by Scott Lasser
David reached for the remote and hit the mute button. It was Marlon’s friend. David had gotten his number from Michelle in a last-ditch effort to find Marlon. David had left a message to call back on his cell number, worrying that the law firm’s receptionists might scare the kid off. “Thanks for calling back,” David said.
“Yeah, you leave a message like that, you get a call back, you know?”
“So, do you have a number for Marlon?”
“I got Marlon. He right here. Wants to know if you’re for real. Whose money you giving?”
“It’s an inheritance from Dirk Burton.”
The phone went silent, and then a new voice came on.
“This Marlon Booker.”
“You’re a hard man to find, Marlon.”
“Not if you know where to look.”
He asked Marlon his date of birth, his mother’s name. He was the right Marlon Booker. Marlon agreed to come to David’s office, but he wanted cash. Cash? Unbelievable.
“I can’t give you cash,” David said.
“Why can’t you?”
“First, because I need a record of the disbursement for the estate and for the government. Second, because a hundred thou cash takes up a lot of space. What, you want a sack with a dollar sign on it?”
“Maybe no dollar sign.”
“You’ve got to take a check. Come to my office.”
“Be there in a couple hours. Where’s it at? Out in 248?”
“I’m not working today. It’s the Friday after Thanksgiving.” A thought occurred to David. “I guess you’ve got something to be thankful for. Did you go out to Ypsilanti to be with your mother?”
“It’s Thanksgiving?” Marlon said.
• • •
DAVID’S MOTHER WAS dead, and he’d spent enough time with his father. The woman he loved was AWOL. Later there would be a college game on the tube, some Big 12 matchup, which he still thought of as obscure, though he had lived for years in a Big 12 state. His idea for the day was to put his financial affairs in order, in preparation for the house purchase: balance the checkbook, file the brokerage statements, make sure everything was ready to go. This took twenty-five minutes. The house was so cheap he was paying cash.
He decided to take a drive down to see the house. Shelly was in Texas. He wished he could get in and walk around, lay out how he would live there, but he was happy just to check out the neighborhood.
November, Michigan style: gray sky hovering atop the telephone poles, brown leaves, faded grass, snow flurries swirling, as though circling down a drain. On Shelly’s street—his new street—dead leaves collected along curbs, along with the occasional American-made car. A few black kids—eleven years old, twelve, a couple with green Michigan State ski hats—were playing touch football, one of them hamming it up, the other yelling, “I got you! I got you!” The ham shook his head. “Nuh-huh,” he answered.
He thought about Cory. He could feel it, as though the boy were here. He’d be older now, sixteen. It was Thanksgiving. You were supposed to be with your children on Thanksgiving: it was the natural order of things.
David remembered a time when Cory was eleven. He had a friend named Andy Cash, who lived in a four-thousand-square-foot house two blocks away and always seemed to be starving. David made Cory’s school lunches, and one day Cory said, “I need two sandwiches.”
“Why?”
“I get hungry.”
He was a thin kid, and there was no way he was eating two sandwiches, but David made them. Soon Cory was asking for extra chips, a second apple.
David remembered the day. It was snowing, the air full of the big, wet flakes of late April in Denver, while the week before it had almost reached eighty degrees.
“Sit down,” David told him. He joined his son at the kitchen table. “I know you’re not eating two sandwiches or two apples. I also know it’s not right to lie, especially to your own father. So just tell me, what are you doing with the food?”
The boy looked stricken, caught. “You won’t get mad?”
“I doubt it,” David said.
“It’s Andy, Dad. He’s got nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?” Andy’s father was some big-shot lawyer for Qwest.
“No lunch. He never has any lunch.”
“Can’t he buy?”
“His parents, they never give him any money for lunch. They forget, I guess.”
“Who gets up with him, gets him off to school?”
“No one. He does that himself.”
Eleven years old. David felt his heart tear a little for his son, who would steal food for a friend. You can try to teach your kids to be generous, he thought, but really they either have it in them or they don’t.
