by Dan Barden
Crash smiled. “No, I think you’re an out-of-shape, breathing-too-heavy father. Why do you ask such stupid questions?”
“I feel like a goof with this helmet,” I said. “Isn’t there some way I can get you to wear one without having to wear one myself?”
She stood on her pedals and cranked ahead of me a few yards.
“Why did your mother need the afternoon off?” I shouted after her.
“She has a date,” Crash said.
“With John Sewell?”
“Yeah.”
“Since when did your mom start taking off weekday afternoons?”
“Since John asked her to the groundbreaking of the new bazillion-dollar Civic Center. Mom always goes where the rich people go.”
“Are you being a smart-ass about your mother?”
“No. If I were an investment banker, I’d follow the rich people, too. Besides, she goes wherever John goes. He’s her guy.”
“He ever say anything to you about an electrician with a name like a dog?”
“Huh?”
“Never mind,” I said. “You think they’ll get married?” I wondered what effect her marriage would have on our custody battle.
“Why?” Crash said. “You jealous?”
“I barely know the guy,” I said. “I think it’s nice that you like him, though.”
“You think it’s nice that I like him? Why are you talking like a father from a TV show? Yeah, they’re going to get married. Yeah, I like him. But you don’t even like my coaches. You’re telling me that you’re going to be totally cool with a stepfather?”
“Unless you call him ‘Dad,’ ” I said. “And then I’ll have to kill you both.”
Crash rode close to the edge of the road. We were getting higher and the drop-off was steep. “Tell me what’s wrong with you,” she said, “or I’m going to throw myself over the cliff.”
My stomach churned. There was a part of Crash, I knew, that believed she could do it. So much for escaping the insanity of her parents.
“I’ve been feeling sad about my friend Terry.”
Crash had insisted on coming to the memorial service because that’s the kind of girl she is, but we’d never really talked about his death.
“He was like my big brother,” I said. “And my father and friend all rolled into one.”
We slowed to a stop in the middle of the fire trail. It blew my mind that Saddleback Mountain was no longer wreathed in smog. I’d been looking up at that smog my whole life.
“I know what he was,” Crash said. She looked up at Saddleback before she looked back at me. “What’s it feel like?”
“I guess I feel lost,” I said. Like a dinghy in an ocean that just got emptied by a meteor. “No one has ever died on you, have they?”
“Your dad? Mom’s dad?”
“You don’t remember them, do you?”
“Not really,” she said, “but I know what you mean. I felt that way when you got divorced.”
“You remember that?”
She glanced at me like I was an idiot, a glance I recognized from her mother.
“Remember when Terry and I used to take you to the movies?” I said, eager to change the subject. “What was that movie we saw so many times?”
“Terry never talked that much around me. I liked him, but I was never sure if he liked me.”
“I didn’t notice. Was that weird?”
“Not weird,” Crash said. “Maybe confusing.”
We started riding again, turning away from Saddleback toward Santiago Canyon Road. Thinking about Terry, I remembered a definition of “cool” that I’d once heard: loneliness seen from the outside in. Terry had always been pretty cool.
“He was jealous,” I shouted, my calves burning to keep up. “He wanted kids more than anything, but he didn’t know how to make that happen.”
“Why didn’t he ask somebody to marry him?” Crash said as I caught up with her.
“You think it’s that easy?”
“Absolutely,” Crash said. “Don’t you?”
I wanted to say I didn’t think it was that easy. But then I realized we weren’t talking about Terry anymore. My thirteen-year-old daughter smiled and started pedaling hard again.
STORIES ABOUT TERRY MAKE HIM seem like some sort of tough but loving drill instructor. He was that, but he was also a deeply strange man whose life baffled him as much as anyone.
