by Dan Barden
WHEN WADE DIDN’T PICK UP his phone, I drove by his apartment three times. I checked in to each of his favorite restaurants at least once. I even cruised the parking lot of the Coastal Club. No Wade.
I returned home to change my clothes. Just as I was taking off my federal-law-breaking Armani sport coat, I noticed most of MP’s wardrobe stacked and neatly folded along the edge of our bed. My girlfriend did this kind of thing all the time: some people get sober and become Oscar, and others become Felix. When I caught MP attacking the grout in our bathtub one afternoon with an electric toothbrush, I hired Yegua’s girlfriend to clean our house. Did I need to know that MP had a system for organizing in which brown sweaters were always closer to the top than navy sweaters? She was probably just reorganizing her closet.
The sight of my kitchen reminded me that I was extraordinarily hungry, and the clock on the microwave told me why: it was nearly seven o’clock, and I hadn’t eaten since … well, I just hadn’t eaten. Time flies when you’re obsessed with hydroponic pot farms and amateur pornography and why the fuck your dead friends are involved with either of these things. It was only when I opened a ginger ale that I noticed the juicer was gone. I could explain that, too: sometimes MP and her yoga friends had antioxidant parties.
I sat down in my Eames chair and watched the dusk settle into the canyons behind my house, and I had almost made myself forget about the neatly folded clothes when I heard a car cresting the driveway. I went outside to see MP in a Volvo station wagon with ALL PEOPLE YOGA painted on the side. It was the company car for the studio where MP worked. She switched it off and set the parking brake. She wasn’t crying, but she wasn’t not crying. I crouched beside her window and touched her shoulder. I didn’t have to ask whether she’d heard about last night and Colin Alvarez. I didn’t have to ask whether I had remembered to call her back.
“It might just be for a little while,” MP said.
“You didn’t want to take your own car?” I pointed at her VW Cabrio in the garage.
“That’s your car. I don’t want to think about that stuff.”
Refraining from begging her to stay felt like I was swallowing a tape measure. “What do you want to think about?”
“Whether I’m helping you by being your girlfriend. Actually, I want to pray about that.”
“Jesus, Mary Pat. How can you even ask that question?”
MP stared down into the steering wheel. “If you keep this up, you’re going to be back where you started eight years ago.”
“If it wasn’t for Terry, I wouldn’t be where I am right now.”
MP turned toward me; the compassion vanished from her face. She slammed her hand against the Volvo dashboard. “Don’t fucking lie to me, Randy! This isn’t about Terry—this is about you wanting to punish someone!”
My fist clenched, and I would have punched the side panel of the Volvo if I hadn’t seen the fear spark in MP’s eyes. My hand slowly returned to the window. Her mouth closed and softened before she spoke again.
“If my mother had left my father the first time he hit her,” MP said, “one way or another, he never would have hit her again. It’s as simple as that.”
“You think I could hit you?”
“You need to know that I won’t put up with this. In your bones, you need to know.”
Doing the kind of calculations that a drunk will sometimes do when he sees the writing on the wall, I figured the likelihood of getting through the next twenty-four hours without another assault. Not likely. Then I added up my love for Mary Pat Donnelly. It was significant, but balanced against the slim possibility that I could find out who or what had killed my sponsor, Terry Elias, it didn’t add up. I pinned an asterisk to both these estimates to represent the chance that I might also lose my bid for custody of my daughter. Still, God help me, I stood there.
MP looked at me, waiting for me to plead my case.
“Will you please tell me where you’re staying?” I said.
WADE HADN’T RETURNED MY CALLS. I wanted to go back and do over my interrogation of Mutt Kelly, but Sean had been pretty explicit on that subject, and I took him at his word. I thought about tracking down Busansky’s erstwhile girlfriend, Emma, but decided against it because I knew that eventually, she would come to me. All I had left was Catalina Acuña. I decided that I would visit her in the morning and hope that Wade remembered my phone number between now and then.
