“Nice, Ronnie. Real nice. Grow up.”
“This isn’t Ronnie.” A man’s voice, bland and flatly Midwestern.
“Okay?” Ben asked, trying to place the voice.
“I don’t know who you think you are.”
“This is Ben Thales.” A wrong number, maybe. Hadn’t had one of those in an age.
A heated noise on the other end, edging toward a growl. And then his own recorded snarl. Vinegary old cunt, it looped, vinegary old cunt. Ben hung up. There was no sense reasoning with people. He’d watched the clip and it was no worse than he’d expected. The cursing, the fly, the way he’d built to a royal lather. You could see how people might take offense. You could get the impulse to look up his number. But the planning involved in that little trick. Recording his voice, cueing it, playing it. Even with the tech they had these days, someone had gone to a fair bit of trouble. It made Ben more jittery than he’d care to admit. People could be unspeakably nasty.
His limbs felt too long for the muscles that tensed along them, and he wished he’d ponied up for some damn curtains. He went to the computer and watched the clip again. So he’d sworn. So a fly had landed on him. So what? Ben rubbed his cheek. People were laughing in the comments. People were phoning his home. A fine world. A fine response to the sight of a man turning himself inside out. He watched again. He looked slack. He looked sick.
No wonder the kids were worried.
The phone again. A woman this time. She identified herself, which you had to respect. “Lois Kibben. You don’t know me, and after how you’ve represented our community, I don’t care to know you.”
“Lois. Ms. Kibben. Lady.” His hands had begun to shake. Only a little, but still. If Veronica were here, she’d sure as hell have spotted it. “You’re the one who called me.”
“People have standards and if you can’t—”
“You called me.” He felt his pulse, a hot, defensive tattoo. He hung up, then clenched and unclenched his fists, getting his fool fingers back under control. His body was a fight-or-flighty old bastard with no sense of proportion. It was only the phone. Toward the end of things, he and Ronnie had seen a counselor. A two-seventy-five-an-hour dud, but you didn’t walk away without trying. Dr. Flynn would’ve had Ben break out some toolkit to manage this, forgetting that the human heart was nothing but a muscle, that it could go ahead and muscle through. All right then. Ben unplugged the phone. He wound the cord with exaggerated care. He’d like to see them pester him now. He unplugged the bedroom phone for good measure. His heartbeat was perfectly normal.
He let himself out onto the back patio. There had been good reason to buy here. A yen to start over. The whole, clean feeling of a safe and self-contained world. The built-in sociability, and the 2007-vintage confidence of an eventual tidy profit. But sometimes Ben thought what had tipped the balance was the clear, pure scent of grass. He inhaled, and the foul thing in his gut resettled. You didn’t get wild or weedy notes here to muck up the smell. You got one thing only, and that could be very soothing. Out by the water hazard, a pair of golfers teed up. The ball made its neat, predictable arc. Ben’s sister liked to tease that any game you had to buy more than a ball for was a game for people with notions. Maybe she was right, and maybe he’d become one. Well, he’d earned it. He’d worked hard for his place here. The Commons. He thought of the prissy way the Kibben woman had said community on the phone. How they’d had him list his home number for the directory. The second golfer swung, the ball skewing right. The callers were neighbors. Every last one, he’d bet.
The grass scent, at least, remained uncomplicated. He breathed, his body overstretched and spongy. That heart of his started hammering again. He went into the house and then the garage. He started up the cart but didn’t floor it. His foot wanted to, but he’d show some restraint for once. Invent an errand so none of this would feel like flight. He puttered along. Immaculate grass. Sculpted rises and shallow dips. A whoop carried across the green, an unadulterated peal of joy. Ben felt a sullen barb of envy and allowed himself to pick up speed. Another cart approached and from its passenger seat, Sadie Birnam called his name. The granddaughter was at the wheel. She didn’t have the best handle on the thing. When she braked, both women rattled forward. The carts drew up face-to-face. Ben eased to a gentle stop.
“Sadie! Where’re you off to?”
“Jewelry making. There’s a class at the Hacienda.”
“I can’t wait,” said the granddaughter, only she said it cunt.
