The Last Good Day

by Peter Blauner

  “I think it’s about learning to have faith.” Lynn filled her own wineglass almost to the brim.

  “Then why don’t you have enough faith to let me go to the city with Dennis?” Hannah made a surly show of pulling her strap back up on her shoulder, refusing to take part in this sham of family togetherness.

  “I guess all politics is local,” Barry muttered.

  “Honey, we just weren’t sure it was safe,” said Lynn, creating an opening for the main subject.

  “As opposed to being here?” Hannah raised her voice. “Oh, yeah, Mom, that makes a lot of sense.”

  She threw her napkin down and let the strap fall off her shoulder again, a deliberate provocation.

  “I just think it’s so ridiculous,” she said, seizing control of the moment.

  “What?” Barry felt the dog’s wet nose nuzzling into his lap, looking for scraps.

  “The way you both keep telling us to act like everything’s fine when it isn’t.”

  Barry watched Lynn’s knuckles turn white around the stem of her wineglass. Our fault. We waited too long to say our lines. It wasn’t just Hannah grabbing center stage. The girl had an eye, like her mother.

  “I’m not sure what you mean by that,” he said, testing her.

  “Oh, you’re not sure? How about the fact that one of Mom’s best friends is dead? How about the fact that no one knows what’s going on? How about the fact that we’re about to go to war? How about the fact that Mom’s going to court next week, and neither of you said anything to us about it?”

  “Who told you that?” asked Lynn.

  Hannah tossed her black molasses hair over the vanilla scoop of her bare shoulder as Barry realized that he wasn’t even around when Lynn broke the news to the kids about Sandi.

  “Jennifer Olin in organic chem,” Hannah said, clearly relishing the opportunity to capture her parents in their full hypocritical glory. “Her father’s a town trustee. She overheard him telling somebody that both of you were fighting with the police.”

  Lynn and Barry both started speaking at once. “Well, that’s not really … We were going to tell you … If you want to be accurate … I thought I mentioned …”

  Hold the front lines. Man the barricades. The children were an invading army trying to get at the stockpile of secrets. God help us all if they ever got a hold of them.

  They both went quiet again, and Lynn kicked him under the table as she crossed her legs, accidentally he assumed.

  “I think what we’re trying to tell you,” Barry started again, measuring his words judiciously, “is that an unusual situation has come up.”

  The dog scrambled out from under the table, noticing that there were no longer as many ankles to lick or scraps to feast on.

  “An old friend of your mother’s has decided he has a problem with the two of us,” he said. “It’s not necessary that you know all the details. Just that this man is not right in his head and not acting … responsibly.”

  The children took a moment to absorb that, Clay looking to his sister for cues about how to react. And Hannah directing her searchlight gaze right back at her father.

  “I guess I should also tell you that this man is a police officer,” Barry continued, trying to sound calm and reasonable. “He’s been suspended, but he obviously still has friends on the job and around town. So I think it would be wise for all of us to be very careful over the next few weeks.”

  “Oh, that’s just great,” said Hannah. “And what exactly does it mean?”

  “It means that you’re either going to have to come straight home after school or go directly to a friend’s house where I can pick you up,” said Lynn. “And we’re going to need you to be home by eight every night.”

  “Now it’s an eight o’clock curfew?” Incredulity crushed in Hannah’s mouth. “Are you kidding me? None of my other friends have to be home until ten.”

  “Honey, whaddaya want me to do? We can’t afford to just go move in to a hotel somewhere indefinitely.” A half-dozen spaghetti strands slid off Barry’s fork. “I’m sorry you guys have to go through this, but things come up in life. You’re forced to make adjustments sometimes.”

  “But what about karate?” Clay piped up.

  Something small and plangent in his voice reminded Barry of the nights when the boy would show up over and over in their doorway with the quilt around his shoulders, like James Brown with his cape, begging please, please to be allowed into their bed.

  “I have to have lunch in the city, but I’ll make sure I’m back here in time for your match,” Lynn said, thinking fast and trying to make last-minute adjustments. “Jeanine’s heading over there, so she’ll give you a ride.”

  She tried to give him a reassuring smile, but Barry saw the effect fall short. Clay’s chin lowered. He nudged his plate away. And somehow that small look of boyish disappointment wounded Barry as much as anything he’d seen since the day his father’s deli burned down. My son thinks his parents can’t take care of him.

  “Look, it’s not going to be like this forever.” Barry pushed his chair back from the table. “We’re going to get through this hearing, this man’s going to lose his job, and then everything’s going to go back to the way it was.”

  “And what are we supposed to do in the meantime?” said Hannah. “Just sit around and stare at the computer screen?”

  “Um, that’s another thing.” Lynn sighed. “I kind of only want you guys going on-line when one of us is in the room. We got a bit of a weird Instant Message on the computer.”

  “Oh, shit,” said Clay, lending credence to his mother’s suspicion that he was downloading porn off the Internet.

  “Watch your mouth,” said Barry.

  “Nice town you brought your kids to.” Hannah folded her arms, fed up with both of them. “Anything else?”

