Dinner last night was uncomfortable for other reasons. “Your father and I,” Lisa began, and Richard watched his children’s faces fall as the family home was taken from them.
Richard deals the last card. Let them play a hand. Maybe if they just start playing—
“Should we leave?” Diane has addressed the table as a whole, and Richard knows better than to respond.
“What do you mean, dear?” Lisa asks.
Always, Lisa’s called Diane dear, though never Jake. Jake will get a term of endearment if he and Thad marry, Richard guesses, not before. With Lisa, everything is earned.
“Given what’s happened,” Diane says. “Do we want to stay?”
To witness a drowning and keep going, keep playing cards. Is it unreasonable? Are they in shock, Diane the only one who’s thinking straight?
Lisa smiles the smile of someone trying not to cry and working her way toward angry all at once.
“Where would we go?” she asks.
Let them leave, Richard wants to say. Release them if that’s what they want.
He doesn’t want to hurt his wife. He only means to stick up for Diane. He loves Diane. She’s good to Michael, kind to all of them, and still Lisa’s tough on her, which Richard finds hard to watch.
“You kids can go,” he says. “We’d love for you to stay, but—”
Lisa frowns. Her knuckles whiten around the handle of her mug.
“We won’t blame you if you want to call the week off,” he says.
His wife watches him. She wants him to meet her eyes, and he won’t. He keeps her in his periphery, and his eyes settle on Michael’s bandage, the cotton square stained orange by Betadine. When the stitches come out, his son will have a scar.
“At least give it a good night’s sleep,” Lisa says. “In the morning, if you still want to leave, you can leave.” She’s watching Richard, talking to Diane. Richard watches Michael. Michael watches his lap.
Jake reaches for a pretzel, seems to change his mind, and gives the ceramic pretzel bowl a spin. The bowl’s one of Diane’s. She’s good with pots, less good with paints. She’s no Jake, of course, another thing everyone knows and no one says.
Sword in head, the king of hearts watches Richard from his hand. The hand is weak. Too few face cards to take tricks, too many trumps to go nil. Unless Jake’s cradling some monster spades, they’ll be off to a slow start.
“I could use a drink,” Richard says, leaving his seat.
“Me too,” Michael says.
His son can drink. More than he should. More than the others seem to notice. Richard only sees his son a week at Christmas and a week each summer, so maybe it’s a vacation thing. He hopes Diane would tell them if Michael had a problem. Unless Diane knows something and is afraid to say, the way Richard suspects and is afraid to ask.
He pulls the last of the summer mason jars from the freezer and two tumblers from the cabinet above the sink. He pours two fingers into each. The moonshine is called Apple Pie, and he’s never met the locals who distill it. Instead, he calls a number, leaves a message, drives his car to the county dump, then takes a twenty-minute walk. When he returns, the money under his front seat is gone, the moonshine in the trunk. His Cornell friends would find this procedure troubling, dangerous, but it’s been done this way for decades. It’s a North Carolina thing, and Richard gets it. These are his people. He was born a Southerner, and he’ll die a Southerner. No PhD or professorship can change this fact.
He sets a tumbler before his son and sits.
“Go slow with that,” he says, and Michael nods, then gulps. Moonshine, plus wine with dinner, plus painkillers can’t be safe, but Richard bites his tongue.
The rain is slowing.
“It’s a brave thing you tried,” he said, driving Michael and Diane home from the hospital. Did, he should have said. Did, not tried. He wanted to say more, though anyone who’s watched someone die knows just how cold cold comfort in the face of death can be.
At the table, he examines his cards, though he memorized them the second he saw them. This round, it’s him and Jake against Thad and Diane. Diane’s good. She carries Thad and Lisa. Every third turn, when Thad and Lisa are paired, that’s when Richard makes his move.
Diane bids. Richard sips his drink, and he’s pummeled in the face by bright, unfiltered joy. The moonshine, which he’s been drinking all summer, doesn’t mess around. His tongue fills his mouth. His spine is light.
Jake bids low, which means his hand is garbage. Thad bids high, so he has all the cards. Richard bids, throws down his club, and Michael leaves his seat. At the kitchen counter, Michael takes a shot, then returns to the table, tumbler refilled. In all his life, Richard’s never had three moonshines in one night.
