“So you’re leaving today?” she asked, sitting on the small bench across from the dinette. She was wearing what looked like the exact same pants and blouse as the day before; everyone had a uniform, Greg was realizing. Or at least everyone their age did.
“I am,” he said. He bit into the bagel, still warm, crunchy on the outside and tender on the inside, perfect.
“Last night was a bust.”
He nodded, took another bite. This would be a four-bite bagel. He didn’t want to think about the night before, how they’d driven home in silence, how Greg had walked to his RV without saying good night, both of them defeated and silly and useless and relieved.
“Where are you going next?”
He swallowed too soon, the bagel rough and barnacled as it slid down his throat. He had considered, before drifting off to sleep the night before, driving all day back to West Virginia, calling Deb from the parking lot of the RV rental place, eating a spaghetti dinner, and sleeping in his own bed. Weighing his options from there. Filing a missing person’s report, or starting a Facebook page, calling the local news. The idea that he would find GJ by lumbering around in the RV was feeling less noble now, and more foolish. The fate of the aging man: every action, if looked at from a certain angle, was a joke. “I might go home,” he said. “Unless you have a better idea.”
She leaned back, crossed her arms under her breasts. “Maybe you could go to your father’s.”
The bagel felt lodged just beyond his heart, holding steady there like a rock plugging a geyser. “You think GJ is at my dad’s?” He hadn’t considered that possibility, not for a second. His father lived in a ground-floor apartment in the tower of an assisted-living community about a three-hour drive from Marie’s. Senility had given him bursts of meanness; he’d already been given “a warning,” for pushing an aide when she’d tried to take his temperature. He did not like to talk on the phone, did not like visitors, and Deb’s yearly Christmas gift of chocolate truffles and a new Oxford shirt may as well have been mailed into a black hole. But his father also kept cash in tumbleweeds of crumpled bills, all over his apartment. Hidden in coffee cups, in the drawer where he kept his toothbrush and razor, in the toes of his shoes, bursting out of his pockets like stuffing in a couch. GJ had never gone to his grandfather’s before, not without Greg, but it seemed possible he might, if he was desperate.
“Think about it: GJ could easily get there, even if he walked, in a matter of days. Your dad always liked him, his namesake, the heir to the Reinart dynasty…” This she said bitterly, her mouth tight, like she’d found a pit in her own words and was looking for a way to spit it out.
“Why don’t we just go inside and I’ll call him and ask?” Greg put his plate on the dinette. The rock in his gut had ruined everything. He didn’t want to go back to her condo, no more than she wanted him there, but he liked threatening her with the possibility.
“Sure, we can do that,” she said. Always calling his bluff. “We should do that. But I have a feeling you’ll still drive over there to see for yourself.”
She was right. He had come this far. It’d be the first thing Deb would ask. Did you check your dad’s? Maybe Deb should have taken this trip. Maybe Marie should have. Instead it was him, bumbling here and there. Jesus, was he even really looking? Grow a pair. His mother’s voice. He felt her cigarette ashes in his throat.
“I’ll drive there first thing,” he said. Marie clinked her water glass to his. “This is a good thing. You’re doing a good thing,” Marie said. She reached across the short distance between them and touched his knee. “You’re probably not going to find him. But you’re looking for him, and that’s what matters. It’s a long time coming.”
You’re probably not going to find him. It was beginning to feel like GJ lived in another dimension, lived in the dream Greg had just had, maybe, but in this one he was just a memory, a conjuring. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to wait for him,” Marie said. “He knows I’m here. I’m not going down to OBT anymore, and I’m not coming with you to your father’s. But I’ll stay right here and every day I’ll wait for him to knock on the door and ask if we can order Chinese.”
It had been a family tradition, when they were a family, to order Chinese every Thursday night. When Greg moved out he’d tried to make pizza Fridays a new tradition, but it never stuck. GJ always wanted Chinese instead.
“I haven’t seen my dad in a long time,” Greg said.
