Also by Laura Lee Smith
Heart of Palm
THE ICE HOUSE
A NOVEL BY
LAURA LEE SMITH
Copyright © 2017 by Laura Lee Smith
Cover design by Gretchen Mergenthaler
Cover photographs © Palm trees: Evelina Kremsdorf/Arcangel; Dog: gjohnstonphoto/Bigstock
Excerpt from “Little Gidding” from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot. Copyright © 1942
by T.S. Eliot; Copyright © renewed 1970 by Esme Valerie Eliot and
© Set Copyright Limited, 2015.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
and Faber & Faber Limited. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: December 2017
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-8021-2708-2
eISBN 978-0-8021-8931-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
17 18 19 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Ken and Judy, who gave me yesterday.
And for Iain and Gemma, who give me tomorrow.
Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers.
—T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”
Table of Contents
Cover
Also by Laura Lee Smith
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Acknowledgments
Back Cover
One
Johnny MacKinnon developed a fierce headache just before dawn. He’d slept poorly: spells of fitful dreaming and heart-skittering wakefulness. Now he lay still and chilled, watching through half-opened eyes as gray October light pushed into the bedroom. In his head: jackhammers. Pile drivers. My God.
He looked to his right and found the bed empty. Pauline had already risen. He closed his eyes and listened; she was moving around the kitchen downstairs. There was the soft thunk of the refrigerator door and Pauline’s voice, indistinct but lilting, speaking to the dog. There was the music of spoons and ceramic mugs on tile. There was the faint rushing of a compressor. The air-conditioning temperature was set too low. Johnny found it all immeasurably irksome. He was hurting, and he was cold.
The only way out of it is through it. He’d read that somewhere. He willed himself out of bed and made for the bathroom, where he swallowed three ibuprofen tablets with handfuls of water from the tap and took a shower while waiting impatiently for relief. It arrived tentatively. The pounding in his head resolved slowly to a dull echo. He dressed and descended the stairs. Then, standing at the kitchen sink with a cup of coffee, he immediately found himself caught in a nettlesome conversation with Pauline, who thought they ought to give Johnny’s son Corran a call today. It was Corran’s thirtieth birthday, she reminded him. But Johnny wasn’t keen.
“I have a headache,” he said. “And I need to get to the factory.”
“Well, maybe later then. Did you take something? Ibuprofen? Maybe you need to eat.” Pauline was standing next to the kitchen table, rigging an iPod to the waistband of her shorts in preparation for a run. “Eat and feel better. And then we could call him. Or you could call him on the drive in.”
“I took something. I’m not hungry.”
“Just to say happy birthday. Try to get past this thing.”
Johnny regarded his reflection in the kitchen window and didn’t answer immediately. The air conditioner finally sighed to rest, and in the sudden silence he could hear the indistinct bickering of fractious gulls, the faint thumping of waves on sand. Two blocks away, the Atlantic Ocean advanced, retreated, advanced.
“I don’t think so, Pauline.”
“But there’s the baby now,” Pauline said. “You’re a grandfather. Don’t you want to mend the fence?”
“There’s no fence to mend,” Johnny said. “Corran’s seen to that.” An exaggeration, perhaps, but metaphorically sound.
“He’s clean now. It’s what we wanted. You could just swallow your pride and give him a call,” Pauline said.
“He needs to apologize to us. He could give me a call.”
Pauline always said stubbornness was the same as stupidity. “One day you’ll be sorry,” she told Johnny. “Your only child. One day you’ll regret this.”
“One day he’ll regret it,” Johnny said. Pauline threw up her hands.
“He’s your son. And if I can forgive him, you ought to be able to.”
“Pauline,” Johnny said. “I can’t. Tough love. You wouldn’t understand.”
That stopped her. She hated that, to be reminded that she wasn’t Corran’s real mother, that she wasn’t anybody’s real mother, and therefore couldn’t possibly understand how any parent could turn his back on his own child. Johnny didn’t mean to hurt her. But he couldn’t discuss it anymore.
“Lord have mercy,” she said, her injury quickly turning to annoyance. She moved to the center of the kitchen and started to do toe raises. “I swear to heaven, Johnny, you could piss off the Pope.” Sometimes—like when Pauline was irritated with him, for example—the North Florida argot he always found so arousing became even more pronounced. When he’d first arrived in Jacksonville from Scotland at twenty-seven, he’d been astounded at the local dialect—it was real!—and to meet someone of Pauline’s beauty and grace and hear the tangy drawl of her voice had been almost too much. The first time he’d ever heard her say “y’all” he’d immediately developed an erection. There were moments even now, all these years later, when the sound of Pauline’s voice still had this effect on him, though this morning, with her insistence that he reopen this barrel of emotional monkeys with Corran, was admittedly not one of them. An apology. He’d made the point to Pauline a thousand times. He’d wait for an apology from Corran before taking a single step back from the line.