He looks from one son to the other. “Michael got the skinny genes, and Thad got the skinny jeans,” Jake once joked. Both boys look like Richard—high cheekbones, sunken eyes, hawk’s nose—but Michael’s height and slenderness make him more his father’s son.
When the boys were growing up, Lisa sometimes invoked a thought experiment she called Smart, Happy, Good. Lisa believes people can be all three. Richard feels the best most can hope for is two. He’s smart. (Modesty’s dishonest—worse, a waste of time.) He’s happy off and on. But rarely is he good. Not that he’s bad Good, the way Lisa puts it, means giving, serving others with a sacrificial love. That’s the game: Is your life a quest for knowledge, happiness, or good works? They need not be mutually exclusive, except that they so often are. He’s known colleagues who were giddy in their meanness, had friends who were kindhearted idiots. Seven combinations, then. Seven kinds of people in the world, eight counting those with no virtue at all. Far more permutations taking rank into account, though Richard’s never taken it that far.
Thad is smart. He’s good. It’s happiness that eludes him. Michael is smart, though he has a knack for making poor choices, saying stupid things. Lisa, well, Lisa might just be all three.
Thad plays the ace of hearts, which Jake takes with a trump. Richard will have to watch Jake’s discards for hearts. Occasionally Jake cheats, which destroys the integrity of the game, which Richard can’t abide. No fun winning if the winning isn’t real.
“What I want to know,” Michael says, “what I want to know is what the fuck those parents were thinking.” His voice is liquor and painkillers. He downs his third glass and sets the tumbler on the tabletop too hard.
“Michael,” Lisa says. Her voice is firm, but there’s fear there too. Don’t, she seems to say. Don’t mess this up. As if the week isn’t already wrecked.
“Those people,” Michael says.
“Glenn and Wendy,” Richard says. He lays his cards on the table, facedown.
“Who?” Michael asks.
“The people you’re about to slander,” Richard says. “They have names, and their names are Wendy and Glenn.”
“Wendy and Glenn,” Michael says. “I’ve got a few choice fucking words for Wendy and Glenn.”
“Language!” Lisa says.
His wife is not a stickler. She is a person of faith, but she’s the crunchy, progressive, God-is-love kind, not the turn-or-burn, no-bad-words kind. The lake house, though, is sacred. She’s ecclesiastical in this, if nothing else. A time to curse, a time to refrain. A place for anger, a place for peace. For her, this house has always been a place for peace.
For Richard, peace is illusory. There’s beauty in the world, sure, but look closer. The world wants you dead and will not rest until it gets its way.
Jake plays the queen of diamonds, a wasted play. Thad plays the two of diamonds. Richard discards a club, and Diane takes the trick.
“I mean, who brings a kid who can’t swim on a boat?” Michael says.
“Darling,” Diane says, but Michael slaps the table. The pretzels tremble. The rain has stopped.
“Those people are everything that’s wrong with America,” Michael says, voice loose with moonshine. “Rude and white and upper middle class.”
“Michael,” Lisa says, “we’re white and upper middle class.”
“You’re upper middle class.” Michael shakes his head. “Those people should be in jail.”
Lisa stands. She sits. She so rarely grows angry, Richard had forgotten what it looks like when she does. But Lisa’s angry now.
“Some things are no one’s fault,” she says. “They just happen. They happen, and they’re no one’s fault.”
She watches the ceiling. She is a mother. She had three children. Now she has two.
“Please,” she says. “Leave those poor people alone.”
All eyes on Michael. What happens next depends on him. Around this table, they’ve had some mighty blowouts, thanks mostly to things Michael has said. Just two years ago, he made his mother cry. “No son of mine is voting for Donald Trump,” Lisa said, storming from the room. This evening, though, she’s going for diplomacy.
Michael lifts his empty glass, and Richard can’t say whether it’s a surrender or a toast. It’s no apology. Then Michael burps. The burp is loud and long, with more than one octave in it. It’s meant to break the tension, but tonight no one’s laughing.
Michael shuts his eyes. When he opens them, he’s focused. An old trick, Richard’s noticed, how his boy blinks to sober himself up.
