Lonesome Lies Before Us

by Don Lee

  She focused on making careful, concise strokes with the clippers, rhythmically arching them away from her father’s head as she went upward.

  “You’ve been together almost three years,” Joe said. “The two of you talked about getting married anytime soon?”

  The question caught her by surprise. “What’s brought this on?”

  “You think you guys might?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “You could do worse,” Joe said.

  “Meaning I couldn’t do better?” Jeanette asked.

  Joe canted his head and peered back at her. “I didn’t say that.”

  “He’s still flat broke. He’s going to be as stooped as you are in a few years, and he already has the hearing of an old man.”

  “Overall he’s a good guy, though, isn’t he? You have to admire how hard he’s worked to get his shit together. He got out of debt, gave up that music nonsense, realized what it means to work for a living. He’s been a good employee. He’s responsible, honest, practical, he never complains. He doesn’t drink or do drugs. He has a pretty good business sense. He came up with an idea to add carpet cleaning and repair to our services. I think we could make a go of that.”

  “He’s not that practical,” Jeanette said. “You know how much all his supplements cost? And he spends about twenty bucks a week on scratch tickets and the SuperLotto.” She didn’t know why, but the more Joe defended Yadin, the more compelled she felt to criticize him. “Then there’s his food—everything has to be organic.”

  “Julie’s pregnant,” Joe said.

  She stopped clipping his hair. “What?”

  “Fourteen weeks. Her due date’s November fourteenth.”

  “When did she tell you this?” Jeanette asked.

  “Couple of weeks ago.”

  Jeanette should not have been hurt that her sister didn’t tell her the news herself, but she was. Julie had been eleven years old when Jo died. From that moment on, Jeanette had raised her, fed her, taken her to school, to play dates, to sports practices. She had been her surrogate mother. Yet Julie grew more and more distant from Jeanette after she went to the University of Washington on a golf scholarship, and then to UCSD for law school, her tuition paid in large part by Joe, something he never offered to do for Jeanette or Jeremy. He had always pampered Julie, given her everything she wished—getting her braces, for example, when he had told Jeanette as a child that she would have to live with her crooked incisors.

  “Is she going to give up being an attorney?” she asked her father.

  “She’ll go on maternity leave, and then see. Andy makes enough so she doesn’t have to work.”

  Julie had been an associate in her law firm for only a year. Andy, a cardiologist, was twelve years older than Julie—an age difference that Joe had objected to, until he heard how much money Andy made. Her sister had always made it a point to say that she’d wait to have children, that her career would come first, but evidently circumstances had changed her priorities.

  Jeanette resumed cutting her father’s hair, tilting his head the other way.

  “You know I’ve always wanted grandkids,” Joe said. “I’d like to be around. I’m thinking I might move down there.”

  “To San Diego?”

  “Not right now. In a year or two. I’ll be sixty-six next January. I’ll be eligible for full Social Security, and I’ve got some mutual funds.”

  She couldn’t imagine her father not working. “You’d really retire?”

  “I’d do something down there—I don’t know what,” Joe said. “First thing, they want to put in an addition and build a guesthouse in back for me, and I’d be the contractor for those. I was asking about you and Yadin because I was thinking, if you two got married, maybe I’d leave him my business.”

  “You’d just give it to him?”

  “I’d expect a percentage of the monthly net while I’m still alive. I know he’ll never have the money for a buyout.”

  “What about Jeremy?” Jeanette asked.

  “What about him?”

  “Shouldn’t you consider leaving Wall to Wall to Jeremy? He worked for you. He knows the trade.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Joe asked. “You know how much he still owes me in legal fees?”

  She stared at the scar and lump on her father’s scalp, now exposed with the shortened hair. The scar, two inches long, was from a childhood accident, climbing a cyclone fence. The lump, Joe could never explain. Sometime or another, he said, he must have smacked his head somewhere, he couldn’t remember. When Jeanette first began cutting his hair and had noticed it, she worried he had a tumor and asked him repeatedly to have the lump examined. He never did.

