The Next Right Thing

by Dan Barden

  “Terry wasn’t trying to help him get sober?”

  “Maybe that’s what he was doing. After my own thing, I couldn’t hack it. Simon made me uncomfortable. When Simon was around, I wasn’t.”

  “What about Colin?”

  “Colin’s a Boy Scout,” Wade said. “He always thought A.A. was like, I don’t know, Go and sin no more. Terry hooked him up with Simon in a deal that allowed him to cheaply expand his business or his mission or whatever he thinks it is, but I’m sure he didn’t like this shit any more than I did. And there’s no way I can buy him knowing about any porn. Colin threw people out of the house if he found a dirty magazine under the bed. Right, Troy?”

  Troy nodded. “He says it’s demeaning to women.”

  My hands were throbbing, but so was my spirit. “Terry had just had a fucking baby, Wade. His dreams had come true. Why would he end up in a motel in Santa Ana? Thirty-six fucking hours after the child was born. Something must have set him off. This guy at the hospital said Terry was ranting about a business partner. I think that’s Busansky. And not even the DEA knows where he is. So how the fuck do we find Busansky?”

  All of us at once looked at Emma in my truck. Her eyes were still, eerily, closed. We turned back. “I’m going to get to her in a minute,” I said.

  “I don’t know, Randy,” Wade said. “But I think you’re missing the big picture here.”

  “What’s the big picture, Wade?”

  “This guy.” Wade pointed at Troy. “This guy.”

  Troy withdrew his attention from an investigation of the motor beneath the table saw. He seemed to be in the process of memorizing my shop, although I was also sure he heard every word. It took me a moment to recognize what Wade was saying: Troy is the patient today, dude.

  “Troy’s fine,” I said.

  “I’m not worried about Troy.”

  “You think I’m going to drink if I don’t sponsor Troy?”

  “How should I know?” Wade said. “I’m the one who dropped the ball on Terry, remember? All I know is that without this guy, we’ve got nothing.”

  As Troy joined us between the worktables, I thought about the two days since I’d met him in that other garage. How did we get from there to here? In our dysfunctional little A.A. family, we’d traded Terry for Troy.

  “Tell him,” Wade said to Troy.

  “Tell him what?” Troy asked.

  “Tell him that you’re done.”

  “Done?” I asked. “Done with what?”

  “Oh,” Troy said. “My fourth step.”

  What separated the men from the boys in A.A.: the moral inventory. Basically a list of resentments, it also ended up being a list of sins and fears and the chronology of an entire stupid life. A good sign, too, that the kid was serious. The fifth step should be the very next thing, in which you shared that list with another person. People sometimes called it the end of isolation. I myself thought of it as the beginning of my new life.

  “You finished the whole funky resentment-list thing?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Troy said.

  “What about the sexual inventory? Did you write down all the people you hurt by your selfish pursuit of sex?”

  “Yeah.” Troy laughed and looked at Wade. “It was a short list.”

  “How about your fears?” I asked. “You write down your fears?”

  “Relax, man. Wade wouldn’t let me get away with shit. He went through the book page by page. It was old school.”

  “When are you going to do your fifth step?” I said.

  “This is the question,” Troy said.

  Waiting to do a fifth step after finishing the fourth is a bad idea: like waiting to replace your skin after it’s been peeled from your body. Terry had canceled half a day to hear my list of resentments and fears, woes and missteps.

  “You should do it with this man.” I pointed at Wade.

  “I’m not his sponsor,” Wade said.

  “Then why were you helping him write the inventory?” I said.

  “It takes a goddamn village,” Wade said.

  “I explicitly told him why I wouldn’t become his sponsor.”

  “I know,” Wade said. “Because you can’t stand the sight of him, and you’re such a badass that you might punch him at any moment. So maybe you feel about him pretty much the way Terry felt about you?”

  I looked at Troy. “Is tomorrow morning soon enough?”

  Troy pointed at his borrowed bicycle. “Like I’ve got someplace else to go?”