“What say we drop all this and get some ’scream?” Michael says.
Lisa moves to her son and stands behind his chair.
“That sounds lovely,” she says.
She rubs his shoulders and kisses the top of his head. She doesn’t mention his thinning hair. She doesn’t give his shoulders an I’m still your mother, and you will respect me shake. Already she’s forgiven him, unasked.
And can Richard be blamed for wondering if there’s grace enough for him? But Richard’s not the son. The son you love no matter what.
He rises, and his family follows. Tumblers are rinsed, pretzels bagged, cards put away.
They will go to Highlands, and they’ll get ice cream.
It’s not too late. The ice cream will save them. All will be well.
He thinks this, and it’s such a simple idea that, for a minute, he almost believes it’s true.
10.
In Thad’s memory, Nico’s stands a turreted wonder on a hill, a citadel rising from the roadside, gabled, rococoed, daffodilled. In memory, Nico’s towers proudly, a beacon in the dark announcing ice cream, waffles curled to cones before your very eyes. Nico’s and the river below Nico’s crowded with trout—rainbows, browns, brook trout—fish thick as bodybuilders’ arms. On the porch of Nico’s, domes perch on the deck rails, waiting for your quarter, waiting to drop food into your small hand, fish waiting for the pellets to be flung. Then into the river the sand-tan pellets go, and this is what you’ve come for, this more than ice cream, this cacophony of food inhaled in pops and smacks, of gills like bellows, echolalia of fin and scale, and you have done this, with your quarter, with the cast of your hand, you’ve brought the river, writhing, into life. In memory—
But Nico’s, like the lake house, is merely what Nico’s has become. Paint-faded, chestnut-pocked, the building on the hill appears to be deflating. The domes on the deck rails are gone, the railing replaced by mismatched two-by-fours. A mistake, Nico leaving his empire to Teddy. Teddy is the dead man’s perpetually stoned only son who, since inheriting Nico’s two years ago, has used the storefront to push merchandise that probably hasn’t hurt his ice cream sales.
Yes, if you’re looking to get high in Highlands, Nico’s is the place to go. Ask for the tubby guy, the one who can work up a sweat just tugging the lid off a canister of rocky road, the one with the twin cobra tattoos (one for each forearm). That’s Teddy. And Teddy doesn’t just sell weed. He sells weed. Indica, sativa, hybrids, crossbreeds, loose leaf, pre-rolls, edibles. Anything Thad can get in Brooklyn, he can get cheaper and better from Teddy’s mahogany chest.
Evenings, Nico’s is usually packed. But it’s late. The after-dinner crowd has come and gone. Probably the rain’s kept customers away. Everything is wet: the staircase, the mildew-slicked front stoop, the pink-stenciled Nico’s logo peeling from the windowpane beside the pink front door. Thad holds the door for everyone but Michael, who won’t have doors held for him, who always nods and waves the holder in.
Inside, the ice cream parlor’s empty. The man behind the counter is not behind the counter, which has Thad quietly freaking out. What if Teddy was arrested? What if he’s dead? Thad’s not sure he’ll sleep tonight without a hit.
Then, there descends over the parlor, a smell. It’s a smell Thad’s smelled before, a body odor composed of perspiration, weed, and chicken soup. The smell is trailed by a clatter, beyond the counter, of white, saloon-style doors. A stomach passes through the doors, and the rest of Teddy follows it.
“Thaddeus!” he booms. Teddy’s been peddling to Thad since they were teenagers, when he sold dime bags from the heavily bumper-stickered trunk of his beat-up Corolla. They’re friends, as much as you can be friends with the dealer you see twice a year.
Teddy approaches the counter, but he’s stopped short by the prodigiousness of his own gut. Thad sympathizes. What Thad can’t relate to, though, is Teddy’s general dishevelment. Gone are Nico’s pink-and-white-striped shirt and paper hat. Instead, Teddy wears a turned-back Boston Bruins cap and tea-colored Mossimo tee that Thad remembers being white once upon a time. The shirt is snug as a singlet, Teddy’s nipples like jacket fasteners showing through the front. From his collar, a tuft of hair uncurls, pubic and obscene. Saddam just after capture, is the look Teddy seems to be going for. Saddam in a hockey hat.
