The Outer Cape

by Patrick Dacey

  “Thank you, honey.”

  “What else do you need? Are you hungry?”

  Suddenly his mother is on the verge of tears. Her hands tremble. The remote falls from her hand.

  “Sometimes you’re horrible,” she says.

  “Mom,” Andrew pleads, because these sudden shifts in mood are near impossible for Andrew to process, with his own similar shifts in mood.

  “Just horrible.”

  “I didn’t mean anything—”

  His mother waves him away.

  “Where’s your brother?”

  Andrew’s earpiece buzzes. He looks at the phone—Dad.

  “Here,” Andrew says, handing his mother the remote. “Watch your show.”

  He walks back through the dining room and into the kitchen before answering his father’s call.

  “Can you pick up the papers for me?” his father asks before Andrew even agrees to come by.

  “What about that coffee shop on the corner? Don’t they have the papers?”

  “Just the liberal ones.”

  “I might be awhile.”

  “Where am I going?”

  Andrew presses the earpiece to end the call. He breathes in five seconds, holds five seconds, breathes out five seconds. He’s been watching a series called Self-Preservation in the Age of Anxiety on YouTube. Nearly an hour of the ten-hour series is spent on breathing techniques. They work as stopgaps when he needs to move from one anxiety-inducing scene to another. He had never realized how incorrectly his breathing had been before.

  “That was Dad,” Andrew tells his mother.

  “Oh, is he out of prison?”

  “He’s been out.”

  “Good for him. Maybe all of us—me, you, your father, and Nathan—can have lunch together sometime.”

  Her bitterness is new, culled by her anxiety, her sickness, the replacement of what could be with what could have been. Andrew accepts her sarcasm, no matter how disparaging it is—given her attitude on that particular day. He accepts it, accepts her. He has become all the men she once knew and loved. He listens, reacts the best he knows how. He’s become adept at taking the brunt.

  But the sneering tone of her voice causes Andrew’s chest to tighten, and for a moment he is short of breath, which, when short of breath, breathing technique six in Self-Preservation in the Age of Anxiety instructs one to find a safe place to stand with one’s arms above one’s head, like a tree, in an act of receiving, while trying to remain conscious of only your body, slowing the heart rate, returning to a steady breathing pattern.

  “I’ll be back soon,” he says, and quickly rushes out of the room.

  “You’ve always been such a good boy,” she calls after him. “Maybe that’s your problem.”

  * * *

  Andrew drives to the corner of Main and Southbay and pulls up at the penny candy store where nothing costs a penny anymore. He picks up the Herald and Post and Times; the first two he remembers his father reading back to front because he says they tell the truth and still keep the lines on the games in the sports section. The Times he uses to get the coals started on the grill.

  Andrew tosses the papers into the backseat and drives along Southbay, glancing out at the ocean, at the soft swells, the seagulls perched on the empty lifeguard stand. This has always been the best time of year. The tourists haven’t yet arrived, the beaches are still empty, and you don’t have to pay to park your car close to the shore. Maybe later today, after he visits his father, maybe he will drive back down and dive into the water and swim out to the old floating raft and lie back on the mossy wood, the way he had when he was a kid.

