by Earl Emerson
“Is that how you look at me? As somebody who gets angry at anybody who has more money than I do?”
“I would say that’s one of your defining traits.”
“And not a pretty one, either.”
“Most times, no. It isn’t.”
Zak knew his sour attitude toward wealth had contributed to their breakup. If she hadn’t belonged to the moneyed class, her reaction to his biases might have been different, but she did and it wasn’t. Not that it was her fault he was a prejudiced jerk. “I was thinking about you,” he said. “I’m glad you came. How long are you going to be around?”
“Not long. Our parents are expecting us home tonight.”
“What are you two doing?” Accompanied by Fred and Chuck, Kasey walked over and wrapped his arm around his sister’s shoulders, something Zak knew he only did when he wanted something from her.
“The bigger question is, what are you guys doing hounding my friend,” said Nadine.
“We’re not hounding anybody, are we, Zak?”
“I don’t know what you’re doing.”
Kasey held his sister close and said, “Just think. If I’d kept dating Zak’s sister and you’d kept dating Zak, one day you and I might be brother and sister and brother-in-law and sister-in-law all at the same time. Wouldn’t that be the ticket?”
“Why don’t you leave my sister out of it?”
“Oooh. I suppose I’d be touchy, too, if my sister was thirty-one and working part time for the post office.”
“Leave her alone,” said Nadine, shaking off Kasey’s arm and holding Zak’s look. “And don’t you two dare get into this old argument again. Just stop this!”
“No. Don’t stop,” said Zak. “I want to know what’s wrong with honest work.”
“All I’m saying is we all have the same opportunities in life, and people who end up in menial jobs like hers are doing them because they’re not smart enough or industrious enough to set high goals for themselves.”
“You think you’ve achieved what you have in life through your own hard work? That you can avoid bad luck because you’re smart? Jesus, you’re twenty years old. You don’t know shit about life.”
“Anyone can educate themselves to make good choices, and if they don’t bother to do that, I don’t call that bad luck. I call it willful stupidity and laziness,” Kasey said. “I’ve gone to good schools and I make educated choices, so things are always going to be fine with me.”
“There are plenty of smart people who, given their circumstances, have made the best choices they could and will never be able to dig themselves out of the hole they’re in. And there are brainless idiots in your spot who, through no accomplishment of their own, will be rich the rest of their lives. It’s good to be smart, but it’s better to be lucky. All you are is one of those assholes who was born on third base and woke up thinking he’d hit a triple.”
“Zak,” Nadine said. “Don’t do this.”
“You mean, don’t voice my opinion?”
“No. I mean, don’t be so disagreeable.”
Hugh stepped forward and spoke in his most professorial and phony voice. “Okay, okay, okay. There’s something I’ve been meaning to say. Ready?” Nadine nodded, even if nobody else did. Pregnant pauses were Hugh’s stock in trade. “You have a camel, a donkey, and a kangaroo…” Everybody had stopped their separate discussions to watch Zak and Kasey go at it, and now they were watching Hugh. “A camel, a donkey, and a kangaroo…and three naked ladies.” Hugh blushed and stepped directly across the fire as if he hadn’t seen it, tripped on one of the logs, then danced about as if he’d been burned. “You girls don’t mind a joke about naked ladies and kangaroos, do you?”
The eager look on his face cracked up nearly everyone. It was a welcome respite to the quarrel Zak and Kasey had been waging. The only one not amused was Scooter, who hadn’t taken his eyes off Nadine since her arrival.
Once the laughter died down, Hugh said, “No joke. This isn’t the time for jokes. I have a bet to make. I said it before and I’ll say it again. My guys can beat your guys. Up this road. Down this road. Anywhere you say.”
“Wait a minute,” Scooter said. “Are you talking about your guys on bikes and us in trucks?”
Nodding rapidly, Hugh said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. My guys can beat your guys. Up or down. I’ll betcha a hundred dollars.”
“That’s just stupid,” said Jennifer.
“No, no,” said Scooter. “Let’s do it.”
“I like it,” said Kasey. “Let’s go.”
“I’m not racing a truck up this hill,” said Stephens.
“Then we’ll race down,” said Scooter. “We’ll make it easy for you guys. We’ll race from here down to the center of the bridge.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Stephens. “That sounds safe. My bicycle bumping up against a truck. Who’s going to get killed in that scenario?”
“Then let’s make it a time trial,” said Scooter.
The cyclists all looked at one another until Giancarlo said, “I’ll do it.”
“A hundred bucks,” said Hugh.
Scooter stepped into the center of the group. “Why don’t we make it a thousand?”
13
May
Nadine was aware that her laughter was drawing looks from the other patrons, but she couldn’t stop herself. Who would have guessed the stoic fireman who’d saved her from a life in a motorized wheelchair and who had such a dour outlook on the world would be hiding this streak of humor? She not only loved listening to his stories but found that he liked hers, which was refreshing, because until she met Zak she hadn’t known any guys who were good listeners.