When I woke up at two forty-five A.M., wishing that I were alone with anyone but myself, I searched the house for distractions and found nothing but more evidence that MP had prepared to never return. Pictures that had been taken with her camera were gone, while pictures taken with our camera remained. The juicer was gone, and so was her garlic press, but a Pottery Barn storm candle that we’d picked up for evenings on the deck remained. The eyesore beanbag chair that she’d found at the swap meet was gone—the only improvement I could detect. When I found myself checking the CD collection, I knew I had to leave.
MP may have taken her juicer and beanbag chair, but I had an espresso machine and a mini-fridge at my cabinet shop in the canyon. I opened the bay doors at about three-fifteen A.M. and made my own damn double espresso with a little crema on the top. Then I started to sort lumber for a project that I’d been designing in my head all evening.
It was one of the first things I learned in A.A.: just do the next indicated thing.
Sometimes people will say, “Just do the next right thing,” but that was too advanced for me. Who knew what the next right thing was? Indicated, I could handle.
I left Wade a voice mail telling him where I’d be when he was ready to talk. Sipping strong coffee and denying for the moment that anything in my life was wrong, I began to build a crib for Terry’s son.
I’d been taking courses at Art Center in Pasadena, one of the best all-around design schools in this galaxy. It was a long drive from Laguna Beach, though. So one morning I just quit. My fear of failing and the length of the drive had a talk, and they decided.
Terry and I were walking away from the seven A.M. meeting at the Catholic grammar school above Pacific Coast Highway. The flower stand across the parking lot was a gang fight of color. I told Terry of my decision as we reached his car, which in those days was the Caddy.
“I’ve been thinking about this,” I said, “and it makes sense that I stop going to that school.”
Terry turned around to face me. The traffic was rushing beside us. Over his shoulder I could see Vic, the one-armed florist, fluffing up a bucket full of crocuses. Terry took a deep breath, and I stood exactly where I was. Maybe even leaned in to him.
“You’ve been a loser all your life,” Terry began through thin lips. “And now, for the first time, you’ve got a chance to win. There’s no way you’re going to quit that school. You’ll get in that car this afternoon and you’ll get your ass up there.”
A huge silence grew between us. Vic looked over. Very quietly, I said, “Why?”
“Because if you don’t,” Terry said, “I’m going to kick your ass.”
My smile had no love. “You can’t kick my ass, Terry. I’m the ex-cop with the impulse control problem, remember?”
Terry didn’t back down. His smile had no love, either. “Then one of us will be in the hospital tonight.”
He walked away. I laughed to pretend I wasn’t scared. He turned back, practically charging at me.
“You think I’m here on this planet to be a fucking lawyer?” Terry shouted. “You think you’re here to build houses? You think you avoided jail after that circus in Santa Ana because you’re lucky? We’re in Alcoholics Anonymous, you fucking prick. We have the power to bring dead people back to life. That’s why we’re here.”
“So why am I driving to Pasadena?” I yelled back. “Why don’t I stay here and go to a meeting? Talk to a newcomer? Clean some fucking ashtrays?”
“Because you think too goddamn much.” Terry tapped the side of my head, hard. “You need something to do, something that sca
res you to death. Can you understand that?”
“No.”
“Can you do it anyway?”
That afternoon I drove to Pasadena.
Once upon a time, I wanted to design furniture, too. So far, I hadn’t been as successful with that as I had been with home design. I’d spent about six thousand hours and twenty thousand dollars trying to design the first prototype of the first chair in my first line of furniture, and I was as close to the beginning as I was to the end. I enjoyed my shop, though, where I liked to pretend that I was an honest workingman with thick hands and a simple brain.
