Sorry for Your Trouble

by Richard Ford

  Their headlights tumbled along the tree-walled road across which occasionally flitted a shape—a bat, an owl. On the margins, a deer then a coyote were glimpsed. North of the highway the forest went on and on and on and on. To the right, the riding lights of lobster boats inching into the night. He was now, just suddenly, paralytically tired. Someone—Mackey at the firm—had said to him: “Whatever you think is the right thing to do” (he was, of course, talking about grief and death and loss), “contemplate the opposite.” This was certainly that. What would he do with Jenna in the house? A woman alone.

  When they’d left the village, there’d been a pickup following, and in a while the girl’s cell phone rang, though she’d ignored it. “I never answer it,” she said. “It’s just some car dealer—never who you want.” After a while the truck overtook them, accelerated, then turned off on a dark road.

  Boyce understood that what he was doing now was attempting to feel different, or feel something different. Not be private and sealed away. To open up. A line he’d read this morning on the beach came to him. Mrs. Dalloway, again. “. . . She always had the feeling it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.” He’d never thought that. He’d believed the reverse. But they could both be true. It would make each day feel different.

  The girl grew quiet, occasionally leaning and looking up through the windshield as if she sought a favorite star. When he made the turn on Cod Cove Road, by the red house, the Parkers’ windows were lit and cars pushed into the side yard. Their kids were there. Jenna looked at him in the dashboard light and cleared her throat again. It was how she introduced her subjects. She was chewing a stick of gum, the Peppermint smell over-laying her clothing’s odor. They were nearing the house. FOR SALE passed through the headlights. The McDowells were long gone. No lights were on. He missed Mae as intensely as he’d ever missed her. It was just sudden.

  “Do they let women in combat yet?” She’d been thinking this over, watching off into the underbrush.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” He turned into the grass driveway. The house bulked against the lightless sky.

  “Me and my sister used to play at this house when I was little.” She said “little” as if it were spelled liddle. The headlights swept the flagpole and the cistern, the path to the beach, a motionless rabbit. “And here’s Mr. Bunny. Hel-lo,” Jenna said happily. “My mom, I guess, had some friend who lived here. Mrs. Birney or whatever. We used to play with a kitty she had. Is there still a path to go to the beach?” She smiled at him hopefully.

  “There is,” he said, shutting the motor off and opening his door quick to get the light on. It was cool near the water, the salt air drifting up. Mosquitoes were a presence. Jenna looked defenseless, alone in her seat.

  “You’re not picking me up, okay?” she said in the dimness, her yellow gym bag in her lap, her fingers kneading its nylon hand-loops. She seemed as if she might start crying.

  “Of course not,” Boyce said.

  “I’d have to punch you,” she said, then smiled her weak little smile. “I smell a little doggy. Sorry.” He was exiting the car. Crows made gathering sounds in the trees. “You’re very nice,” she said.

  “My wife’s name was Mae,” he said, leaning in to look at her.

  “That’s nice,” Jenna said. “It really is. What’s your name?”

  “Peter. Peter Boyce.”

  “Peter’s my father’s name,” Jenna said. “That probably means something.”

  HE WENT THROUGH THE DOWNSTAIRS TURNING ON LIGHTS. LIGHTS kept things orderly. Get her to bed and to sleep. She didn’t smell good, it was true. A shower would help.

  Fenderson’s card was on the kitchen table. The house was cold, the cellar door open, a chill, sewer-y odor had leaked up. Someone had helped him or herself to a coffee cup of the pie and left the cup in the sink. The McDowells wouldn’t do that. On a scrawled-on legal pad leaning on the old sink pump handle was a note. “Hi Mr. B, We’re your neighbors down the road. The McDowells of Bethesda. Love your beach. Love Maine. We’re in the red house. Come visit. Happy summer! Pat ’n Bill, Jeff ’n Naomi.” Fenderson had not informed them about Mae. Too much trouble.

  Jenna was standing alone in the living room under the floral fixture Fenderson’s wife had put up. Her gym bag was clutched to her front. She looked small and uninteresting, her droopy hair half framing her face. In her camo pants and smelly shirt, she looked like somebody who often slept in different houses. She was in his now.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind me being here.” She had a way of starting to smile then frowning. She’d said these words before also. She was possibly twenty. Might never see thirty. Things happened to people.