One time he took me to an A.A. convention in Palm Springs. He was speaking at the banquet, and I think he told me about it ten minutes before we drove away in his Cadillac. He knew I didn’t have anything better to do. After we’d been in the hotel for about a half a day, moving from room to room listening to charismatic A.A. speakers, sitting before good-natured A.A. panels, I’d had enough. I couldn’t handle the volume of the place. Everyone was vibrating at a frequency that made me want jump from my skin. I went back to our room, took a long shower, and then lay on the bed in my shorts planning to hitchhike home.
Terry returned in crisply pressed linen pants and a blue Hawaiian shirt that didn’t have any wrinkles, either. He leaned against the wall beside the bathroom. “You want to get away from here at any cost,” he said. “Failing that, you want to kill yourself. You’re thinking about stealing my car right now.”
I just stared at him. Yes, yes, yes, I thought. So fucking what?
“If I were you”—he stood up straight—“that’s exactly what I’d do. Go ahead and steal my car. Get the fuck out while you can.”
He smiled. And then he left the room.
When I took Crash home, there was a full-tilt autobahn-eating Mercedes in my ex-wife’s driveway, the G-series, the expensive kind. Jean’s date wasn’t over yet. I’d get the chance to talk with John Sewell sooner than I’d thought. When I took off my seat belt, Crash gave me a wide-eyed look: it was rare that I wanted to see my ex-wife.
I walked in with Crash, armed only with the vague cover story of speaking with my ex-wife about starting a college fund, an idea that had suggested itself after this morning’s abrasion with the very uncollegiate Troy Padilla. I sometimes dreamed up these arbitrary conversations with Jean, hoping that if I distracted her from our custody battle, maybe it would go away.
Jean and “her guy,” John Sewell, were on the patio, drinking the same expensive ginger ales that I stocked myself. Crash wisely ducked into her bedroom.
As he stretched out his hand, I remembered how much I had wanted to like John Sewell that time when we invited him fishing with us off Dana Point; I was guardedly encouraged when Crash brought his name home one weekend. He was about my size and shape, maybe five years older, going gray, and he had a jaw that belonged in a shaving commercial. He wore a navy suit without a tie, but I knew the tie was around here somewhere. He was the kind of man who held your hand for exactly the right amount of time as he looked squarely into your eyes.
I gave Jean an awkward kiss on the cheek, which is what people like us do to pretend we’re not people like us. It had been years since we’d screamed at each other, but that didn’t mean we were friends. Jean was wearing a tailored jeans jacket over a salmon-colored shirt and a butt-framing pair of slacks. She was a compact but lovely woman, and she should have married the kind of country-club geek she went to USC with, the kind her father always pushed her toward. The kind of guy who grew up to look exactly like John Sewell.
“We shouldn’t be talking,” Jean Trask said. “You’re suing me.”
“I’d be happy not to sue you,” I said, “if you’d agree to share custody of our daughter.”
“It’s a good thing, then,” she said, “that it’s not my job to make you happy.”
Her response was so sharp that I almost laughed. “This is ridiculous, Jean. If I lost your trust eight years ago, I’ve more than—”
“You gave away your rights in this situation,” she said. “It would be easier on everyone if you would just accept that.”
I looked at Sewell, wondering how far ahead of me he was.
The conversation had gone to shit almost immediately, and yet his expression seemed remote, maybe even bemused.
“This is not unreasonable, Jean. I’ve consented to drug tests. I’ve consented to home visits. For the past eight years, I’ve lived an exemplary life. What do you want me to do that I haven’t done?”
“I want you to drop the lawsuit. You have everything you need. I don’t deny you access to Alison; she even has a room at your house. What we’re arguing over is a technicality.”
“You think it’s a technicality,” I said, “that I have no legal status in her life? You could move her to another state without even telling me.”
“You should have thought of that, Randy, when you destroyed our reputation on the front page of every paper in Southern California.”
Jean Trask had shed my last name as quickly as a prisoner sheds his orange jumpsuit. Her maiden name had always sounded like military discipline to me. I couldn’t remember what it felt like to love her.