  Truth is, since he’s been home, he can’t imagine leaving. In a sense, his mother’s dying has offered him sanctuary. He remembers early summer cookouts when the kids in the neighborhood appeared alongside the adults, like ghosts from a mist. And in the backyard on those orange sky evenings, Andrew would study their legs, their calves and knees and thighs. Some of them were red. Some brown. Some were hairy. Some were hairless. Mrs. Landslow’s veins wound around her legs like ivy. How confident they all were when they laughed and shook hands and lit cigars. They mimicked a bullet to the head, a dancing pastor, a man on fire, a dog taking a whiz on a tree, a cripple. They were never the same person twice. When the adults had finished eating and were slightly buzzed and nostalgic, they joined the kids in whatever game they were playing. Mr. Dunning snapped his pinky finger back behind his ring finger during a game of Horse. He snapped it back to the children’s delight. “Ewwww!” they screamed. Andrew’s mother felt faint and needed to sit down. She had a big cigarette between her fingers and when she smoked it she coughed until her face went scarlet and patted her chest and said, “What the frig is in this thing?” And it was ninety degrees and humid. The mosquitoes got fat and died in the grass and on the patio furniture. On nights like these, when he wasn’t being watched by their father, Nathan gorged himself on grilled meat and bread and pasta salad. Andrew watched him sneak back for a third and fourth hot dog. He always took three scoops of ice cream when the other children took one. Whenever he passed by a table, he grabbed a handful of potato chips. Inaction made him nervous. The more he ate, the sleepier he got. Once the plates were cleared and the adults had their drinks and the other kids were playing Wiffle ball, he went into the kitchen and snuck a Kit Kat from the drawer where his mother kept their high-test-score rewards. Andrew caught him and said—what did he say?—something about his shorts bunched between his red thighs as they always were when they ran around in summer, or the pimples on his cheeks and chin, or his chunky upper body. “Fat Tits,” he had called him. “What are you doing with that Kit Kat, Fat Tits?” That’s what he had said. And he still regrets saying it.

  He pulls up his contacts on the screen in the console. Then says, “Call Kirsten.”

  The other end rings once, then goes to voice mail:

  Hi! This is Kirsten, but you probably already knew that, or, if you didn’t, maybe this is destiny. Either way, leave a message!

  Andrew doesn’t leave a message.

  He speeds past the beach and rolls down the windows.

  The panic starts again as he passes the Tidewater Hotel on the hill opposite the beach, taking the curve in the road, where the ocean is eclipsed by the giant triple-decker houses standing on the rocks, and Southbay turns to Eastbay, and all the subdivisions his father and grandfather had built up since moving to Wequaquet fifty years ago with names like Horseback Run, Garrison Court, and Meadowbrook Lane, with For Sale signs and open house announcements planted in the ground.

  As he turns onto the gravelly road leading up to his father’s depressing cottage, he stops short of the tire ruts in the shallow, muddy yard so as not to scratch the rims on his BMW. A part of the person he still is cares about these things.

  For a moment he wishes he hadn’t agreed to see the old man, but in the window, his father’s shadowy frame raises up the thin curtains, and he knows he can’t leave now.

  Andrew is certain his father wants more than just to touch base. Since his release, over a month ago now, his father has ditched his self-help book on obtaining clarity and taken up Andrew’s mind space with various propositions, such as selling authentic Cape Cod beach grass, acai berry powder, and, just last week, time shares at the El Presidente Retreat in Costa Rica. Andrew wonders if his father isn’t losing his mind, though, each time, he transfers some money into the old man’s account. When his father’s efforts fail, he blames Andrew for not going all-in. They had a chance to hit the big time. If only.

  “I guess you’re already big time,” his father has said more than once, bullying Andrew into upping his ante toward a future investment.

  Andrew collects the papers and steps out and into a patch of sticky mud. He throws the papers in the driver’s seat and rips out the Times sports section and wipes the mess off his shoe sole. He dips the sole in a puddle and rakes the bottom of his shoe against the stones in the driveway.

  On the
small, unstable front porch, his father takes the papers and puts them down on a plastic table, hugs Andrew, and kisses him just next to his lips.

  “You look good, Dad,” Andrew says.

  “I’m running again, just down the street and back, and lifting weights. I use these stretch bands. It’s all about resistance. Are you hungry? Want lunch?”

  “I could eat.”

  His father puts together a couple of sandwiches—turkey wraps with mustard—and pours two cups of coffee.

  His father has always been a fast eater, possibly from his time in the army, or, more likely, to make a quicker getaway from Red at the dinner table. Still impressed, Andrew studies the Pollock-like drops of mustard left on his father’s plate.

  “You’re not hungry?” his father says. “This is all I eat now—lean meats, eggs, legumes.”

