The Outer Cape

by Patrick Dacey

  “All done,” he says.

  His father plucks the cigar from the ashtray and sticks it between his stained false teeth.

  “How do I look?” he asks.

  “Like a million bucks,” Robert says.

  TEN

  Andrew fusses as his mother straightens his collar and pulls down the sleeves of his jacket with a quick snap.

  “Why do I have to wear this stupid suit?” he says.

  “Because this is what you wear to someone’s funeral, out of respect.”

  “I think Grandpa would want us to be comfortable.”

  “You’re probably right. But that’s not what we think.”

  “Why’d he have to die anyway?”

  “You can’t anticipate when people will die, honey,” Irene says. “Just like you can’t anticipate when someone will be born.”

  “Yes, you can,” Andrew says. “Nine months, give or take a week, unless the water breaks early, then the doctor has to factor in the baby’s weight and the development of its lungs and so forth. Some don’t make it, which is sad. Some don’t turn out right mentally. That’s sad, too. But at least they get to live. That’s what I figured happened to Nathan.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “No one. I just was wondering.”

  “He was born perfectly normal. That was the best day of my life.”

  “And when I was born? Was that the second best?”

  “No, I mean, I didn’t mean it that way. I had two best days. That was the first, and you were the second. You get three in a lifetime. I imagine when one of you marries and has a grandchild, then that will be the third.”

  “What if we have more than one child?”

  “Then I guess whoever came up with the idea of only having three best days was wrong.”

  “But you were the one who came up with it.”

  Irene stands and parts Andrew’s hair with three quick strokes of her finned hand. He’s smart. Perhaps too smart.

  “Go get your brother,” she says.

  * * *

  As Robert pulls up to the funeral home, so, too, does a black town car, just behind his Wagoneer. The back doors open and the boys jump out, chasing each other around the front lawn. Robert helps Irene out of the passenger seat, then calls for the boys to wait by the front door, where a man in a green jacket is standing peacefully with his hands crossed in front of him.

  The short, paunchy driver of the town car tips his hat to Robert before racing around the back and opening the rear passenger door, from where Blanca emerges, slumped over, heaving holy gasps on the crosswalk. The pearls dangling from her neck knock against her breasts.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Robert says.

  The poor driver does his best to console her, placing his arm around her waist, as she crosses her arm around his shoulder, her giant left boob seemingly suffocating him.

  “Irene,” Blanca cries over the driver’s head.

  Irene and Blanca exchange quick hugs. For some reason, Robert feels compelled to shake the driver’s hand and does so. Then he half-hugs Blanca, like someone might a sick person they’re afraid of catching the flu from. Together, the three join the boys at the top of the stairs and greet the greeter in the green jacket, whose pleasant, nonthreatening, boyish face is enough to ease them in toward the dead.

  * * *

  At the wake, the boys stand before the body and scratch at the pant legs of their stiff suits. They look at their grandpa’s frozen face. His shoulders pressed back and his chest perfectly still. Robert instructs them to kneel in front of the casket and put their hands together.

  “Pray,” Robert says.

  When they are finished, Nathan asks if he can go to the bathroom. Robert goes with him. Any chance to get away from this room and the smell of aftershave and heavy, floral perfume is welcome.

  As they wash their hands at the bathroom sink, Red’s eldest brother, Walt, shuffles by and pats Nathan’s head, then drops his pants at the urinal, showing his small, wrinkled buttocks.

  “That’s Uncle Walt,” Robert says.

  Walt lets out a wounded moan, then farts.

  He leans his head to the side and says, “It’s either this or the other.”

  Robert moves about the funeral home receiving hugs, handshakes, and slaps on the back. What is this rude, intrusive ritual? he thinks. They look at you when you’re born and they look at you when you’re dead. In between, they can’t stand to look at you.

  Robert heads down the hallway and out the side door beside the funeral director’s office and lights a cigarette. Mourners keep filing into the funeral parlor. Some he recognizes, former contractors, not retired, so much as hunched, arthritic, broken. Robert remembers how when he was a kid, sitting in his father’s office on Friday afternoons, he’d watch the same men make this kind of slow walk into the room, heads down, silent, as his father sat there expressionless, a set of checks in front of him, already written and signed. Then there are the locals, the lawyers, the members of the town council, all of whom had once viewed his father as something of a malevolent colonizer, destroying unspoiled land for homes, paved roads, and signage. Like good puritans, they are here to forgive.

  Nathan sidles up beside Robert, his shoelace untied.

  “It’s funny,” Robert says. “All these people and not one of them knew what a prick your grandpa was.”

  “Why is that funny?”

  “Not ha-ha funny, funny like ironic.”

  Nathan looks at him.

  “I can’t explain everything, Nathan.”

  “Okay.”

  Robert puts his hand on Nathan’s shoulder.

  “When does he get buried?” Nathan asks.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Where?”

  “Beachwood, by the Seven-Eleven.”

  “It’s nice there.”

  “I don’t know if any of them care how nice it is.”

  Nathan laughs.

  “That’s ha-ha funny,” he says.

  “Tie your shoelace,” Robert says, clutching the keys in his pocket.