The crib: I pulled out my laptop, went to Google, and looked through a hundred images for cribs. I finally found a Shaker design that was as simple and unadorned as anything I’d ever seen. It was nothing more than a box with slats for the baby to see through. I made it out of quartersawn oak, I made it well, and I tried mightily to avoid putting anything of myself into it. For a few hours, I felt some peace as I assembled that simple, boxy design. The only time I fucked up was when I stripped a bolt near the drop side (I’d fabricated the fixtures myself) and scraped my knuckles on the wood. Other than that, the time I spent making that crib felt better to me than sleep. But then I did sleep.
Having conked out with my head on the workbench, I woke up looking straight at my masterpiece. I felt a click down deep in my heart when I recognized how well the crib had come together. It reminded me that my first impulse toward making things had been when Crash was a baby. Silly fabrications were always flowing from my hands. Crash was always asking me for things: Daddy, make me a flower. Daddy, make me a robot. Daddy, make me a sky that’s full of flowers and robots.
I did what I was told. Maybe that was all I was doing now. It seemed to me then—as it had seemed to me this morning—that I might die if I didn’t find a form for my feelings. I made robots and flowers and sky out of my love for Crash. I made a crib out of my love for Terry and his son, whom I hadn’t yet met.
Wade showed up at about nine. I turned off the planer and threw my safety visor across the room. I checked my knuckles and they had stopped bleeding. As Wade walked toward me, my project caught his attention. “Why are you building a crib?”
The clamps had pushed some wood glue out of a dowel. I wiped it away with a damp rag. “Commission.”
“Someone commissioned you? When did they hope you’d deliver? Just in time for medical school?”
“Make yourself useful,” I said. “Drill up some espresso.”
After he had made the espresso and steamed some milk, Wade opened a bag of pastries he had brought from Jean Claude’s.
“MP moved out,” I said.
Wade took out two chocolate croissants and started to chew on one. “She’ll come back.”
“It’s lucky for me that you know so much about women.”
Wade’s espresso tasted like you’d stuck your head in a bucket of scorpions, and I hadn’t known how much I needed a chocolate croissant until I was eating one. For a single second, I was in my happy place.
Wade went and stood by the crib. One of his problems in life was that he couldn’t hide his feelings from me for long. He was impressed. He kept looking at it. For another second, that made me as happy as the chocolate croissant.
“What are you charging for this?” Wade asked.
“I’m being an artist this time.” Being an artist was how Terry described my tendency to underbid.
“It’s really beautiful, man. But there’s no way this is a commission. Come on, who’s it for?”
“Terry’s son.”
Wade looked genuinely startled, and I guess I knew right then that this was his first time hearing. I finished swallowing the croissant before I told him about the hospital trip and Catalina Acuña.
“Fuck,” Wade said. “Fuck.”
Thinking about that fatherless baby, I was angry again. “You connected Terry to the pot farms. That’s how he met Simon Busansky. That’s how he found this lovely new business taking money from drug dealers. He got involved with those people because of you. And that’s why you’ve been avoiding me again.”
Wade shrugged, turned away from me. He looked up at a wall crowded with tools: drill press, band saw, rotary saw, and more specialized woodworking gimmicks than I would ever use. I couldn’t see his face but I kept going: “Working out a deal for you is one thing. Working out a deal for someone like Busansky? That puts Terry in a totally different league. That’s a business. You should have fucking told me. It wasn’t the kind of thing he should have been doing.”
“Why?” Wade turned around. “Because you would have fixed it? Because you would have done what I couldn’t do? Protected Terry from himself? You give yourself a lot of credit, dude.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe I just don’t want to feel like I was excluded.”
“You weren’t excluded,” Wade said. “You excluded yourself.”
“I was falling in love. I was building a career. I have to hang out in coffee shops with you two for the rest of my life?”
Wade looked at me. He didn’t shrug, he didn’t turn away. At that moment, a bicycle bounced up from Laguna Canyon Road into the parking lot that I shared with three other shops. A cute little bicycle bell rang three times. Emma was on the handlebars, and Troy was pedaling. Troy stopped, straddling the bike a few feet from Wade. Emma rang the bell one more time. Then it must have become obvious to them that Wade and I had reached some kind of climax, because neither of them spoke, and the bell didn’t ring again.