“Tell you what,” he told Cory. “From now on, I’ll make lunch for Andy. And you don’t hide things from me. Deal?”
“Deal.” Cory smiled, and David thought, This is what it’s all about.
• • •
NOW HE SAT in the car and watched a few more plays, and then he got out of the car, surprised to find a man standing on the sidewalk, waiting for him.
He was a stocky guy in an overcoat, hands thrust deep in his pockets. “May I help you?” he asked.
“I’m David Halpert. I’m buying this house.”
The man looked at Shelly’s house, then back at David.
“Shelly’s?” the man said.
“Yeah. Great place. Thought I’d come over, take another look.”
“Where you from?” asked the man.
“Most recently Denver, but I grew up in Detroit.”
“Detroit?”
“Birmingham,” David admitted.
“So you’ve got some idea what you’re doing.”
“Being the white guy, you mean.”
The man smiled. “I’m Russell Wilson,” he said. “I live next door.” He pointed behind him, then looked at his place, as if to make sure it was still there. “Listen, you want to come over, have a cup of coffee?”
Wilson’s house was at least as big as Shelly’s, though slightly different in style. “Craftsman” was the word that came to David’s mind, though he was no expert in architecture or design. Around the house were pictures of children who would now be grown and of what David took to be grandchildren. David ended up in the kitchen, where he met Susan Wilson, a trim woman, formally dressed.
“Really?” she said when she heard David would soon be a neighbor. She went to work on the coffee.
Wilson had been a judge but was now one year into retirement. He’d bought the house in the summer of ’68, “when I was a young man.” What he left unspoken was that it had been the year after the riots. Fires had burned whole blocks as tanks rolled down the streets of Detroit. By the next year, whites were giving their homes away and moving out of the city.
Wilson grilled David on his life, especially why he was moving here. “You understand, you’ll be the only white person,” Wilson said more than once, as if he feared maybe David didn’t understand. And so David kept saying the truth, which was that he did indeed know what Wilson was saying. It was hard to make people understand that he was committed to the idea of return, that he was coming home, all the way, and he wasn’t going to be dissuaded by the racial striation of his city or the expectations of its citizens. He was, for once, doing things his own way. He was forty-five years old; this would be the last great adventure of his life.
Wilson was impressed that David had known Dirk Burton. “Quite a man,” Wilson said. He sipped his coffee and put the cup back on its saucer in a way that David thought was making some sort of point about Dirk, or maybe race, or maybe both. At this point it seemed better not to ask for clarification.
“So tell me,” Wilson finally said. “Are you the white Moses? Is there now going to be a steady stream of white folk making their way back to Palmer Woods after wandering forty years in the suburban wilderness, or . . .” Here he paused for words, or maybe just breath. “Or, David Halpert, are you just the one lunat
ic who wants to come back?”
“I’m the one lunatic,” David admitted.
XI
E-CALL WANTED TO go with him, said there was no other way. He’d wear his 9mm in his waistband with the big hoodie. You get a call that’s too good to be true—one hundred G’s—then it’s too good to be true. If this guy David was for real, no one would see anything. But E-Call smelled a rat.
“No, Dirk, he was like an uncle, he told me he was leaving me money,” Marlon explained. He had thought it would be a decent number, like five grand. A hundred grand? It was crazy; it did seem like a setup. If Elvis was behind it, then he knew that E-Call was hiding Marlon and they’d go to this meeting and end up dead or have to shoot their way out, which he’d never done. It was times like this he asked himself how he’d gotten into this life, but the answer was simple enough: he’d followed E-Call. His brother. Marlon had always liked to go where he knew someone, and this was no different.
“ ’Kay,” Marlon said. “You bring the gun. I’ll drive.”
“You’re gonna go meet some white man in a suit in that piece-a-shit car?” E-Call said. True enough, but there was no stress in owning a beater. It was something Marlon had learned from his father.