  The word “legumes” rolls around in Andrew’s mouth like a marble.

  “I feel better than I have in years. I’m meditating now. Do you meditate?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You should meditate.”

  As Andrew finishes the first half of his wrap, his father starts out as he always does, asks about Nathan, says he hasn’t heard from him in a while.

  “It must be difficult. Having to transition back to this lush life.”

  “He’s had enough time to do it, don’t you think?”

  “They take a piece of you when you leave.”

  “I didn’t know Iraq and Germany were so similar.”

  “Don’t be a smartass,” his father says, pinning Andrew to his chair with his dark eyes. “What about your mom? Anything new on that front?”

  “The same.”

  “I’ve been meaning to call.”

  “She’d appreciate that.”

  “Right. Well.”

  Bases covered, his father starts to explain his plans for the future, how he’s been contacted by Corbon Dennison, a venture capitalist out of New York, who his father had met in prison, and this Dennison has summoned his father to procure his knowledge of the real estate market, whether it’s a good time to buy, which his father believes that if you have the money then it’s always a good time to buy, has said it to Andrew during any and every father-and-son talk they have ever had—“Buy property. They can’t take it away from you.” Who were they? Andrew had often wondered as a boy. Always there was a “they” lurking outside the boundaries of their lives, paying close attention to their every move. When finally he had discovered who “they” were—tax collectors, bank managers, property attorneys, building committees, politicians, women—all of whom played one role or another in severely damaging his father’s financial stability, not to mention his integrity, Andrew started to understand why his father had run off all those years ago. Andrew had been working with “them” since he graduated college. In fact, up until just recently, he’d been one of “them.”

  Dennison had nearly the full amount needed to buy the old Tidewater Hotel, boarded up and vacant for the past decade, a junkyard of used auto parts and miscellaneous metals delivered, dumped, and stacked behind a loose, wind-stripped fence.

  “You know my position,” his father says, pulling up his pants leg to flash the blinking anklet. “I can’t be anywhere near this thing.”

  “Right,” Andrew says, and drinks from his mug. The coffee tastes strong and stale, like end-of-the-night diner coffee. Andrew nearly spits it back into the cup but instead swallows the sludge to show his manhood, always challenged when he’s with his father, no matter his age.

  They sit, slightly hunched, Andrew in his khakis and polo, his father in sweats and a mock turtleneck, the cool summer afternoon, and the light barely visible through the pines.

  “I have to use the bathroom,” Andrew says after a while.

  “Take this in with you.” His father hands Andrew his plate. “And make another pot of coffee. The grounds are in the top cupboard.”

  Andrew puts the plates in the sink and runs the faucet. He sighs in relief, an intermission, finally. He finds the large can of coffee and spoons the grounds into a filter, pours the water, and listens as the machine gurgles and whines.

  How lonely it is to wait for something.

  He walks into the bathroom and shuts the door. He recognizes the burnt-match smell, a politeness his father issued after taking a shit, most likely a habit formed from having to share a bathroom with his sister when he was a boy. Andrew washes his hands, then taps the puffy skin under his eyes, looking in the mirror, the wrinkles that have formed at the edges and webbed out but stop before they reach the edge of the cavities. And here are the long, unfurled hairs sticking out of his eyebrows, the unshaven cheeks and chin, the small crop of curls that spring from the opening of his collared shirt.

  Taped to the medicine cabinet is a piece of lined paper with the heading:

  THINGS TO WORK ON

  1. Be Patient

  2. Express Remorse

  3. Eat Healthy Foods

  4. Exercise Routinely

  5. Secure Thy Self

  Andrew despairs in picturing his father sitting down to write out such a specific mission statement, choosing where to place it, where he will be reminded of the things he needs to work on. In order to achieve what?

