“Really?” She looks at him through her reading glasses, and she’s just used the surprised, slightly concerned tone one friend would with another. It’s a tone Daniel has overheard in diners and restaurants for years but rarely, if ever, has had it directed at him.
“I just came in for these.” He holds out the sunglasses he hasn’t tried on yet.
“You do know that those cost more than your entire outfit.” She smiles as she says this, and he just stares at her. Behind her reading glasses, her eyes look big and kind. “This is a consignment shop.”
He looks down at that “summer-weight” jacket, the silk pants and shirt beneath it. “These’re used?”
“We like to say pre-owned. But, you know, by the kind of men who can afford to wear them just once or twice before they toss them out like paper plates. I mean, look at this.” She leans close to the price tag tied to the sleeve button of the jacket. “Seventy-five dollars. This would easily cost you four or five hundred new. You do what you want, of course. They just fit you so well, is all.”
Again, that smile. Like they’ve both known each other for a very long time, like she knows all he’s done but that was so long ago, and why not own some good clothes for good times?
“I’ll take ’em.”
“Oh, good. And do you still want the Ray-Bans?”
He nods and hands them back to her. On the shelf below the sunglasses are a row of money clips—some silver, one with a turquoise stone in the center, some gold, one black steel with tiny red stars glued around its edges. Will Price always carried a money clip too, and Daniel hasn’t seen or thought of one since. Price paid them all in cash, and he’d pull it out of his front pants pocket, the bills folded and held together by a diamond-studded clip, and then Price would flick out the bills like perfectly placed words that never came easily to Danny, only the ones he was given to say up in the booth of the Himalaya when he was “The Sound.” And if he could go to his daughter now wearing the red blazer and white shirt and pants that had made him somebody on the strip, he would. She’d see what her mother had seen. A man who had been going places. A man who, if things hadn’t gone the way they had, might have become a Will Price himself.
“Would you like one of those, too?”
“Yeah. The silver one.”
“With the turquoise?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome . . .” She turns her head at him and draws that last word out, smiling, waiting to hear his name.
“Danny. I mean—Daniel.”
“Karen. It’s been a pleasure.”
Daniel nods, his face a hot mask as she hands him the money clip and he reaches into his pants for his cash. But as he pulls it out it’s clear the wad is too thick for that clip and now half his cash slips out from his hand onto the glass counter, over thirty hundreds, a few tens and ones, and there’s the naked shamed feeling he just showed her something he shouldn’t have.
“My, my, did you rob a bank?”
“No.” Again the hot face.
“Of course not.” She laughs lightly and begins to fold and bag his new old clothes. A lone trumpet is slicing through all the low bar noise from that club so long ago, and Daniel wants to tell this Karen that he’d earned each and every penny of every dollar on her counter, that he’s never stolen from anyone. Not ever. And inside, all those falls and winters and springs and summers, over and over again for fifteen cycles of them, he’d never understood the cons who’d planned their wrongdoings—the Bunker Hill boys with their banks, the men from the North End and Winter Hill and Providence, guys who’d laid out in advance just who they were going to hurt and how and when.
But not Danny Ahearn. It was one reason he’d liked Pee Wee Jones so much, because they’d both gotten locked up from falling into one bad moment they never wanted to come in the first place. But it had. It sure as hell had.
Daniel gathers up a dozen of the hundreds and folds them into his new turquoise and silver money clip. He asks Karen if she’s rung it up already, and she says she has, and he slips it into his pocket then picks up and straightens out the rest of the cash. The front door opens. Daniel turns and sees a man and woman, his age or older. The man’s holding the door for his wife, two paper shopping bags hanging by their handles from his hand, and he’s tanned and the little hair he has left is combed over his head sideways, his gut pushing against a maroon T-shirt with a setting sun in the center of his chest. His wife has let her hair go nearly white, but it’s styled around her pretty round face, and her eyes take in the rack of Bermuda shirts. “Oh, honey, look. You’ll find one here. You’ll definitely find one here.”
