Kids These Days

by Drew Perry

  “Olivia. Delton. She’s here.”

  Alice stood at the other end of the hall. “You want me to tell her what?”

  “Downstairs,” I said. “On the parking deck. Come see.”

  “How did she get here?”

  “You’ll like that, too.”

  “There’s not some chance you’re enjoying this, right?”

  “Just come see,” I said.

  Outside, she kept a little space between us, leaned on the metal railing. Delton looked up and saw us, but did not wave. “Oh, hell,” Alice said, pushing the heel of her hand into her forehead. “Oh, no.”

  “Right?”

  “I’m going down there,” she said.

  “Give her a minute,” I said.

  “Whose car is that?”

  “It might be hers. I’m not sure.”

  “She’s fifteen years old. It can’t be hers.”

  “Mid’s been driving it. He said he was thinking about getting it for her.”

  “That? For a child?”

  “It’s got low miles.”

  “My God,” she said. “He belongs in jail.” She walked away, disappeared into the stairwell at the end of the building. When she came out again down on the roof of the parking deck it was like a magic trick, the slap of her shoes coming back up at me as she moved toward Delton, who was sitting now on the hood of the car. They talked, but I couldn’t hear anything. At one point Alice held her hand out, and Delton gave her the keys. I wouldn’t have thought of that. There was some school counseling for you. Every now and then one of them would look up at me, so I went inside, switched balconies. They didn’t need me watching. Alice had it under control.

  The beach was mainly emptied out except for a red pickup driving our direction, stopping every few hundred yards for a minute or two, then starting again. There was an orange light going on the roof. I found Sandy’s binoculars, fooled with the focus until I was dialed in enough to see that it was a woman driving the truck, that when she stopped, she was getting a rake out of the back and smoothing a path from where the beach was flat back up to these cordoned-off areas in the dunes, places where stakes had been driven into the sand and pink tape strung between them, maybe three or four feet on a side. She got back in, drove a little, stopped and raked in another landing strip. There was a taped-off spot just past our buildings. I hadn’t noticed it before. A sign was stapled to the stakes, but even with the binoculars I couldn’t read it.

  Alice and Delton came in behind me. I heard Alice tell her where the towels were, heard the bathroom door open and close. I still had the binoculars up to my face when Alice came out. “She’s taking a shower,” she said. “We thought that might make her feel better.”

  “Is she OK?”

  “Well, her dad’s in jail.”

  “Besides that, I meant.”

  She sat down, let out a long breath. “I don’t know that there is much besides that, really.”

  “Did you call Carolyn?”

  “She asked me not to. She said she wanted to do it herself.”

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t—”

  “Please don’t ask me that,” she said. “She asked me to wait, and I decided the ten minutes it’d take her to shower wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference. God, I want a glass of wine.”

  “You could have a half,” I said. “Want me to open a bottle?”

  “I think I’ll just shut my head in the sliding glass door a few times instead.”

  “It’ll work out,” I said.

  “Empty promise,” she said. “You don’t know that.”

  The phone rang, and we looked at each other. It was loud. It rang again. “We have to get that,” I said.

  “I know,” she said, but neither of us moved. The answering machine picked up. This is Sandy Wilkes, Aunt Sandy’s voice said. We hadn’t changed the message. It felt weird to keep it, weirder still to erase it. We’d been meaning to get a new phone and save that one on a shelf in the closet. If I’m not here, her voice said, I must be out. Please leave your name and number, and I’ll get back with you as soon as I can. I was holding her binoculars. We were sitting in her chairs. Delton was getting ready to use her monogrammed purple towels. The machine beeped, and then there was Carolyn’s voice filling the condo, saying, “Leecy? Are you there? Jesus Christ, is Olivia with you? She left a note. Pick up. Goddamnit, I need you to—”

  Alice was already at the phone, telling her yes, Olivia was here. “She’s fine,” she said. “She’s in the shower. She wanted to call you when—”

  Delton opened the bathroom door, stuck her head out. She said, “Is that my mom?” Then she saw me. “Oh,” she said, and shut the door.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Alice slid a stool away from the little pass-through bar to the kitchen, looped the phone cord around her wrist, accidentally pulled the phone off the counter. “Shit,” she said, trying to pick everything back up. “Are you still there? Hello?” She pressed the button a few times. Other than the shower running, it was dead quiet in the condo.