  “I’m still not your sponsor,” I said. “This is a one-off, never to be repeated.”

  “Everyone gets that,” Wade said.

  As I contemplated a future that included knowing Troy Padilla’s darkest secrets, I looked up at Emma. At precisely that moment, she opened her eyes and stared right at me.

  I walked around to the passenger side of my truck, which was parked in front of the bay door that opened my shop. Emma popped the locks, and I got in. Then she locked them again. Troy said that Simon had hurt Emma, which was another way of saying they were in a relationship. I guess I already knew that she was here to tell me something. The trick would be getting her to tell me in a language I could understand.

  We sat quietly for a minute while Wade and Troy vacillated between watching us from outside the truck and fixing more coffee. I pretended for a moment that I was the kind of good A.A. who practiced meditation. I began to count my breaths, but by the time I got to four, I wished that I had a cigar in my mouth to enhance the process. Still, there was something about sitting next to Emma, feeling her try to contain her restless energy. I had to admit that I already loved her—and Troy—a little bit more than they annoyed me.

  “I’m not going to talk to you about him,” Emma finally said.

  “Then I don’t want you to,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. “You want me to.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but I’m taking that desire and putting it in a box buried deep in my mind, and then I’m going to find out what happened to him whether you help me or not.”

  She turned to me, smiling.

  “Isn’t that what a recon marine would do?” I said. “Put those unquenchable desires and unanswerable shames into deep storage? And still complete the mission?”

  “Which makes me want to tell you everything. You’re a real mind-fucker, aren’t you, Officer Chalmers?”

  “Not really.” I softened my voice. “I know you want to tell me, Emma. You’ve been circling around it since we met.”

  “I do,” she said. “I really miss him.”

  “This is Busansky?”

  “Simon.”

  “Was he your boyfriend?”

  Emma laughed. “Not that he knew it.”

  “But you loved him?”

  “The way that you love a guy who spends half his time trying to convince you to do weird shit on video, yeah.”

  “You want to tell me about that?”

  “It was supposed to make me feel free, but it didn’t make me feel free. Recon makes me feel free.”

  “Did you, ah, do weird shit with my friend Terry, too?”

  “Did I fuck him, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re not ready for the answer to that question, Officer Chalmers. You gotta walk a few more miles in this marine’s boots.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “I loved Terry,” she said. “Not the way I loved Simon.”

  “Which is your sweet but fucked-up way of telling me you didn’t sleep with him.” I sure hoped so.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “Okay, Emma. But if you really care about Simon, you need to answer some questions. And I don’t want you to fuck around. Fuck around about everything else, but I want straight answers to these next few questions. Okay?”

  She nodded.

  “Did you know that Simon sold all those houses to Colin?”

  She nodded again.

  “When was the last time you saw Simon?�
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  “About a month ago. He took me to this swingers club in San Diego. He wanted me to—”

  “I don’t need the details of that right now,” I said. “But when he brought you back home, to the house, was that the last time you saw him?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Is it weird for him to be gone this long?”

  “He goes to Mexico sometimes, but he’ll send me an email just to keep me on the hook, you know? He doesn’t want me to wander too far, if you know what I mean.”

  “What do you think happened to him, Emma?”

  “I think he’s dead, but I don’t know how he’s dead. Or why he’s dead.”

  “What makes you think he’s dead?”

  She stared at me frankly, and I knew I was missing something.

  “If you had a woman as smart and pretty as me,” she said, “who was willing to do anything that you asked, how long would you disappear?”

  I was relieved when she started to cry. This was a girl who needed to cry. I put my hand on her shoulder. If it hadn’t been for my bucket seats, I would have hugged her. “Okay,” I said.

  “Any other questions, Officer Chalmers?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Are you ready to settle the fuck down and become a regular A.A. member like the rest of us?”