“I think we missed Thanksgiving,” Marlon said.
“It’s next Thursday, right?”
“Yesterday.” They’d spent it inside, playing video games. Marlon didn’t go out much, because there was no way to know who he might run into. He wondered now what his mother had done for the holiday. In any case, he couldn’t visit her; he wanted to stay low till the coast was clear. The woman had enough trouble without her son bringing more home.
“You think we’ll know each other in forty years?” Marlon asked. He tried to imagine his friend as an old man, but the only thing he could come up with was an image of gray hair. People, he knew, aged in different ways than that.
“Shit, I’m behind a week as it is.”
“Just thinking ahead.”
“Just like I used to tell everyone about you. ‘He’s more than just quiet,’ I’d say. ‘Wheels are turning.’ ” E-Call paused. “If it’s real, this lawyer thing, what you gonna do with all that money? You could actually buy a Benz with that much.”
“And then what if Elvis sees me?”
“Shit, man,” E-Call said, almost mesmerized in thought. “You buy that Benz and you drive the hell away.”
XII
SHE’D BEEN TO her tenth reunion, which had been held at the Pontiac Silverdome, that stadium with the inflated roof that wasn’t any better for reunions than it had been for football games or rock concerts. Some architect had designed the building, she thought. It was the product of human design, unfettered by the messiness of love and family, and still it was shit. Soulless and depressing. Now she was at a banquet hall in Pontiac, the southern end of Pontiac, but still Pontiac. From the looks of it, maybe the same architect.
She had to park far from the door and then walk along the line of cars, most of them American, illuminated by the buzzing street lamps. It was freezing, the air of her youth. She finally reached the hall, the automatic doors opened, and she stepped in from the cold.
“Carolyn!”
She looked up and there was a girl she knew she should know, they had hung together all through sophomore year, stayed friends till Carolyn left town after high school, which was the last time they talked.
“Oh my God, you look exactly the same. I mean, exactly. How do you do it?”
“I don’t know,” Carolyn said. Tracy, Theresa, Terry. Something with a T, she thought.
They went to the coat check, Carolyn feeling a little shy. Who else was going to come up to her whose name she wouldn’t be able to remember? This was the Midwest, and they would all be well-meaning. She was beginning to hate the whole idea of well-meaning, because well-meaning required a response.
There was a guy at the coat check and Carolyn couldn’t help but notice him. He was tall, lean, had a full head of dark hair and dark, kind eyes, eyes not unlike David’s, which were, she thought, David’s best feature. They showed his basic intelligence and depth. Like David, this man was handsome, able to attract attention when he walked into a room. He took his claim check and headed back toward the hall.
“Who was that?”
“Never seen him before,” Carolyn said.
The next step, thank God, was the name-tag table. Theresa it was. “Let’s get a drink,” she said.
Carolyn followed Theresa into the hall, packed already with a couple hundred people, a room full of strangers with a full bar, which, Carolyn had to admit, was her kind of party. An Irish whisky would have been lovely.
It was about an hour later when Suzy found her. Carolyn was nursing her second tonic water while looking at a board from homecoming senior year. Carolyn had been lesser royalty in that homecoming court, and there was a picture of all of them standing on a float parked at the fifty-yard line at halftime, all smiles, though Carolyn remembered that the night had been as cold as this one, and that she’d been embarrassed to stand next to Monica Honans, who was so beautiful, and apparently not at the reunion.
“How are you?” Suzy asked.
“I ended my marriage,” Carolyn said. “You were right.”
In the background the band started up “Sweet Home, Alabama.”
“I’m sorry,” said Suzy.
“Well,” Carolyn said, “I’m less miserable.”
The handsome man from the coat check walked by. Carolyn and Suzy watched him pass.
“Look at Paul Michalowski, all grown up.”
“Who is he?” Carolyn asked.
“Exactly. Never even noticed him in high school, and now look.”
“What’s he do?”
