Chances Are

by Richard Russo

  “I’ll speak to Anita—”

  He shot Lincoln a warning glance. “No, you won’t. I mean it.”

  After a moment, Lincoln said, “I will have to tell her about all this, you know.”

  “What?” Mickey said, his mock outrage momentarily convincing. “Just because you’ve been married to the woman for four decades, you have to tell her stuff?”

  “I know. Pussy-whipped to the bitter end.”

  “Yeah, but you’d have ended up pussy-whipped no matter who you married. At least Anita’s a class act.”

  “I’ll tell her you said so,” Lincoln smiled. Somehow their conversation, painful though it was, had cleared the air, and for that he was profoundly grateful. Maybe they weren’t all for one and one for all. Maybe they never had been. But they’d been friends, really good ones, and apparently they still were. “How about a cup of coffee?”

  “Nah, I’ll gather my shit and then we’ll be off. It’s not going to be easy talking Delia back into her program. The longer she’s AWOL, the tougher it’ll be.”

  She and Teddy were heading up the center of the lawn now, their conversation, whatever it had been about, apparently concluded. “Tedlowski better not be telling her about Jacy jumping on tables when she sang, because that would definitely appeal to her.” He looked around now. “You’re really gonna sell this place?”

  “You think I shouldn’t?”

  Mickey shrugged. “How would I know?”

  “Most people have opinions.”

  “Not me,” Mickey said.

  It had always been one of the most endearing things about him, Lincoln thought—this ability to say perfectly ridiculous things and make them sound absolutely true.

  “LOOKED LIKE YOU and Delia had quite the conversation this morning,” Lincoln ventured. He was driving Teddy to the hospital, where he’d have his eye checked and the bandage replaced. The damaged side of his face seemed even more swollen than it had that morning, the bruising more vivid, but the nap he’d taken after Mickey and his daughter left seemed to have done him good, and Lincoln marveled at his recuperative powers. “What do you make of her?”

  “I’m not sure,” Teddy replied, as if this were the very question he’d just been pondering. “It’s like one minute Jacy’s in there, looking out through those eyes, and the next she’s completely gone and there’s just this stranger.”

  Lincoln nodded. Though he himself had barely spoken to the woman, he’d come away with the same impression.

  “She’s definitely a coarser version of her mother,” Teddy continued, “but I guess that’s to be expected. Take away Greenwich, Connecticut, and good private schools, and replace those with shitty public ones, and Delia’s what you get. But I found myself liking her. Quite a lot, actually. She’s defensive and stubborn, like anyone would be after bouncing around foster homes. She can’t quite figure Mickey out, but she seems to like him well enough.”

  “Like him?”

  Teddy shrugged. “I read somewhere that babies in Russian orphanages stop crying after they learn it doesn’t do them any good. Which of course ruins them emotionally for the rest of their lives. I think something like that might be happening with Delia. If she let herself really love her father, she’d be vulnerable. She’d rather be tough, even if that means being resigned to bad outcomes. On the other hand, she wouldn’t have come looking for him if she hadn’t been hoping for something. Having found him, though, she doesn’t seem to know what comes next. Could be she just needs a friend who isn’t her father.”

  “Yeah?”

  Teddy must’ve heard the skepticism in his voice, because he gave him a one-eyed look of disapproval. “You don’t feel any obligation? She’s Jacy’s daughter.”

  In truth Lincoln wasn’t sure. Earlier he’d offered to help pay for a better treatment facility than Mickey could afford, but the obligation he’d felt then was to him, not her. Anita factored into it, too. What would she think if he allowed himself an emotional attachment to the daughter of a girl they both knew he’d once been in love with? Didn’t she deserve to be shut of her rival at last? He’d hoped that finding out what happened to Jacy would at long last settle his own mind, but now, thanks to Delia, that might never happen. Although she was a couple thousand miles away and still knew nothing of Delia’s existence, Anita nevertheless seemed to sense her presence when she’d phoned earlier. “What’s wrong?” she wanted to know as soon as she heard his voice. Instead of giving her a complete accounting, he’d told her only about Teddy, how he’d passed out, fallen on a shattered wineglass and nearly lost an eye as a result. “Actually, there’s more,” he admitted, “but I can’t really talk now. I’ll tell you all about it as soon as the guys are gone, I promise.” When she didn’t say anything to that, he took the opportunity to change the subject. “How’s everything where you are?”

