by Dan Lopez
He imagines entertaining her poolside with drinks and witty conversation. For all his sexual bluster, what he desires most is to talk to an elegant woman, somebody who isn’t always looking at him like he’s failed at something he didn’t even know he was supposed to do. Maybe his frustrations with Cheryl boil down to friendship. They were once best of friends, but lately they’ve become acquaintances propelled by inertia.
“Poop.”
“Just a little bit longer now, beautiful. You’ve been a real trooper, sticking by your old grandpa all this time, you know that?”
She pulls an old movie ticket stub from the crease between the seat and the armrest and fans it at her face. The a/c is inconsistent, and after a long, sunny afternoon heat radiates off the asphalt, making sitting at a traffic signal a sweaty affair. He adjusts a well-worn plastic vent. The air blows across his chin and he grins, but the second he moves his finger the slats droop again. His lip twitches into a momentary frown. “Just a bit longer,” he repeats.
She crosses her arms. “Poop.”
When the light turns green he accelerates. He creases his face into a doughy smile for Gertie’s amusement. “I know exactly where we are. Just gotta have a little faith in your old grandpa.”
She rolls her eyes and he reaches over and taps her chubby thigh, directing her attention to a passing drug store. “That’s where your grandma picks up my pills. Did you see it?”
Sighing, she sinks farther into her seat.
“Not impressed, huh?”
She gives the glove box a few exploratory kicks.
Another drug store zips by. Maybe that’s the one where he has his prescriptions. And isn’t that over there the grocery store that sells the blueberry muffins Cheryl likes? Landmarks sweep through his memory like the yellow glow of a lighthouse. Buried among sun-bleached CDs in the armrest is an emergency stash. He wrestles a joint from a crack in the plastic and punches the car lighter.
“Grandpa really has a good feeling about this now. I really do. Just another few blocks now, Cheryl—I mean, Gertie. We can still make it for the fireworks. You’ll love them.”
The plan for Disney World is over. He knows this, yet he doesn’t. The road is all that matters now, the act of driving, of continuing on. Everything will fall into place if he follows through. Yet a growing doubt urges him to pull over and place a call from any of the stores slinking out of view in steady procession. It could all be over. Time on the road weighs him down. He’s tired and he’s tried, and isn’t that the important thing? That he tried? But when he looks down at little Gertie, her delicate face and stubby hands, her straight black hair, he feels rejuvenated. He won’t do it. For once he can’t bring himself to take the easy way out, to simply toss up his hands and leave Cheryl to sort out his mess. That’s what he did with Stevie for all those years and look at the results. No. Gertie may be a little bored but she’s safe. He fed her. He played with her. He is in control. Nothing can stop him. Thaddeus Bloom is invincible.
By now the day care has certainly noticed Gertie’s absence, but as long as he remains on the road he’s safe.
He takes a puff.
Gertie coughs and bats away the smoke.
“You got the right idea there, beautiful. Don’t follow your old grandpa’s example. This stuff is bad medicine.” He lobs a grin at her, then returns to scanning the road. Somewhere out there a turnoff waits to change his luck. It’s bound to be close. That palm tree. Yes. He’s certain he recognizes the reticulated crook of that particular palm tree. “This stuff.” He brandishes the joint, indulging with a smallish drag before continuing in a choked-up voice. “This stuff is only for grandpas, and only when things get a bit too wacko. Do you understand?” But she’s not looking at him.
A cold sweat seizes him, and he reaches out for her hand. He squeezes it hard, too hard maybe, but he can’t afford the luxury of consent. He squeezes until she looks him directly in the eye and then he lets her go.
“Listen to me close,” he says with measured lucidity. “One day you’re probably going to be offered a lot of it when you get to school, high school that is.” He stifles a laugh. “You’ll be offered a lot, but you have to promise your old grandpa that you’ll just say no. Don’t make the same mistakes I did. Can you do that? Hmm? Can you make your grandpa one little promise?”
Slowly, she nods.
“Yes!” He spreads his arms wide. In his excitement, he slams his hand against the dome light and sends the joint flying under the dash. “Oops.” Deftly he bends over to paw the floor mat. “Of course you will”—his voice cracks from the effort—“because you’re a real winner.”
