The Next Right Thing

by Dan Barden

  The Next Right Thing is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Dan Barden

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by The Dial Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  DIAL PRESS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Barden, Dan.

  The next right thing : a novel / Dan Barden.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-64435-4

  I. Title.

  PS3552.A6144N49 2012

  813’.54—dc22 2011012646

  www.dialpress.com

  Jacket design: Catherine Casalino

  Jacket images: Aurora Rodriguez/Workbook Stock/Getty Images (neighborhood), Ian Watts/Flickr/Getty Images (palms)

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  “Let’s not louse this thing up.”

  —Dr. Bob S. to Bill W., November 12, 1950

  OFFICIALLY, I STARTED DESTROYING MY LIFE that Wednesday morning. But it had been on my mind for a while.

  As I drove up Pacific Coast Highway past the Laguna Art Museum, I suddenly longed for still-sort-of-disreputable Santa Ana, where there would have been a neighborhood nearby that would better reflect my mood. There’s nothing worse than a beautiful town when you’ve got an ugly head. From every corner of always-blooming Laguna Beach, bougainvillea announced that unhappiness was not an option here.

  It had been almost three weeks since Terry died, and I hadn’t done a damn thing but drink espresso and avoid the people who loved me.

  It reminded me of when I first got sober. I didn’t want to drink, but I held the idea of drinking close, like a suicide bomb inside my heart. Just bend my elbow and a world of possibilities would open up. Bad possibilities, but possibilities nevertheless. I’d never see my daughter again, but I’d make sure that a few people paid for their sins.

  I could hear Terry’s voice: Clamoring for justice again? Is that it, Randy?

  I was waiting for the light beside the Cottage to change, staring into a pack of well-dressed skateboarders pointed toward Heisler Park, when my cell phone rang. It was Wade’s number, so I didn’t answer. Sometimes you’re too lonely to talk to your friends.

  Instead, I drove my F-350 up to Jean Claude’s café in North Laguna. Like every other morning these three weeks, I would park my ass in a molded plastic chair beside a molded plastic table and try to clear my mind with double espressos.

  That morning the sidewalk and the shrubs were still dewy. Across the parking lot, surfers were jaywalking across Coast Highway, shrugging into wet suits, blowing their noses into the street. Above the beach access, a gray shelf of fog announced the Pacific Ocean.

  At a table nearby, a couple of rich people waved at me tentatively. I vaguely remembered being introduced to them by someone who thought I might design their home. She was too old to be his daughter and too pretty to be his first wife. I’d probably been dodging their calls, but they wouldn’t approach me here. I had perfected my sullenness. It was another way that my old life clung to me: sometimes I scared people.

  For three weeks, I’d been pretending I was just a home designer and not that earlier, angrier version of myself. It wasn’t working. Every day it got harder to pretend I was anyone but myself.

  Jean Claude set down another double espresso on the flimsy table. He was hardworking Eurotrash—a contradiction I liked. Also, the only guy in Southern California who didn’t look like he’d grown his goatee yesterday.

  “Ça va?” he asked.

  “Ça fucking va. How about you? Who are you humping these days?”

  “An important man, works for Obama. He’s too good for me, though. I want somebody bad, like you.”

  One good thing had come out of the past three weeks: I’d finally found a way to describe the sound of my diseased conscience. It was a Styrofoam ice chest wedged behind the seat of an old pickup. The rougher the road, the louder it squeaked, until the noise became unbearable.

  My cell phone rang again as Jean Claude was clearing away my second double espresso. This time I answered: “What the fuck do you want, Wade?”

  “It’s not Wade. It’s Tom. Wade got into a fight. He wanted me to call you.”

  “Tell him that I’m not coming.” I hung up.

  They couldn’t be anywhere but the Coastal Club, one of the places I was avoiding, a place that I’d been avoiding even before Terry died. I poured my espresso into a sip cup and sped out of the parking lot. Something that had stuck with me from that lost decade of being a cop: running out of coffee shops and driving away too fast.

  A simple white building in a glade of oak and eucalyptus just off Laguna Canyon Road, the Coastal Club was nicer than most A.A. clubs because a rich gallery owner had endowed it thirty years ago. Then it took them almost half that thirty years to decide on a design. It was just down the road from the old Bhagwan Ranjeesh place—now a nursery school—and you could have mistaken it for a deal like that. The architectural equivalent of a freshly laundered linen nightgown. They’d done a good job.

  I hated going there, but it was the place where my life began. Once I would have slept there if they had let me. I first met Terry in the gravel parking lot where I was now skidding my truck into a swirl of dust.

  Wade stood at the front door beside Tom and several other fools from the seven A.M. meeting. It seemed like everyone but Wade wanted to tell me what had happened. But they were a little scared to tell me, too. Since Terry’s death, I’d become an authorized repository for community grief. One reason I hadn’t attended a single meeting since the funeral was that I was sick of people looking at me as though I might break down or explode. Wade’s pal Tom, an overweight photojournalist who’d taken the highway patrol on a chase through two counties last summer, gave me a jaunty and ridiculous salute. He and a guy I didn’t know at all, with dark glasses and a bomber jacket, stood behind Wade like Secret Service agents: arms at their sides but ready.