  ELEVEN

  Conditions must be right for mass destruction to take place. When a tornado forms, the only thing one can do is get the hell out of its path. And when Robert Kelly wakes up that Monday after burying his father, he feels in his gut the end that’s coming.

  Becky at the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through had been fired for stealing out of the register, and so a new kid, some Brazilian girl in braces, hands him his large coffee but forgets the Sweet’N Low. Minor, but telling.

  At the office, Mike calls to say he’s just met with Charlie from paving and Charlie from excavation, and Charlie’s saying he won’t finish the roads in the subdivision until they get paid and the other Charlie’s threatening to fill in the hole they spent a week digging for the man-made pond.

  “Haven’t we paid them?” Mike asks.

  We? Robert thinks.

  “Tell Charlie I’ll settle up with him in the morning. Mention my father. They used to work together.”

  “And what about the other Charlie?”

  “What other Charlie?”

  “From excavation.”

  “That’s the one,” Robert says and hangs up.

  The Prestons and the Shedlocks have yet to sign the paperwork for the sale of the first two homes in the subdivision, so Robert makes copies of their contracts and signs for them, takes the contracts to the bank, and levies another two hundred grand against the sales, which should keep his head above water until his father’s estate is settled.

  * * *

  That afternoon, in the office of Luscious Betterent Esq., Blanca, via speakerphone, says she plans to sell the house, move back to Sweden, and give 60 percent of Red’s estate over to the animal humane society.

  “Animals!” Robert shouts into the receiver. “You dopey cunt!”

  “Thees is why I don come to office,” Blanca says.

  “This, you mean. This! This is why.”

  “Oh, you s
tupid English language.”

  Betterent picks up the phone and handles Blanca with the kind of graceful, unwavering tone that makes Robert envious. Robert stands up and paces around the office. He looks at the diploma Betterent had received from Harvard Law. Then he smashes the frame with his fist.

  “Oh, for crying out loud, Bobby,” Betterent says.

  Robert holds up his bloody hand.

  “No, one second, Mrs. Kelly.” Betterent tosses Robert a handkerchief from the drawer where he keeps his nail file, comb, and hand lotion.

  “Okay, Mrs. Kelly, I understand. Okay, I will handle it,” Betterent says, and quickly hangs up the phone. “Sit down, you goddamn maniac.”

  With his hand wrapped in the handkerchief, already splotched with blood, Robert fumes and fusses like a boy who’s done bad and wants to do worse.

  “I don’t have many options,” Betterent says. “Your old man felt you needed to work for your own.”

  “Let me be honest with you, Luscious. I’m stretched tight. Everyone’s scared the housing market is about to go bust. No one’s buying.”

  This is the first time Robert has confessed his insecurities aloud.

  “You’re in a tough racket,” Betterent says. “You have savings, right? You’ve put money aside for the kids, I hope?”

  “I was expecting this money. I just had a hole dug for a pond in my subdivision. We’re going to fill it with perch.”

  “Junk fish.”

  “No one’s going to eat them. Listen. You can’t imagine how much money I got wrapped up in this place.”

  On his desk, there’s a photograph of Betterent holding up a giant bass, a cigar between his lips, his big white belly hanging over his soaked bathing trunks.

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” Betterent says. “I’ll charge the widow, have my secretary write it into my after-hours fee.”

  Betterent stands, meeting over.

  “The carpet cleaning, the hanky, the frame, don’t worry about it,” he says. “Have that hand checked out. You don’t want to get an infection.”

  * * *

  As he walks to the trailer at the end of the road in the half-finished subdivision, Robert feels the ground underfoot is slightly tilted. He putzes around for a while, crumpling up bills from contractors he can’t pay, tossing them into the trash can in the corner. He calls a few banks in Florida and Nevada, banks that extend credit to even the most destitute cases. But with a third mortgage and a Jeep Wagoneer worth next to nothing, Robert has no collateral to put up against a loan. He looks at the Rolex his father had given him the week before. Funny, he thinks. The old man probably knew Robert would have to sell it, and sell it soon. He examines the stainless steel minute hand, watching it click past the sixth diamond. It’s already half past eleven. Candice will be by any minute. He watches the minutes and waits.

  When Candice finally arrives a half hour later, he puts his arms around her for some level of support or comfort. He feels her back tighten. She shifts to the right as he tries to kiss her neck on the left.

  “Don’t,” she says.

  “Don’t what?”

  “That.”

  She has become more desirable than ever before.

  “I’m going to visit my family in Chicago next week. This place gets so depressing when all the people leave.”

  “What does that have to do with us?”

  But as he says this, Robert realizes this was just a summer fling, something he hasn’t been part of since his days working construction for his father, when the Irish girls on working visas he’d make out with on the beach flew back home, and the boarding school girls took buses back west to the mountains, ivy, and castles where they belonged. There was one named Bethany who he thought he loved. She was from Belfast. They had planned on moving there at summer’s end. He was sixteen. She was twenty-two. She had wide, wild eyes, hair as black as a crow’s feathers. He had saved $167 for a plane ticket, and when he went to retrieve his money from under his mattress, it was gone. His father had flown to Vegas that week for the opening of the college football season. His cash was in the hands of a bookmaker, his Irish princess walking along the black sand of Giant’s Causeway Beach, where they were to marry.