“I’m sorry,” he said to her now, “I only meant—”
“Oh, quit,” she said. She raised up on her toes again. “I know what you meant. Anyway, I’m going to call him.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
Pauline put her hands on her hips and stared at him as she bobbed up and down, flexing her calves. He watched a flicker of resistance pass over her face—God forbid he try to tell her what to do!—but he kept his gaze neutral and added “please,” and it seemed to work. Her face softened a bit. She settled flat on her feet. She bent one knee, drew a leg up behind her, and clasped her foot to her backside in a move that she’d explained to him as a quad stretch but that always looked to him like an awkward but slightly erotic jackknife.
Pauline had become a runner only a few years ago. She ran on the beach at low tide, when the sand was wide and flat. She was usually in training for some race or other, and she maintained a meticulous log of times and dates and pace rates in her iPhone. At fifty, she was three years younger than Johnny, a point she rarely allowed him to forget, but even with this advantage she was still, in his opinion, aging past the athletic ability to which she now aspired. When she was in her thirties and forties, she was softer and more pliable (fat, she would correct him), but since she’d started running her muscles were steely, unyielding. He had very mixed feelings about all this.
“You don’t need to train at all,” he told her one afternoon recently, when she came in from a long run red-faced and limping. “We own an ice factory. Just come out on the shop floor and throw ice with me for a few weeks, you’ll be fit as a fiddle.”
“Throwing ice is not the same as athletic training,” Pauline said.
“Let me see you throw two bags up onto a pallet. One. Let me see you throw one bag.” Pauline narrowed her eyes and didn’t answer.
“Fine,” she said now. “Don’t call your son, and I won’t, either.” She stretched the opposite quadriceps and then stood still and regarded Johnny somberly. “But I just think it’s sad.”
“It’s sad,” Johnny agreed. Though really, “sad” didn’t even begin to describe it. Over the past decade, Johnny had paid for his son to attend three different private programs for heroin rehabilitation: two in Scotland and one—the real doozy—a stay at an exorbitant inpatient facility in Jacksonville that was paid for with a second mortgage on the MacKinnons’ house. Corran had relapsed within a few months of each treatment. It wasn’t that Johnny blamed his son for falling victim to addiction. But last Christmas, Corran came from Glasgow to Florida for a holiday visit and went on a bender that culminated in a violent row upon the discovery that he’d stolen Pauline’s wedding ring for drug money. Oh, God, wasn’t that quite the circus? Denial. Defensiveness. Rage and accusations. Enough. Johnny put Corran on the first flight back to Scotland and hadn’t spoken with him since. Now, word from Glasgow via Johnny’s ex-wife was that their son, inspired by the birth of a child, had recently cold-turkeyed at a public clinic. Which was a lovely thing, if it was true. Even more if it was permanent. But Johnny was afraid to hope.
“All right. I’m going down to the beach to run,” Pauline said. She’d stopped stretching and was pulling her blond hair up into a tight ponytail. “Can you feed the General?” General San Jose was the geriatric dachshund who had lived in their house for fourteen years. The old dog slept in the bed with Johnny and Pauline, though Johnny had been trying to insist for years that he should at least be relegated to the foot of the mattress and not be allowed to burrow directly between them, which he usually ended up doing in the middle of the night anyway. The General came downstairs once every morning to eat a bowl of kibble and poke around the backyard for a few minutes, and then he bumped back up the stairs and spent the rest of the day in bed. In cooler months Pauline left a heating pad under the duvet. It was an out-of-control situation. Johnny had given up. The General was now gazing at him skeptically.
“I’ll feed you, you fat old thing,” Johnny said. “Quit worrying.”
“Obdurate,” Pauline said. She’d stopped near the back door.
“What?”
“That was a word I got this morning in my game. That’s what you are, Johnny. Obdurate.”
“Well, that sounds a wee bit ugly, Pauline,” Johnny said.
“And do you want to know another word I got the other day that reminded me of you?” she said.
“I don’t think so.”
“Truculent.”
“I don’t know what that means,” he said, though he did.
“I’ll leave it to you to look it up, then.”
“I’ve got a word for you, Pauline,” he said.
“Oh?” she tipped her head to one side and raised an eyebrow.
“Grand.”
“Grand?” She scowled.
“Yes, grand.”
“That makes me sound huge. And old.”
“I mean grand, like we use it in Scotland. As in brilliant. And stately. Queenly.”
“Those are even worse! What am I, a cruise ship? A cathedral?”
He rolled his eyes. “I can’t win,” he said.
“Word to the wise, Johnny,” she said. “Ain’t a woman on God’s green earth wants to be called grand. You know they named a canyon for that word, don’t you?”