  “You talk about how Yadin’s put his life back together,” she said to Joe. “What about Jeremy? What about me? How about giving us some credit? We’re your children.”

  “Jeremy doesn’t give a shit about carpet. He hated every minute of it.”

  “He hated the way you made him feel,” she told him. “You never let him forget how ashamed you were of him.”

  “You have no idea what it was like, having to tell people your son’s in prison,” Joe said. “Fucking right he should’ve been ashamed. I’d rather have said he was dead.”

  She stopped clipping again. “You don’t mean that.”

  “No. You’re right. I don’t,” he told Jeanette. “I don’t know why I said that. It was a terrible thing to say. But you know the last thing he’d want is the business. He wants to be a chef. Yadin’s the logical choice. The two of you could be set. It’s not big bucks, with the way this town’s dying on the vine, the fucking fad for hardwood, but if he ran it with a skeleton crew, it’d be a living. I wouldn’t have to worry about you anymore.”

  She was at once touched and insulted, hearing her father say he worried about her. She had long assumed that she would have to take care of him in his old age. She’d always fretted that if something happened to her, he would have no one to cook for him, or clip his hair, or clean his house, or do his shopping.

  She switched to a #4 guide comb and buzzed the top, cropping his thinning hair from front to back. “There’s not a lot of passion between us,” she said.

  “Passion’s overrated. That’s not what marriage is about. You’ve always been a romantic, and it’s never led you anywhere good.”

  “Étienne, you mean.”

  “You have these ideals, but you’re thirty-nine now, almost forty,” Joe said. “You’re too old for ideals. People in our family, they don’t live very long, you know. Yadin’s nice to you, isn’t he? You have some of the same interests. Your church. You trust him. Those are the important things.”

  Jeanette took off the guide comb and turned the clippers upside down. She trimmed his neckline, sides, and sideburns, pressing downward with the blades angled forty-five degrees. “We’ve never even talked about living together,” she said. “Where would we live? My place is only big enough for one person, and his is a dump.”

  “I’m planning on giving you the house,” Joe said.

  “You are?”

  “You were asking me before about going on a date,” her father said. “I’m an ornery motherfucker. I wouldn’t know where to begin, having to be nice to someone at this stage. I should’ve remarried when I still had the chance, while I was still relatively young. I didn’t realize, there’s nothing worse than growing old alone. I don’t want that to happen to you, babe. It hurts, seeing you so sad all the time. It really hurts.”

  8. A Day and Forever 4:19

  From the Centurion hotel, Yadin retraced his morning route along the golf course and the coastal trail, half running. By the time he reached his van in the dirt lot at the end of Vista Del Mar, it was almost eleven-thirty. The observance ceremony at the Golden Gate National Cemetery would be over soon, but Yadin thought if he was quick about it, he might be able to get to San Bruno for part of the picnic. He tried calling Jeanette to tell her he was on the way. It rang and ra
ng, and eventually went to voicemail. He left a message.

  In his van, he hurried across Montecito Avenue to Highway 1, drove through town, and turned east onto Highway 71. No one was on the road, and he was making good time. But then, just before the top of the hill, he came to a stand still. The traffic wasn’t moving at all. His van rattled and shook on the incline. He texted Jeanette that there was a backup. It took over an hour and a half to travel the five miles to Interstate 280, and it wasn’t until near the bottom of the other side of the hill that he understood why. The cab of a tractor-trailer was squashed against the embankment of a sharp curve. The truck driver must have been speeding or lost his brakes. In the process, he had taken out a sedan, which was partially flattened underneath the wheels of the truck. Yadin couldn’t tell whether there had been any fatalities. By that point, the drivers and passengers, if there had been any, had been hauled away.

  He phoned Jeanette again; he wanted to know how long she and Joe would be staying at the cemetery. Again she didn’t answer, and again he left a message. He continued onto Interstate 280, rumbling the nine miles to the Golden Gate National Cemetery. After passing through the tree-lined entrance, he stopped at the office, seeking the location to Jeanette’s cousin’s plot. The people there directed him to a kiosk outside, which housed a computer. He typed in Atticus’s name, and a letter and a four-digit number appeared on the screen. Confused, he looked around the kiosk, then saw a map with the cemetery divided into alphabetical sections and numerical rows.