  “Your father says hello.”

  “Yeah? How is the old reprobate?”

  “Okay, except he keeps calling this new woman Trudy. When she reminds him that she’s not your mother, he says”—and here she mimicked his high, squeaky voice—“ ‘I can tell that just by looking at you.’ ”

  Lincoln laughed out loud, as he always did when his wife allowed herself to mimic his father. She’d had Dub-Yay down about ten minutes after meeting the man, but she was usually too kind to mock him.

  “And here’s the part you’ll love,” she continued. “She’s Catholic.”

  “Roman Catholic?”

  “She took him to Mass last Sunday.”

  Lincoln felt the earth wobble. “Wolfgang Amadeus Moser went to Mass?”

  “Yep.”

  “The end times approach.”

  “I don’t know, Lincoln,” she said, sounding exhausted, as if this were an ongoing argument she’d given up winning long ago. “People change.”

  Why, he wondered, was he so resistant to that possibility? Just last night Mickey had tried to convince them he was no longer the same person they’d known back in the seventies, but wasn’t he really just talking about disillusionment? Okay, sure, the night he and Jacy became lovers, he’d discovered something about himself that surprised and frightened him. He’d always thought of himself as a chip off the old block, the sort of man who, like his father, always knew what was right and did it. Certainly not someone who hid in the trunk of a car to avoid military service. And after following Jacy into that motel room, he no doubt felt changed, and from that point forward everything he did—from using money Jacy had stolen from her father to buy instruments and sound equipment, to drinking too much and smoking too much weed—had strengthened his conviction that he was no longer the same person. But wasn’t that the point? If he was feeling shame, it was himself he was ashamed of, not some new person born of moral weakness. Adam didn’t become a different man after eating the apple. He was who he’d always been, except miserable.

  And yet. W.A. Moser attending Mass? That did feel like a sea change. Was it possible the old man was actually admitting, albeit obliquely, to being wrong about something? Not Catholicism, of course. That wouldn’t happen in a hundred lifetimes. But wasn’t his attending Mass with this new woman tantamount to confessing he’d been wrong to insist on his wife’s conversion? And therefore wrong to oppose his son’s marrying a Catholic? Wrong to taunt him for the better part of four decades for a betrayal that existed only in his own imagination?

  “Tell him I’ll come visit as soon as I get back,” Lincoln said.

  “Is that wise?” she replied. Because he’d made similar promises many times and broken as many as he’d kept, and the latter had been more out of duty than love. Why keep making halfhearted promises? was his wife’s point. Because, he wanted to say, maybe it was time to stop pretending, even to himself, he didn’t love the old bugger. After all, paternal love was permitted, even if your father could be summed up in a single word and the word was impossible. Even if he was Wolfgang Amadeus Moser.

  THE HOSPITAL’S WAITING ROOM was mobbed. Lincoln of
fered to stick around, but Teddy said there was no reason to if he had better things to do. He’d shoot Lincoln a text when they were finished with him. Ten minutes later, when Lincoln knocked on Coffin’s apartment door, it was Beverly who answered. She was wearing the same loose shorts and sweatshirt (the latter probably Coffin’s, since she was swimming in it) she’d had on last night at Rockers. They both said “Oh!” at the same instant, and then, in the next, “I wasn’t expecting …”

  When she recovered enough poise to invite him in, Lincoln said no thanks, perhaps a little more emphatically than necessary. Yesterday, at the Vineyard Gazette, he’d allowed himself to be attracted to the woman and enjoyed that she seemed attracted to him as well. At the time it had seemed harmless enough. Today, though, nothing felt harmless. “I just stopped by to see how Mr.Coffin was doing,” he told her. Not the whole truth, but still.

