Kids These Days

by Drew Perry

  Mid was nodding his head a lot. It looked cool inside the cruiser, and suddenly I wanted to be in there instead of out in the heat, wanted a badge in my pocket and the safety and security of a grateful citizenry to serve and protect. That would be one way to chalk through the days. I pressed a finger against my sunburned arm, watched the skin go white, then fade back pink. A cattle egret—I’d been studying Aunt Sandy’s books—landed right down at the water, walked back and forth. Across the waterway a couple guys were trailering a flat-bottomed boat down to the edge of the sand. I spied. I waited. Mid finished what business he had up on the hill—sales figures, ages of consent—smacked his open palm twice on the hood, and the cops backed up, drove away. Once they were out of sight, he looked back at me like he was only just remembering I was still there. “So,” he said. “Let’s you and me go talk Hurley into getting these things built right.”

  I said, “You’re not going to tell me what the hell that was?”

  “More of the same. Nothing new. Well, sort of. Now they want to bug the store.”

  “They what?”

  “I told them I was no longer truly in a place where I could be telling anybody what they could or could not store in my home. Said if they wired me up, all they’d hear was Carolyn telling me how it was. So they said, OK, Plan B.”

  I said, “If you bug the store, won’t everybody quit when they find out you’re secretly taping them?”

  “Fuck, man, won’t I have to fire everybody anyway once they’re all arrested?”

  “I guess that makes sense,” I said.

  “It sucks,” he said, “but it does make sense.”

  I said, “I think I need to know how bad this is.”

  “The cabins?”

  “All of it.” I’d tried to go small, figure out one thing at a time, and that wasn’t working. “I don’t really understand anything out here,” I said.

  “Welcome to Florida,” he said. He pulled on his shirt collar. “Alright. These foundations aren’t as bad as you think. Even if we have to get somebody to haul all this off and start completely over, it only puts us under a week or two. And it probably doesn’t make much difference. He can’t open until next season as it is.”

  “But what about the rest?” I said.

  “Hard to say. Looks like all they want is to set up their little cloak-and-dagger gig, sit in some van all day long wearing headphones, maybe find the guy who sells to the guy who sells to the kids. They want to make the papers, run for office.”

  “That’s what they want,” I said. “To set up a cop show at the pizza shop.”

  “That’s what they said, anyway.”

  “With your help.”

  “With our permission, more like.”

  “Ours?”

  “Mine.”

  “Are you in it?”

  “I’m attached to it, let’s say. It belongs to me. It’s happening on my watch.”

  “I can’t be involved in this,” I said. “Whatever this is, it can’t be me.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Let’s get you involved in these cabins right here. That’s it. This can be your thing.”

  “Except you said these were crooked.”

  “I said they were complicated. Whatever he does with his money is his thing, on his books. We’re investment partners, free and clear. These are rental cabins. We’ll build them and rent them to real people who’ll love them. They’ll come back year after year. Come on—this is right in your wheelhouse. It’s got your name all over it.”

  “I’d have to see the books,” I said.

  “I love it. You’re doing it already. Let’s go in there and have you lay some financial mumbo-jumbo on him, maybe frighten him a little bit.”

  “He doesn’t seem like the type to get frightened,” I said.

  “Just jerk a chain in his ass. A knot in his chain. Whatever.”

  “You want me to scare the black-market guy.”

  “Don’t piss him all the way off,” Mid said. “Just make it a little less likely he’ll hire cousin Jimmy to pour the foundations.”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  “Great. Then this can be your baby.”

  I said, “I’ve already got a baby.”

  “This can be your other baby.”

  I looked around, made measure again of how close we were to the water. “All I know is I’d never build down here like this,” I said.

  “Perfect,” he said, smiling down at me like I was the son he never had. “You’ll figure it out as you go. You’ll improvise. The foundations can’t be any worse than they already are. The stakes are very low. You’ll be great.”