They’d played tennis again, their seventh time, on the indoor courts at Seattle University and now they were having brunch together, a habit established after that first match: coffee or brunch, one or the other, depending on how long they played and what each had scheduled for the day. She never did call the police about the break-in to her car, mostly because she was 99 percent certain the culprit was Scooter, who had a key and who was likely to pull just that sort of stunt if he caught her playing tennis with another man.
It had taken her more than a year to realize two things about William Potter III. First: even though he was financially secure for life, he was more adrift emotionally than just about anybody she knew. Second: he was a bully, pure and simple, and probably always would be. Once she’d cemented those facts into her thinking, she knew she had to break up with him, and she did it in May. Largely because she made the mistake of announcing it in his car, the breakup took almost four hours. They were parked near Chism Park on Lake Washington, and he told her he wasn’t going to take her home until she changed her mind. They argued for hours, but eventually he relented and took her home.
Even though Zak still wasn’t much of a challenge for her on the tennis court, she looked forward to her matches with him, as well as to the after-match coffee sessions. He was playing better now, and despite her strenuous attempt to skunk him, he’d managed to win a couple of games that morning. Zak was the only male she’d ever played who didn’t get irked when she whipped him. In fact, despite how hard he fought to win, she had a feeling he almost enjoyed getting beat by her.
“I broke up with my boyfriend,” she said, wondering why revealing this to Zak made her so nervous. Was it because she was afraid this announcement might change their casual relationship, or because she was afraid it wouldn’t?
“Okay. Sorry to hear that. How about a movie?”
“I think it might be too soon to go out with other people.”
“We’re just friends, right? This won’t be a romance or anything. I mean, I won’t send you flowers or chocolates or a watermelon. I just don’t like going to movies by myself.”
“A watermelon?” They both laughed. “Okay. Sure, then.”
Their first date was disappointingly platonic. Nadine wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, but they hadn’t held hands in the theater line in the
cold or done anything more than chat the way they always chatted. She liked talking with him, liked being with him, and had the feeling he liked being with her, too.
He was twenty-eight years old and lived in a world of men and women who did things she could only dream of, while she was a nineteen-year-old student who still resided mostly at home, was answerable to Mom and Dad every night, and had never done anything more thrilling than wrecking the Lexus her father had purchased for her eighteenth birthday.
Before the trailers began, Zak leaned over and said, “Would you like some popcorn?”
“Sure.”
“With butter or without?”
“Without, I guess. I am supposed to be in training.”
“Just a little butter?”
“No, thank you.”
“Something to drink?”
“A Diet Pepsi.”
“Jujubes?”
“No, thank you.”
“Sure you don’t want any butter?”
“No butter.”
“Licorice Whips?”
“No, thank you.”
“Dots?”
“Would you just go?”
“Okay, but what about M&M’s?”
“I don’t want M&M’s. Just go,” Nadine said, a little too loudly, realizing their neighbors in the packed house were glancing at her. It was hard sometimes for her to tell when he was pulling her leg. She laughed quietly. She’d never met anybody quite so bent on making everything just a little bit fun.
14
Zak and Nadine were on a jaunt to see Nadine’s grandmother in Broadmoor, an exclusive, gated community in Engine 34’s district where her father had been raised.
Since she was old enough to walk, her grandmother had kept up with her comings and goings and had recently been following her relationship with Scooter, though not with approval. Now, learning that she had a new guy in her life, Nana had insisted she bring Zak around so she could inspect him. Nadine thought it would be tricky to convince Zak to visit her grandmother, but after he learned she had been arrested back in the 1960s for protesting the Vietnam War and more recently for a sit-in at city hall to spotlight the city’s poor treatment of the homeless, he said he would love to meet her.
Nana was going to get along famously with Zak. For one thing, they both had a no-nonsense approach to life. For another, they both believed humankind was slowly but wantonly destroying the planet. Plus, each had an offbeat sense of humor she was sure the other would appreciate.
Even though the May weather had turned nippy and clouds were rolling in, Zak and Nadine both wore shorts with light jackets and athletic shoes. Zak mentioned he couldn’t recall ever wearing anything but athletic shoes, and Nadine said she couldn’t, either. She wondered if it was silly to be thinking they had a lot in common because they both wore Nikes. But of course there was more; there was always more. There was what her friend Lindsey called the “indefinable chemical attraction” that either exists or doesn’t exist between every person on the planet. It definitely existed between Nadine and Zak, though neither had acted on it yet. There was the way Zak listened to her talk about tennis or her religious beliefs or school, interested in what she was saying in a way nobody else in her life was interested, except perhaps Nana. There was the way he encouraged and admired her athletic ambitions—her parents condescendingly regarded her sport as nothing more than a “stage” she would outgrow, and Scooter had actively tried to discourage it.
Nadine was conscious of the fact that this was only the second time she and Zak had met without tennis as an excuse. She was also aware that Zak looked on this as a benchmark in their relationship. “Meeting relatives,” he said, grinning, when he picked her up. “Big step.”