Gertie screams as they sway into the neighboring lane, but the sway lasts for only a moment before he finds the joint and regains control. He takes a puff and smiles at her.
“A real winner, just like your old man.”
He wiggles his eyebrows and sticks his tongue out at her. She crosses her arms. But he knows her laughter is hiding in there, waiting to make everything better. It’s just a matter of bringing it out, so he pulls a dozen funny faces. With each one she squirms a bit more freely, twists her fingers, and pulls her hair a bit more anxiously. Eventually he coaxes it out of her. Eventually she drops her concentrated stare and erupts in belly laughter.
“That’s right, beautiful. You go ahead and laugh at your old grandpa. He’s got a few screws loose, huh? But that’s okay. He gets by. But you! You’re going to be a big success. Maybe the first Oriental president, who knows? What do you think about that?” He doesn’t wait for a response. “I’ll tell you a secret. You won’t repeat it, will you? Of course you won’t. You didn’t get those brains from your grandpa’s side of the family. You get that from your grandma Cheryl and your daddy Peter. And you know something else? I say God bless them. People like your grandpa here are lost without people like them.”
His gaze drops down to the business card on the dash, and suddenly he feels guilty.
“I don’t mind telling you that. I’ll tell the whole world. Your grandma saved my life. I haven’t always been the best, but she kept me from being a lot worse. That’s a fact. She’s the greatest woman in the whole world. Well, at least until you came along.”
Gertie giggles, covering her face with an arm.
Outside, the soft pink-and-orange glow of the evening sky gives way to a starker halogen as streetlights blink on. The road is illuminated for miles, a vast network of asphalt curving and bending into an impossible number of subdivisions and culs-de-sac and driveways. It occurs to him with the precision of weed philosophy that in all his years of driving, no matter where he’s been, he’s never left this road. The stucco. The trailers. The grocery stores, the car dealerships, and the retail plazas anchored by a bar or a restaurant or a gas station. All of it piled alongside the road, all of it vaguely familiar. He wonders if there’s a woman for every confused man in each of these places.
The turnoff could be anywhere.
“Do you know why melons always have big weddings?” He softens his eyes. “Because they cantaloupe! That’s a good one for the junior audience, huh? Fruits getting married. Not that I mean anything by that, Stevie, er, beautiful,” he stammers. “Hey, you know, just a joke.”
Sweat beads his brow and he roughly wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. He glances in the rearview and spots a police cruiser keeping a steady distance.
Gertie frowns.
“Yeah, I know. Poop! Lay off, would you? It was just a joke. You have no idea how lucky you are to have two devoted fathers.” He takes a toke. “Not everybody gets that, you know? Your parents, they’re A-OK. Couldn’t do any better by you. Wonderful people. And Cheryl. That grandmother of yours, boy, did you luck out... All of them...” He dabs at his suddenly misty eyes. “Hey, what are you doing over there, cutting onions? You got my allergies going. Look at me, I’m blubbering like a whore on payday. Ha!”
The cruiser advances, and he swerves the car to miss a neon traffic divide, cursing it
as he careens back onto the largely deserted road. The effort momentarily sobers him. He blows his nose into a crumpled napkin and drops it on the floor before drying his eyes with the collar of his shirt. Gertie whimpers.
“No big deal,” he says, straightening his back, smiling—the very picture of calm. He kisses his fingers and taps her head. If this is the end then at least it’s been better than nothing. “I know exactly where we are now. We’re almost there. What about one last joke? Would you like that?” He puckers around the roach end of his joint, and she coughs. “All right, all right. I get the hint. Your grandma doesn’t approve either; gives me the same shitty look.”
With the push of a button he lowers his window. Rushing wind drives out the smoke. The wind licks at the business card, too, peeling it off the dash and sending it sailing out of the cabin.
“There. Happy? It’s gone!” he shouts, but he can’t bring himself to toss the joint just yet.