The man smiles, his eyes passing over the shirt rack and landing on Daniel, nodding at him like they’re both in this together—wives and keeping them happy, even if it means buying and wearing a shirt you don’t really want or need. You know, wives.
PART
FIVE
56
SUSAN SAT on the edge of her mattress, her fingers spread over a loosening knot of nausea she could no longer deny. Her mouth began to fill with saliva and there was an upward roiling and then she was rushing into the bathroom, the door slamming behind her as she dropped to her knees and hot shame heaved out of her into the toilet. The sperm and the egg. Her father and her mother. There was no cutting herself from either of them and she’d hardly even known them and now she was spitting into her toilet and why had she been so careless?
A knocking, Bobby’s muffled voice. “You all right?” The door opened behind her, and Bobby’s big hand cupped her forehead. She pulled away. “I’m all right.”
“Think it was something you ate?”
“Maybe.”
“Lois wants to leave, but I don’t think she should drive.”
Susan spat. The smell of her insides stung her nose, everything about her foul, really. Noni’s pinched face in the kitchen looking up at her. How could you, Susan? Oh, how could you?
“I’ll drive her.”
“I can do that, baby.”
“No, Bobby. I want to. Just follow us so I can come back home.” Her throat closed up on that last word, though Bobby didn’t seem to notice and he squeezed her shoulder and said, “I’ll walk her out. You sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine, Bobby. Really, honey, I’m fine.”
57
THE LITTLE man at the inn had helped, and it was good Daniel had come down the stairs in his new used suit and silk shirt because when he asked if the phone book was in the Business Office, the man behind the shiny oak counter took in Daniel with more respect than he had earlier, and he said, “We have no telephone book, Mr. Ahearn, but I’m more than happy to help you.” He began tapping his keyboard and asked Daniel for the town and the name of the person he was looking for.
“St. Petersburg. Susan Dunn.” Daniel felt as if he were telling a secret he should be keeping to himself.
“I see many possibilities. Do you know her age?”
“Forty-three.”
Forty-three this past May 5. Daniel had the flu that day, and he spent it lying in bed in his trailer instead of working. Not a May 5 had come and gone without Daniel thinking about it, feeling her out there somewhere. And Linda liked to bake cakes. She liked to buy those tubes of frosting at the IGA. Happy Birthday, my little Suzie Woo Woo!
“Susan and Robert Dunn?”
“I don’t know.”
“This is the only listing with that age range for a Susan Dunn, Mr. Ahearn. Shall I print it out?”
“Is it in St. Petersburg?”
“Oh, yes. Do you know where Eckerd College is?”
DANIEL DRIVES slowly down his daughter’s street, his old heart pumping an echo he can feel in his newly shaved face. His jacket’s shoulders are bunched up at his collar, and he glances back down at the La Habana Inn slip of paper on his lap.
Susan and Robert Dunn,
137 Osprey Lane, St. Petersburg, Florida.
All the odd-numbered houses are on th
e left so that’s where hers will be, too—133, 135. He’s cruising as slowly as a cop, and he’s afraid this will draw too much attention, but the next house has to be it. It’s a one-story stucco the color of an artichoke, and his tongue and mouth turn to sawdust. There’s a gray Honda parked in the driveway. Hers? For a heartbeat he sees her standing in the middle of their TV room in shorts with flowers on them, her shirt with a frilly lace hem. She’s laughing at something he’d just said or done, and he would’ve taught her to drive. He would have done that. And then he’s beginning to pass in front of that car and that house, and he eases off the gas and squints out at the black metal letters screwed in at an angle on the trim beside the front door: 137. The windows are small, most of them with light curtains, and his blood quickens and he accelerates to the stop sign at the end of her street.
The lanes in front of him are busy now with worker-bee traffic coming and going in both directions. There’s a buzzing in his fingers and toes, and he can see her college campus right there on the other side, the pines and the oaks and the open guard shack he’d driven by twice. He looks in his side-view mirror but can only make out the end of her driveway and a patch of grass. Is that her Honda in the driveway? Her husband’s?