  “I’m sure Mike won’t miss any work,” Candice says. “Sometimes it’s hard to look at him.”

  “He doesn’t suspect anything, does he?”

  “Does it matter at this point?”

  Robert had imagined a similar conversation during the nights when he felt the guilt of not feeling that guilty over the affair, in bed next to Irene. Now it just seems pathetic to even try to tell her that he had been with someone else.

  “Anyway, I thought I’d let you know I won’t be coming by for a while,” she says swiftly, and with great indifference.

  After Candice leaves, Robert stands outside the trailer and takes in a long breath, then lights a cigarette. He sits on the trailer step, thinking about his father, if the old man was ever ashamed of the things he’d done in his life, the drinking and the women. Then he’s struck with the image of Bethany’s shimmering green necklace bouncing against her pale chest, between her small breasts and pink nipples, when they made love. She was so small, he was afraid to hurt her. They drank beer and laughed and listened to music on the radio in the small bedroom of a beach cottage she shared with three other girls. That was something, Robert thinks.

  * * *

  On the drive home, Robert tells himself to stay positive. Then he sees a dead and gutted deer on the side of the road. He tells himself, his world is over, not yours. Then, a split second later, a vulture flies straight into the windshield, thumping off the glass like a hard fist. Robert slams on the brakes, and the rear wheels spin out. He’s planing toward the Wequaquet River Bridge. He muscles the wheel left, then lets it fly right, through his fingers, and grips the wheel as hard as he can, slamming the gas and regaining control of the Wagoneer in time to get across the bridge and pull over, making sure he’s alive. His insides feel as though they’re screaming, clawing, knocking at the wall of his skin to get out. He presses his head against the steering wheel, against a shard of glass stuck in the wheel, and not until his heart rate slows does he see the piece sticking from his forehead, just a moon sliver of glass in a dot of blood, strange but laughable. The head, the hand, the heart. Something, he tells himself, is coming for you.

  * * *

  That evening, Robert sits with his family at the dinner table, wishing for quiet. But Nathan has been sent home early from school, and that needs to be addressed, Irene says, as she passes around the glazed carrots. Robert tries to keep his father’s tone out of his voice when he speaks to his boys, especially now, when he’s conscious that the more he fights against being like his father, the more he finds he can’t escape the transition.

  He eats hurriedly, cramming a fork with a potato and vegetable, along with an oversized portion of baked chicken, and somehow fitting it all into his mouth, grinding the food down and swallowing while collecting another round on his fork, finishing his meal in half the time it takes the rest of the family to eat. Then he sits for a while watching the boys, soon instructing Nathan and Andrew to keep their elbows off the table and not to make sandwiches with their rolls.

  Finally, he’s had enough, folds his napkin, and places it on the table.

  “What happened to you at school?” he asks Nathan.

  Andrew cracks his toes. Nathan looks to Irene, who has her face down, staring at her plate as if it’s holy.

  “I hit Kevin Gaffney,” Nathan says.

  “I know you hit him. The whole town knows you hit him. But why did you hit him so many times? Who taught you how to fight like that?”

  Robert glances at Irene, silent and apprehensive, as though she feels bad for their son, as though some wickedness he can’t control is in him and it’s Robert’s fault.

  “Did I teach you to fight like that?” he asks.

  “No. I guess not.”

  “You guess not?
”

  “Some of the stories you tell us about how it was for you growing up, and how it was in Vietnam—”

  “I was never in Vietnam.”

  “I thought you was.”

  “Were,” Irene says. “Were.”

  “I was in Germany. I told you that. I was lucky. We had trouble on occasion. There’s always trouble somewhere.”

  “Kevin was picking on him,” Nathan says.

  “And? Your brother can defend himself, can’t he? I taught both of you the same way, didn’t I?”

  “You did knock Nathan’s tooth out that time,” Irene says.

  “Eat the rest of your dinner,” Robert says.

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m a child.”

  “Then stop butting in unless you have something constructive to say.”

  “Let him tell us what happened so we know his side of things, Robert, please.”

  “Okay, all right. Go on then.”

  “We were all outside after school, waiting for the buses, and Kevin comes by and shoves Andrew right into one of those handicap signs, and I went and helped Andrew up and he was bleeding from the mouth and then Kevin said, ‘Now both the Kellys are retards.’ And when the buses came around the corner, I ran out and grabbed Kevin and tossed him into the side of one and hit him.”

  “Did he fight back?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  “Did he?” Robert asks Andrew.

  Andrew shrugs. His lip is swollen.

  “He was in the parking lot. He couldn’t see.”

  “My question is when did you know to stop hitting him?”

  “I didn’t,” Nathan says. “Ms. Vech pulled me off him.”

  “And so you punched her, too?”

  “She grabbed my butt.”

  Andrew giggles.

  “Shh,” Irene says.

  “So you didn’t really know what you were doing then? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I think that’s what I’m saying.”