  Boyce closed the front door on the night. “No,” he said, “it’s great.” He felt for some reason stern, a way he hadn’t been enough with Polly. He’d always kept his distance. “Go have a shower upstairs. You’ll feel better. The little bedroom’s made up.” Polly had not really slept there.

  “It’s cold.” She clutched her bag.

  “There’s a space heater in the bathroom,” he said. The house smelled like the pie and faintly of perfume and the basement. He thought of Pat McDowell in her white hat on the rocks. “A shower’ll fix you,” he said. Mae would’ve been amused by black people being the house prospects. She’d maintained off-center views about black people—being Irish. It hadn’t helped much in New Orleans. Just some other way she was.

  “I don’t like the dark,” Jenna said, as if where she was was dawning on her.

  Boyce stepped to the front foyer—the only grace note in the house—and snapped on the bulb at the top of the stairs. “There,” he said.

  “What time is it?” She seemed a girl who’d never care what time it was.

  “Nine. Little after.”

  “There’s a meteor shower tonight, speaking of showers,” she said and smiled. “If you go outside in a while you’ll see it in the south.” The room’s poor light smudged the details of her face. He was more than tired.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “You’re so nice to let me be here,” she said and began her way up the stairs to the bathroom.

  HE SET THE PIE IN THE CABINET WHERE THE MICE WOULDN’T REACH it. He’d left the car unlocked, but now needed very much to lie down and close his eyes—just for a while. His hands ached. His knees, also. He’d been very tense. But for what reason? In the morning Jenna would be up praising the day and be gone.

  He climbed the stairs. Light shone under the bathroom door. Jenna was speaking through the shower noise—talking on her phone, telling someone where she was. Which was welcome. It was hazardous when no one knew where you were. Now someone knew. “You silly thing,” he heard her say. “I’ll have to deal with you tomorrow. Ciao.”

  Ciao.

  He opened down his covers, raised the window and looked out onto the little patch of lawn, the rhododendrons and the road. A sheriff’s car was passing, its inside light on. Another smaller rabbit sat in the grass where the sheriff’s lights found it. A dog barked a distance away. He looked up to possibly see meteors, but the window faced north.

  Boyce laid on top of the covers, clothes and shoes on. The shower sound was soothing, then the toilet flushing, boards squeaking as Jenna moved about. His mind again floated as it had in the afternoon. What was it he’d needed to decide because it was the anniversary, or something—about Mae completing him, inventing him? Or was that a new thought? He could pay the McDowells a call this week.

  “PUSH OVER, MISTER MAN.” JENNA WAS IN THE BED, WARM, DAMP, SLICK under his covers. A strand of moonlight fell on her bare shoulder, a breast she was just covering with a hand. At some unremembered point, he’d removed his shoes, pulled up the bedspread, but still had on his clothes. Beneath the covers, Jenna was bulky, more substantial than she’d seemed. Foreign. Like a little peasant, he thought. “I stayed in that other smelly bed as long as I could, where it was freezin’,” she whispered.

  “You don’t have a
ny clothes on,” he said, not awake. “No wonder you’re cold.”

  She drew closer. “Pajamas suffocate you. You have to warm me up. I know you’re a sad old thing. I won’t presume.” She grasped him brusquely, the way she’d asked his name in the bar. Who are you? All of her was against him—hair, face, knees, her bare back all humid—her little legs insistent. She smelled of the Camay Fenderson’s wife had left on the sink. “You’re good ’n’ warm, aren’t you.” Her nose pressed his chest, her legs working closer. He touched her breast without meaning to, which caused her to utter a sound. “Mmmm. Ooohhh.” Then very softly, “Nothing else. Okay?”

  “What?” he said. “What is it?”

  “What Muppet would you want to be?” she whispered

  “I . . .” he started to say, but knew nothing about that. She experienced nothing unusual being here. She saw everything different from how he saw everything.