A white SUV pulls up behind him. There’s a blonde driving it. Her shoulders are bare, and she’s tapping the wheel with two fingers and not like she’s listening to music, and so he takes a right into a gap in the traffic and thinks of the married women of Port City, all those well-put-together lawyers and teachers and mothers and their busy, busy lives. Susan’s probably just like them, and he needs to call her first. He knows where she lives, but now he needs to call her.
Cars pass him on the left. He looks down at Susan’s picture taped to the dash. He needs to find a phone. The sun is in a low haze, but his eyes don’t hurt glancing directly at it, these sunglasses the finest things he’s ever owned. On both sides of the road are golf courses in a blue-green light, men in white carts and white pants driving from one hole to the next, or standing on the grass with other men waiting for one of them to swing his club at the ball.
Back at St. Pete Beach, on his walk back to his room, he passed one couple after another, and then he watched five or six ladies leaving the outdoor tiki bar, laughing. One of them lit up a cigarette while another took their picture with her phone. They were all older than he was, or looked it, and he’d thought then that they were divorced or were widows, but now he thinks, no, they’ve played their own golf for the day and their men are still playing and, later, they’re all going to get together for drinks and dinner, and what a strange and beautiful place this is. Like some heaven they’d earned for themselves, but they can feel the clock ticking so the plan is to squeeze as much pleasure from each minute as they can get away with.
Up ahead is the Pinellas Bayway tollbooth back to the beach. Daniel slows and hands the smiling operator a dollar. He’s wearing a half-buttoned Hawaiian shirt, and he takes in Daniel with a warm nod, like he’s seen him every day like this for many years. He slaps the dollar into his drawer then drops a quarter into Daniel’s cupped hand. “You have yourself a fabulous night.”
Now he feels foolish in this suit, and again, yet one more time, there comes the itch to just turn north and drive back home. He now knows where his daughter lives. He’s seen where she works. And he has this printed-out photograph of her he can print out again new whenever he wants to. His little girl has done just fine—very fine, really—without him, and why mess with that now? What he should do is head back to his inn and use those Business Office computers to make out his own will. He can just put in her address and type up the rest then head home to find someone to execute it for him.
But he’s here. He’s here.
And so is the searing ache in his hips and legs that seems to be lodged in his lower gut now too. What he needs to do, more than anything, is find a toilet, and as the bridge slopes down to the intersection of what he’s learned is Gulf Boulevard, he sees off to the left a towering grand hotel the color of pink roses, and what a look he gets from the young valet in white as Daniel pulls his old red pickup under the domed archway and steps out and hands him the keys. The kid is taking in Daniel in his new suit, but he’s taking in his truck, too, his eyes dropping to Daniel’s work boots.
“Are you a guest, sir?”
Ruthless gravity is weighing on Daniel’s groin. “Nope. I won’t be long.” He turns and starts walking for the hotel’s tall glass doors.
“Sir, I need to give you a ticket.”
Daniel tells him he’ll be right back, and then he steps into the hotel’s lobby, and it’s like stepping back into a time of high-class living that raged brightly years before he was born. Stretching out before him is a shining marble floor that catches the gold light of the crystal chandeliers hanging high above, the ceiling held up by columns all the way to windows looking out over the gray gulf. There’s music playing, the soft rising and falling strings of a harp, and off to the right is a sitting area of deep sofas and chairs and a young woman in a black dress is sitting at that harp, her fingers moving along the strings like a butterfly flitting from one blade of grass to another. There’s low talk and high laughter and a sharp pinch in his abdomen, and he sees a men’s room between two palm trees in mahogany planters, then he’s inside that men’s room, standing at a urinal enclosed by slabs of polished gray marble.
