Go for a run? Running always made her feel better. But to run Amy needed to go home, get the dog, and change. Dan was at home. She couldn’t deal with Dan. Jack was at home. Her sweet boy. But his pain overwhelmed her. Maybe it was okay to let Dan do some of the parenting now that he was back, and she could take a tiny break? Miles was at home. He was easy, Miles. Usually he was the easiest of all, but right now, facing the results of her own neglect and her surprise at his getting into trouble, too, she wasn’t ready to face this kid, either. Thank God, Theo was with Blossom. Theo even on a good day could have tipped her over the edge. Begonia would keep him that night as well if Amy wanted, that’s what she’d said on the phone: “Theo es mi hijo. We can keep him as long as you want.” What would the world be like without other mothers? How could any of them have survived?
The car was across the street where Dan had parked it. It was a little crooked, the end jutting out just enough into the street to bug her. The last thing she wanted was to open the door and go inside. She felt like right now if she were to enter that car, the air inside would smell like a mouth and she would never get out of it again. So, she walked right past it and headed down the block.
The Chois lived in one of Amy’s favorite neighborhoods in Palo Alto. She had always coveted their house and their location, but as Dan reminded her, Wei was in finance and Marilyn was a brain surgeon. It was out of their league. Dan was an unemployed journo and she was what? A PR girl? Now a tech den mother? Back in the day she had wanted to work in film or maybe magazines. Those dreams had gotten her into public relations.
The Chois lived in a beautiful old mission-style house in Professorville where it met Evergreen Park. The houses were larger than they were in College Terrace, where Amy lived, although there were some old-fashioned bungalows here, too, plus some modern types, and a few stately two-story Colonials that looked as if they’d been shipped out from back east. The sidewalks were leafier, and the yards more verdant, and often there were citrus trees. It was more gracious than it was where she lived with her boys; there the houses were closer together and the interstitial spaces narrower, more cement in the alleys and carports, less green.
Kevin was dead.
Even after the last few days had forced her in such an intimate way to face that gruesome fact, she still couldn’t really believe it. That dear, sweet, vibrant, living boy was dead. Her own son had gone from inconsolable to easily comforted and then back again. At times, he raised his hand to step up to the plate, like today at the service; at other times he was a human puddle, crying in her arms. She knew from her own experience that time would take care of some of this; and she also knew that a loss this deep was everlasting. The only peace to be had at this moment was in leaving the Choi house and, also, not going home to hers.
Amy turned down Cowper. It was a nice, broad, leafy street and it went on forever. There would be no more decisions to make, she could just turn back when she hit the stores and restaurants on California Avenue. Her feet hurt in her shoes, black pumps with a kitten heel. She took them off and stood on the cool cement. Her panty hose made her feel like her pelvis was choking. She looked up and down the block and saw no one—which was not unusual for this time of day in the middle of the week. The kids were probably at afterschool or already doing their homework, the parents who worked were commuting, the ones who weren’t were contemplating the endless puzzle of dinner; it’s the worst part of having kids, Dan always said, trying to figure out what to feed them.
With the coast clear, Amy reached up the skirt of her dress and pulled her panty hose down, then stepped out of each leg and out of the little sock-foot at the end of them. Now her feet were on the crunchy pavement. She balled up the panty hose and started to walk, panty hose in one hand, shoes dangling in the other. The corner house still had its recycling and garbage bins out by the curb. She deposited the panty hose in the trash and kept walking. She vowed never to wear panty hose again. The cooling late-afternoon air felt nice on her legs.
Dan was sleeping with another woman. Dan had lied to her and told her he’d gone job hunting. He’d spent money they didn’t have. He’d gone to Japan to write a story. He’d said he’d gone to Japan, after he’d said he’d gone to Boston, but for all Amy knew he was shacked up in San Francisco or had gone wine tasting with this person in Sonoma. Who was she? How had he met her? Was she younger, prettier, richer, smarter, funnier, kinder, more interesting than Amy? Better in bed? Was this just a midlife crisis, as Marilyn said? Or was he leaving her? Who even wanted him? He was a lying, cheating, unemployed slob, and he’d left her all alone at the absolute worst time in all their years together. She felt like a single mother. Wasn’t that what she’d been afraid of becoming all along? The only responsible one?
