’t like she and his father argued all the time and he always took his father’s part. Last night’s was, in fact, the first real argument he could remember. Now here she was spoiling for yet another fight, this time with him. “Why spend all that money?” he continued, trying to sound reasonable and unbiased as he poured milk on his cereal and grabbed a spoon from the drawer. It was his intention to eat standing up as usual, leaning against the counter.
“Sit,” she told him. “There are things you don’t understand, and it’s high time you did.”
Grabbing the step stool from between the fridge and the kitchen counter, his mother climbed up onto the highest step. What she was after was on the top shelf of the cupboard, and far in the back. Lincoln watched, amazed and, yes, a little frightened. Had she hidden something up there where his father wouldn’t find it? What? A ledger of some sort, or maybe a book of photographs, something secret that would shed light on these things he supposedly didn’t understand? But no. She was reaching for a bottle of whiskey. Since he hadn’t moved away from the counter, she handed it down to him.
“Mom?” he said, because it was seven in the morning and, really, who was this strange woman? What had she done with his mother?
“Sit,” she repeated, and this time he was glad to obey, because his knees had jellied. He watched as she poured a slug of amber liquid into her coffee. Taking a seat across from him, she set the bottle on the table, as if to suggest she wasn’t done with it. He half expected her to offer him some. Instead she just sat there staring at him until, for some reason, he felt guilty and looked down at his cereal, which was getting soggy.
The gist of it was this. There were several facts about their lives of which he was ignorant, starting with the mine. Sure, he’d known that it was slipping, and that over the last several years the price of copper had tanked. Each year there were more layoffs, and the workers had again threatened to unionize, as if that would ever happen in Arizona. Eventually the mine would close, and the lives of all these men would be shaken. None of this was news. No, the news was that their lives might be shaken. Indeed, they already had been. Many of the extras—things they had that many of their neighbors didn’t, the in-ground pool, the groundskeeper, membership in the country club, a new car every other year—were thanks to her, she explained, to the money she’d brought to the marriage.
Chances Are Page 1