“You’re not grand, Pauline,” he said. “You’re nongrand. Antigrand.” She suffered a reluctant grin. “I’ll be gone by the time you get back,” he added.
“Fine. Grand. I’ll see you at the factory later,” Pauline said. She waggled her fingers at him. Then she wedged in a pair of earbuds and banged out the back door. Johnny turned back to the kitchen window and watched her run away: shoulders hunched, head down, flesh pressing tight against overpriced Lycra. She was grand. If he could see her face he knew she’d be scowling fiercely against the pain of her own exertion. Such a serious business. She reached the beach access and disappeared beyond a dune. Oh, Pauline. It was a mystery beyond reason; he’d never understand how he’d won her.
Johnny fed the General and took him to the backyard. While waiting for the dog to do his business, he checked his phone and found a text from Pauline that she’d evidently sent while running. How did she do that? Don’t forget atty coming to factory this week, it said. Want to see work logs. For OSHA. Remember?
Well, now, there was one more thing to add to what was becoming a thoroughly discomforting morning. Johnny had been rather proud of himself for successfully beating back thoughts of the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration throughout the entire weekend. Leave it to Pauline to bring it back to mind on Monday morning. The Bold City Ice Plant, which they’d owned for nearly twenty years, was in the process of preparing an appeal against federal citations levied following a harrowing ammonia tank rupture that had occurred over the summer. There’d been no injuries, miraculously, though clearly the potential for harm or even loss of life had been significant. OSHA didn’t like it one bit. The investigation was quick, the safety citations were hefty, and the associated fines, if they stuck, were hovering near three-quarters of a million dollars. Unfathomable! Bold City Ice would never survive a financial hit of that magnitude; the success of the looming appeal was critical. OSHA claimed negligent maintenance on the ammonia tank; Johnny MacKinnon claimed bullshit. And while the expensive attorneys Pauline had signed up were attempting reassurances (throwing around phrases Johnny found intentionally vague, like “nonculpable confidence” and “derivative innocence”), the whole calamity was not something that he was in danger of forgetting about anytime soon. He felt a moment’s pique at Pauline for assuming he would.
He texted back a terse Yep and went to put the phone in his pocket, but before he did his eye fell on the date depicted on the phone’s welcome screen: October 25. Yes, there it was: Corran’s birthday indeed.
Don’t you want to mend the fence?
It was hot in the backyard, must have been already pushing ninety, and here it was not quite seven in the morning. General San Jose
was nosing in the Mexican bluebell. The gulls on the beach were still squabbling, their cries distant but clear through the pines. Johnny pocketed the phone and sat down on the back step while something like an aura washed over him, not quite dizziness, but the opposite: a startling clarity, as though everything was suddenly rendering itself at a higher resolution. His headache clanged with renewed fervor for a moment, then almost as quickly subsided to a mild pulse. He waited until the General was pushing at the kitchen door, then he went inside, gathered his keys, locked up the house, and headed for ice.
For almost a year, Johnny had asked only one thing of Corran: an apology. He was willing to wait as long as it took.
One day you’ll regret this.
Johnny knew, of course, that Pauline was rarely wrong. But this time was an exception. Tough love. It’s what Corran needed.
Thirty minutes later, Johnny was gaining slowly on the approach to the Acosta Bridge, pushing stubbornly through the familiar traffic-stoppered I-95 bottleneck that was his daily commute from the house on Watchers Island to the ice factory in downtown Jacksonville. The forecast had promised rain, but the morning thus far was searingly, frustratingly bright. In the distance, the city’s northern skyline, a loose half dozen high-rises, hugged the St. Johns like corset bones. Jacksonville, Bold New City of the South—city of bridges and Baptists, of Navy bases and nor’easters, of breweries and boats and the hot, holy temple of the fifty-yard line at EverBank Field. Engine rumbling. Radio chattering. Thumping of bass somewhere behind. And through it all, the faint smell of coffee, borne on a hot wind from the Maxwell House factory two miles up the river. Winter, spring, summer, now fall—always, in Jacksonville, the stubborn tinge of burned coffee. It was not something you could get used to.
Johnny crested an overpass and looked south, where the narrow funnel of the river opened wide and the banks winked with the reflections of stately white homes fronting the water in San Marco and Ortega. Where the rich people lived, Pauline always said. A relative statement, Johnny maintained; after all, it wasn’t as if Pauline herself had ever known want. No, rich-rich, she would clarify. Old South rich. Not working rich. Different thing entirely. Johnny had to take her word for it. Johnny had spent the first half of his life in the biting poverty of a cold Scottish slum, so richness of any type was not a world he knew well. Well, fine. Better than working poor, he told Pauline. Johnny had seen the other side.
The Ice House Page 1