He stares at a white vein in the stone and waits. He closes his eyes and hears whistling. It’s the bathroom attendant, a black man in a white shirt and red bow tie he passed on the way in but ignored. The tune the man’s whistling has to be his own. It’s a cheerful one and Daniel shakes his head at any good cheer coming from a job like this. Even he has never worked at a job this low, and as a hot dribble comes out of him, then another, he feels bad about rushing right by that man without so much as a nod.
He pisses and waits. Pisses and waits. His limbs feel light and heavy, hollow and packed with dust. He should drink something. He should eat something.
But he should call her first, shouldn’t he? “I don’t know.”
“Me, either, sir. Lord, I sure don’t.” The bathroom attendant laughs, and then Daniel is shaking himself off and stepping away without looking at what he’s left behind, the urinal flushing on its own. The attendant turns on the sink faucet for him. A white towel is folded over his arm.
“And how are we today, sir?” He is bald, the brown skin of his head and face smooth, but the whites of his eyes have yellowed and Daniel can see he’s an old man, a much older man than he is, and look how he’s spending his last days.
“Good.”
The attendant smiles as widely as if Daniel has just told him a long story that ends well for everybody. “That is fine, sir. That is fine indeed.”
The man offers Daniel soap from a silver dispenser. Daniel holds out his two cupped hands and receives it then scrubs. In the mirror is a well-dressed man wearing dark sunglasses. In the mirror is Will Price, and Daniel says, “I need a phone.”
“Yes, sir. They got one in the lobby bar. Been there since they built this palace.”
“When was that?”
“Oh, 1925. When I was two years old.” He smiles and shakes his head then reaches in front of Daniel to turn off the sink, placing the folded towel in his wet hands.
“So you’re—what? Almost ninety?”
“Oh, no, sir. I’m still in my short pants.” He laughs, this time harder. He pulls out a thin narrow comb and Daniel hands him back the towel then takes the comb and pulls it through whatever hair he has left. “You got kids?”
“Five that I know of.” He shakes his head again and takes back the comb then holds out to Daniel a small glass spray bottle, the old attendant’s index finger on the button. “Aftershave, sir?”
Daniel nods and offers his hands palms-up then slaps his face with a stinging liquid that smells like some garden at night in a faraway place. He wants to ask this old man about his kids. If they live nearby. If
he sees them. He wants to ask what they think of him working all dressed up in a shitter. When at his age he should be—what?
“I’m just pulling your leg, sir. I been with the same woman for sixty-eight years. Imagine that. Sixty-eight years.” He laughs and hands Daniel a wrapped breath mint. Daniel just looks at him, but it’s like looking at something good and private he’s got no right to look at, and he reaches into his left pocket and pulls out his money clip and takes out a C-note he drops onto the ones and fives in a glass jar beneath the mirror.
“No, sir. I can’t take that. No, sir.”
“Yes you can.” Daniel unwraps the mint and places it onto his tongue, its sharp sweetness a scolding and a blessing as he walks back out into the grand lobby in search of the bar and its very old phone.
58
SITTING IN the passenger’s seat of her own moving car, Lois stared out at fields of palmetto scrub under a sky the color of urine. Susan had tuned the radio to a news station, the kind at the lower end of FM where all the broadcasters sounded like college professors, and Lois never listened to it because she felt talked down to, but it was better than sitting in this quiet car because neither of them had said one word to the other since St. Petersburg. It was Lois who got in the last one. “If you won’t think of me, then think of your mother, Susan. Think about her.”
No, it was Susan, because she said, “I can’t believe you just said that.” She shook her head, her eyes on the road, and she looked like she was going to say more, but she did not. Now the air had grown thick and still. In her side-view mirror, Lois could see Bobby’s black Kia following them, Susan’s husband sitting so tall behind the wheel. It was Lois’s idea to go back home, but being driven and escorted like this made her feel like a child who’d broken the rules, and there was another feeling too, that what she’d worked so hard for since she was a young woman was slipping away, that Susan would do just what she wanted to whether Lois liked it or not, and you know what? So be it. Lois was too damned old and too damned tired to fight any longer. So damn be it.
Gone So Long Page 40