  When I rolled up beside the curb, Wade said, “Dude.”

  “In the truck,” I answered.

  “It wasn’t his fault,” Tom said. “Troy Padilla came out of nowhere.”

  “Out of nowhere,” the other guy underlined.

  “In the truck, please,” I said to Wade.

  “His dad’s a mafioso or something,” Tom explained. “He knows how to do that shit.”

  “In the fucking truck.”

  When we got back to my house above Bluebird Canyon, MP�
��only her father calls her Mary Pat—was back from yoga training and drilling up something in the blender that I might drink if I were dying of cancer. She gave Wade a hug. They’d gone to Catholic high school together in Ranch Santa Margarita. Wade had grown up surfing and perfecting his substance abuse and brushing his blond hair out of his eyes. MP had grown up riding horses, wishing she weren’t flat-chested, and steering clear of boys like Wade.

  “He won’t talk to me,” Wade said. “All the way over here, he wouldn’t speak.”

  “You guys are going to have to work this out,” MP said. “While I’m somewhere else.”

  “He thinks I’m lying to him. This dude came out of nowhere to punch me, and he thinks I’m lying.”

  I sat down on the Indian daybed that MP had found for me at a swap meet. Not as comfortable as my Eames chair, but it provided me a great view of my home. I’d taken a midcentury hillside ranch-style and redone the interior as contemporary cottage. Eclectic furniture like this daybed contrasted with the white ceilings, white walls, and white plank flooring. I had used traditional materials and hadn’t goobered them up with too many fixtures. Reclaimed oak beams in the ceiling were the darkest element by far. Otherwise, it was a playground for the light from the hills.

  I’ll always be happy to see Wade—forever, for the rest of my life—but he’s the guy who finds your kitchen first. The guy who wonders if you’ve made coffee. The guy who pleads his case to your girlfriend. The guy who was now scanning my living room. We’d been friends long enough that I could read his mind: Is that a new Blu-ray player? The kind that records? How much does something like that cost? You’d think he was still a crack-addicted surf rat instead of a guy with a modest trust fund and an afternoon job as a scuba instructor.

  I’ll never not love him, though. Him and Terry.

  “Coffee?” Wade asked.

  MP shook her head and punched up the blender again. She was the only brunette with bangs I would ever love.

  “Not until you drop the bullshit,” I said.

  “Bullshit?”

  MP had her back to me, but I could feel her smiling.

  “The bullshit about how this guy attacked you for no reason.”

  “His father’s in the Mafia,” Wade said. “He’s from New Jersey. He needs a reason?”

  Even Wade knew better than to sit down in my Eames chair, so he passed it to stand in front of the window watching the goats across the canyon. Wildfire control: they ate everything on the hill until there was nothing left to burn.

  “I think he’s the guy who was with Terry,” Wade said.

  “That’s not why he hit you. Once you’ve got Tom and that other bozo defending you, I know it’s a bigger story than that.”

  Wade smiled. My friends can get mighty full of shit, but sometimes they’ll drop it if you ask them. While Wade considered how to tell me the truth, I watched Yegua, my Guatemalan laborer/assistant/better half, cross the backyard with a posthole digger.

  “Well …” Wade finally said. “I’ve been telling everyone he was the guy with Terry.”

  “Do you know that for sure?”

  “No,” Wade said. “But it makes sense.”

  “How does it make sense, Wade? And if it made so much goddamn sense, why didn’t you tell me?”

  Wade turned from the goats. “You were too busy hiding out at Jean Claude’s. I thought I’d wait until you showed up at a meeting.”

  “Fuck you, Wade.”

  Wade stared across the room at the nook where my electronics were stacked. I could feel that MP wasn’t smiling anymore.

  “Okay,” I said after a while. “I’ll fix some coffee.”

  Wade looked at me. “Rick Buford at the South Coast hospital meeting said that this dude Troy and Terry had been driving around all day, checking out Terry’s old drug neighborhoods. A nostalgia trip. Sometime after the funeral, Troy told Rick how guilty he felt.”

  “Feeling guilty doesn’t mean he was with him when he died.”

  Wade sat down on the couch. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Rick said Troy told him that Terry fell like a tree, that he’d never seen anyone fall like that. He saw it happen, Randy. Then he must have just bailed. Didn’t even call the fucking paramedics.”

  MP set down her protein drink and leaned against the counter. For the first time in forever, I wished that she weren’t in my house.

  My sponsor Terry was a big man, about six foot three, with silver hair and a pale youthful face. I’ve had moments when I thought he stood straighter than any man I’d ever known. He’d been off booze and drugs for fifteen years on the night that he died. On the night he died from a heroin overdose in a shitty motel room in Santa Ana.

  My friend Terry would have fallen like a tree.