  “I’d be Janet,” she said. “Though in my happier moments I’d be Kermit.”

  “I don’t know,” Boyce said.

  “Do you want to talk about your wife? You can.”

  “I don’t.” He was whispering, too.

  “Then we don’t have to,” she said.

  “She would’ve liked you.” It was a lie. But better for her to hear that. It hadn’t been a good day for her, except now, conceivably. Mae would have thought she was ridiculous and him more so. An everlasting and embarrassing eejit.

  “What’s her name?” Jenna said, close to him. “Was, I mean.”

  “I told you. Mae.”

  “Mae like the month?”

  “Yes,” he said. He hadn’t thought of that recently. They used to joke about it. Something-something brings Mae flowers. “Yes,” he said. “Mae like the month.”

  “I understand,” she said. “Okay.” Which was how it was in the moments before they went to sleep.

  HE WOKE SWEATING. THE GIRL WAS A FURNACE. HIS LEFT EYE WASN’T focusing perfectly. His hands were numb from clenching. Jenna’s mouth was open, and down inside tiny clicking noises could be heard with her breathing. Her gin and tonics exuded a sour-bread smell. She would sleep hours and hours.

  He went downstairs where lights were on, carrying his shoes. He meant to go sleep in the little room once the lights were off. He didn’t feel trapped now in some out-of-all-good-sense disaster-in-the-making. This would be fine. Though of course she could be fourteen. “Who of us could stand the innocent evidence of our lives to be placed before a jury of our peers?” It was their joke at the firm. The answer was—no one.

  He found a tablespoon, got down the pie from the cabinet and stood at the sink in his socks, hand to his chest the way his father used to, left eye un-focused and half-closed, and dippered out a big bite, breathing a heave, filling his mouth—runny and tart and too sweet—swallowing, barely chewing. It was intensely, intensely good—the middle still warm, the crust bitterish, the sugar hardened on top. He took another gulping bite and relished it. He would serve it to Jenna for breakfast before they left for her car.

  Unfocusing eyes was a symptom you were having a stroke, everyone knew. The old engine under assault. Blood pressure the obliging assassin. He’d never once thought of his own dying—even in the worst, when Mae was careening around, preparing to depart life. His death had not been a part of it—a failure of empathy, possibly. Only life had, and carrying on. He heard a sound upstairs. The girl’s voice, “Ohhhh. Mmmmmm.” Then nothing. A dream. She was deep asleep. Now would not be the time to die. Far too melodramatic, Polly would certainly say.

  HE PUT ON HIS SHOES AND WALKED OUTSIDE. TRANSLUCENT CLOUDS had moved in, the half-moon inching to the horizon. The meteor shower was past. The air had warmed with a wind change. When he’d first arrived to the little house, he’d planned to greet the sun each day, build driftwood fires on the beach, bring a blanket, possibly sleep there. Instead, he’d lain in his bed, listening to crashings in the underbrush, grinding lumber trucks on the highway, moans, voices on the beach, the girdering of lobster boats on the darkened water. He was a born listener, a man who paid attention. Accepting was how you kept the run of yourself. The evolving, small adjustments.

  He decided to walk to the beach and not to sleep more. Beyond the privet, the path was almost undetectable. You followed the cooler air to the water. A mosquito pinched his ear, then again. Crows made soft exchanges in the cedars. Skunk stink drifted up. He turned to see if light had come on in the house. But it hulked like a ship at sea, unchanged.

  He looked for the side path to the pillbox—the rose briars emitting their faint late-summer rankness Polly had also disliked. And then suddenly he was at the beach—all the way already, its air widening and cool off the nearly invisible water. He climbed stiff-legged over the boulders. The bay sipped and hissed like something being rinsed. Everything seemed to pull outward—the beach sand sour and fishy, the tide to its farthest. Tiny pinpoint lights flickered at the Coast Guard on Schicke Point. A lobster boat rumbled out of sight. He heard gulls shouting in the dark. Black Magic Woman played on a boat radio farther out. He was here and nowhere else. Though hardly alone.

  He walked to where the sand was damp and the air smelled of sulfur. He had no idea of the time. The lobstermen went at four.