Amy looked back down Cowper, she had just come that way. What if after leaving the reception she had actually gotten into the car and driven home? Might she have burst into tears and then hit a neighborhood dog by accident, while reaching into the glove compartment for a Kleenex?
What if she’d walked the other way, toward home and campus, like Dan and Jack presumably did? Could she have run into Naresh skipping out on work and taking his kids out to the playground? Would they have sat down on a bench, while his boys took to the swings, and had yet another thought-provoking and soothing conversation?
Amy loved Naresh.
Or maybe if she’d walked toward home she would have run into some nosy parent from the high school, right by the Starbucks on the corner, like Jody Bledsoe; someone who wanted to be reassured that Kevin had really been on drugs—which he hadn’t—so that she could separate his fate from that of her own beloved son’s?
What if Amy had chosen not to walk, but had taken the car and not burst into tears and not hit a dog, but had driven around and around, the way that Jack said he and Kevin had done so aimlessly that fateful morning? What if in all that directionless driving, at one point she’d looked at the dashboard and saw her tank was close to empty, and then she’d pulled into the gas station on campus just as, after all these many years, her old boyfriend had pulled up at the other pump?
Is that what Donny meant with all his multiverse theories? Would Furrier.com allow her to know the outcome of all these decisions if they were ever to be made? Or were Amy’s petty problems to be delegated by Donny and his minions to the forthcoming crisis-light social media service Summer Fur?
Maybe in the multiverse where Amy floated around in her car all day, so as not to go home, and decided to get gas on campus (which was more expensive and something she never, ever did anyway), he was here on business. Just like that, after twenty-five years or so, except for grainy LinkedIn photos, she got to finally see his older, softened face. It was lined and dusted by a silvery close-shaved beard, but he still had his hair and he still had his smile. Or maybe in another multiverse he was taking his living daughter (she’d seen that kid’s Facebook page and she was a cutie) on a college tour of Stanford. Their daughter had never been born. Amy thought she’d aborted her, but if Donny’s algorithms meant anything it turns out she might have miscarried her anyway, even if she’d married him and tried to make things work. (Why didn’t I try? thought Amy. If I’d tried back then, would that pain be anything like the multilayered one I’m experiencing right now?)
And, wow, in that same multiverse, he said: “Don’t you look great?”
He said: “You’re still beautiful,” making Amy’s stupid knees grow weak and this horrible day somewhat better.
Amy doesn’t think that! She doesn’t think that! She knocks on a wooden fence, she spits over her shoulder three times, she erases her own memory, a psychic do-over, she chooses early Alzheimer’s or cancerous death over that now-forgotten, instantly obliterated, totally immature and egoistic thought.
“How long has it been?” he says. “At least twenty, twenty-five years. There’s so much I’ve wanted to say to you, there’s so much I’ve wanted to know. My daughter’s got an interview after her tour. And an info
session. Do we want to get a coffee?”
Or maybe in another multiverse Amy sees this guy, this guy she doesn’t even know anymore, she sees him pull up to the pump and get out of the car and stretch, and his T-shirt rides up, and she sees an unwanted sliver of his hairy belly, and knowing it is best to let sleeping dogs lie, she’ll pull out again without getting gas; she has read The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, she knows it’s too late for anything but awkwardness and sorrow, relief and regret, so maybe as she backs away from the pump she almost runs over the evil Maximus’s evil father, Chris Powell. Chris has taken a leak inside the bathroom in the station’s minimart. He’s bought a candy bar from a vending machine and, without looking either way, while stuffing his ugly, nasty face, he walks right into the path of her car and she stops in time, no roadkill Chris, but he still chases her car out of the lot, screaming again about his lawyer.
Or perhaps instead of going for gas on campus, Amy decides she’ll get her gas at the station near the entrance to 101, and after filling her tank so high she almost floods it, Amy thinks, gotta burn some of that up, why the hell not, and turns onto the freeway.