Teddy extends a beefy hand, which Thad shakes. Only Michael and Jake know this man is Thad’s dealer. The rest, let them assume whatever they’d like.
Teddy moves to the sink behind the counter, washes his hands, and pulls on plastic gloves.
Jake’s first, and he starts in, a complicated order not on the menu. To hear Jake order food, you’d never know he grew up on milk and cornbread, on hens whose heads and feathers he removed himself. At least, that’s how Thad imagines Jake’s childhood from what he’s been given, which isn’t much. “Tell me a story,” Thad will say, and Jake will say, “Once, there was a boy whose parents loved God more than they loved him.”
If only he’d known Jacob the boy, but, when Thad met Jake, Frank had already traded Jacob the boy for a New York story the rich pay five figures a canvas to hear. Assuming Jake’s popularity keeps up, it’s only a matter of time before some enterprising journalist makes a Memphis pilgrimage, knocking on doors and taking quotes from neighbors, family, friends. Even then, Frank will find a way to spin it: Country Mouse Makes Good in Big City!
Jake’s order goes on longer than the longest order Thad’s heard in a Starbucks line. Teddy pulls on the brim of his cap. He appears to have stopped listening some time ago.
“Hold up,” Teddy says, cutting Jake off. “Cup or cone?”
Thad doesn’t have to look to see the expression of anger and dismay that now crowds his boyfriend’s face.
Jake isn’t a bad guy. Thad’s seen him offer his seat on crowded subway cars, seen him break his stride to drop a twenty into a homeless person’s cup. Turn on a Sarah McLachlan animal adoption ad, and watch Jake sob. Jake’s never met a stranger or an animal he didn’t like. But people he gets to know get on his nerves. Take Thad’s family. He’s pretty sure Jake dislikes all but Thad’s dad. If this is true, poor Teddy doesn’t stand a chance.
“Cup,” Jake says, then repeats his order, word for word. There’s a please at the end, though the please feels more like an I dare you to get this wrong.
Teddy frowns, wipes his forehead with the back of his hand, then makes Jake’s order so quickly and precisely, Thad’s sure he was fucking with him all along. Teddy serves the rest of them, then rings up Thad’s father, who never lets anyone else pay.
Once everyone’s outside, seated in yellow patio chairs or peering past the railing, riverward, fo
r fish, Thad skirts the counter and follows Teddy through the saloon doors. In back sit two upturned buckets, the white, five-gallon tubs ice cream comes in. Between the buckets, a sheet of particle board serves as a makeshift table, cinderblocks for legs. Teddy’s mahogany box rests on top, and Thad sets his dish of ice cream next to it.
“Your boyfriend’s kind of an asshole,” Teddy says, the way only an old friend who’s also your drug dealer can say.
“I’m sorry,” Thad says. “It’s been a rough day. We saw something.” But he doesn’t want to talk about it, or wants to talk but doesn’t have the words. Better to get what he came here for and go.
“Saw?” Teddy says.
“A deer,” Thad says. “We saw someone hit a deer.”
The lie comes easy as exhalation. Teddy removes his cap. Beneath, white scalp, brown hair, a perfect Friar Tuck.
“Dude,” Teddy says. “That sucks.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s some heavy shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Bambi, ‘your mother can’t be with you anymore.’ ” Teddy opens the box, and Thad relaxes into the familiarity of the transaction.
Thad needs a job, and he could do this. He could totally sell weed. More than once, his therapist’s suggested he find work. Not so much for the money—Jake has plenty—but because this is America. Because here, work equals self-esteem and self-respect. And, if Thad’s honest with himself, being a lightly published poet doesn’t exactly fill the hours of his days. The best reason, though, is this: He can’t count on Jake forever, and what becomes of him when that day comes?
At the very least, Thad needs routine. Something repetitious, like an assembly line. The satisfaction of fitting lids to miles and miles of shampoo bottles, or the calm familiarity of checking cuffs for stitching, then slipping your tag into a pocket: Inspector #5. Thad could be Inspector #5. No one to hassle Inspector #5. No one to check Needs Improvement under Work Habits, as Thad’s grade school teachers used to do.
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