The Last Good Day

by Peter Blauner

  “What?” Jeff shrugged. “It belongs to one of your guys. Keeps the wood from rotting, I guess.”

  “ ’Scuse me?”

  Paco looked from Jeff to the can and then back again.

  “One of your guys was doing our deer fence this summer. The guy who was here with you yesterday. Mike Fallon. Old friend of my wife’s. I thought you knew that.”

  Paco’s head became a stubbly sphere of clefts and ridges. “So, what’s it still doing here?”

  “Beats me. I don’t get that involved. He took two or three other cans with him when he came to pick up his tools last week.”

  The sergeant’s mouth opened slightly.

  “So Mike was by in the last week?” Paco asked, the skin wrapping tight over his skull again.

  “Yeah, sure.” Jeff stared at him. “Don’t you guys talk to each other?”

  21

  “HE DID WHAT?”

  Barry sat up quickly, as if he was about to choke. He’d started off doing one of those tender just-hold-me things with Lynn after the kids went to bed, but it somehow turned into a whole hot fleshy triple-X-rated adventure during which they were bouncing around the four-poster like pinballs, falling off the mattress, tonguing and humping wildly on the floor. Eighteen years and she could still intrigue and startle, still beguile and enthrall, still draw him in so deep and rock and roll him with such abandon that half his relatives, the School Board, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir could all walk in the room and he wouldn’t be able to tear himself off her. But then … a huff. A restless shifting of the hips, an upward tilting of the torso. A murmured “I’m sorry … I just …” Okay. He backed off: she needed time. Her best friend was dead. Come on, man. Call that dog back from the hunt.

  And then she suddenly climbed off the floor and up into bed and laid this story on him about her ex-boyfriend showing up at the studio.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding,” he said, getting in beside her. “This guy’s supposed to be investigating a murder. What’s he doing coming by the house unannounced in the first place?”

  “He said he had some more questions.”

  “I’m sure he did.”

  He propped up his pillow and punched it a few times as he pictured Fallon smiling down at him in the train station parking lot. You trying to tell me she’s never mentioned me?

  “You didn’t let him think it was okay to make a play for you, did you?”

  “Of course not.” She pulled the linen sheet over her breasts. “I told him to go away.”

  “I just couldn’t help noticing that you were a little cagey when I asked you about him before.”

  She sighed and started to tug a blanket away from him. “It’s complicated.”

  “So you keep telling me.”

  He felt the shifting of her weight on the bedsprings. It had taken him years to truly understand that when you marry someone, you marry a whole history. Not just the bloodlines that give your son the big nose and your daughter high cholesterol. You marry close friends, old records, inside jokes, and long-standing Friday-night traditions. You marry into arguments you never made, deals you would’ve never agreed to in a million years, promises you could never hope to keep.

  “Then are you going to fill me in on some of this deep background or am I just going to have to go blundering along, stumbling over my own dick?”

  She sat up and fluffed the pillows behind her. In the bedroom candlelight, she looked like a portrait of one of those fair porcelain beauties who always turned up in the middle of tawdry nineteenth-century scandals that caused great empires to collapse.

  “Well, you know, things got a little rough after the first time my mother got sick,” she began.

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “My parents had already split up, and my dad was living in the city, making the swinging bachelor’s scene at Maxwell’s Plum or wherever.”

  Barry snorted at the mention of her Deadbeat Dad, who’d stepped out on the family just in time to miss the tail end of the Sexual Revolution. The brilliant advertising mind that brought us the famous chimp Mr. Muggleby smoking a Winston in a Chevy convertible. Barry remembered the old man standing by himself in his groovy black turtleneck and tweed jacket at their wedding reception, trying to hit on young waitresses going by.

  “So it was basically the three of us staggering along,” said Lynn, tucking the sheet under her armpits. “I’d just gotten my learner’s permit, and I had this ridiculous Chrysler Cordoba my father left us so I could get Mom to the doctor’s and do the shopping …”

  “Ah, Cordoh-bah,” Barry purred like Ricardo Montalban. “Feel the rich Corinthian leatha-ar.”

  “Exactly. It was like steering the Love Boat.”

  It occurred to him that she’d never mentioned this car before. Not that he’d ever probed her that much about high school.

  “Anyway,” she said, “one day it stalls out in the school parking lot, and this Eric Clapton song comes on the tape player. You know, ‘Sister will do the best she can …’ And I just lost it. I couldn’t keep it together anymore. My parents are divorced. My mother has MS. I just broke up with my boyfriend. And I’m sitting there, tears streaming down my face because we’re like a boat taking on water every day.”

  “What about your father? Where was he?”

  “He was being a schmuck,” she said, giving the deli-counter Yiddish she’d picked up from him a certain WASPish élan. “Trying to pick up the coat-check girl, visiting about once a month, and chintzing out on child support payments.”

  He couldn’t recall the last time she’d spoken with such heat about her father. But everything was sounding different tonight. He wondered if there was more to the story of her and the cop in the studio than she’d let on so far.

  “So, what happened with the car?”