She drives and drives. After a while, a good long while, hours maybe, or even a couple of days, she decides it is high time she visited Lauren back in Scarsdale. Dan can deal with the boys. Dan can deal with the dog. Dan can deal with Jack’s misery and Thing Two’s not-reading and Thing One’s money-laundering and his own fat-faced fat-bellied unemployment and infidelity. She can take 101 North to the Bay Bridge and 80. She can drive and drive and drive three thousand miles and land herself at Lauren’s front door. Lauren will take one look at her and fix her a cocktail, that’s for sure, a vodka martini, three olives, the way she likes it, when she arrives.
Or when Amy turns onto 101, before she gets to the bridge, she can exit into San Francisco, and she can risk life and limb and her driver’s license by texting Sam Choi, one hand on the wheel and the other on her phone, asking him to meet up in the city for dinner. He says yes of course. He thinks she’s cute. He needs something else to contemplate aside from his dead nephew and his shattered brother, and when the check comes, he will insist and Amy will let him pay.
She thinks about how Sam looked when he clutched his hands to his heart when she’d handed him that beer. She imagines how grateful he’d be if she fucked his fucking brains out.
Amy stopped walking. Her feet were hurting from the hard, gravelly sidewalk. She put her shoes down and rubbed each sole clean with her hand before slipping first the left, then the right shoe back on. She reached into her purse for her cell phone. She pressed CALL BACK on the last number to call her. When he answered, she said: “I’m going to the Nut House. Meet me there when you can.”
Amy turned off her phone, dropped it in her purse, and kept on walking to California Avenue.
* * *
Donny loved the Nut House. He’d gone there the first time, orientation week freshman year, when his RAs coerced most of the floor—that is, the truly smart kids who came to college with fake IDs fully loaded—to join them in a classic Palo Alto night out. It was a real dive, the RAs said, with pride, a perfect “old man’s bar,” where truck drivers and construction workers and grad students and service-industry folk all drank cheek to jowl with tech giants and coding stars. Bobbins, the humongous football-playing RA who lived on Donny’s hall, said: “Might even be some creepy-crawly hookers prowling if we’re lucky.” But what got Donny instantly on his computer creating his own fake ID was when an RA named Sheila said: “Zuck even hangs out there sometimes.”
Donny and his cronies had been going to Antonio’s Nut House ever since, although never, not once, had Zuckerberg been there when he was. Donny had seen him at Palo Alto Sol, but he was there with his wife, so Zuck had not looked that approachable. Donny thought it would be easier to talk to him in a bar and was for a long while disappointed.
But as the weeks and months passed without a sighting, Donny didn’t care so much, because there was enough at that crazy pub to entertain him. Playing to theme, a squirrel plaque hung over the front door, and a giant gorilla statue, dispensing free roasted peanuts, lived in a cage in a corner. The floor was covered with their shells—everyone just threw the empties on the black linoleum; it looked like no one had swept it in the four decades it had been in business. An electronic news ticker displayed cracked jokes behind the bar. The twining lights spelled out: SO A DYSLEXIC WALKS INTO A BRA . . . BOOZE IS THE ANSWER. NOW I CAN’T REMEMBER THE QUESTION . . . WELCOME TO ANTONIO’S NUT HOUSE!! GET A DRINK AND GRAB YOUR NUTS!
Donny liked the noise, which could get thunderous when the place was packed, and the neon lights that were hung around the rooms were bright and shiny. Sometimes when he entered the bar, he felt like a metal ball just shot into the game in an old-fashioned pinball machine. Bam! Zam! Whap! Whoop! It was a great joyride. Plus, bras hung from the ceiling. Donny didn’t often get to see bras IRL.
An old guy once told them how the bra business got started, while he and Adnan attempted to play pool. “I saw the whole thing,” the guy said. “I was sitting next to this young lady at the bar. Maybe it itched or something, because she got busy with her hands under her shirt, and then, holy shit, she slid that thing out one armhole, it was one of those lacey white ones and she flung it up in the air where it got stuck. It’s still up there.” Beer bottle in hand, the guy acted out the entire hard-to-imagine feat as he narrated. When he mimed the final skyward gesture, he ended up pouring beer on almost everyone in the pool room. Donny and Adnan had nearly peed in their pants, they’d laughed so hard.