  Alice had a baby monitor set up when I got home. She was sitting in the den looking at it, a black-and-white picture of the front bedroom on the little screen. You could see the foiled-over windows, the crib in the corner, some bags of clothes Carolyn had brought by—the smallest jeans in the world, tiny sun hats. It looked like Alice had set the camera up on the floor, which did strange things to the perspective. There was a low static hiss. I said, “How was your day?”

  “No bleeding,” she said. “No nausea. All clear. How was yours?”

  “Fine,” I said. I was working out how to tell her: Mid is operating according to some other set of rules, ones we don’t know anything about. “I think the cabins might be mine now.”

  “How are they yours?”

  “He wants me to be the project manager. I’m supposed to get them built.”

  She turned around. “What do you know about building cabins?”

  “These ones seem like they need new foundations.”

  “That doesn’t seem like enough to really go on,” Alice said.

  “I’m mainly supposed to threaten this other guy to make sure he builds them right.” Our voices echoed back at us on the monitor. “Where’d you get this thing, anyway?”

  “I ordered it in the mail.” She spun some dials, and the picture got clearer, then fuzzier. “So that’s what you do now? Threaten people?”

  “I’m more like the bouncer. I’m the heavy.”

  “You’re not big enough to be a bouncer.”

  “I’m not big enough to be anything.”

  “Well, this makes plenty of sense.” She flicked another switch, and the picture zoomed in. We were right up against the crib. “Carolyn called. She wants us to go to that pancake supper later on.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Mid didn’t mention it?”

  “I think he was too busy running the world.”

  “I said we’d go.”

  “What we?”

  “Mid and Carolyn, the girls, you and me. All of us. She thought it’d be fun. It’s a fundraiser or something for the volunteer firefighters.”

  “We don’t have a regular fire department?”

  “We do. This one’s for wildfires, I think. Off the island. Over by them.”

  I checked the monitor again. The crib looked like it was glowing. “How does it see in there without the lights on?” I said.

  “I just turned it on, and it worked.”

  “Is this what we’re going to use?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Why?”

  “Will we have to be watching it all the time?”

  “No,” she said. “Of course not.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  She clicked it off. “I told Carolyn we’d be there by six. I’m going to take a shower.”

  It was five-thirty. I said, “We’re going to be late.”

  “Then I’ll hurry,” she said, and got up, left the room, and shut the bathroom door—hard.

  It was Mid. It was the cops on the hill, and it was what was true and what was not true, and all the space in between. It was the fucking crib, my own childhood crib, which my parents had FedExed us right after the move. It came in a huge crib-sized box. I’d cut the hell out of my hand putting it back together. I sat on the sofa and looked at the blank screen of the monitor. Whe
n I heard the water come on, I chased her in there, sat on the toilet, watched the steam collect on the mirror. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s a monitor,” she said. “That’s all it is. It’s a video game.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t know why you can’t stand there and watch the thing and at least pretend like you’re interested.”

  “I didn’t know we were getting a video monitor,” I said.

  “You didn’t know we were getting any monitor.”

  “You didn’t say anything about it,” I said.

  “Would you have cared? At all?”

  I opened the sink cabinet, looked in at Aunt Sandy’s cleaning supplies all lined up. “Here’s what I don’t get,” I said.

  “What?”

  “If she wants to have dinner all the time, why won’t she let him come back home?”

  “You’re changing the subject?”

  “I’m asking you a question.”

  “And you’re taking his side.”

  “No side,” I said. “I just want to know.”

  She was quiet a minute. Then she said, “Because he hasn’t asked. She was the one who said they should have dinner as a family, and now she’s ready for him to have an idea.”

  “He has ideas,” I said.

  “He has schemes. And she doesn’t think she should be the one to have to fix everything every time.”

  I picked up a bottle of grout cleaner. “Do you think they’ll be OK?” I asked.

  “I don’t think she’d divorce him until Maggie was older, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “That is definitely not what I was asking.”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t think Mid has any clue at all that that’s an option.”