  “So I look up, and there’s Michael Fallon staring at me. And I’m like, Oh, shit.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I thought he was a lunatic. His older brother, Johnny, and him were like these local legends who’d go down to the river and shoot fish and give each other ink tattoos, like inmates. And we all knew their father was this prison guard who used to beat them and whip them up like rottweilers so they’d act even crazier.”

  “I went to school with guys like that.” Barry shook his head. “The Lobrano brothers. Their parole officers came to our graduation.”

  “So I think I’m about to get carried off and raped, but instead he pops the hood, takes a look, goes to get some tools from his car, and five minutes later he’s like, ‘Okay. Try it now. You had carbon on the spark plugs.’”

  “The course of true love. He fixed your car.”

  “Listen, it was more than my father was doing.” She picked up an elastic band from the night table to tie her hair back. “It was good to have a man around.”

  “I’ll bet.” He wagged his eyebrows, not wanting to appear to take this too seriously.

  “It wasn’t just this caveman thing,” she protested. “He was really nice to me. I guess he kind of recognized that we were both damaged goods. I remember he asked me out for ice cream about a week after he fixed my car. And I just kind of mentioned that I was trying to figure out how to get Mom into the car for her next appointment. And so he just shows up the next day and literally carries her to the car, as if she was this precious vase. It was … sweet.”

  “Sounds like you were really into him,” he said, noticing her face was still flush and warm.

  “Yeah, but you know what? I wasn’t so much into him as a guy. As a boyfriend. I was more into everything around him.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He found himself pausing and pondering little details that he normally would’ve shrugged off and forgotten. He’d always just assumed that she was reticent talking about this time in her life because she’d got slingshot so abruptly into adulthood. But now he was beginning to wonder if there was another reason.

  “I mean, I kind of fell in love with h
is whole world. For awhile.” She gave him a worried look, wanting him to understand. “He was this real neighborhood guy, and I grew up on a street that didn’t even have sidewalks. You know what I mean? His family was real bedrock in this town. Literally. They came over during the potato famine and helped build the old tunnels and aqueducts.”

  “Sandhogs they used to call them.”

  “They totally took me in,” she said. “His mother would cook these big heaping trays of lasagna and ziti for me to take home to my mother and sister when we were all living on junk food and pizza. And then his dad would give Mike extra money to take me out to the really nice restaurants in town, like Florio’s and …” She stopped and shook her head, silently recriminating herself. “I didn’t get what a big deal that was. These were working people. They never even took themselves out.”

  “So why’d you break up with him?”

  He found himself pulling back the layers, playing prosecutor, wondering exactly how it was that she’d managed to never mention these people in his presence before.

  “I don’t know. I guess I just started seeing around the edges too much. But it’s not like I was totally naive either. I did some things that were maybe kind of questionable.”

  “Like what?”

  He noticed lumps and hills appearing and disappearing under the covers as she fidgeted. Here a bent knee, there a crooked elbow. He found himself growing a little wary, as if he’d just realized she was concealing a jackknife under the mattress.

  “Like I had this camera Mom had given me, and I started taking all these pictures of him and his family.” She dropped her voice. “I mean, she always said that once you find your subject, hang on to it with both hands. So I kind of got to be the official photographer at their family functions and Knights of Columbus dinners. It was this whole other world, one great picture after another. Old drunks at christenings, laughing with a beer in one hand and a baby in the other. Volunteer firemen checking out patio furniture while the market down the street was burning. Then one day his father gave me a tour of the prison, and I got that picture of the guard asleep in the old electric chair.”

  “Well, I certainly know that one,” Barry said.

  One of his personal favorites. He remembered bursting out laughing the first time he saw it. But when you looked again, it became more haunting; the screw with his head thrown back and his mouth open, as if Old Sparky had just discharged him from this mortal coil.

  “So that’s when I really figured out what I was doing,” she said.

  “And what was so bad about that?”

  “That I kept doing it even after I knew I was going to break up with him.” The sheets were bunched up around her like clotted cream. “I mean, I always sort of knew it wasn’t going to work out in the long run. He just needed to control things too much.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  All this scrunching down and covering up was starting to get to him. It was as if they’d never been naked together.

  “See, I took all these great black-and-whites of him and his family. Really good grainy W. Eugene Smith, Dorothea Lange stuff. They were just these amazing subjects. His mother was kind of a hefty Irish lady with big ankles, who kept house for the good families up the hill. But she was always carrying on like she was Jackie Kennedy. She had all these nice plates and bath towels that never matched, like they’d all come from different places. And so I got this picture of her at the ironing board, wearing these fake pearls and a helmet of sprayed black hair. And it’s heartbreaking because you can see the distance between who she is and who she wants to be. She’s all dressed up in this nice sleeveless blouse and Capri pants, but she’s got this black eye and her husband’s sitting at the kitchen table behind her, and he’s like this bent steel pipe in an undershirt, cigarette on top of his Piel’s can. And his arm is in a cast because it got broken in a fight with an inmate. It’s just this study in frustration. I called it, Someday My Prince Will Come.”

  “So why haven’t I ever seen it?” asked Barry.