  AFTER WADE TOOK OFF for the scuba shop, Troy and Emma learned how to make espresso the way I liked it. While I finished the crib, I gave them both the kind of meaningless but fun chores that Crash had grown out of: Emma sorted wood, and Troy swept the floor. My life was starting to feel like a clubhouse again, which was not the worst thing.

  I told Troy and Emma it was time to help me transport the crib to Santa Ana. Ms. Acuña needed to pick the stain herself.

  My sort-of sponsee Troy was, apparently, technically oriented. As we left the canyon, he explained to me what was so cool about the automatic shutoff on my table saw. Until that moment, I didn’t know I had an automatic shutoff on my table saw.

  I made Emma sit shotgun, so I could grab her if she tried to jump out of the truck. I planned on keeping her close from now on.

  On the way to Santa Ana, I asked Emma and Troy the same question Terry asked me eight years ago. “What would you guys do if anything were possible? If God, against all odds, actually loved you the way He/She/It is supposed to love you?”

  “Him first,” Emma said. “Actually, him only. I don’t want to play.”

  “I’m afraid my dad will hate it,” Troy said, “and because you and Wade are becoming surrogates for him, I’m afraid you’re going to hate it, too.”

  “Did you just say ‘surrogates’?”

  “Yeah. It means—”

  “I know what it means, Troy. But it’s not a word you should use around me again. And never in this truck.”

  “Okay. Jeez.”

  Emma laughed. One of the most horrible moments in A.A. is when you decide to make someone else’s bullshit your own. That’s what Terry did for me at Corky’s when he explained how much he didn’t like me. That’s what I was doing for Troy, taking him with me to Santa Ana for no good reason but his company. It was more complicated with Emma, but not by much.

  Before Troy could answer the question—what do you want to be when you grow up?—he took one last detour through the drama of his “criminal” family: “The culture of blame and revenge was the hardest thing to abandon. Being raised Catholic was tough, too. That Higher Power wasn’t—”

  I wanted to shoot myself. “Troy,” I finally said. “Please shut the fuck up.”

  Troy looked as though he’d misunderstood. I wasn’t fascinated?

  “Listen,” I said. “We all come to A.A. feeling like punks, talking about how tough we are, pissing in everyone’s coffee, but I don’t believe you’re from a dangerously criminal family. Dangerous just doesn’t look like you.”

  “I never said I was dangerous.”

  “I don’t care. Okay? I’m going to hang out with you, I’ll even be your sponsor, but I don’t want to hear any more shit.”

  “You’ll be my sponsor?”

  “And you don’t have to be anyone special. You just have to be a still-breathing alcoholic.”

  Troy’s face changed, like he had coughed up a spiritual hair-ball. “I’ll stop talking about it,” he said quietly.

  Catalina Acuña was approaching forty, with a sharp nose and bright eyes. Her long hair was like the feathers of a swift black bird. There were strands of gray, too, but I liked them. When I buzzed at the wrought-iron security gate of her stucco apartment building, and she came out to meet me, she said that no one called her Catalina anymore—her name was Cathy. Her accent was less heavy when she wasn’t reporting her boyfriend’s death.

  I pointed to the back of my truck, where Troy was standing like Vanna White beside the crib. Emma was in the truck, having asked if she could skip the whole “heartbreaking single mother rising from the ashes of her life” thing and stay in the car. I couldn’t believe I’d managed to get this feral reality-television star to ask for my permission to do anything.

  “I had a free day,” I said to Cathy, “so I thought I would bring it over.”

  “Who are you?” Cathy made it sound like her own failure to remember.

  “We just need some decisions about paint and stain. I tried to contact Mr. Elias, but his cell phone isn’t working.” It occurred to me that I would be going to hell for this. But at least I wasn’t wearing a blue blazer.

  Cathy looked down, closed her eyes, smiled. As she walked toward my truck, I had the pleasure of her first impression.

  “Terry ordered this?” Cathy glanced at Troy.

  “Designed it, too.”

  “It’s too nice for this place,” Cathy said. “Can you keep it until we move?”

  Troy nodded as though this were his department. I decided to lie some more.