“I suppose,” she said. She tried not to think of the two of them as “dating,” mostly because during the breakup with Scooter she’d told him she wasn’t seeing anybody, and that she specifically wasn’t seeing that “fireman dude.” If he found out she was dating him now he’d think she’d been dating him all along, and that might cause even more problems than she already had. Scooter disliked Zak for a number of reasons besides the obvious—Zak’s interest in her. To Scooter’s way of thinking, Zak’s secondary offenses were his job as a firefighter and the fact that he was older, as little sense as either made.
“He’s a control freak,” Lindsey said to her about Scooter. “Face it. He wants to control every event in your life. Everybody you see or talk to, and everywhere you go.”
Now that she’d had time to review their relationship over the past year, she realized Lindsey was right—Scooter had done his best to dictate her own life to her, disapproving of her friends, her choice of college, her love of tennis, even her belief in the Lord. Scooter had been even more demanding these past months, moody, and…well, let’s face it, horny, which posed a problem for someone bent on remaining a virgin until her wedding night. Most of their dates had ended in some sort of argument about sex. In all the time she’d spent with Zak, they had yet to argue about anything. It was nice to know relationships didn’t have to be one titanic struggle after another, or that she didn’t have to be defending her honor every time she left the house.
She was casually comfortable with Zak in a way she hadn’t been with anyone before, and she liked that. She liked it a lot. They seemed to be forming a relationship of equals, something she hadn’t seen in her own family, where her father more or less ran the show.
Today Zak was driving his van, which was full of tools and paint cans, a complete contrast with Scooter’s immaculate BMW 3 Series or her own Lexus. She remembered the day Scooter found out she’d been meeting Zak for tennis. “You’re not going out with some asshole who drives a van, are you?”
“We’re just friends. I can have friends. You can’t run everything in my life.”
“No guy is just friends with a girl who looks like you. He wants to fuck you.”
“Would you please watch your language? I know that’s not true.”
“Of course it’s true. Mark my words. Some asshole firefighter in a van. And nearly ten years older than you. Jesus Christ!” He’d been furious over the breakup and, as far as she knew, was still furious. The situation was delicate, because Scooter remained Kasey’s best friend and was in and out of the house every day.
She and Zak had been talking rather casually about each other’s families when Nadine said, “So what was your family life like after your sister died?”
“You really want to know?”
“I want to know.”
“None of us ever really got over her death. My father started drinking and scrapping with Mom over trivial stuff, and then Mom threw him out, and later they got divorced. Mom took solace in a new life that alternated between religion and prescription drugs. When she was out of meds or couldn’t talk a doctor into prescribing more, she would take up another religion. As soon as she had a fresh supply, the religion would drop away. The religion part of it pulled me into an endless series of church meetings, Sundays, Wednesdays, Thursday nights, and sometimes all day Saturday. It depended on the denomination. I figured if it was helping my mom cope, then I could put in the time. When she wasn’t praying, she would get juiced up on painkillers and diet pills. Booze was a vice she relegated to my father.”
“Sounds awful.”
“I had Stacy, and she was great. When I was fourteen, I got into bike racing. It wasn’t easy, because racing gear isn’t cheap and we didn’t have a lot of money, so I mowed lawns in the summer to pay for a bike and parts. Looking back, I think I got into bikes to make myself into the person I wanted to be. A lot of kids from troubled families find things to throw themselves into as a way of subsuming the self.”
“You think I’m doing that with tennis?”
“Doubtful. Would you say you’re from a troubled family?”
“No. I wouldn’t say that at all. So how did you become a firefighter?”
“I graduated high school with pretty good grades, went to commun
ity college for part of a year, and then, when there was no more money for school, got a job painting houses. It wasn’t bad work, and the people in the company I worked for treated us great, but one day one of the other painters got on with the fire department. I visited him at his station and thought it looked like a pretty good gig.”
“What about the rest of your family?”
“After Charlene’s death, my father spent fifteen years drinking. He had a pretty good job for the first few years and paid child support, but after a while the money stopped coming and he disappeared. We thought he might be dead. Later he told me he’d worked a succession of small-time jobs, mostly physical labor, making a fraction of what he was used to and barely keeping his head above water. The household was different after my mom became the sole breadwinner. We’d been living high on the hog until the divorce, but afterward a lot of my well-off friends didn’t feel comfortable around a kid who didn’t even have money for a movie ticket. Then, when I was seventeen, Mom got cancer. She fought through it, took the treatments, and declared bankruptcy two years later. The cancer went away, but a year and a half later it reappeared, except that this time she didn’t tell anybody. It was just about two years after that when she died.”
“That’s so sad.”
“She died a couple of days after my twenty-first birthday. She just didn’t know how to fight the good fight a second time. Not without money or friends, and she’d alienated most of her friends with the drugs.”
“I’m sorry. And your father? What’s he doing? I mean, besides rebuilding our pool house.”
“He lives with me. He’s doing okay. He’s a nice guy. Everybody likes him. He goes off on a bender about twice a year, very quietly, disappears for a few days, and then he’s back. I don’t really understand the psychology of it, because the rest of the time he won’t touch a drop.”