  He remembers showering with his father when he was very young, how the water sprang off his father’s hard, thick forearms and the white met the tan edges of his skin from where his sleeves were cut and the sun couldn’t reach and the bushy hair in the middle of his chest and around his navel and penis, how it collected in the drain and he asked Andrew to pull it out so the drain didn’t clog. His rough hands on Andrew’s wet body, his skin red from the heat of the water, turning Andrew around and soaping up a washcloth, scratching his skin, making it even redder. Andrew had wondered if he was that dirty that he should be scrubbed with such force. His father picked him up and held him close to the water spitting from the showerhead. Andrew had always taken baths with his brother, not showers, had played in the bath, had had his mother’s soft hands massage his head with shampoo. But this was how men bathed. His father placed him down carefully outside of the tub and told him to grab a pair of towels. They walked out of the bathroom, Andrew’s towel trailing behind him like a sweep train. He was moving away from his mother and toward his father. He didn’t know what it was, then, but he took pride in having achieved something. But if what he had achieved has all led to this—an old cottage, bad coffee, sad lists taped to the medicine cabinet door?

  He opens the medicine cabinet and sees on the single rack tubes of foot cream, toothpaste, and lotion. In the cabinet underneath the sink is a small leather bag that contains years of toenail clippings. Strange. But not unlike the collection of gray hairs Andrew keeps in a plastic ziplock bag tucked away in his shaving kit.

  One more glance at the list, the phrase “Secure Thy Self” catches him and, in his head, he repeats the phrase as he pours the coffee and returns to the front porch.

  Outside, his father lights another cigarette, crosses his leg over his knee, and lets his foot dangle. Andrew remembers how he would grab at his father’s foot and his father would pull his foot back and tap Andrew on the top of his head with his toes. Come to think of it, his toenails were always perfectly trimmed.

  “Just imagine,” his father says, “a world-class hotel here in Wequaquet. We’ll have luxury and affordable luxury—a view of the ocean, a view of the garden, separate but equal. Everyone will be treated the same. Guests must wear shoes and a shirt in the lobby, and a suit coat in the dining room. We’ll have an Olympic-size swimming pool, restaurant on the patio overlooking the ocean, fitness center, putting green. And here, look.”

  What the Cape is, and always has been, is a refuge for the rich, spending a month or so in houses bought and kept up through the off-season by a local hire. Then there are the minivan families, who save all year to spend a week in a motel off Route 28 with two springy mattresses and a bath running only cold water, park their asse
s on the beach, eat fried clam rolls, and play putt-putt with their kids.

  His father unrolls the blueprints, which up until now had been hidden in a tube just behind a potted ficus tree. The initial outdoor design shows, in pencil drawing, a victory-style casino look with a central lobby, two wings, and a wide sloping lawn in front.

  “It’s one of those deals you don’t pass on, a home run.”

  A slam dunk or a hole in one or a sure bet, Andrew thinks.

  He looks over the other sheets, unsure of what the measurements and all mean, but, by the size of the property, he can tell that this is a lengthy, arduous deal, which could fall apart at various stages over the next year or so it will take to build, including Stage One—Today.

  His father knows how to get things done, on the quick, skipping the lines with a bill squared in his palm. And Andrew knows a project of this magnitude requires certain palms to be greased. And at present, mulling it over in the way he used to mull over his own investments—by examining the negatives first—he isn’t so sure the small town he grew up in needs any sort of upscale hotel. The real whales who summer here rent houses on the bluffs, hire Portuguese maids, and send for girls in Boston.

  “So, what do you think?” his father asks indifferently, as if not asking at all.

  Unsure of what to say, Andrew sips his coffee like a child sipping hot chocolate, both hands around the mug. He looks up at his father with a willing expression. He wants to please him. There is still nothing he wants more.

  “I think it can’t miss,” he says.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  A week after his brother’s call, Nathan buys a bus ticket for Phoenix so he can make the flight Andrew has booked. He sits on a bench out back where the buses are parked and smokes. Then he pops one of the blue pills Mason had given him on his last visit to the bungalow. Home seems so far from this dreary cement-stamped station.