  She wiped a circle clear on the glass door, looked out at me. “I don’t really think he’s got much of a clue about a lot of things.”

  “He’s trying.”

  “Oh, bullshit, he’s trying. He’s taking his fifteen-year-old daughter to parties.”

  “One party,” I said.

  “Plus he’s letting her date that boy.”

  “You know about that?”

  “Carolyn told me. He told you?”

  “We saw them today, riding around. But come on—that can’t be by himself. Carolyn’s letting her date him, too.”

  “I have no idea what Carolyn’s doing or not doing.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “All I know is, our fifteen-year-old doesn’t need to be dating any thirty-year-olds.”

  “Nineteen.”

  She said, “You cannot be for this. You don’t get to be for this.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “But weren’t you the one who was so ready to have her on the pill?”

  “That was so she could have safe, clumsy sex with awkward boys her own age. I don’t know why she doesn’t have anything better to do.”

  “Like what? SAT prep? Volunteering at soup kitchens?”

  “Either of those would be fine.”

  “I don’t know what we’re arguing about,” I said.

  “I know you don’t,” she said, her voice thin.

  I said, “What’s the matter?”

  “What’s your real problem, anyway? Is it that you feel like you can’t raise a child, or do you just not want to?”

  I listened to the water hit the tile, run down the drain. “Sometimes it’s both,” I said. “I don’t want it to be, but it is.”

  She pressed her belly against the shower glass. “You do see this thing, right?”

  “I do.”

  “You don’t, apparently, because this is the same conversation we always have. Why can’t you just surprise me once? Would that be so hard?”

  “I’m trying,” I said, though I wasn’t sure if I actually was.

  “I’m ready. I’m ready to be a little fucking surprised.” She was crying. “You’re a bastard sometimes,” she said. “This was supposed to be the fun part.”

  All I knew was that I needed to be doing something, anything other than what I was doing, which was sitting on my ass. I stood up. I took my clothes off. I got in there with her. I stood behind her, close. She had the water too hot. I squeezed some shampoo from the bottle, started washing her hair.

  “I already did my hair,” she said.

  I said, “I’m doing it again.”

  She leaned back into me. “How does this make anything any better?”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “You’re the only husband I have,” she said. “We should get to be a team.”

  “We are a team.”

  “You don’t ever want to talk about it. You don’t ever want to do anything about it. All you do is ride to the doctor and not talk to me, and ride back home and not talk to me. It’s not fair.”

  I rinsed the shampoo down her neck and back. I could taste it in the water coming up off her skin. “There’s nowhere here to build a swingset,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I was thinking the other day—there’s a pool, and the beach, but there’s no yard. We don’t have a yard. There’s nowhere to put a swingset.”

  “You were thinking about that?”

  It was clear she didn’t believe me. “I was,” I said.

  “Mid and Carolyn have a swingset,” she said. “We can use theirs.”

  “A kid’s supposed to have a swingset,” I said.

  Alice said, “A kid’s supposed to have a lot of things.”

  She had red hair right then, our two-year-old child. Luzianne. Spartica. She was sliding down the slide in her red hair and her red dress in Mid’s clear-cut backyard, and Alice was standing at the bottom, arms out, waiting for her. Carolyn was filming the whole thing on an old sixteen-millimeter camera, all chrome and black plastic. The twins flipped a jump rope, chanted out rhymes about Delton and Nic, sitting in a tree. Maggie sat in the grass watching the rope spin. And me? I was in the pool, up on Mid’s shoulders—we were wanting to play the game where one team tries to topple the other, push the top man into the water, but there was no one else in the pool. No other teams, no other takers.

  I picked up the bar of soap, started in on Alice’s shoulders, her arms, the backs of her legs. All that familiar ground. I didn’t tell her about Mid, or about Hurley, or about the agents. I couldn’t. We stayed in the shower until the hot ran out, until the water ran so cold we couldn’t take it anymore, and we had to shut it off.