The road screams through the widening gap of the window, jostling candy wrappers and ashes from all the hidden corners of the cabin, roaring toward an elegant equilibrium, an equilibrium of... of everything. His fingers and scalp grow clammy in the buffeting wind. The temperature drops. His ears pop. In his anxiety, he misses when the police cruiser—which was an ambulance anyway—turns off the road. He swerves into the oncoming traffic lane, slowly gaining headway over a rollicking tractor-trailer carting a cargo of logs. Ahead of them approaches a car.
“Hey, it’s okay. Just a joke, you know? Relax, and anyway, I wasn’t going to call her. You believe me, right, beautiful?” His hands are off the steering wheel now; one holds the joint while the other juts out the window, surfing on the palpable waves of pressure, skating across some invisible, mellow ether.
“It’s a funny one, this joke.”
Her stare is the coldest thing in the world.
Presenting two crossed fingers, he bows his head solemnly. “Scout’s honor,” he says before once again—his final recourse—bending an exaggerated frown. “We simpatico, beautiful?”
The approaching car blares its horn. Beside them, the tractor-trailer decelerates, honks to signal the all clear. It all happens in another world. Right now, this instant, his only concern is Gertie. He wants that smile. He needs that smile. If he can get that, then the cops can have him. He sticks out his tongue. Blows a raspberry. Rolls his eyes dizzily in their sockets. If he really focuses he could probably make out faces in the approaching car.
Gertie blinks. At last she smiles.
“Now that’s what I’m talking about. Ha! Okay, here we go.” He shifts in his seat. He pinches the roach end of the joint between fat, tender fingers and inhales with great relish before grinding the butt into the ashtray, then flicking it out the window. Like a needle finding its groove, they slide between the reflectors and overtake the trailer in time to wave at the screeching car disappearing in the rearview in a halo of fishtailing brake lights.
“Two old friends,” he begins, screaming above the wind, “a rabbi and a priest...”
“HOW FAR COULD HE HAVE GONE?” PETER ASKS.
They sit idling in a strip mall in an unfamiliar part of town. Burger wrappers litter the floor mats. A carton of fries sits on the console between them. The greasy aroma of onion, mayonnaise, and ketchup recirculates through the vents. He rests his chin upon the wheel and gazes out the windshield. “We’ve looked everywhere. Haven’t we?”
She scours a cuticle and sighs. A hundred shopping plazas containing a thousand stores beneath a million stucco arches litter the landscape. Thaddeus could be at any one of them.
“We tried,” she says. “Maybe we should leave the rest up to the police.”
He slams his fists into the pitted dashboard with such force that the whole car shakes. Then he throws himself into the seatback. He pummels the soft center of the steering wheel. The horn bleats.
“Stop it! You’re going to hurt yourself. Peter!”
He carries on. He’s a machine fueled by a deep well of guilt, but she knows what to do in these situations. She knows the right way to squint and pucker to convey a sense of authoritative empathy. The technique has kept Thaddeus in line for decades, and maybe Peter isn’t that different—maybe no man is. She looks into his gaunt face with its premature lines and already a dusting of gray in the stubble, and she calibrates her expression.
“We’re calling it a night,” she says. “Maybe Steven will be home by now.”
He smirks, but she holds his gaze until she feels a shift in his mood. Sighing his consent, he reaches for her hand. Their fingers entwine and he gently bounces their hands against the gearshift. His fingers are much rougher than Thaddeus’s. They feel nice. She holds on until he regains some equilibrium.
He looks down at his knees and laughs. “I don’t care if he ever comes home.”
“Steven? No. You don’t mean that.”
“I’m thinking of leaving him.”
“Because of today?”
His head drifts toward the window and his eyes are closed. “It’s not just today.”
“Steven’s never mentioned anything to me about this.” She picks at a loose thread on her pants. “I always assumed... Oh, Peter, I’m so sorry.”
“We don’t want the same things. I’m not even sure we understand each other anymore.” He sighs. “This kind of life—a family—it’s not for him.”
“Well, have you talked to somebody about it?”
“Yeah, and I think that’s what it comes down to. We just want different things. And because he can’t give me what I want I think he resents me for wanting it. It’s kind of fucked up.” He fiddles with the angle of the rearview mirror, keeping his eyes away from her. “Anyway, I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I’ve held off because of Gertie, but that’s kind of a cliché, isn’t it?”