  “She’s gone?” I said.

  “She’ll call back,” she said, and the phone rang again.

  “I’m going back outside.” I motioned at the bathroom door. “Give her some space.”

  She nodded, answered the phone. “Hey,” she said. “No. I dropped it. How are the twins?”

  The pickup was past us, headed farther down the beach. Up north, some kids were setting off Roman candles. Somebody had a grill going on the strip of grass between the condos and the dunes. There was that mineral smell of charcoal in the air.

  Alice had come to Florida when Delton was born, and when the twins were. She came for Maggie, too. When she got back that time, the Maggie time, all she could talk about was what a good father Mid was, how involved he was, how many diapers he changed. We’d stopped at some chain restaurant on the way back from the airport. There were hockey sticks on the wall. She said, “But here I am treating him like he’s some wonder of the world because he’s wanting to be a parent. To his own child.” Then she said, “You know Ed came to see them and didn’t even pick her up?”

  Ed was Mid’s brother. “Is he supposed to?” I said.

  She looked at me. “What do you mean?”

  “Why is it a big deal that he didn’t pick her up?”

  “She’s his niece,” she said. It was clear exactly what kind of deal it was.

  “I get it,” I told her. “I’m sorry.”

  She went back to her cheese fries, got quiet, and I ordered another beer. That was basically how it went for the few years we talked about having a kid, talked about trying: I’d make some error, and things would be sharp between us for a couple of days. What I’d feel afterwards was mainly guilty, and stupid—like I was a failure one more time and one more way, like here was the most primal thing in the world, and yet again I could not figure out how to do it. Or why. Everybody was scared. I knew that. You were an idiot if you weren’t scared. But my thing broke along another fault line: I simply didn’t want to do it, didn’t want to think about it. In a bizarre way, Alice being pregnant, finally, was better. The abject dread of getting ready to have an actual kid was better than the shapeless place I’d been before.

  I looked in through the glass doors at Alice. She had one foot curled up underneath her on the stool, was dressed in thin sweatpants and a T-shirt with holes worn through the back. The light in there made her look like she was in a store window. She laughed at something Carolyn said, a small laugh. She put one hand on her collarbone. She was beautiful. If we’d had a kid three years ago, like she wanted, we’d already have three years past us.

  Delton came out through the other set of sliding doors, the ones off the master, and sat down next to me. She had on a pair of Alice’s shorts, one of my shirts. “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” I said back. Play it cool, I decided. Play it straight. Just talk to her.

  “Thanks for the clothes.”

  “Anytime,” I
said.

  She said, “They’re still on the phone.”

  “Yeah.”

  “My mom’s going to be pretty pissed.”

  “Maybe Alice can smooth things out,” I said.

  “No. This is bad. I’ll be grounded.” She put one foot up on the railing, started picking at her nail polish. “What’s with the binoculars?” she said.

  “I was watching that pickup. The woman driving it keeps getting out and raking the sand.”

  She said, “That’s for the turtles.”

  “The turtles?”

  “You’ve seen the nests, right? They’re marked with like string or something?”

  “The pink ribbon?”

  “Right,” she said. “That.”

  “Why does she have to rake the sand?”

  Delton pulled her knees up to her chest, rested her chin between them. “It’s so if they hatch, the babies can make it to the water. She’s raking out the tire tracks.”

  “Really?”