  “That’s nice of you,” she said, “but he went out a couple hours ago and didn’t say where he was going. Anywhere I’m not was my impression.”

  “I’m sorry to—”

  “I’m a scold, it seems.” She made a face that signaled a mixture of resignation and exhaustion. No doubt they’d spent the morning arguing about the surgery he’d vowed to skip last night at Rockers. “Nothing I say seems to get through.”

  “Maybe he’s hearing more than you think,” Lincoln told her, though he had no idea whether or not this was true. “I know he cares for you.”

  “He told you this?”

  “Not in so many words,” Lincoln admitted weakly, “but he can’t seem to go more than two or three sentences without alluding to you. It’s none of my business, but is his son still in the picture?”

  “He told you about Eric?”

  Lincoln nodded.

  “No, he took him to the ferry the night he … hurt me. Told him to never come back or he’d …” No need to finish this sentence. “We have no idea where he went. I still have all his things. I think Joe regrets driving him away, but he’d never admit it. We don’t talk about him.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lincoln told her, which was true. He’d never seen a man so at war with himself as Joe Coffin.

  “He’s hard on people,” she continued, as if reading his mind. “Especially himself. Did you know he went to Dartmouth?”

  “No,” Lincoln said, though he wasn’t that surprised, given how offended he’d been when Lincoln mentioned where Minerva was located.

  “One semester. But his mother got sick and he came home to help out. He never went back. What money there was went to her doctors instead.”

  “That’s a tough break, all right,” Lincoln said, trying to imagine what it would’ve been like for him if he’d had to go back to Dunbar after a semester at Minerva. “Would you let him know I dropped by? I have some news that might interest him.”

  “I’m so embarrassed,” she said when he turned to leave. “I’ve forgotten your name.”

  “Lincoln,” he reminded her, feeling some of the wind go out of his sails. Which no doubt served him right.

  On a hunch he drove out to Katama, and there, a couple hundred yards from the beach, was the old pickup, parked on the strip of grass between the road and the bike path. Coffin registered his presence in the rearview mirror when Lincoln pulled in behind him.

  “Even if I believed in coincidences, I wouldn’t buy into this one,” he said, having rolled down his window as Lincoln walked up.

  Lincoln nodded. “I had an idea you might want to see your hawk again.”

  “Turns out that not everything you want to see feels like seeing you.”

  It occurred to Lincoln that he might not be talking about the bird. “I won’t bother you for long.”

  “I apologize for last night,” Coffin said. “Did I frighten you?”

  “A little,” Lincoln admitted.

  “That wasn’t my intention. It was Kevin I was hoping to scare. He pushes steroids to local kids dumb enough to think they could be pro athletes if they could just bulk up. Did he look scared to you?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Yeah, he definitely took my attempts at menace in stride. Anyway, you’re too late. I’ve already talked to my friend the police chief. I expect he’ll pay you a visit soon.”

  “He’ll be wasting his time,” Lincoln said. “I found out last night that Jacy died back in the seventies.”

  “You know this?”

  Lincoln couldn’t help smiling. “No, but I believe it. Turns out she was on that ferry after all. She and Mickey secretly met up in Woods Hole. She convinced him to go to Canada with her instead of reporting for induction.”

  He was prepared for Coffin to find fault with this narrative, but he just nodded thoughtfully. “A girl that good-looking? He’s lucky she didn’t want him to rob banks. Doesn’t explain why she never told her parents, though.”

  “Long story, there.”

  “You say she died?”

  “Of the same neurological disease that killed her biological father.”

  Lincoln could see the man’s mind working. “In other words, not the same guy your friend Mickey beat the shit out of?”

  “Nope.”

  “I guess I can fill in the blank there.”

  “See, Mr.Coffin, that’s the reason I’m telling you all this. Because filling in the blanks, as you put it, is exactly what you and your friend Troyer have been doing, except you’ve been filling them in wrong.”

