Sorry for Your Trouble

by Richard Ford

  “I thought you could use your Sharpies and customize it,” Hobbes said.

  “And say what? It’s stupid. I don’t have Sharpies.” Louise promptly tore the goose card in half and in fourths and in eighths and threw the pieces on the car floor. “Now I don’t have anything to give. Thank God.”

  “You still have your winning personality,” Walter said. “That’ll definitely make Ginny change her mind about leaving. After I risked my life at Walmart.”

  “Fuck Walmart. You didn’t risk your life. That’s racist.” Louise turned toward the spent cityscape and put her bare knees together tightly. Finerty would’ve had a more novel approach with Louise. His Irish-American daughters wouldn’t comport themselves thusly in times of turmoil. Hobbes felt he lacked a novel approach.

  “How old are you?” Walter said, steering cautiously through a signal-less intersection. No police around to save you. People were in an unforgiving mood.

  “Old enough to say ‘Fuck Walmart,’” Louise said. “And a lot more.”

  “Well, try to save back something nice for Ginny.” Louise had pronounced the address on Delery Street shortly before going ballistic about the goose card.

  “I’m not going without a gift. That goes without saying.” Louise had righteous anger always at her disposal.

  “You’d better concoct something to say, then. It’s the gesture that counts. Or would’ve.”

  “What am I supposed to say?” Louise sniffed, as if she might cry a little, or try. That was not one of her assets. Dry eyes were her redoubt.

  “Let’s see,” Walter said. “How about ‘Dear Ginny, I’ll miss you when you’re gone.’ Or, ‘Dear Ginny, I hope your new life in Kenosha is wonderful.’ Or, ‘I hope I see you again.’ Those seem serviceable.”

  “They’re pathetic.”

  Louise was working her teeth and did not have her device in.

  “No, they’re not. They’re things that shouldn’t go without saying. This is a part of your education.”

  “Why did you get divorced?” Louise said blazingly. It had been her default defense for some time—always from ambush. A mean rabbit out of a pretty hat.

  “I forget,” Walter said, seeing the Delery sign—a paper placard stapled to a telephone pole, the regular sign hurricaned away. All around were other handwritten signs, in Spanish. “Demolición de Su Casa.” “Reparos.” “No se siente sola.”

  “No, you don’t,” Louise said. “Was it your fault?”

  “I’m sure,” Walter said.

  “Why did you do it, then? You were bad.”

  “Nobody was bad,” Walter said. “Not even you.” Again, he felt profound fatigue. “It’s always easier if somebody’s bad.”

  Louise looked at him contemptuously, blinking her small, intense eyes behind her glasses, fists clenched, her dental supplies still in her lap. Louise had gained weight in these months. She now had an adolescent pimple on her forehead near her hairline. She was leaving it untended to out of malice. The torn goose card pieces were scattered on her school shoes.

  “I don’t understand you,” Louise said. She was now twenty-five, he was her poor-communicator boyfriend, they’d just broken up, possibly for the last time.

  “I know,” Walter said, slowing to turn alongside a great many-windowed, weather-beaten, brick high school now deserted. “It’ll have to do though. It’ll make an interesting subject for later life.”

  “What later?” Louise said victoriously. “There won’t be any later.” She liked the final word in all arguments. He did not.

  DELERY—LONG, STRAIGHT, POTHOLED, REFUSE-STREWN, GOING toward the lake—was a street of wreckages. Where the flood had churned past, homes were flattened, floated away, had their roofs removed. Others—compact brick ones—were scoured out, their walls surviving staunchly. Weeds thrived where concrete slabs had held houses. A sleek sporting craft had been miraculously hoisted and deposited atop a white frame bungalow. An ancient Studebaker had been pushed through the front door into someone’s living room. All magical achievements of the water. Most houses bore a dark water stain above their casements and the messages of rescuers. “No Pig Found/9-10-05.” “Dog in house/10-8-05.” Another simply, “One Dead Here.”

  Farther down beneath the baking, white sky, a crew of shirtless, aspiring young black men was busily loading usable timbers and shingles onto a sagging pickup bed. No one was remaining in the surrounding blocks of battered streets. All was becoming fields. A few surviving trees. A long view. It was the submersible land everyone knew about. It had always been mainly black and poor, but still a place to live. Louise’s school had made a field trip, and later written moving poems about it, painted gaudy landscapes, written letters to kids in faraway cities, predicting better things. Come back.