But bras weren’t the only thing that hung from the ceiling at the Nut House. For fifteen bucks, you could paint your own tile and hang it up there, too, which Donny did on his nineteenth birthday; he painted the first line of code he’d ever written, and a lot of the squares were kind of art house versions of bathroom graffiti: private jokes, sports boasts, crude drawings. The windows were covered with sloppy hand-painted signage listing the available food items: hamburgers, dogs, fish and chips, burritos, popcorn, nachos, chili fries. Whiteboard and handmade posters, announcing the daily specials, helped block the natural light (they were virtually the same as the menu). Happy hour prices all the time. You could get a G&T for three bucks and a margarita for $3.50. Donny liked the super chicken burritos, but Adnan said the food was rancid, and whenever they came for beers, Adnan would run back across the street to use their office bathroom because the men’s room was so effing filthy. Not Donny. There was a sign in there that made it worth flirting with giardia: PLEASE DON’T PUT YOUR CIGARETTES OUT IN THE URINAL. IT MAKES THEM SOGGY AND HARD TO LIGHT. He’d Instagrammed that several times, until his mom begged him to stop. That and foosball and two pool tables? What more could a freshman want? For Donny’s first year and a half at Stanford, the Nut House was collegiate nerd-boy nirvana, the perfect place to hang out in pink, polished, pricey Palo Alto.
This was the heaven in which he’d lived until one mean, rough, and ragged waitress entered his life, with her dyed red hair, and too-tight wifebeater, and heroin-chic skinny black jeans; Donny and Adnan decided to call her Old Red behind her back, even though she wasn’t much older than they were. One night, after serving Donny about a million times, in the middle of sophomore year, for no reason at all, she confiscated his fake ID.
When Donny said, “Hey, no fair,” she said, “Stanford University students are our worst customers, rude and cheap,” and she walked away. She wouldn’t even acknowledge Donny’s presence when he followed her and tried to talk reason. She threatened to turn the bouncers on him if he persisted and gave him the silent treatment the rest of the night.
Other times when Donny patronized the place, like during the middle of the day when the coders at work were making him crazy, the waiters would serve him margaritas and beer, whatever he wanted. But whenever that evil witch was on duty the best Donny could hope for was a Diet Coke. In those days, if Adnan were with him, Adnan would order two shots
and slip one into Donny’s drink out of pity and the largess that comes with superiority. Old Red seemed to have no problem with Adnan.
Then when Donny turned twenty-one, just a few weeks ago, and returned with his New York State driver’s license, legal and ready to play, Old Red looked at it and then at him, back and forth, and back and forth, and said: “Your schnoz looks bigger in the picture.”
She looked at it again.
“Nope,” she said. “It’s bullshit.” Reading off the card: “Donald. Donald fucking duck. What do you think, I’m stupid? Get outta here.”
“Good one,” said Donny.
She refused to return the ID until Donny offered her stock options. He gave her ten shares of i.e. Now, whenever he entered the bar, Old Red called out: “Hey, Ding Dong,” as a sign of affection. She even poured him a beer, always before he asked for one, even when sometimes he would have preferred a mixed drink. The last time, the beer was warm.
“If you like cold beer, go to the bar next door,” she said.
Old Red was a bit of a minefield. So Donny felt a little trepidation walking inside, but it was a cool, late afternoon on a weekday, no one was at the food counter, and there was a single guy with tattoos pouring drinks. No sign of the Red Devil anywhere. It was dark inside and it took a moment for his eyes to fully adjust. Donny walked over to the bar.
“A margarita, please,” said Donny.
“Sure thing,” said the bartender.
Donny looked around the room while the guy did his magic. She was sitting at a wooden table up front in the shadows by a window. The paint let in little light. She was staring right at him.
“Amy?” said Donny.
“You walked by me,” said Amy.
“My bad,” said Donny. “I didn’t see you.”
“The boys okay?” asked Amy.
“The boys?” asked Donny. When she nodded, he said, “Oh, yeah, Miles, he’s fine. Dan came in looking a little tired, so we sent him to bed. That was right, right?”
Come With Me Page 27