He pretended not to notice. Sadie smoothed her hair, which wasn’t mussed in the first place. Lily looked at him as if he were something smeared on the sole of her best shoe. “I can’t believe all the amazing things there are to do here,” she said. Again, the inflected, not quite can’t.
“It’s a pretty special place,” he offered.
“And I can’t believe Gran’s letting me drive.” That can’t again. Wasn’t she a clever one.
Ben Thales was a decent man. He should be feeling the bright kindle of shame; this girl had clearly seen him, heard him, and there was a time when he’d have wanted to deck anyone who used that kind of language in front of his daughter. Instead, he bristled at the finicky pitch of Lily’s voice. There was a fulsome sense of sheen about her, as if she’d come out of shrink wrap. “Drive safe,” he said, and he indicated his chest. “No seatbelts.”
The girl gave an elaborate shrug. “I can’t imagine Gran would let me do anything dangerous.” Except for the unsubtle can’t, her tone was very prim.
Ben was approaching his eighth decade. It still surprised him, sometimes, how thoroughly what he felt and what he ought to feel diverged. History like his, you’d think he’d clench up in the face of an adolescent snit. Instead he felt a fluid, internal lightening and something like tenderness toward the girl. Let her have her moods and brackish places. She wasn’t his daughter or any of his concern. The crank calls weren’t either. A bunch of dithering busybodies with nothing better to do. Ben beamed at Lily. He offered a courtly little bow.
Lily scowled. Her hair made a dark halo, hateful and kinetic. The cart jerked forward.
Sadie’s voice rose in reprimand and then the world went slow, peach lit and syrupy, as if ladled into a jam jar. Ben’s eyes met Lily’s, which were an extraordinary blue. They widened, white and shocked and unveined.
Impact.
The jammy world unstuck. And then the women were beside him, terrible and tall. Sadie knelt to touch his shoulder, which meant he’d wound up supine and on the ground. He gave a lung-stuck wheeze and struggled against the light of fantastic pain. “You with us?” Sadie asked. He nodded. Something leaden thrummed where his skull met his spine. Sadie’s eyes were the same bold blue as her granddaughter’s. Ben shut his own and the blue stayed, Bunsen burning, as an afterimage. Tara’s eyes had been brown, straight-up brown, no romanticized flecks of green or gold. Still, they let her get away with claiming hazel. Veronica had said it was important for girls to feel in control of their looks. Christ on a bike. No wonder their family went wrong. Some things simply were. It was a waste of your finite life to pretend.
A FAMILY MATTER
SETH WAS IN HIS OFFICE, daydreaming. A letter of resignation, terse and dignified and cutting. A lesson for Lobel: saying something didn’t make it so. He shook his head, as if words were marbles rolling around in there. Ali was good at this sort of thing, but he wasn’t about to go running to her. Not after being an ass about the shower drain. He grabbed his Roget’s. There had to be a way to say personal and professional integrity without sounding like an outrageous prig.
“Hey, Boss?” Nicky Tullbeck hovered, uneasy, in the doorway.
Nicky was a boy like any other boy, not big, exactly, but tall, hapless, and waiting for his body to catch up with his bones. The kid was okay. Still, every time he saw him, Seth felt pummeled. In Chettenford, he would have been kind. He’d found something likeable in each and every one of his students. He made himself gesture encouragingly. Th
at grizzled fraud Lobel wasn’t Nicky’s fault, and the boy wasn’t to blame for the thinning treads of Alison’s running shoes. Seth’s smile felt frayed, the curve of his lips thin and chapped. “Yeah?” he asked.
“I met a girl this morning.”
“Okay. Congratulations?”
“Not met a girl like met a girl.” Nicky waved a top-bound reporter’s notebook and wrested a pen from its spiral. “She’s the official spokesperson for the Roskos. Some kind of neighbor. Says she was the one who saved the kid and all.”
“We’re not going to be putting anything else about that family out there. It isn’t news. It’s a family matter.” Seth liked the way that sounded. He’d use it with Lobel. Polite and resolute, but still no. He was an adult, after all. If you believed CNN, he and Ali had snagged the last two jobs in the Continental United States. Enough with the daydreams. It was time to act right. Be responsible. Play a few innings before calling the game.
