Sorry for Your Trouble

by Richard Ford

ALL ALONG THEY HAD PLANNED TO GO FOR SUSHI. A PLACE CHARLOTTE liked far downtown, with little boats that delivered California rolls and miso soup and unagi on a stream of water that ran in a channel around a circular bar. It was hard to envision, Charlotte said. It was Charlotte’s treat for Jonathan’s coming with.

  Outside, though, on the hot River Mansions sidewalk, Charlotte had turned and looked up at the old, low brick edifice. Elderly people were staring down at her from rooms. The blue hydrangea was still in her mother’s window. She began to cry. She cried without drama, Jonathan thought, tears rolling freely over her cheeks, her mouth wrinkled, trying to smile, breathing through a stuffy nose. He stood beside her. Families were walking by, paying no attention to someone crying. He put his hand on her bony shoulder, where the fabric was cool from when she’d been indoors. He simply waited, attended her, let her do what she wanted or needed. He didn’t imagine she would cry very long. He remembered at that moment and for no reason that Charlotte had wished for no money in their divorce. He’d authorized the four million—without her permission or knowledge. They were still married then. But divorce was her idea she’d said. Money wasn’t owed. It wasn’t as if he’d done anything wrong. He thought, though, he should settle the money on her now. Ease her life. It would keep them bound by something of substance. She was a woman who needed very little.

  “I really wasn’t thinking about my mother, just now,” Charlotte said, when she’d almost stopped crying. Jonathan had handed her a green-and-red silk handkerchief, and she had blotted her eyes and blown her nose. “I’m sorry about my nose,” she said and smiled smally. The sun was dazzling heat up off the sidewalk. He’d begun sweating—the thing he did and hated. A big-man’s thing. “I was thinking about my sister and how much I don’t love her, how I’ll hate calling her and hearing her yak and yak about spiritualism, as if it meant a fucking thing. You know?”

  “I think I do,” Jonathan said. He had never met the sister. And he had never seen Charlotte cry, though he’d been married to her almost two years. Neither of them had cried.

  “You didn’t feel the room get full of pressure, did you?” she said. “I mean . . .” She cast her gaze back toward the window, where at one time or another she, her mother and Jonathan had stood, and where the hydrangea plant had now been removed. Charlotte shook her head as if she were rejecting things too numerous to consider.

  “I didn’t feel anything,” Jonathan said.

  “No.” She looked at him in the sweet way she’d looked at him on other occasions. Occasions he remembered. “But you were so good. You were so good to come with me. You took charge. I just couldn’t navigate, wouldn’t have known what to do if you weren’t here. I’d be lost.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Jonathan said. He hadn’t done anything, but felt now a stirring, a feeling close to sexual, rising through him but not lasting. “Are you hungry?”

  “I’m not,” Charlotte said. “I’m really not. I know I said sushi.”

  “It’s fine,” Jonathan said.

  “It wasn’t a bad way to die, was it?” Charlotte said. “She just went to sleep. Just let herself go. Wouldn’t you want that to be your fate?”

  He’d felt different about it. He thought Beezy had actually clung to her life, had held on to it fiercely. Charlotte simply hadn’t noticed, had noticed other things. Though Beezy’s was not a death he would want. Some crappy room with sour aromas. A balloon. Oprah mugging on TV. There were better ways. Mary Linn’s not being one of them. Hers had not been awful, but had been too abrupt. He hadn’t been prepared. “I can’t say,” Jonathan said regarding his dying preferences.

  “Oh. I suppose you’re right.” As though he’d complained about her mother’s death. She shook her head as if she’d been in a daze, touched her cheeks with his handkerchief, her emerald ring catching the afternoon sun.

  Jonathan then realized that the question of “what is desired of life?”—which was, in his view, the next most logical question—would not come up. Not at this moment. Possibly it never would come up in Charlotte’s thinking. This was the thing he knew.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Jonathan said. Charlotte smiled at him weakly. She liked sudden new things, had no idea what he intended. “I’ll take a taxi home. It’ll be easier.” More people were going past. He and Charlotte could be talking about anything. About the great and drastic commotion now loose upon the earth. Or something smaller. Across the boulevard from the River Mansions, the refinery flame licked the sky. A police siren was heard in the distance.

  “But will you walk me to my car?” Charlotte said. She leaned into him, put her warm head against his chest as if she was listening to his heart beat-beat, beat-beat, as she had other times. “I’ll just go home and go to sleep. Okay?”

  “Yes. We’ll both do that,” Jonathan said.

  “We’ll talk tomorrow, won’t we?” She breathed deeply, breathed him in, he was so close.

  “That’s right,” he said. “We will.” And that was all they said and did together where these particular matters were concerned. There would be other days, as Charlotte said, when he would see her. Definitely. Things would go on for them until whatever was desired of life was clear and accommodatable, as though they had always wanted it that way. All these things, these separate things were really connected, he felt.

  Acknowledgments

  I wish to thank my dear friends Cormac Kinsella, Fergus Cronin, Gerald Dawe, and John Banville for their valuable counsel; and my friends Joseph O’Connor, Daniel Victor, Joanne Sealy, and Kenneth Holditch for their good guidance through terrains not known to me. I’m grateful to Deborah Treismann for sensitively editing “Leaving for Kenosha” and “Displaced,” to Emily Nemens for helping me finish “Nothing to Declare” in style, to Miranda Collinge for taking pains with “Jimmy Green,” and to Megan Lynch for thoughtfully working through the rest of the stories included here. My thanks to Sonya Cheuse, Dale Rohrbaugh, and Sara Birmingham for deftly pushing this book into the world. I’m grateful to my colleagues in Trinity College, Dublin, for taking me in; in particular my thanks to Terrence Browne, Stephen Matterson, Eve Patten, and Orla McCarthy for their friendship. I’m grateful to Gill Coleridge for happy decades of motoring around England, to Simon Williams for his many and amusing generosities, and to Christopher and Koukla MacLehose for a great, great deal.

  I’m grateful to Emmanuel Roman and to Barrie Sardoff for their trust, and to my colleagues in the School of the Arts at Columbia for offering me time to write most of these stories. Eudora Welty and James Salter are lively in my thoughts as friends and inspirations. My thanks to Alexandra Pringle for her astute encouragements. I’ve been lucky for most of my life to know and learn from David M. Becker, who once taught me real property and (almost) how to be a lawyer, and became my great friend. Amanda Urban has seen me through a lifetime, keeping what’s important in at least her clear sight. My thanks to Daniel Halpern for generously supporting the writing of these stories.

  And finally, my much more than thanks to Kristina Ford for being her dazzling self. RF

  About the Author

  RICHARD FORD is the author of The Sportswriter and Independence Day. He is a winner of the Prix Femina in France, the 2019 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature in Spain. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Canada. Ford’s story collections include the bestseller Let Me Be Frank With You, Rock Springs, and A Multitude of Sins. He lives in East Boothbay, Maine, with his wife, Kristina Ford.

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  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SORRY FOR YOUR TROUBLE. Copyright © 2020 by Richard Ford. All rights reserved unde
r International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  Cover design by Allison Saltzman

  Cover photograph © Ross Muggivan

  Digital Edition MAY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-296981-1

  Version 03042020

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-296980-4

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