A Calling for Charlie Barnes
Page 29
“Just goes to show you,” I said, looking up.
Jerry peered across the table at me. “What’s that, Jake?”
“The power you have when you control the narrative.”
When Barbara finally made it down, it was with a face so grief-stricken, so cried out and puffed up, that my heart went out to her in spite of everything. She loved that man, and I loved him, too, and that was something. She paused to straighten a rug with her foot before cutting in for the kitchen.
“Barbara?” Karen said.
“Hold on,” she said. “Let me get my Diet Coke.”
We waited for Barbara to get her Diet Coke.
“Is there a problem here?” she said when, with her soda can and a handful of baby carrots, she deigned at last to enter the dining room.
“You fucking bitch,” Karen said.
“Hold on, Karen,” Marcy said.
“Out of my house!” Barbara demanded, and pointed a finger at the front door.
Marcy attempted to calm everyone down.
“Barbara, hold on. Karen, please. Barbara, let me ask you: Where are we in these pictures? Why are there no pictures of his children here?”
What she hoped Barbara might do, while her husband’s body was still warm, was take a moment and look at that display through his children’s eyes so that she might see how she had offended them. Perhaps it was just an oversight. She could make up for it by sending Troy to the store for more poster boards and by taking a stab at revision. She might not have meant to make any kind of statement.
“You’re there,” she said, pointing with a baby carrot. After a longer pause, she pointed again and said, “You’re there.” And after a lengthier search still, she said with satisfaction, “And you’re there.” Then she snapped the carrot in two with her teeth and said, “I don’t see the problem.”
There was a brief pause.
“You are a sick cunt,” Karen said.
“I want you out of my house. All of you—now!”
“With fucking pleasure.”
We followed Karen out—though it might be more accurate to say Barbara frog-marched us out. It was, he liked to say, our house, too, but that offer was provisional, as they always are with stephouses. He was dead, and our warm welcome was over. I carried my shoes out by hand. The four of us ended up at the curb, dazed and loitering outside the house on Rust Road. Karen turned her rage from Barbara to the next best thing.
“You’re no better than she is,” she said to me. “She takes us out, you put yourself in. You’ve been inserting yourself into our lives for how long now?”
“Karen,” Marcy said.
“What are you even doing here?” she demanded of me.
The phone in my pocket began to ring—not my ringtone, not my phone. I pulled it out; it was Charlie’s phone. He’d handed it to me just minutes before going into surgery. The head mechanic at European Motors was calling for Charlie Barnes. His Saab was repaired and ready for pickup. The Porsche needed to be returned.
He didn’t die on the operating table. He died a few hours later, after Barbara and I (and Karen) had left the hospital. Some kind of complication that went straight up the corporate ladder to the heart. They called us back in, did all they could. He was dead by the time we arrived. That was four—no, five days ago.
He woke a final time—for his teeth. Barbara had the chance to restore them in post-op, first the bottom plate, then the top. That part is true, and later came to feel occult: his fake teeth so distressed him when they were out of his mouth, he could postpone death just long enough to get them back in place before he let go for good. He knew his ghost would not rest without them.
That puzzle would never be solved. He would never wear his Brunello Cucinellis. And Jerry’s last words to him would always be “Good luck with your fake cancer, you fraud.”
It couldn’t end this way, with his children banished, the man misremembered, the family in tatters. Inconceivable that it could end this way. I looked around at the disintegrating stepfamily; at immovable Jerry in his dumb denims; at Marcy, who refused to accept one apology, held one grudge, taught him one lesson—and what happened? He died, and it couldn’t be undone; at Rust Road with its crumbling blacktop and cheap fencing; at the house he never made it out of, the ranch-style asylum with its small rooms and sorrows, its endless sources of discontent for a man with dreams now dead; at his bride in the window who loathed and rejected us, who would rather edit us out than accept us, or attempt to love us; at the entire miserable compromise cut short, offered no second chance, when I believe he might have turned his life around. I honestly believe that he might have.
We still had the goddamn funeral ahead of us.
I began writing this book in 2009, in the thick of grief. A year later, I’d taken the facts as far as they would go—up to the day of his surgery. For the next ten years I banged my head bloody against a wall of truth, searching for a way out. There was none—unless I defied his request that I stick to the facts and got a little fancy, gave him the ending he deserved. If he was not the angel Barbara believed him to be, he was a better man than most people knew. Suddenly, the color came back to me, the music resumed. It was the end of grief. I could play again. He’s right: it’s a silly occupation for a grown man. I had bowed out of an impossible situation, but without losing my mind. Turns out, he was my calling. I had only one trouble: What right did I have to control the narrative any more than Barbara did?
I would give it to them. Jerry could be more than his cutoffs. Marcy could say a final goodbye and never regret staying put in Texas. Karen could make an appearance. And they could all three slam me for the fictions I lived for and the lies I loved to tell, and for the limits my narrative imposed on them, all the ways I got them wrong. Even the evil stepmother would get a fairy-tale ending. She was awful, just awful, but she had a good medical mind and would have made a fine doctor.
As for me, it is the fate of sons to become their fathers, and I am like mine, a dreamer and a liar, and more deluded than not. I am the son of Steady Boy, and this is my Doolander, half fact, half flying toupee. Go on, take a brochure. Give it a whirl. Watch it soar, if it can get off the ground; past acorns and oak trees and out to the coasts—this lark and coffin lid, this old hairpiece on a rack and pinion.
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published in the United States of America by Little, Brown and Company 2021
First published in Great Britain by Viking 2021
Copyright © Joshua Ferris, 2021
The moral right of the author has been asserted
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN: 978-0-241-97296-0
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