Nicky said, “The Daily Star doesn’t think it’s a family matter. They had another article this morning and—”
“A family matter, Nicky.” Seth would have liked the kid in Chettenford. He wouldn’t have had to force it. Nicky had gumption. Nicky had stick-to-itiveness. Seth had a barely animated wife, a son who’d never drawn breath, employment at the whim of a venal cowpoke, and all the zing of canned peas. He tamped down a sigh.
“USA Today had it, too. As, like, their Arizona thing. You know how every day they do a few lines for every state?”
Seth didn’t know offhand. The last time he’d seen a USA Today he and Ali had been in some nowhere of a motel on their drive out to The Commons, still working under the theory that because the move was new it was destined to be good. The sigh he’d been fighting escaped. “Okay. What’ve you got?”
“Two ideas, really. The main one is local response. You know, since we’re all about what goes down here in The Commons.” Nicky’s voice slid deeper in an attempt at professionalism. Seth pretended this was office hours, that the town where he’d been teacher of the year wasn’t two thousand miles away.
“Go on.”
“Okay. So there was this man who freaked out about it online. One of the Rosko neighbors. It’s pretty funny—there’s this crazy fly—and it’s getting a ton of hits. And Lily, that’s the girl I mentioned, she has a Facebook group going in support of the family. So I thought I could frame it as The-Commons-meets-cyberspace. Like, our little community is a part of the whole big world.”
Back home, at least two students a semester had pitched some spin on the same idea. Once upon a time, Seth got a kick out of that. How happy they were, so sure they were thinking something new. He’d tell Ali about it tonight. She’d laugh the wry laugh she’d had back in Chettenford. She would soften then. She’d be on his side. And then he could tell her about Lobel. She would rail on his behalf. They’d either get out their suitcases or come up with a plan.
Nicky tore a page from his notebook. Two web addresses were spelled out neatly on it. The ripped page was the only one in the pretentious little book with any marks on it at all. That kid. Add a fedora and press pass and send him off to a Halloween party. Something viscous and nasty thickened in Seth’s throat. He’d been a boy like that once. One in an ambitious blush of boys. Only, it wasn’t right to say ambitious. It was more the lazy confidence that all would be well. Even into his thirties he’d assumed as much.
And then.
Nicky used vocab words, source and lede and nut graf, to explain that he’d also like to explore the military family angle. Seth told him to focus. One thing at a time. Seth indicated the piece of notepaper. He said he’d check it out. He did these things so that he wouldn’t say something cruel.
“Seriously? You’ll look into it?” The kid looked like he was about to break into song.
“I told you I would. Now quit hovering. I’ll tell you if I think it’s something.”
“And I’ll get to write it? If it is?” Nicky’s frame filled the door.
“Maybe,” Seth said and the boy retreated. He’d like a word with Nicky’s journalism teacher. The Colliers had put that whole world behind them, but still, as a professional courtesy. Seth opened his browser and entered Nicky’s first address. The page loaded. None of Seth’s students would have come running to the editor for consent if they thought they were onto something. His kids would trust their damn instincts and dig. On screen, the clip began to play.
It had been evening when Ali was finally discharged from the hospital. She still looked pregnant, and she moved as if the sidewalk had been iced over. The world was dense with shadows. Three miles on surface roads and then eight on the freeway. On the radio, NPR appealed for money. Lights flared assertively from the opposite lane. Seth only got that they’d been flashing their brights when he pulled safe into the garage. He killed the engine and realized. He’d driven the whole way home without headlights.
And.
Ali’s parents had come. Her mother said, tea, though he and Alison were both known to be java heads. Seth found a kettle. He filled it and placed it on the stove. He watched the flame and waited. Alison’s father came into the kitchen to see what was keeping him. Evidently the kettle had been shrieking a solid minute or so.
And.
He had taken off his glasses. He’d set them on the nightstand. He brushed his teeth, then tried to pop out his contact lenses. His finger grazed his pupils. First the left, then the right, as the optometrist had instructed back in sixth grade. He tried each eye three times before it registered.
And.
And.
And.