  “We went on a field trip about it. They can’t get over the tire tracks by themselves. They need it flat. It’s kind of cool. The turtle people are super serious about the whole thing, though. If you mess with the nests, you go to jail or something.” She blinked a few times and turned away. “Fuck,” she said, her voice catching. “Sorry.”

  I didn’t know what to do, whether I should touch her on the shoulder, anything like that. “It’s OK,” I said.

  “It’s just, this’ll be really great at school next year, you know?”

  “It’ll be over tomorrow,” I said. “Maybe nobody will find out.”

  She wiped her mouth on her sleeve. My sleeve. “You don’t get it,” she said. “I mean, you wouldn’t know. I have friends who buy from there. From Island. It’s pretty famous.”

  I said, “Are you saying you knew?”

  “Everybody knows. I just didn’t know he knew. This is so fucking weird.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Wait, OK?”

  “What’s the matter?”

  I thought, How long do you have? Instead, I said, “Maybe he didn’t know.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you think he did?”

  “No. I don’t know. Listen, you can’t tell her this, OK?”

  “Who?”

  “Aunt Alice. Don’t tell her. She’ll tell my mom.”

  “How am I going to—”

  “Oh, God, I know, you’re married, you’re best friends, you tell each other everything. Whatever. Could you just not tell her this one thing?”

  “Do you buy?” I asked her, because now I was the cops.

  “Sometimes I smoke with my friends. But I don’t actually buy it.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “Safer, anyway.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does everybody smoke?” I said.

  “Not everybody. But a lot of people. So you won’t tell her?”

  The wind picked up. More fireworks down on the sand. Delton knew about Island Pizza. Mid was in prison and Alice was on the phone. I was who was left to be in charge. I said, “What if we just try to make it through tomorrow, and then see what happens?”

  “Can you at least not tell her tonight?”

  “OK,” I said. “I won’t tell her tonight.”

  “Cool.” She relaxed a little, pushed her hair off her face. “I ran over a sign, by the way. But I got out and checked. You can’t see anything.”

  “What kind of sign?”

  “Something in the middle of the road, up on the grass. I’m not sure.”

  “Are you alright?”

  “It was just a sign. I kind of lost it and drove over the curb. I’m fine.”

  She looked out at the water. The shrimp boats were lit up red and white. I wanted a beer. Or a joint, even. Instead, I sat with her, studied her, waited for her to tell me something else I did not know.

  Alice and Carolyn decided Delton staying with us was easier than somebody driving her back home, so we set her up on the sleeper in the living room. We left her watching a comic explaining the difference between going to bed with white girls and going to bed with black girls. “Are you allowed to watch this stuff?” I said.

  “I’ve seen it already,” she said. “It’s on all the time. I like him. He’s funny.” She turned around. “Not this part so much, but other parts.”

  The comic said, “Now white girls will go like this.”

  I said, “Can we get you anything? Water? Another blanket?”

  “I’m good,” she said. “You guys are cool. It’s cool here. I’m all set.” Alice rubbed Delton’s hair. I waved. We went to bed.

  Through the wall, I could hear the rise and fall of laughter on the TV, and I could hear when it changed over to commercial, but I couldn’t make out individual words. I said, “Do you think she’s having sex?”

  Alice said, “That’s what you’re worried about right now?”

  “No,” I said. “But do you?”

  “You were, right?”

  “She seems young.”

  “No, she doesn’t. She seems fifteen.”

  “That’s young,” I said.

  “I’d have her on the pill. I’ll tell you that.”

  “Oh, God,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Fifteen years feels like a lot of years from now. That’s all.”

  “Don’t freak out about that. Freak out about other things.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “What did Carolyn say?”

  Alice moved her pillows around. “She said the twins handled it OK. She didn’t tell Maggie. I think she thinks he did something. But I don’t know.”

  “Does she know what the charge is yet?”

  “Intent to distribute,” she said. “Whatever that means.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Well, you don’t go to jail for a parking ticket, right?”

  “Yeah, but—” My head felt a little loose from my body. “We might be fucked.”