The color drains from her face and her arms feel heavy in her lap. All she can muster is banal advice about how difficult it is to know what the right thing to do is as a parent. “You just never really know.” When she hears her voice it sounds like it’s coming from a thousand miles away.
“I don’t think he’d fight me for custody, but there’s stuff—in my past—that if he wanted to be vindictive, and then after today...” He trails off.
“But you wouldn’t want to deny him some rights, would you?”
“I don’t think it’d come to that.”
A breeze rustles the stand of azaleas and cabbage palms abutting a nearby retention pond. A stray napkin spirals across the parking lot.
“Sorry,” he says, sniffling back tears. “I didn’t mean to put you in the middle of this.”
She manages a wan smile. “These things happen. I’m glad you told me.” But she can sense him retreating. It’s as if a wall has gone up between them, and she feels ashamed that she allowed her shock to get the best of her and now Peter will believe that he cannot confide in her.
“If the problem is with Gertie, Thaddeus and I... we’d be willing to watch her, indefinitely, if you two need some time to work things out.”
The wry grin that always hovers on the edge of his face deepens. “I appreciate the offer,” he says, “but she’s our responsibility.”
“Maybe I’m making a big deal out of nothing, but it’s just that you said—Never mind. I’m sure you know what you’re doing.”
“No, please.”
“It’s just... is it something I said?”
“I don’t think I follow.”
“Well, you said neither one of you wanted to emulate your parents. I know this family can be very selfish. Thaddeus has his things—I’ve indulged that, so it’s partly my fault—but we’re good parents. We raised Steven right, even if we don’t always agree on everything.”
“I never questioned your parenting skills, Cheryl.”
“No, I know...”
He sits up in his seat and squares his shoulders. “Did I miss something?”
A late-model Chevrolet rumbles out of the drive-through and
stops for a moment before merging onto the road. The commotion flushes an egret from the retention pond.
She worries her hands in her lap. “It’s just, you say you’re unhappy, but you don’t want my help. You never even leave Gertie with me.”
“It’s not you—”
“But what if it was just me?” she blurts out, afraid to lose her nerve now that she’s started. “Or just me and you?”
“I don’t follow.”
“It’s Thaddeus and Steven that are always causing the problems, but what if we didn’t need them.” She reaches for his hand and presses it to her breast. “What if it was just you and me and Gertie?”
“Are you suggesting—”
“An arrangement.” She looks at the prominent bulge of his knuckles and feels the warmth of his skin against her chest. “Like what you have with Steven. We can be a family. The way it should be without all this animosity.”
“You can’t be serious.” He pulls his hand away and drops the transmission into drive.
“Don’t do that,” she says. “Don’t be silent. We’re both adults here. Can’t we just discuss this like adults?”
He needlessly adjusts the mirrors, then grabs his phone from the center console. The Mercedes coasts toward the road. “I don’t think there’s anything to discuss. I’m sorry I bothered you with our private affairs.”
“Who are you calling?”
“The police. Maybe they have some news.”
AT FIVE A.M. SHE STOPS PRETENDING TO SLEEP AND gets dressed. She laces up her sneakers in the dark. Her phone, always nearby, is quiet. No text messages. No missed calls. The only activity a couple of notifications reminding her to return to games in progress, which she ignores. She slips the phone into her hip pocket and creeps downstairs, mindful to make as little noise as possible.
She doesn’t need the caffeine today but she prepares a quick cup of coffee anyway for the sake of her nerves. While the coffeemaker cheerfully percolates, she sorts through the contents of her purse by feel, electing to rely on the penumbra cast by the streetlamp just outside the living room window rather than risk losing her resolve in the rational brightness of her kitchen fluorescents. Her shame has made her a cat burglar in her own home. She may not be proud of what she’s about to do, but the possibility of it kept her up all night. Every time she closed her eyes she saw that image of Alex out at a bar with a stranger, a stranger she recognized. A familiar stranger she could trace. But she hesitated. Was she the type of person who stalked men? It would seem she has become that type of person.