  Louise was possibly cataloguing complimentary phrases she could address to Ginny when they got where Ginny lived, and had sunk into silence. The fell weight of destruction—grammarless, attractively foreign—had yet to fully impress her. Some uniformed white men were up ahead—utility workers in yellow helmets and white jumpsuits—gathered around a light pole, connecting, disconnecting. Two wrecked houses behind them had little trailers parked in front. A black-and-white spotted dog stood in the grass, staring.

  “This is horrible,” Louise said, as if she’d never seen any of it before. She pressed her nose to the window, her glasses frames ticking the pane. She had a better reason to be here now.

  The address numbers on the few standing houses led them to the place they were going, which was not far. “Ginny lives with her grandmother.” Louise sighed, emitting a small cloud onto the window glass. She had found a new course to being resolute—affect competent ennui.

  Ahead, in the next emptied block, was a collection of vehicles none of the other houses had out front. A man was in the street, lifting household articles—a chair, a small table, a lamp—into the back of a red-and-white U-Haul that had a mountain scene from the state of Idaho on its side. “It’s not just potatoes!”

  “There’s Ginny,” Louise said, buoyant, no longer bored. She now knew everything she needed to say.

  A child dressed in exactly Louise’s uniform stood on the side of the street opposite the man loading household articles. Two cars were parked in the weeds where a house had been but now was a concrete slab. She was just watching. A chain-link fence recollected a back yard where a mangle ironing contraption sat marooned. Everything around Ginny was open ground with different squares where houses had been. A steepled white church rose in the distance. Gulls soared, singing out. The character of destruction, Hobbes thought, was quite diverse.

  Louise was out before Hobbes could get stopped. Ginny saw Louise, knew her, but didn’t move. Louise marched straight to her and began talking. It was an official visit. She took Ginny’s hand and waggled her arm until Ginny said something and smiled. Louise and Ginny looked alike in their uniforms and tortoiseshell glasses and long straight hair.

  Across from where the girls were, stood a remarkably new but small house, raised to a man’s height on concrete pillars, everything freshly painted bright blue with white trim. A new concrete driveway had been laid, azalea plantings set against the base of the pillars, bright plastic geraniums in window boxes, a thick carpet of St. Augustine fresh off the truck. On the elevated front porch, a desiccated, elderly black woman in a long skirt watched the man loading boxes and suitcases into the square trailer—all things brought from inside.

  For a moment the man didn’t acknowledge Hobbes in his car. Then he stopped loading and looked first at the two girls and at the car and Walter Hobbes getting out. He was moderate-sized with short, neat hair, and was wearing a tank top he’d sweated through, plaid Bermudas he’d also sweated through, and black basketball sneakers with white knee-highs. His skin was the same light-brown color as Ginny’s—just like Louise’s color mostly matched Hobbes’ own. The man loading the U-Haul stood a moment, then came across the street, wiping his hands together.

  “Lo
uise wanted to say good-bye,” Walter said. Everything was knowable.

  “All right,” the man said. He was thirty-two, smooth-muscled, compact. He might very well have been a UPS man—mannerly, implacable, thorough.

  “They’re in the same class,” Walter said. “My daughter.”

  “Okay.” The man regarded the girls. Ginny and Louise were locked in a fast privacy. “Ginny,” he said, interrupting them. “Louise’s daddy.” Louise and Ginny both looked at Hobbes, who waved. Ginny waved back. Louise turned away.

  A second woman appeared on the porch of the blue house, beside the elderly desiccated woman. She was very dark skinned and statuesque, her hair braided in rows. Her face, even from the street, was reproachful.

  “I’m Walter Hobbes.” Walter extended his hand.

  “Miller,” the man said and shook Walter’s hand with a not-firm grip. He was almost featurelessly, smoothly handsome, his face shiny with sweat. He had a small gold stud in his left earlobe. On one bicep was a tattoo that said “Cher” in ornate script. He wore a wedding ring.

  They both stood then in the unmoving heat and looked down the street of remaining ruined houses and emptied lots in the direction of the lake. This was the girls’ visit. Nothing need be said about how it was to be a UPS man, or a practitioner of the law, or what it felt like to leave for Kenosha in the white heat of August.

  “What do you do?” Miller said. First name? Last name?