“You don’t like him,” Marie said. “You always hated how he stood by and let your mother treat you like shit.”
Greg was used to Marie’s declarations, her sudden insights, but this was something new.
“And your mother is why you hate women,” she went on. “She made you feel insignificant in her life, second to the parties she had, her friends, second to your dad, second second second.”
“I don’t hate women, Marie.” It was her tone, the way she made it sound like a foregone conclusion, something everybody in the world but him already knew. “Just because you and I didn’t work out doesn’t mean I hate every woman. I just hate you.”
He’d meant it to be a joke, but it came out all wrong; he sounded defensive, peevish. He sounded like he meant it.
“Oh, believe me, I’ve made my peace with that,” she said. She reached over and took his plate. “Sometimes I think our destiny was to make GJ. Isn’t that a nice way of looking at it? We didn’t work out but we created a life. Then sometimes I think destiny is a load of horseshit. Did you see how comfortable everyone seemed last night? How at home? This is the life they choose.”
He had forgotten—how easy it was to forget!—how Marie could unload on him, pow pow pow, how she could pour her every thought into his lap and then look at him like he should have brought a towel.
“Can I tell you something else?” She popped the last bit of bagel into her mouth. “Your mom was jealous of you.”
He could feel his heart pounding, his face getting hot; he must have looked red and sweaty to her, hugely fat, his bare feet with their yellowing toenails; no matter what he did to stop it everything changed color, shape, his hair his toenails his enormous fat body. He must have looked defeated, even as a small voice inside him told him that wasn’t what she was after. Still, he wanted to shout at her, scare her, get in his own blade, right between her ribs, wherever it hurt. It was the same way he had often felt about his mother: unable to find the words, and that if he did find them, he did not have her permission to use them. “I need to shower and get on the road,” he said. “I’ll call you if I find out anything.”
“I’m serious, Greg,” she said. “Did you know there are two kinds of people in this world? Those who forgive their parents, and those who don’t. GJ does not forgive us. You do not forgive your parents. Your mom was so jealous of you that she couldn’t see straight. Your youth, your opportunities, everything she didn’t have. Your dad paid her all his attention because he knew it, too. You forget that I knew her. I knew her, Greg. Did you know she wanted to be a fashion designer? That was her dream, but then she got married and had you. She was just a sad lady who got in her own way. That’s all she was. She failed you and we failed GJ. See how that happens?”
“What do you want me to say?” He wanted to stand, to tower over her, but the maneuvering it took to rise from the dinette bench was something best done in private. He did not want Marie to witness it.
“I want you to understand that sometimes people are just shitty. Even GJ.”
“He’s your son, too. I don’t get how you can talk about him like this. He could be dead.”
She winced. Greg felt that old triumph.
“If he is, there’s nothing we can do, is there? And if he’s not, there’s nothing we can do.”
“So you’re saying that this whole trip is pointless. You’re saying that I’m a fool for even trying.”
“You already knew that, Greg. It doesn’t mean you aren’t still trying.”
; “I can’t tell if you want to make me feel better or worse,” he said.
“I just want you to understand that GJ is who he is. That everyone is who they are. People disappoint you. You’ve never learned how to deal with disappointment. Deb is the one who came closest but I’m willing to bet she’s fed up with you.”
It was a roller coaster, talking to Marie. His stomach dropping, his urge to scream, then the calm slow climb up the summit, everything righting itself again, just before another drop.
“Please don’t talk about something you know nothing about.” Deb had been relieved to see him go. Relieved. “Fuck you, Marie.”
“And that’s my cue,” she said. She stood and made her way to the door. “I am grateful to you,” she said. “I do think this is important. An important gesture. I’m here if you find anything.”
As soon as she was gone, as if to prove something to her, he dialed home. He checked his watch and was alarmed to see it was already ten in the morning; he must have slept in, carried along by the terrible dream, by the strange comfort he found lying next to his son in a coffin. He would be lucky to catch Deb, lucky if she hadn’t already bustled out the door for her day full of errands, but she picked up after the fourth ring.