  “There’s a bit of, well … Mr. Elias didn’t pay for the whole thing.”

  “I owe you some money?”

  Making up a number that might tell me something, I said, “Five hundred dollars, ma’am.”

  A teenage girl who had to be Cathy’s daughter pushed through the security gate. She was carrying a big-headed baby boy.

  Just the fact of him stunned me. He belonged to Terry like my hand belonged to the end of my arm. The same narrow, permanently skeptical eyes, the same flat Irish nose. It was one of those moments—like the moment Crash was born or the day I met MP—when the wall between my world and all the other worlds became impossibly thin, and I had to admit to myself that I didn’t know anything about what was going on.

  Cathy turned toward her children. “This is my daughter, Paloma. And my son, Danny.”

  Holding her baby brother, Paloma spread her feet, a bit dramatically, into a wary, athletic stance. Letting me know that she was prepared to kick my ass if need be, baby or no baby. Not yet as pretty as her mom, Paloma was a solid little tomboy. I liked her very much for not liking me at all.

  My heart ached for Crash, my own child of trouble, tougher and smarter than any child was supposed to be, never allowing herself to be fooled by the world. Why hadn’t I gone to see my own daughter today?

  “Come inside and I’ll write you a check.” Cathy didn’t seem concerned about the money; I definitely could have gone higher. “Paloma can pick the colors.”

  With Danny still on her shoulder, Paloma gathered up the stain samples and followed us inside.

  Stomping my feet on her mat like an honest workingman, I entered a room that hadn’t been painted in a decade. The furniture was worn, and not in a way that looked comfortable. Nothing that suggested Cathy’s quickness to write a five-hundred-dollar check.

  As we sat down on the vinyl couch, Cathy asked if we’d like something to drink. Danny’s eyes, blue like his father’s, wouldn’t stop reminding me of the man who had died of a heroin overdose about a mile away.

  Troy was polite enough not to ask for anything, but I smelled coffee. The next learning opportunit
y came right after Cathy returned with an Anaheim Angels mug. She pulled up her purse from the floor and asked what name she should put on the check. I just went for it.

  “Randy Chalmers, please.”

  I saw how my name stiffened Cathy, but I already liked her too much to continue playing detective. Instead, I turned to Paloma, who still seemed wary as hell. “Are those hands and feet registered as lethal weapons? I hear the Santa Ana Police Department takes a dim view of martial artists who use their skills recklessly.”

  Paloma’s mouth made a surprised “O” until I pointed to a glass bookshelf across the room filled with tournament trophies.

  As I squinted to read the words beneath the golden action figures, Paloma said, “Jeet Kune Do. My sensei trained with the man who invented it.”

  “You don’t think I know who Bruce Lee was?” I said. “I saw Enter the Dragon sixteen times the summer he died. I hadn’t cried like that”—I paused—“for a long time.”

  At a certain point, Cathy had abandoned writing my check. Paloma hoisted Danny back into her arms.

  “Paloma says they killed him,” Cathy said.

  “He was a threat to the establishment,” Paloma said. “He tried to bring the disciplines together.”

  Typically, Troy had begun sniffing around something that I hadn’t yet noticed: a white box in the corner that had, until recently, held a new MacBook Pro. He looked from the box to Paloma. “You got the fifteen-inch? Sweet.”

  Paloma nodded. I knew enough to know that Paloma’s nod had increased the price on an already expensive computer by about six hundred dollars.

  Cathy caught my eye. Of course she knew who I was. And now I knew where my fifty thousand dollars had gone. But I was without desire to get it back. Somehow I would extricate myself from my stupid trick and approach her like a friend. What I should have done in the first place. Maybe I would even let her make the first move. Yes, that was it: I would let her make the first move.

  Drooling on Paloma’s shoulder, Danny made a sharp happy noise as if to approve my decision. Troy asked if he could buy the computer that the MacBook had replaced. Paloma produced a thick IBM laptop. “It’s a cheap piece of shit,” she said.