  “I’m a lawyer.” It sounded quaint to say that, out here.

  “I get that,” Miller said. “I’m with UPS.”

  Hobbes smiled, nodded. The best company ever. Best benefits. Best work conditions. Best customers. Not even like working. “Is that your house?” Walter looked at the bright blue shotgun with the women on the porch watching him as if he was up to something. Louise laughed and said “Oh you. You’re so funny.” The skinny spotted dog that had been up the street trotted past and on into what had become empty fields.

  Miller motioned at the women and nodded. “It’s my mother-in-law’s.”

  “It’s pretty,” Walter said.

  “It’s where her old house sat ’til the storm come through. Some people showed up from a church. Told her they were going to build it back. And did. She didn’t even ask. She just moved back in like nothing had happened. Nothing really surprises her. She’s from the country.”

  Anything he could think to say now, Hobbes understood, would be insulting. He lived in an apartment overlooking the river.

  Miller regarded the house as if his thinking was along those lines. “We moved in with her when our house got ruint’. But. I took a transfer up north. I ain’t turning that down. My wife wants to stay here. But . . .”

  “How does Ginny feel?”

  Miller ran a hand down his bare arm where his Cher tattoo was. The sun was burning straight onto them from behind clouds. Walter’s jacket was wet through. “It’s just a game to her. A big adventure.” Walter looked at the girls together. “Tell me something good about Wisconsin,” Miller said. His brows raveled as if he would take whatever was said seriously.

  “It’s on a lake,” Walter said. “It gets cold. The Packers play there.”

  “I’m starting to be worried about that cold,” Miller said.

  “They have seasons,” Walter said. “We don’t have those. You might like it.”

  “Okay,” Miller said and paused to let this idea cycle past. “I went through Chicago in the Navy,” he said. “But it was in the summer.”

  Then they were silent while their little girls walked a few yards farther down the street, arms around each other’s waist. They had their little girl things to impart, more private than earlier. “So, how’re you doin’?” Miller said. The two women on the porch turned and walked back through the sliding door. One of them had laughed, and said, “You know how he goes . . .” An air-conditioning unit hummed, noise Walter hadn’t noticed. Miller’s question meant, “. . . since the hurricane happened . . . What’s been doing? You’re a human being, apparently.”

  Walter looked down the street at Louise Hobbes, her kilt, her knee socks, her glasses. She was caressing a lock of Ginny’s hair—the spidery tips.

  “I’m doing all right,” Walter said. “I guess that’s how I’m doing.”

  “You livin’ good?”

  “I guess so,” Walter said.

  “There you go,” Miller said, smiling. “That’s what matters.” He, too, looked down toward the girls—lost now in each other’s past and present.

  Walter observed Miller’s hand extend, ready to be shaken again with the same un-firm grip.

  “Good to meet you,” Walter said.

  “All right, then. You be careful,” Miller said.

  “Absolutely,” Walter said, taking the large, soft hand in his. Behind him his other hand found the warm door handle of his car. He smiled back. Miller. Last name, first name. Someone no longer living here.

  “We’re leavin’, quick as I’m loaded,” Miller said, walking back to his trailer, carrying on talking. “Make it to Memphis. Be to Wisconsin tomorrow. Work the next day. You know how it is.”

  “I do,” Walter said. “Safe trip.”

  “I’m a good driver, if it ain’t already snowin’.”

  “It won’t be,” Walter said.

  “There you go,” Miller said.

  Far down Delery, where the workers in yellow helmets were collected around the light pole, a police cruiser turned onto the street and began slowly inching their way. It had been satisfactory here. Better than it might’ve.

  LOUISE SAT IN HER SEAT WITH HER LEGS CROSSED, HANDS IN HER LAP, pleased. She’d achieved victory. “She’s lucky to be moving away,” she said, watching the demolished neighborhood glide past. They were on St. Claude again, where it was possible to view the city’s center at a distance, as if from a desert floor—tall bank buildings in the gritty haze, hotels, office towers not ruined by the hurricane. The city—the middle, where Walter worked—always seemed to rise up where it shouldn’t be. Once, flying in from somewhere, the plane had banked west so he could gaze down the river’s course to the old quarter—the part the tourists knew. What a mistake to put a city here, he thought. A man from Des Moines would tell you that. Nothing promised good from this placement.