  As he drove to Atticus’s section, he admired how clean and well tended everything was—the unblemished roads and curbs, the grass cut and trimmed immaculately, the neatness and symmetry of the headstones, all of them perfectly aligned in rows, a small American flag in front of each one.

  He found the section and walked between the rows, following the plot numbers until he came upon Atticus’s headstone. Jeanette and Joe and their relatives were nowhere in view. He was too late. The picnic was over. He stared down at the grave, which was surrounded by half a dozen bouquets of flowers, most of them still wrapped in cellophane. Engraved near the top of the headstone was a cross in a circle, the marble freshly scrubbed and glossy. He wondered if Jeanette had helped polish it. It was so quiet here, the mood of the cemetery hushed, reverential. The vastness and solemnity of the grounds moved him.

  He had never met Atticus’s father, mother, or sister. He thought it sad that Jeanette was so alienated from them, much as it pained him sometimes that Joe wasn’t closer to his son. Family was family. If they could see things from his perspective—as someone with no family at all—they might not have taken their kin so much for granted.

  His mother had died at fifty-eight—a heavy drinker and smoker. He hadn’t seen much of her after he’d left home at seventeen. She had kept a shrine of his brother Davey’s photos in whatever apartment or house she’d landed, and she had continued speaking of Davey—the golden one, the pretty one—in the present tense. Yadin knew she partly blamed him for his brother’s death, bitter that Yadin’s bone marrow had not been compatible for a transplant, resenting him for living when Davey had had to die. Yadin did not disagree with her. He, too, thought he should have died, not his brother.

  His father was dead as well. Yadin didn’t find out about it until years after the fact. A former Goodrich sales rep who’d been friends with him happened to be in a club where Yadin was playing, and had told him. Apparently his father had remarried twice, but didn’t have any more children.

  In front of Atticus’s grave, Yadin stood with his head bowed, eyes closed, hands together, and recited the Lord’s Prayer. In the last few days, he had been learning the prayers for the rosary and had researched on the Internet how to make the Sign of the Cross. Squeezing the thumb, index finger, and middle finger of his right hand together, he touched his forehead and said, “In the name of the Father,” and touched his chest and said, “and of the Son,” and touched his left shoulder and said, “and of the Holy,” and touched his right shoulder and said, “Spirit,” and pressed his palms together and said, “Amen.”

  He thought he had done this correctly. He was a bit unclear about the horizontal sequence, which shoulder to touch first. On some websites, they instructed going the opposite direction, right to left, but he had read on one forum that you went from left to right to symbolize moving from misery to glory, and Yadin had liked that.

  He headed back to Rosarita Bay. He wondered if Jeanette was intentionally not answering his calls or returning his messages. She could have saved him the trip. Was she upset with him? He felt guilty for lying to her about his van breaking down, about going to the Centurion, but he didn’t think that could have been the reason she seemed to be in a pique. She couldn’t have known that he was at the hotel, unless Siobhan had phoned her right away or someone else had spotted him entering the resort, which he thought unlikely. Maybe she was simply angry with him for bailing on her today, when she could have used his support. Or was she still thinking that he might be having an affair with Caroline? How would Jeanette react if she ever found out that he had gone to see Mallory?

  And that kiss. What was he to make of that kiss?

  He had thought, seeing Mallory again, that he would be elated, but he wasn’t. He felt strangely disillusioned—not necessarily with Mallory, but with himself. He couldn’t put his finger on why. Somehow everything felt different now. Fraudulent. Maybe that was why he had changed his mind about giving her the cassette of his album, especially after she’d alluded to his unwillingness to compromise, to the things she had been forced to get over. It made him forlorn, since with this record he had been trying to return to that place of purity they’d inhabited together in Raleigh, when they were starting out as musicians.