“He’s a bankruptcy attorney. Not for people but for corporations.”
“Looks like he’s doing well.”
“Yeah, well, business is booming.”
• • •
TEN MINUTES LATER, Carolyn found herself standing close to him. “Excuse me,” he said, “but aren’t you Carolyn Evans?”
“I am.”
He smiled down at her. It was almost paternalistic, that smile. “Paul Michalowski. I asked you out once, to homecoming dance, tenth grade. You said no.”
“I was a bitch then,” she said. “I mean, what did I know?”
He chuckled. “What did any of us know?”
• • •
SHE RAN OUT to her car, the air biting. Her eyes teared. She turned the engine over, then ran back to the vestibule to wait. It reminded her of being a girl, when her father would let her start the car in winter. How old was she then? Fourteen, maybe. Now her classmates were trickling out, though the band was still playing, this time an endless version of “Sympathy for the Devil.” Dale Mortola came up to her.
She’d looked for him. She’d lost her virginity to him, the typical fiasco; the whole experience should have been enough to put her off sex for good, though of course it hadn’t. “It’ll get better,” Natalie had assured her at the time. Now she realized that Natalie had been talking about David. And she was right.
“I was hoping you’d be here,” Dale said. “And I’m surprised you are. Thought you’d be a million miles away.”
“Me, too.”
“I’m sorry about Natalie. I mean, it’s horrible.”
“Yes, it is.”
He asked questions and she answered, aware that she should ask him about himself. Deep down he was a sweet guy, kind, caring, from the look of him not all that successful. His wife came up, a plump woman with an elaborate hairdo, hair stacked on her head with tendrils dropping down, the whole effect unfortunate. But then she moved to him, put her arm around his waist, and he returned the gesture and smiled, and Carolyn thought, Look at that, these two people are still in love.
She drove home feeling that she was getting it down, the cold and heating cars and the old boyfriends, the whole world she’d lost still there, beating away, if a bit more
decrepit. It was snowing fairly hard now. The wipers swept the white flakes away from her windshield in a rhythm that made it seem there was a dream or a memory out there, if she looked hard enough into the darkness.
XIII
SONOFABITCH IF THERE weren’t two or three inches of snow in the yard, on the driveway, and it was still Thanksgiving weekend. Sol, as a young man, had always welcomed the snow, the clean freshness of it—even on those brutally cold nights in Korea he had appreciated the snow—but lately he was beginning to see it for the pain in the ass others thought it was. Now, for instance, he wanted the paper and it was at the end of his white driveway. He kicked around in the closet, trying to find his boots, and then decided he’d just wear his loafers. It was only to the end of the drive and back—why make a federal case out of a minute or two of cold feet?
And cold they were—he didn’t bother with socks either—as he made his way down the drive. It was slippery, and with each step he could feel a little sliding. He slowed, careful not to fall. Down at the street was the Free Press, wrapped in a plastic cover, along with the part of the Sunday paper that could be delivered on Saturday. Once he’d sent David to do this. He bent and grabbed the freezing plastic bag. As he stood a car honked its horn, and when he turned to look he lost his footing. He never saw the car, just heard it retreating. Maybe it was two cars. His hip was on fire with pain, though he was lying in the snow. Christ, he thought. A broken hip, maybe.
Or maybe not. He lay there on the cold pavement, afraid to move. It was his right hip. Also his right hand and wrist. He moved the hand slightly, then his body, to get flat on his back. It was freezing. Above, the sky was gray, a deep whitish gray that seemed very close, or possibly very far away.
The thought occurred to him, clearly and calmly, that he might die, that the end could come in just such a ridiculous way. He thought of his wife, tackled to death. Wasn’t the moment of death always unexpected in that way?
“Hey, mister, let me help you up.”
He heard this and was at first unsure if he was dreaming it, but there was a kid there, blue eyes, head of blond stubble. “You okay?” the kid said.
“I fell.” Sol reached out a hand. “Help me sit up.”