  “Did you do okay without a card?” Walter asked. They were bound for their hilarious early dinner at Cyril’s. Ginny and her family were now sent on their toilsome, hopeful way. Bill Murray was on the horizon. Louise’s mother was comfortably across the lake at Mitch Daigle’s. Walter Hobbes would be at work tomorrow. All was as good as it would be.

  “I definitely did,” Louise said. Vivid sunlight sparkled through the windshield, the kind that could give you a headache.

  “It’s good to know you can put things in your own words,” he said. “It’s hard sometimes, but it’s better.”

  “Whatever,” Louise said. “Or buy a better card. Or not go to Walmart, which was my idea, which I’m sorry about. Or never have any friends.” Her jaw was working, grinding. He knew it without seeing it.

  “One at a time,” Walter Hobbes said.

  “Do you think possibly I could maybe move?” Louise said. The goose-card clutter lay under her shoes, the dental supplies sack on the seat between them.

  “Well. You could move to Wisconsin and live on a glacial lake surrounded by stately conifers, go to a country school and learn to canoe and memorize the legends of the Chippewa, and have your classmates say ‘holy cripes’ and ‘Jeez Louise.’” He looked at his daughter proprietarily, reached across and touched her shoulder to indicate he wasn’t making fun, only trying to tickle her. Many things would be possible for her in time. Not even much time. Some of them would surely be good.

  “I’m thinking about going to Italy or maybe China. Or Ireland. And never seeing anybody I know now again.” She withdrew her laptop from her book bag but didn’t turn it on, just looked ahead.

  “Would you include me?” Hobbes said.

&n
bsp; “And Mother, too,” Louise said, and gave him a look of anguish. A look that saw a fearsome future. She turned her laptop on and waited.

  And for that instant, Walter Hobbes experienced a sensation of something being about to happen. A feeling of impendment—not necessarily bad or good, just something in the offing. Though he knew that if he only paused in his thinking, as he’d recently learned to do, didn’t follow his thoughts all the way to where they led, or came from, then this sensation of impendment could subside, or even develop into something he liked. Louise was a smart child beyond her years. In her life she would go to these places and to many others and learn many things. And she would be allowed, also, to forget many things. There was nothing he needed to rebut—only to let her words pass away. He drove on then. They were going out the Chef to Cyril’s, the center of the city still a remarkable feature in the evening’s steamy distance.

  A Free Day

  Eileen Lewis had taken the bus down from Ballycastle to spend the night with Tom Magee at the Maldron at the airport. Tom was off to Paris early, and Eileen was planning a day in Dublin. Not really to shop—though there were the arcades, and the nice little jewelry boutiques in Johnson’s Court, where she’d bought small things when she was at university, and still occasionally would step in. She’d bought some pretty garnet earrings two years ago, though she’d no occasion for them and hadn’t seen them in some time. The day, though, was just to be a free day. A day in town.

  Tom had married her old Queens’ roommate, Marjorie Stearns. They lived in Westport, County Mayo, where he was in the off-shore services business. An engineer or some such. Eileen was an integrated primary teacher. Marjorie was American—from New Hampshire. “Live Free Then Die”—was her joke about that. She was “fiercely independent” but otherwise humorless. A barrister. Tom and Eileen had had this arrangement under way for four years, since a night on the town—the four of them—at Pep’s, when Eileen was still married to Mick and the kids were little. Mick was long gone. The kids nine and eight. Eileen was thirty-six. In Ballycastle now, she’d been “seeing” (the awful word) a good man named James Bowen, who fished and whose wife had died. With James she could perceive a possibility. He was mirthful, kind, liked music, had almost gone to Queens but for his father dying—the boat at risk of being abandoned. The familiar story of staying. James knew nothing of Tom Magee. Marjorie apparently knew nothing about Eileen. There wasn’t any long-range plan to be anything more. Only this. Three, four times a year, when Tom flew out—sometimes to America for seminars—and Eileen would come down on a pretext. “Extra teacher training.” Extended ed. Not that James would’ve asked. No great wrongness to it, Eileen felt. Marjorie was a bit on the mannish side and probably didn’t afford Tom her full attention. Whereas Tom was artistic in spite of the engineering. He played coronet in the city musicale, went to the ballet, liked sailing, had been at Trinity reading English when the thought occurred to him he’d need to earn a living.