  He’d seen hundreds of her other pictures. In fact, he used to joke that he wanted to make love to her the first time he laid eyes on her, but actually decided to marry her after he saw her pictures and realized they’d still have something to talk about in sixty years.

  “Mike made me destroy it.”

  “For real?”

  “Yes. He couldn’t stand to see his father that way, because he loved him. Even when I said I’d never show it to anybody, that wasn’t good enough. He wanted me to burn the negative because he couldn’t stand the way I made them look. As if I’d given his mother the black eye. So that’s when we started having serious problems.”

  “How serious?” He found himself pinching a half-inch roll on his waist, thinking the time had come to start those sit-ups again.

  “Well …” She tucked her chin in, looking embarrassed. “Some of it was my fault. I might’ve let him get the wrong idea about how things were going to be.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  With a queasy stomach, he decided that he needed to know the general outline but not the more graphic details of his wife’s past sex life.

  “I mean, he thought we were going to get married. We even talked very seriously about having kids. And then when he realized that it wasn’t going to happen, he got really upset.”

  “Are you telling me he hit you?”

  “Just once,” she said, almost as if she was rationalizing it. “And a lot of things led up to it.”

  “Oh, fuck this.” He stood up and pulled on his boxers. “Where’s the phone? I’m calling the chief.”

  “Listen”—she reached across the bed and grabbed his elbow—“I’m not saying I deserved it, but there was a lot going on then. His father ended up getting in a lot of trouble for that picture of his friend sleeping in the electric chair. They transferred him to a really bad unit, and the next time they had one of those riots, he almost got his throat cut. And in the meantime, I was off getting a scholarship to Pratt. And then there was this whole thing with his brother …”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Barry cut her off, sitting back down on the edge of the bed. “I can’t stand a man, hits a woman.”

  “I think I got over it faster than he did, to tell you the truth.”

  He studied her profile against the background of the white lamp shade. Dot by dot, a portrait was accumulating in his mind of a woman very much like his wife but somehow just slightly unfamiliar.

  He hunched over, tension ratcheting its way up his spine, disk by disk. “So how come you didn’t tell me any of this before we moved back here?” he said.

  “It didn’t seem important. It was all so long ago. Last I’d heard, Mike was working out in Arizona.”

  “You’ve had this whole little secret world going on here, and I’m only just finding out about it.”

  “That’s not true.” She drew her knees up, making a linen mountain between them. “I didn’t call Michael and ask him to come by. Why are you accusing me?”

  “I want him to stay away,” he said.

  “I don’t think he’ll come back. I was pretty definite with him.”

  “You don’t think?” He stood up again and found his robe, experiencing a late-night rush of adrenaline. “Well, then why don’t I pick up the phone and make sure he got the message? We’ll have a sit-down, just him and me.”

  “I am seriously asking you not to do that, Barry. Really.”

  For a moment, he was too angry to properly hear her.

  “Barry,” she repeated, trying to retrieve him.

  “What?”

  “I know him. He’s not going to like it if another man tells him to back off.”

  “So, what do you suggest we do?”

  “Just don’t provoke him. That’s all I’m asking.”

  He looked back over his shoulder, wondering if there was anything else she wasn’t telling him. You’ll be happy here, the real estate agent had said when they first moved t
o this town. And he’d gone along with it, figuring he owed Lynn a chance to settle down and to be near her mom for the end after all the moving around they’d done for his work. And, of course, there’d been that apple tree. But now he had to wonder what he’d got himself into.

  “Please,” Lynn said, hugging her knees and raising her eyes.

  “Ah . . . fuck.”

  He fell back beside her. He’d outmuscled players with thirty pounds on him in basketball and beaten lawyers with ten years more trial experience, but he’d never had any talent for fighting with her.

  “Will you at least promise me you’ll call the second he shows up again?” he asked.

  “Sure.” She pressed against him, slipping a hand under the sheets. “Now will you just shut up and hold me until I fall asleep?”

  22

  THE PARTY ACROSS the street was just getting going as Mike parked in front of his house on Regan Way. He smelled pork barbecuing, heard Marc Anthony blaring, and saw a Mexican flag draped over the porch railing of the tiny two-story where his father’s cousin Brian Moran used to live. How the hell did these Hispanic guys do it? Every day, they were up the hill digging wells and mowing lawns, and every other night they were in the backyard, throwing back cervezas and celebrating as if they couldn’t believe their good fortune winding up in America. Some of these guys didn’t even live inside a house. At least four of them slept in the ’89 Lincoln Town Car parked in the driveway. But as he listened to the raucous burble of their laughter and let himself into his own house, a drab twin sister with the same concrete driveway and the same lopsided porch built into the slope of the hill, he felt a rusty screw turn inside his heart.

  The place smelled like Murphy Oil Soap and cedar chips from the hamster’s cage. Piles of laundry sat neatly folded on the stairs. Down the short hallway, he saw Marie in the kitchen, still in her work clothes, making a pot of tea for herself. He closed the door behind him and heard the sound of water about to boil.

  “What’s the matter?” he said. “Doesn’t the new girl put the laundry away?”