To his credit, Wade smiled before I did. “Yes,” he said, “I was hoping you two would hang out with me at coffee shops for the rest of our lives.”
Troy seemed upset to have missed the joke. He shaded his eyes from the sunlight in order to see into my shop. Emma got off the handlebars and, without a moment’s hesitation, got up into my truck. She closed the door and then closed her eyes. Locked both doors, too. Troy lifted the front wheel of his bike and let it clatter to the pavement.
I sat down on the worktable that held the crib. Wade sat on the worktable against the wall.
“You want to know what happened to Terry?” On the bench beside him, Wade pushed a pile of sawdust together into a mound. “He got interested. You remember the way Terry got interested? After he steered me out of trouble, he made a study of how the grow-ops worked. I didn’t think he was getting involved. I thought it was like, you know, Betsy’s model trains.”
“Grow-ops?” Troy said. He was on the other side of the shop trying to figure out my planer by sticking his hand into it. “What’s a grow-op?”
“It’s a hydroponic pot farm,” Wade said. “Under your house. That’s what they call them in Vancouver. It was a stupid idea to import the concept to California. In Canada, they write you a parking ticket. In the States, well, things are more complicated. If you have a license for medical marijuana, that’s one thing. If you don’t …”
“You get arrested?” Troy asked.
“It’s a federal felony,” I said. “I thought you were a criminal mastermind.”
“Okay,” Troy said. “I just thought things were lightening up, at least as far as pot goes.”
“It’s hard for things to lighten up,” I said, “when everyone’s still making money from them not lightening up. If the cops find one of these illegal grow-ops, and there’s money behind it, it’s a big payday for them. The drug assets become law enforcement assets. Buys a lot of surveillance equipment and coffee machines and overtime. Back in the day, we would have killed to split something like this with the DEA.”
“They don’t even have to convict you,” Wade added, “in order to confiscate your related assets. Make it easy for them to get what they want, and you can avoid jail entirely.”
“Fucking feds.” Troy crouched to inspect the table saw. “It’s piracy, is what it is. It’s like my dad always says, there’s no difference anymore between cops and criminals.”
Wade and I looked at each other. Where the hell did we f
ind this guy?
“Anyway,” Wade said, “by the time I was back on my feet, Terry seemed to know everyone. I figured, he’s a lawyer. Lawyers know criminals, right?”
“Like Simon Busansky?”
“Like Simon Busansky,” Wade said.
“Here’s what I don’t understand,” I said. “Why did the DEA let Busansky sell his houses to Colin? Why not just take them?”
“The reason you don’t get that,” Wade said, “is because you don’t have a mind for this shit. It’s a relationship. Simon probably said something like, ‘Hey, you guys could take my houses and a lot of my money. But let me sell a couple of houses off first.’ ”
“It wasn’t Simon who said that, right?”
“No,” Wade said. “It was probably Terry.”
“And then Terry turns around and puts Busansky together with Colin and, I’m sure, takes a cut off that end, too.” I thought of my sponsor’s smile in the grocery store at the mention of recovery houses. “And if the DEA lets Busansky do this,” I continued, “it means that he’s in their debt?”
“That’s right,” Wade said. “And the wheel keeps turning.”
“So you’re telling me Terry went into business with Busansky?”
“If you’re asking me whether Terry got involved in anything that was illegal, I don’t know. He’s over there at the recovery house, talking to newcomers like Troy, sure”—Troy looked up as though surprised to hear his name—“but he’s also romancing the idea that maybe he doesn’t have to spend so much time talking with newcomers like Troy. Because maybe it’s more fun to trade war stories with a guy like Simon Busansky. Simon was swimming around in this world where you could run grow-ops, get busted for them, and have enough money left over to eat nice meals and not get a job.”