“I was just on my way out,” she said. “I saw it was you on the caller ID. Did you find him?”
“No,” Greg said. “Marie and I went down to OBT and asked around but he wasn’t there, hadn’t been there in a while.”
“Oh,” she said. He heard the grandfather clock sound in the background; it had always been a few minutes off. “What are you going to do now?”
“Might go see my dad,” he said.
“You think he’s there? Huh.”
“No … I don’t know. He could be, right? He could be anywhere.”
“Mm-hmm.” She sounded distracted; Greg could picture her snatching a glance at the clock, shifting from foot to foot, impatient to get started with her day.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call yesterday evening,” he said.
“That’s okay. I figured you’d be busy. How is she?” Deb’s manners were her armor. Kill them with kindness.
“The same. She’s exactly the same,” he said. He looked out the passenger-side window for Marie, but she was gone, already back in her condo. Maybe even watching him out the window.
“The more people change, the more they stay the same.” Deb laughed, a small-talk kind of laugh, her way of dipping a toe in without wetting the whole foot.
Greg watched a man in flip-flops and a tank top emerge from the dark hallway and shuffle over to his car, a blue Toyota with the spare tire on. Out the back window Greg could see the man staring at the RV, looking around as if to see if anyone else saw what he saw. He shook his head and ducked into the car, which started up with a loud growl.
“I have to go,” Greg said. “I have to move the RV because it’s parked kind of illegally.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll come home today if you want me to.” He hadn’t intended on saying it, didn’t even mean it, really, but still, he felt himself holding his breath, waiting for Deb to answer. It was getting hot in the RV, sweat running down his back like hot fingertips, gliding right down into the funnel of his buttcrack. He needed to get up, turn the AC on, shower, and drive.
“You do whatever you feel is best,” Deb said. “This is your thing. I’m not going to get in the way of it.”
“Marie thinks it’s a waste of time, too,” he said.
“That’s not what I said.”
“Well,” Greg said. The sweat was coming faster now.
“Whatever you decide,” she said. If Marie had said these words, they’d have meant a dozen other things, Greg scrambling around for clues like they were grenade pins. But it was clear that Deb truly did not care either way. It did not feel like a good thing.
“I think I will go over to my dad’s, then,” Greg said.
“Good. I think that’s good. It’s good to be decisive.”
For a moment Greg wanted to ask her if it would be just as good to return home, if she’d even want him there, if she was fed up like Marie said. He thought of the ottoman, the couch, the glitter of dust whirling and falling in the light. There was a framed portrait of a cow above the mantel, a candle that smelled of evergreen on the side table. A bowl of TV remotes. An ass-shaped divot in his favorite chair. In his home with Marie and GJ there had also been things, things that felt like his, a painting of a cornfield, a horseshoe hanging in the kitchen, a dish of peach-scented potpourri in the guest bathroom that one day smelled like nothing. He had become just another object in each home, a depression in a cushion, an odorless pile of debris. Easily removed, forgotten, unnecessary. Was that how GJ felt, too? Was that why it was so hard to conjure him, to envision his face, to see where he was? Houses remain houses. It had once felt like good news, a kind of freedom. He wanted a beer now, painfully cold, to slice down his throat in a fizzing cavalcade. And another and another.
“I’ll call you in a little while,” he said, and they hung up. He was being decisive.