  This was what I’d been waiting for. My gift from God. And not the loving God people talked about at meetings but a God, like me, who got pissed off when good men died. I’d been sitting on my ass for three weeks because I needed all my righteous strength and every bad impulse I’d been saving from eight years of sobriety to go kick the shit out of this little prick from New Jersey.

  MP walked down the hallway into the bedroom and closed the door behind her.

  I said, “Let’s go find this asshole.”

  The first time I really talked with Terry was over breakfast at Corky’s. He was already hanging with Wade then, although Wade still had one more drunk left. They had invited me to breakfast after the seven A.M. meeting at the Coastal Club.

  Sometimes people in A.A. will say, “Let us love you until you can love yourself.” I don’t think it would have worked on me. At the time I wouldn’t have trusted anyone—besides my SAPD partner, Manny, and my sister—who pretended to love me.

  With Terry and Wade, though, it was a totally different deal.

  Corky’s was a great place to have breakfast, and I fell right into the food. Terry and Wade talked about people in A.A. whom I didn’t yet know. Mostly I ignored them. I wouldn’t admit that I needed this thing. When they asked me questions, I answered. Terry seemed like the kind of smugly successful attorney I had always hated. And Wade seemed like a tadpole who needed to be slapped every time he said the word “dude.” Still pretending to be one tough hombre, I let them know early and often that I was a cop.

  About halfway through my bacon, cheddar, and avocado omelet, I could feel Terry staring at me. When I met his eyes, he said, “You know, Randy, we don’t hang out with you because we like you. We don’t like you. Isn’t that right, Wade?”

  Wade nodded slowly.

  “We hang out with you,” Terry continued, “because it’s head cases like you who keep us sober.”

  It was an important moment in my life. I stood up from the table, threw down twenty dollars, and walked out of the restaurant. I think I told them to fuck themselves. Wade said I did, and Terry said I just walked out.

  By that night, I knew who my sponsor was going to be.

  Halfway to our destination, I realized that I hadn’t even said goodbye to MP.

  “It’s not on Temple Hills,” Wade said. “And it’s not on Arroyo Hills.”

  “I don’t care, Wade, where it’s not.”

  Wade looked at me like I was rushing some terribly important process—the composition of a symphony, maybe. His sunglasses were hanging from his neck by one of those Croakie doodads. I pulled them off and threw the doodad out the window.

  “You don’t get to wear that anymore.” I tossed back his glasses. “It looks too stupid.”

  The asshole Troy Padilla lived in a “recovery home”—words that should be said in quotation marks. People in Alcoholics Anonymous were always thinking up new scams, and lately the new scam was this: rent a big house and fill it with newcomers who couldn’t pull together a security deposit if they owned a gold mine. Put two of them in each room, invent a bunch of bullshit rules about curfew and house meetings, and you can rake in at least twenty grand a month over the actual rent. At best, it was “stone soup”:
the newcomer went to A.A. meetings and didn’t mind getting screwed by some old-timers. At worst, the people who “managed” the houses began to think they actually knew something about recovering from alcoholism.

  In Laguna, the scam had been refined a bit, which is often what happens to scams when they reach Laguna. An A.A. member named Colin Alvarez, who’d made a lot of money as a mortgage broker, started a corporation called Recovery Homes Incorporated to administer the houses. Sober just about as long as me, Colin was the kind of guy who, unlike me, didn’t make jokes about A.A. He’d come back from a meth addiction in his early twenties and, also unlike me, didn’t miss many meetings.

  What did I know? Maybe the “recovery homes” were the best thing that ever happened to some of these people. Terry used to say that A.A. itself was the biggest scam of them all, but it had failed as a scam, and it had become something better.

  “Wait,” Wade said. “It is Temple Hills.”

  Eventually, Wade steered us to a little ranch house hanging its ass over the side of a hill. This dwelling had absolutely nothing going for it but the fact that it had landed in Laguna Beach. The porcini-mushroom-and-sun-dried-tomato color scheme beneath the shake shingles was the only upscale element in the design. In Tustin or El Toro, it would have cost half of what it did here. I parked my truck pointing down the grade beside the house.

  I thumped hard on the front door, which was suburban and hollow-core and made a nice scary sound. A near-teenager with a bare midriff and a pierced navel answered. In my limited experience, these recovery homes existed somewhere on a continuum between a prison and a pajama party. I saw that contradiction in the girl before me. She might have been near the bad end of Laguna Beach High, but something in her eyes was harder than that by a lot. It reminded me that in spite of the affluence surrounding them, some of these kids could be living on the street before the year was out.

  “Look who’s here,” she said. “It’s the let’s-drink-too-much-coffee-but-not-smoke-enough-cigarettes-and-still-think-we’re-better-than-everyone-else brigade.”

  I was wondering what meeting she knew us from when Wade shouted after a dark-haired kid in his early twenties peeking at us from the end of a long central hallway. The kid ran, and I ran after him. Wade and Pierced Navel followed. At the end of the hallway, in what looked like the kitchen, I saw three more twentysomethings—two boys and another girl—watching us but apparently staying put.