And the man on the screen was as broken in his own right. Seth swiveled in his chair. There was no way in this world or the next that he’d let Nicky Tullbeck blunder this story. That husk of a man. Seth knew what grief looked like. There’d been times when a fly could have taken up residence in the well of his tongue without him feeling it. One fly, two flies. A whole business of flies. Seth put his head out the door. “Tullbeck! Got a name on the ranter?” Nicky beamed and checked his phone. Proof positive. The notebook was all for show. Nicky said the man was called Benjamin Thales. The directory listed a home number. Seth dialed. As the phone rang, he entered a few of the names Thales had mentioned—Tenaya Alder, Mimi Asencios—into a search engine, guessing at the spellings. Missing. And for more than a decade. He felt a pulse of vindication. Everyone and their busybody cousin told Seth and Alison to give themselves time. But look at Benjamin Thales. Ten years from whatever had happened and still a mess. Time was as true a balm as platitudes.
The phone was still ringing. It kept on and on. Benjamin Thales was the last man in America without voicemail.
And that was just as well. Seth would let Benjamin Thales be. He would rely upon the books beneath the bathroom sink. He’d work. With Lobel. Around Lobel. Simply work. The books all said there was consolation to be had in that. Seth glanced at the second address Nicky’d given him. From the looks of it, a Facebook page, someone tallying other someones in their casual support of the Roskos. Now that was the real story. The psychology of the absurd. The minimal effort it took to get that puffed-over sense of having done good. The phone was pressed close to his ear and still ringing. He returned the receiver to its cradle. Cradle. He tried hard not to dwell on the word.
NO PLACE IN PERFECTION
GRAN SENT HER TO FETCH Ben a glass of water, but the bitter slant of her mouth said she was sending her away, period. Lily walked from the hospital waiting room, carrying herself very erect. Swan neck, high sternum. The stance all the magazines promised would shave off ten pounds. She was going to be flawless from this moment forward: stay offline while she did her homework and abstain completely from swearing. Compost, floss, and use SAT words. She was going to be perfect for the rest of her life.
Perfect. And also, enrolled in some hippie mountain boarding school where the sole computer still took floppies and the uniforms were made of wool from sheep the students sheared themselves. With
luck she’d have Lipstick back by 2060-never.
She passed one drinking fountain and then a second. No cups. Stay tuned for this week’s episode of Bad Decision Theater: Lily brings her grandmother water in her own cupped bare hands. See the water run out the cracks. Watch the penitent mascara run down her cheeks. It’s a nice image, ladies and gentlemen, supplicating on a quasi-biblical level.
Not that Lily would know. Her parents didn’t really go in for all that church stuff.
They probably should have.
Maybe then they wouldn’t have a freaknugget daughter who went around running men over.
Oh, and who stole.
She had Ben Thales’ cell phone. She had honest-to-eye-shadow taken it to help the guy out. It was lying there beside the cart and he probably didn’t want to lose it. Nobody saw. Ben had sat bow-shouldered on the grass, eyes tracking the busy back and forth of Gran’s finger. He knew the day of the week and the name of the president. He took his own pulse and pronounced it fine. His pupils weren’t dilated. He stood. He walked completely unaided. Lily should have returned the phone then, with apologies, as the man checked his limbs over, stretching and bending, swiveling his hips like an advertisement for extra-strength brain bleach. She’d been about to when he shot her a pinched, waspish look and asked if Gran might take him to the hospital.
Which meant that the two things Ben Thales and Miss Bra Strap Bigmouth-Blogkill back in St. Louis had in common were (a) skin so thin it hardly counted as epidermis and (b) an inexplicable urge to ruin Lily’s life, and that consequently the hottest piece of tech Lily was going to be let near was whatever they used for telegraphs back in the day. Maybe this time Mom and Dad would respect her enough to say it was a punishment, not like this nice-little-visit-to-make-sure-Gran-was-holding-up.
Sure. And a fleet of Nigerian princes were dying to give her millions.
She couldn’t believe she’d fallen for the parental line. Sign her up for a brain transplant already. A pair of women approached in blue scrubs, their flat shoes slapping efficiently on linoleum. They looked a little sick themselves, but everyone did under hospital lights.
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