Sewell cut us both off at the pass, which I suspected was his specialty. He did it in an interesting way, too: he cleared his throat, looked at the room around us, and then launched into something entirely different. It wasn’t denial so much as a weird dominance. He’d decided that the conversation should be over, so he declared it over.
“Randy,” he began, “Alison says that project in Capistrano is something to see. How did she put it—Frank Lloyd Wright in skateboard shoes? I’m not sure what that means, but I was impressed by her enthusiasm.” Sewell’s default mode was to conciliate. I remembered that about him. Or rather, I remembered what Terry had said about him: Guy can’t even take a bathroom break until he’s sure everything’s in order.
I wish I were better defended against this kind of compliment, but I’m not. Convince me that my daughter loves me a tenth as much as I love her, and I’m your bitch.
One of Jean’s former boyfriends had written me a poem about his “yearning” for us to be good friends. Another asked if I wanted to do a sweat lodge with him sometime. So I liked the idea of John Sewell. He was cordial, and he acted like a man. All I really wanted was a safe place for my daughter to live when she couldn’t live with me. An end to my alimony wouldn’t hurt, either.
John suggested to Jean that maybe I would like a ginger ale, too, and she left the room with such fury that you could hear the fabric of her slacks whipping against itself. In an instant, John and I were alone together.
“Can I ask you a question, John?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“You ever meet an electrician named after a dog? Maybe someone who worked for you?”
Sewell smiled kindly and shook his head. “I don’t think so, Randy. Why?”
“You don’t even want to know,” I said.
Sewell looked thoughtfully into my eyes. “I was sorry to hear about Terry. I missed the memorial. I was in Sacramento working on—”
I interrupted him. “We were good friends to him while he was alive, right?”
“That’s right,” Sewell said. “Although now I wish we had spent more time fishing. Was that a pretty regular outing for you guys?”
“For a while,” I said. “Then we got busy.”
“That’s too bad,” Sewell said. “I thought of you being out there every weekend, Terry planning everyone’s lives.”
“What was his plan for you, John? I can’t remember.”
“I was going to be a senator. And if I remember correctly, you were going to run a huge development corporation.”
“How’s that working out for us?”
Jean arrived with my ginger ale. “John’s got too much integrity to be a senator. He’s going to be a judge.”
“Should I be congratulating him now?” I asked her. “Did I miss an announcement?”
“Yes,” she said, “you should be congratulating him now.”
“It’s not official,” John interjected, “but it’s in the pipeline.”
“They’re going to give him Judge Fogarty’s bench,” Jean said. “Now that the old bastard has finally done the right thing.”
John looked down modestly. “It came at a good time,” he said. “I was looking for new challenges.” His statement of intent was flavorless, but I didn’t begrudge him: Jean had enough picante for both of them.
“Fogarty resigned?” I said.
“He should have resigned years ago,” Jean said.
“I think judge is better than senator,” I said. “Congratulations.”
“And I’m pretty sure,” Sewell said, “that being a builder who’s regularly featured in design magazines beats running a development company.”
“That may be true,” I said, “but you just came a lot closer to fulfilling Terry’s predictions than I have. You ready to give up lawyering?”
“Happily,” he said.
Although I didn’t necessarily want to end Jean’s discomfort with our mutual admiration, I decided to employ my collegefund conversational gambit. Things had already gone way south with Jean, but I figured maybe I could endear myself to the soon-to-be Honorable John Sewell.
As it happened, Crash walked back into the room in time to hear her mother laugh. “Who is this college fund for? You? That youngster you live with? Alison has less than four years until graduation. What did you think I would do, wait for someone to die and will it to me?”
Sewell smiled in a neutral way. A thought occurred to me that must have already occurred to a smart man like him: this was a discussion we should have been having in private.
“That’s great,” I said. “How much do you need from me?”