  The volunteer fire department was a glorified metal garage, the parking lot full of pickups and SUVs and motorcycles. The air smelled like shrimp. Alice and I hadn’t talked much on the way over, but a thin truce had settled down between us, and I was grateful. Every now and then I’d reach over, put a hand on her leg, and she’d let me keep it there until I had to shift gears. I was counting that as a positive.

  We were late, but Mid wasn’t there yet, and neither was Delton. Alice went inside, leaving me to wait with Sophie and Jane. Feral cats lived in the scrub off to the side of the building, and the twins wanted to stay outside to watch them slink in and out of the open, pick at bowls of food the firemen left out for them. They got bored, though, and started in kicking sand at each other until finally Sophie pissed Jane off enough for her to kick back so hard her flip-flop came off, landed in a grimy puddle. “You’re a total a-hole, Sophie,” she said, which was how I knew she was Jane. She pointed at the puddle. “Get my shoe.”

  “You’re the one who kicked it off.”

  “You’re the one who made me.”

  “You’re the one who can’t take a joke.”

  “You’re the one who’s acting like a giant B.”

  They both looked at me, checking for a judge’s opinion. I felt like using the first letters of disallowed words might not be an entirely fair way around the curse jar, but I let that lie. I didn’t want to get involved. I got the flip-flop out of the puddle, wiped it on my shorts, handed it back to Jane. “Here you go,” I said, holding it out. “Good as new.”<
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  “Make her give it back to me.”

  “I don’t think she wants to.”

  “You’re on her side.”

  “I’m not on anybody’s side,” I said.

  Jane took her shoe. “You are,” she said. “Everybody is.” She sounded so sure that I almost believed her, and I was wondering how I might even the score when Mid pulled into the lot, saving me from having to wade any further in. They both ran to hug him, made an older couple driving a Cadillac stand on the brakes to keep from knocking them down. It wasn’t close, but it launched Mid into some prepared remarks on looking both ways.

  “We know,” they said.

  “I know we know,” he said. “But we didn’t do it.”

  “We will,” they said.

  “What should I tell them, Walter? That safety is a virtue? That it’s the better part of valor?”

  “Dad,” one of them said. Or both. Here was Mid in all his paternal splendor, smoothing over the fight, a hand on each girl’s shoulder now, steering them safely through another afternoon. The storm blew itself out just like that.

  “Everybody’s inside?” Mid asked me.

  “Delton’s not here yet,” I said.

  “She called. She and Captain America are running late. She said we should start without them.”

  “The kid’s coming, too?”

  “Should be a show,” he said. “Fun for all ages.” He looked at me. “You seem off.”

  “Alice and I were into it some.” I held the door for Sophie and Jane. “But we’re good.”

  “You need some fire department pancakes, is what you need,” he said.

  I said, “I need something,” and followed him into the cool of the room.

  There were long tables running the length of the space, red and green tablecloths alternating down the rows. Alice and Carolyn had staked out some space along the far wall. There were snowmen and reindeer and Santas posed in various scenes at each table, cotton balls spilled around them to look like snow. A banner hanging on the far wall said XMAS IN J.U.L.Y. There was no immediate explanation for what J.U.L.Y. might stand for. Mid tried to pay at the door—there was a huge jar with about five hundred dollars in ones and fives—but the woman sitting there said, “They already paid.” She thrust an arm out at Alice and Carolyn. Then she sucked on a massive asthma inhaler she had strung around her neck on a pink cord. The twins stared. I couldn’t blame them. The woman’s mouth was huge, like a puppet’s mouth. It took up half her face. She pointed at two fat rolls of tickets on the table in front of her. “The pink ones are for the kids. Yellow for the adults. Everybody get one, now. We’re running a raffle every ten minutes.” She pulled hard on the inhaler again. “Keep good track,” she told Sophie and Jane. “We’ve got coloring books.”