  Here, too, he expected pushback that didn’t come. Coffin only shrugged, as if he’d been shown an arithmetic error in his check-book. “It happens, Lincoln.”

  “Yeah, but when it does, aren’t you supposed to rethink things? Pause to consider all the other things you might be wrong about?”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, in your shoes what I’d rethink is my decision not to have that operation. You get that right and maybe you’ve bought yourself some time to consider all the other stuff.”

  “More time to contemplate everything I’ve done wrong and all the people I’ve misjudged? You don’t make it sound all that attractive, Lincoln, especially when the alternative is dying peacefully in my sleep while believing I did my best.”

  “You sleep peacefully?”

  He sighed mightily. “Well, you got me there, Lincoln. No, I do not sleep peacefully.”

  “Mr.Coffin?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Beverly really does care about you.”

  His expression darkened. “I’m aware of that. You have a point?”

  “Well, you’re always saying we ought to do better by girls? Why not do better by her? For your own good, let her win this one.”

  Coffin studied him for a long beat, then said, “Shit, Lincoln. I just lost an argument, didn’t I.”

  “I believe you did, yes.”

  “And now you’re all proud of yourself.”

  Lincoln shrugged. “Maybe a little.”

  “I don’t know, my friend. It’s a slippery slope giving women what they want. First thing this one’s going to do when I come out from under the anesthesia is start ragging me about writing that cozy mystery book. Make me the laughingstock of this entire island. The whole thing’ll be your fault and you’ll be gone and I’ll have to find some innocent person to take it out on.”

  “You see the future very clearly.”

  He nodded, rolling his window back up. “It’s a gift.”

  ONE FINAL DUTY, Lincoln thought, saved for last because it was the most distasteful.

  Troyer answered his knock wearing nothing but a Speedo—a relief, actually, though Lincoln did wonder, and not for the first time, why men with prodigious beer guts were so often proud of their physiques. For Troyer’s part, when he saw who was on his doorstep, he laughed out loud and called over his shoulder, “Roxy! Put some damn clothes on. We got company.”

  Even with Troyer standing in the doorway, Lincoln had a direct line of sight out onto the deck, where the woman in question rose from the chaise lounge, came ov
er to the screen door and peered inside through cupped hands and said, “What?”

  “Nothing!” Troyer barked back. Then muttered, more to Lincoln than to her, “Show the whole damn world your pussy. See if I care.”

  When he stepped aside so his visitor could enter, Lincoln shook his head. “I only have a minute.”

  “Okay, I’ll come out,” Troyer said, letting the screen door clap shut behind him, to gunshot effect. Lincoln suppressed a smile. Earlier, when he’d announced his intention to pay Troyer a visit, Teddy offered to come along. Lincoln told him that wouldn’t be necessary, just to call the cops if he heard gunfire. In his mind’s eye he could see Teddy dialing 911.

  “What’s the deal?” Troyer wanted to know. “Your friend didn’t give you my message?”

  “No, I got it. I just wanted to let you know I won’t be putting my place on the market after all.”

  “You don’t want to sell it. I don’t want to buy it. So why tell me?”

  “Well, my realtor noticed something when he was looking at the survey of my lot.”

  The other man stiffened visibly.

  “Apparently you don’t have an easement through my property. Were you aware of that?”

  “Oh, now I get it,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “You don’t want to sell me your house, you want to sell me an easement for the price of your house.”

  “No, I was thinking one dollar would do it. Of course if there are legal costs, you’d pay for those.”

  Troyer cocked his head. “You’re saying you’d sell me an easement for a dollar?”

  “Correct.”

  “Why?”

  There was a long answer that involved an apology Lincoln didn’t feel like making, so he opted for a shorter one that didn’t. “Why not?” he said. “We’re neighbors, right?”

  “Not really. You’re never here.”

  “Actually, my wife and I are thinking about spending a couple weeks here next summer,” Lincoln told him, though he hadn’t broached the subject with Anita yet. “Maybe bring my father along, if he’s well enough.” Who knew? If Dub-Yay was going to Mass, maybe he’d be game for this, as well.