  “I thought you said we were fine.”

  “We are. In one way, we are. But still.”

  “Still what?”

  “We’ll need that money,” I said. “That money or other money.” I reached underneath the sheet, rested my hand next to her hip. “It’s just—you know we can’t really move back, right?”

  She said, “I don’t want to move back.”

  “But we’re here for this,” I said.

  “We’re here. It doesn’t have to be for anything.”

  There was a crack running from the window to the corner of the ceiling. It looked years old. “Do you think he did it?” I said.

  “Carolyn’s pretty pissed off. And sad. She doesn’t sound right.”

  “I don’t blame her,” I said.

  “Yeah, but it’s different. She sounds different.”

  “I just can’t see him as the local whatever,” I said. “Dealer.” Delton clicked off the TV in the other room. The light, too, I saw under the door. “We should probably be quiet,” I said.

  “She can’t hear us.”

  “Carolyn was fine with her staying the night?”

  “She was not. But Olivia wanted to stay, and neither of us could think of anything better. What’d you two talk about out there, anyway?”

  “School,” I said, the lie coming easily. “Turtles. She didn’t really want to talk. I think she more wanted somebody to sit with her.”

  The AC kicked on, hummed and pushed at us. Every noise, every creak and pop, was still so new. Just don’t tell her tonight, she’d said. So fine. I hadn’t. I felt like an asshole, and at the same time like I’d done the right thing, or something like it. “I do kind of love that she stole the car,” I said, trying to pull us in some other direction.

  “You don’t want her having sex, but she can be a car thief?”

  “Thief’s kind of a strong word.”

  “You think it’s cute,” she said.

  “I think it’s harmless.”

  “Do you think she’s d
one? You think her driving herself over here is all there’s going to be?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it like that.”

  She turned off the light and held to her side. The room was dark but for the moon shining through the glass doors. We slept that way, though the next morning I couldn’t remember falling asleep. All I could remember was a dream of Mid, working a drive-through window, handing out bags of newly hatched sea turtles to car after car after car.

  The plan was this: Alice would take Delton back home, take care of the kids while Carolyn went to court. I’d go out to the fish camp. Devil’s Backbone. When I called to make sure somebody would be there, the guy on the other end of the phone picked up and just said, “Backbone.” We agreed on ten o’clock. Alice and I fed Delton a bowl of Mini-Wheats, a glass of orange juice. She sat on the sofa bed watching one of the morning shows. We watched her like she was some kind of exhibit. Eventually, Alice drove her back to the castle in the hatchback, which left me piloting the Camaro. I felt like a child behind the wheel of that thing. I could see how it’d be no great challenge to take out a sign.

  Devil’s Backbone was on the Intracoastal side, a sand and oystershell drive running back to two trailers welded longways at the seam. Out where they had the docks, which were a good deal more serious and permanent-looking than the building itself, somebody was keeping an iguana in a homemade cage. There were no boats in the water, no cars in the parking lot. It was hot and bright. It was always hot and bright. The place was a fever dream. I half-wished I had somebody with me—the twins, maybe. Having a couple of people nearby who knew martial arts might not hurt.

  Inside, it was refrigerator-cold. The biggest through-wall air conditioner I’d ever seen was roaring away behind the counter, and there were low ice-cream-shop coolers full of bait along the walls: Styrofoam containers of worms, shrimp, fish. Live bait, too, in tanks. No bell on the door, no bell on the counter, no way to alert anybody you were there. Faded pictures of fishing triumphs stapled up everywhere. Hats and T-shirts and beer cozies with DEVIL’S BACKBONE printed on them. And the requisite fishing supplies, line and three thousand different shapes and sizes of lead weights, sorted into tins and trays. A sign up by the counter advertised boat rates. FULL DAY 225. HALF DAY 185. 90/HR. The rest of the board was empty, filthy. I stood in the middle of the floor and waited.