Greg took GJ camping, encouraged by Deb; now that they were living in Greensboro they hardly saw the boy. It was high time for a visit. And Marie had been telling them things. How she came home to a party in the condo when GJ thought she’d be away the whole weekend at a new boyfriend’s house. How GJ had apologized, how there were cigarette burns in her curtains, how he’d been high, Greg, high as a kite but swore it was just weed. How he’d lost his job at the food court, something about a new manager coming on who had it in for GJ. How he slept all day but was awake all night, like a cat, jittery and talkative and strange. How he had only three months to go before graduation but he’d been skipping. Greg listened to all of it over the phone, read her e-mails with their all-caps urgency. It felt like a luxury to him, this period of messiness. Kids did drugs, kids acted out, kids tested their parents’ limits. It was all part of it. He hadn’t been allowed the same freedom; his mother had kicked him out when he was sixteen for calling her a drunk, had taken him back in only when Mrs. Helen phoned her and said it was time for him to come home. And only then because it embarrassed her, the neighbor knowing the family business. She had come to the door in one of her best suits, hugged him when Mrs. Helen summoned him from her kitchen, where he’d been gripping a cold glass of lemonade, hoping she’d go away. Then at home she had gone back to ignoring him, her silent treatment as thick as the cigarette smoke that trailed her from room to room.
So GJ had it good, in Greg’s estimation. He could fuck up all he wanted to, at least for a while. No one would be kicking him out. Instead he would take his son on a camping trip, something they’d done plenty of times back when GJ was a Boy Scout.
He bought a brand-new tent, one with a skylight so they could see the stars from their sleeping bags, which he also bought brand-new: thick, luxuriant cocoons that guaranteed warmth in temperatures as low as fifteen below zero, though they’d be camping in the Panhandle in April. Headlamps; hiking boots (GJ’s special-ordered size fifteens); packets of grub in stew, pot pie, and chili flavors; a paperback of ghost stories that was by the register; and a watch for GJ that featured a small compass just above the 6.
He flew in to the Orlando airport, which always felt like a theme park in its own right, dazed parents walking behind children skipping and shrieking and eating sticky lollipops or candy necklaces, expensive shops featuring authentic key lime candies or sugared orange peels or cartoon mouse keychains, everyone moving in a slow herd as the blue sky and white sun poured in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Being away from central Florida for a time always made Greg feel nostalgic. He moved among the herd feeling loose, relaxed. He wasn’t going to Disney World; he wasn’t shepherding his exhausted children onto a plane to go back to the dreary gray of Minnesota or the parched Texas landscape. His son was nearly grown; he was taking him on a camping trip, a trip he hoped they’d look back on in the years to come. A trip he hoped would be like
a couple of badly needed sutures over the withering wound his relationship with GJ had become. They didn’t fight; it was even worse: GJ was polite to him, overly polite, in the same way that the gate agent had called him sweetheart. A distant kind of polite, even a pitying kind. But now he was doing something fatherly, something that would bring them closer. He had spent three thousand dollars, all in; his expensive new haul was probably wheeling around baggage claim, just waiting for him to retrieve it and pack it neatly in the trunk of the SUV he rented, GJ’s watch zippered snugly in his carry-on.
He got to Marie’s in record time, enjoying the drive, the moon roof in the rental open and the wind loosening him up, making him feel wide open. In retrospect, that was the best part of the trip.
He was not prepared for what GJ looked like, not prepared to see his son’s cheekbones jutting painfully out from his face, his hair thin and oily, a thick silver earring in his ear, the enormous jeans he was wearing, a single handcuff around his wrist. It had been three months since he’d seen the boy, over Christmas. No earring then, no cheekbones.
“Hey,” GJ said, breaking into an easy grin. His gums looked pale, patches of stubble dotting his face. He hugged Greg, and Greg hugged him back, alarmed to feel his son’s shoulder blades. He looked at Marie, standing just behind GJ in the kitchen. She mouthed, I told you.
GJ pulled back and bent for his bag, a bright orange cross-body that had smudges of dirt and what must have been a hundred safety pins holding together an enormous tear. Greg hadn’t bought GJ a new bag; it hadn’t even occurred to him, though there had been a whole row of them along the back wall of the store.
“Is that a handcuff?” Greg asked. It was the wrong thing to say, the wrong thing to notice and call out, but he couldn’t help it, a fucking handcuff?
“Oh,” GJ said, looking down at his wrist. As if he’d forgotten it was there. “Yeah, it’s not real.”
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