“You’re already contributing,” Jean said. “I’m putting in your alimony. It’s not like I need it.”
Humiliation from my ex-wife wasn’t anything new, but it was particularly painful in front of her boyfriend. I considered my options. With Crash standing beside her mother, I didn’t have any. I could have asked Jean for a steak knife in order to commit ritual suicide, I guess.
“Can I make a suggestion?” Sewell said.
For a second, we both looked at him as though we couldn’t imagine how he had materialized in our lives. I managed a nod. Jean barely moved.
“The way things are going with the market these days,” he said, “it makes sense for both of you to have college funds. One of you could have a 529, and the other could start a trust in Alison’s name. Listen, if you want to talk sometime, Randy, I can give you some suggestions. I do okay with this kind of thing.”
Jean wasn’t happy to watch Sewell pull me from the fire. She gathered up the empty bottles, and my own not-empty bottle, and took them to the kitchen. Crash followed her mother, probably to make sure she didn’t return with that steak knife.
“She hates you.” Sewell said it like he was telling me my truck needed new tires.
“I didn’t notice it while we were married,” I said, “because there was so much disgust, too.”
“I’m going to make her hate you less.” Sewell stood up, which I took as a signal that I should start heading to the door. “It’s no way to start our marriage. I’m good at this kind of thing, too.”
Leaving without saying goodbye to Jean was an excellent plan. I could call Crash from my truck. Shaking John Sewell’s hand, I felt grateful for his attempts to make my life easier. And that wasn’t even the worst mistake I made that night.
TURNING UP CHAPMAN TOWARD the toll road, I took a moment to enjoy one of the last pieces of open farmland in this part of Orange County. Thousand-foot peaks brooded over both sides of a box canyon that bottomed out into a lake. It was getting near dusk, and I almost didn’t mind being myself for a few moments.
On the way toward Laguna, though, my cell phone rang. The caller ID said MVP Entertainment, which didn’t sound like anyone who wanted me to build them a home, so I answered it.
“Randy, it’s Claire Monaco. I want to straighten a few things out.”
Call waiting cut in. It was MP. Considering our talk this morning,
and the fact that I’d recently been seen soliciting prostitutes in Santa Ana, I figured I’d better take it: “Hold on a second, Claire. Hi, sweetheart.”
“Claire Monaco just called.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. “Did you, uh, give her my cell number?”
“No,” MP said. “I told her I would ask you to call her. Which is what I’m doing now. Do you have her cell number?”
“Yeah. I think so. I was talking to her this morning about Terry, in fact. She’s trying to help me figure out what happened.”
There was a long beat of silence before MP spoke. “Do you know what she did last week?”
“Something awful?”
“She came to the Saturday-afternoon women’s meeting at Saint Ann’s, and when it was her turn to share, she made amends—in front of everyone—to Sherry. She wanted to apologize for sleeping with Jack the week before. She said she felt really bad about hurting another sober woman. ‘A sister’ is what she called her.”
I thought about this while I swung my truck around on the cloverleaf between the Santa Ana Freeway and the Newport Freeway. A low-wattage energy-saving lightbulb appeared above my head. “Sherry hadn’t known about it until that moment?”
“That’s correct.”
“Aren’t you supposed to keep that stuff to yourself?” I said. “I mean, it being a closed meeting and all?”
“Sherry’s going to divorce Jack,” MP said. “If it were me, I would have cut off his balls.”
Apparently, advanced yoga training was more ethically complicated than I had imagined. Maybe I shouldn’t have laughed. MP hung up.
When I clicked back over to Claire, she said, “I think you’ve got some bad ideas about me, Randy. Was that MP on the other line?”
Why, besides causing trouble, would Claire call my home when she already had my cell number?
“Is it possible,” I said, “to have good ideas about you?”
“This is what I’m talking about,” Claire said. “What you just said.”
“Tell me something,” I said. “Have you made any 911 calls in Spanish lately?”