  After they broke up, he had gone back to Ohio, to Elyria, where Davey was buried, for a few months, and then had moved to and fro along Interstate 80, working menial jobs and sending out demos to record companies, to no avail. Once in a while he busked on sidewalks and did open mics. He knew he would have to get better as a performer if he ever wanted to win a recording contract. After four years, when he was twenty-seven, the founders of a new indie label in Chicago, Inland Records, heard him playing a set in the side bar of a club called FitzGerald’s. They asked him to record a song for a compilation of what they were then calling insurgent country, and later signed him as a solo artist. They didn’t put any pressure on him initially. They knew he wasn’t the type of singer who’d ever chart big sales, but they loved his music, they said, and wanted to support it. Even if he remained niched on late-night college and public radio, they told him they’d be satisfied.

  As the company grew, things began to change. They started making suggestions here and there, particularly about his performances. They arranged for Yadin to get a manager (aka a handler, a babysitter, a noodge), who had a doctor prescribe him Xanax and Inderal for his stage fright, though he still needed to chase them with other drugs and liquor. They discouraged him from playing with his back to the audience and using light installations. They asked him to stand front and center instead of sitting off to the side in a chair, and to talk to the audience once in a while, try to be charming, personable, witty. Yadin didn’t know how he could manage to talk to the audience when he could barely walk onto the stage without passing out. Already he had to have his lyrics in clear plastic pocket sleeves, spread out on the floor at his feet, because often he was so nervous and overwhelmed, he’d forget them mid-song. They expected him to do stage banter? He couldn’t tell stories. He couldn’t tell a knock-knock joke. Trying to be accommodating, he wrote out some stage banter to slip into a pocket sleeve. He always included a Townes Van Zandt cover in his set list, usually “Waiting ’Round to Die,” and he used the song as a segue for a few stories about TVZ, like how he once lost his gold tooth in a card game—anecdotes he stole from Steve Earle and Guy Clark.

  Then Inland’s PR people—seemingly overnight, after they became a major-label subsidiary, they ha
d a cadre of PR people—told his manager that something had to be done about Yadin’s looks, his persona. He came off as sullen, burly, scary. That was when he was put on Accutane. They wanted him, too, to dress better. His flannel shirts and two-tone trucker caps and work pants and construction boots were so square, so hicksville, never mind the beard and matted, tangled hair. (Ironically, the ensemble later became standard hipster garb, boho chic. He had been fashionable before his time.)

  After the mega-label merger, Inland said he could release a double CD, then reneged. They said he could put together an EP of downbeat love songs, then shelved it. Instead, they wanted crossover singles. They wanted hooks; foot-stomping beats; heavy guitar strumming; big, rollicking choruses; pounding, anthemic folk-rock. They hired producers and engineers for him, who, in the studio, would ask for take after take. They would listen to playbacks and insist on comping Yadin’s vocals, patching together the cleanest segments from various passes for a pristine master. They’d have various session players drop in to record isolated tracks and assemble everything together on a computer with filters and plug-ins. The songs would sound nothing like what Yadin had played and sung. He despised everything about the process.

  By that point, he had accepted that he would never win a Grammy or be anything more than a cult favorite. He no longer had any delusions about being a brilliant songwriter, or more than serviceable as a singer, or that he’d ever be anything other than an embarrassment as a performer. He knew there were tens of thousands of singer-songwriters out there who were just as talented as he was, if not more so. Some people made it. Most didn’t. Not in any big way. It hadn’t happened for him. That was just the way it was. But he was fine with being a journeyman. All he wanted was to be able to earn a living with his music and not have to succumb to day jobs between albums. Yet that proved impossible. Despite decent advances, after everyone from his manager to his booking agent had taken their cuts and points, after accounting for administrative overhead, expenses, and what were called packaging deductions, after subtracting his taxes and cross-collateralizing his royalties, whatever the hell that was, somehow Yadin was always in the hole with a negative balance. (It could have been, too, that his manager was embezzling from him, he realized later.)