  “Okay, then,” he said for no reason—perhaps addressing the beach. Everybody must experience—when calamities came down—that it’d been a dream from which you’d wake and things would be as they’d been. He would awaken on this beach, a sleepwalker, turn back to the house—the red house. Mae would be in bed. Means something, means nothing. It wasn’t true. Means something, means something. You had to imagine what it would be.

  Again, in law school—the instant he’d felt he’d grasped something permanent, found a fastness wherein he could reside and hold on, the young professor would flip the page in the case book, grin into the yawing despair of the rows of students, his eyes snapping, and shout, “Next, NEXT. NEXT!” The terror at that moment had been: don’t be left behind.

  Out on the bay, onto which the moon primly shone, a brief pink-and-green sizzle of fireworks sprouted, commanded the cold stars then quickly faded. What was it the skinny woman said? Life began once the fireworks ended. Everybody had a way of explaining the fix they were in.

  “Those are just Coast Guards over on Schicke,” the girl said. She’d come along now—not afraid of the dark at all. “They get real bored out there. That was definitely not the meteor shower.” He turned to make her out. “It’s sticky out here. Where’d you grow up?”

  “In New Orleans,” he said. Both eyes were working again. No stroke. No death.

  “You prolly told me that, too. Did you meet your wife back there?”

  “I met her in college in New Jersey.”

  “Jersey girl!” She took a deep breath and held it. She was bored. She’d been nice to him. It had been a novelty. “Did you ever see Bye, Bye, Birdie the play?”

  He had. With Mae, in a little back-alley revival house in the Village. Nineteen seventy-four. Mae’d loved Elvis. And there’d been a character called Mae. He said. “Yes. With my wife.”

  “We performed it in high school,” Jenna said flatly. She was just talking, seated on a rock in the dark, wearing the terry robe from the bathroom. “‘Honestly Sincere.’” She hummed what might’ve been that tune.

  He wished he had something important to tell her. Call upon his years and years of legal experience. But he had nothing. Life, he thought, would now be this—possibly even for a long while—a catalog. This, and then this, and then this, and then this—all somehow fitting together to signify something. Conversations, meetings, people, departures, arrivals. Things passing like ghosts. Not terrible at all.

  “I always think I’m going to find a dead person when I come to the beach,” Jenna said.

  “I do, too,” Peter Boyce said.

  “Isn’t that weird? You aren’t down here being all Mr. Gloomy, are you? About your wife?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not.
I was just allowing the day to begin.” His heart was beating regularly, eyes focused in the near absence of light.

  “Do I remind you of somebody?” she said.

  “No,” Boyce said. “You don’t.”

  “Do you know how I knew you were down here?” He turned and looked at her. She was ten feet behind him, aglow in the diminished moonlight, the white robe not quite around her. Being almost naked wasn’t unusual for her.

  “No. How?” he said.

  “Tracks in the grass,” she said. “You left me some clues, didn’t you?”

  “Right,” he said. “I did.”

  “Do you think I’m a narcissist? Some people’ve told me that.” She pulled her robe around her.

  “I don’t know,” he said wondrously.

  “So do you think we’ll get to know each other better and be friends?” She seemed concerned.

  “Yes,” he said. “I don’t see why not. Do you?”

  “No. That’s what I was thinking,” she said and looked into the sky, as if she’d heard something fly past her invisibly.

  And that was all they said for a time while the day made its fresh claim again upon the darkness.

  Jimmy Green—1992

  They were in a taxi, on their way to the American Bar down General Leclerc, to watch the election returns. Rain had begun blowing sideways, three minutes past midnight. The little Fiat, its windshield dimpled and furred with water, all at once began sliding, veered left and (almost) into the Denfert-Rochereau lion, but swerved again, wheels spinning, then sped all the way around the rotary and half again and stopped, facing up Boulevard Raspail the wrong way. “Ooo-laaaa,” the driver said, exultant. “Maximum machine-gun racket effect.”

  The French woman, Nelli, had squeezed Green’s hand ridiculously hard in alarm.

  “We’re almost there,” Jimmy Green said. “He just wants to make it interesting.”