  “Well, we certainly don’t want to make you any more overanxious, but you both have cell phones.” Lynn cleared her throat. “You should call us if you see something that makes you uncomfortable.”

  “Then who will you call?” asked Hannah. “The police?”

  Barry touched his tongue to the roof of his mouth, not having devised a ready answer.

  “Never mind.” Hannah got up and started to clear the dishes, showing some vestige of the good-girl manners that she used to have in such abundance. “I think I’d like to be excused.”

  42

  ALL THE WAY DOWN to the train station that morning, Lynn was jumpy, seeing things out of the corner of her eye that weren’t really there: stop signs, flashing lights, children crossing. The sight of a young cop standing by the side of the road pointing a radar gun at her car almost made her veer off the road.

  Given her druthers, she would’ve skipped the trip to the city altogether and hunkered down at the house, waiting for school to be finished so she could pick up the kids. But François was threatening to cancel the gallery show if she didn’t come in for lunch to discuss the pictures, and the rest of the family had admonished her to go about her business. On the car radio, the president was exhorting people to keep going to ball games and taking their kids on vacation, as if nothing was wrong.

  Nevertheless, she’d pored carefully over the schedules, making sure Hannah had her after-school study group and Jeanine would pick up Clay for karate, so there wouldn’t be a single moment when they’d be left alone and unattended before she arrived back on the 4:02.

  She took the portfolio case out of the Explorer, locked the car behind her, and started up the steps to the overpass above the tracks, having decided it was safer to take the train than risk traffic getting in and out of the city.

  Down below, a lone figure in a khaki Burberry coat loitered in front of the HBO Sex and the City billboard at the far end, staring out at the ripples that moved like veins under the surface of the river.

  Something in his solitude brought her attention into fine-grained focus. The wind seemed to whip around him without quite touching him, only lightly riffling his li
ght-brown hair, as if an invisible force field surrounded him. From above, she saw a telltale patch of pink scalp exposed and then covered at the back of his head.

  Jeffrey turned and waved when he saw her coming down the steps to the platform.

  “There she is,” he called out, the wind whisking his words out over the water.

  “What are you doing here?”

  She came down to his end of the platform and gave him a hug, the portfolio under her arm getting between them.

  “Oh, you know, business in the city,” he said. “Taxes on the estate and all that crap. It’s terrible, having to deal with all these lawyers. Parasites.”

  “Well, not all of them.”

  “Of course, I didn’t mean Barry.” His nostrils flared in embarrassment. “I meant these bastards who are trying to keep Sandi’s money from going to the children, like it’s supposed to. I really don’t know how some of these people sleep at night.”

  “I understand.”

  She noticed how clean-shaven and comparatively bright-eyed he looked today. That looked to be a good brown wool suit under his coat, possibly Canali, and he was wearing black-tasseled loafers, an ironed white shirt, and a red silk tie with tiny yellow octagons that couldn’t have cost less than a hundred and fifty dollars at Barney’s.

  “So how are you?” she said.

  “Hanging in. It’s been very tough. I’m still not sure the kids really get it. Maybe it’ll just sink in over time.”

  She felt the wind whipsaw through her bones as it dawned on her that this was where Barry must have been standing when he first spotted the body. Watch yourself. And she was going into the city today? Already the thought of being separated from the children was causing a painful pulling in her chest, as if she’d drifted off her moorings.

  “Lynn, can I ask you something?” Jeff stood close to her, blocking the wind.

  “What?”

  He bowed his head. “I know how women talk. Did Sandi ever tell you she was having an affair?”

  “Oh, Jeff, I don’t know …”

  “Listen, it’s all right. She’s gone. You’re not betraying anybody. I just need to know.”

  She winced at the abasement, the utter humiliation. He might as well have dropped trou on the platform and asked for her frank assessment.

  “She never said anything to me,” she answered scrupulously.

  He looked out toward the palisades, where the morning mist was burning off.

  “I know she’d been unhappy for a long time,” he said.

  “I think she always appreciated you for the man you are, Jeff.”

  He startled her with a pinched dry laugh.

  “I’m sorry.” He wiped the corner of his eye. “I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. It’s just some things the police said have got me thinking.”

  “Like what?”

  “First they ask me if we were having financial and emotional problems in our marriage. Then they want to know if either of us had started seeing other people. I said of course not, but …”

  A southbound express blew by, sending a gust through her clothes.

  “What do I know?” he said. “Then they come to my house and start ripping things up and making all kinds of strange insinuations to me until they find this can of Thompson’s Wood Protector in the garage.”

  “Wood protector?”

  “This cop was using it. The guy we hired to put up our fence. Fallon. He went to school with Sandi. You must know him too.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The wind tore through her pea coat, a sudden blast of winter pebbling her skin.

  “And then right after they found that, they all clammed up,” said Jeffrey. “It was like everything shifted, and they all started looking the other way. I mean, they kept asking questions and taking out evidence in cardboard boxes, but I had this feeling like they weren’t really that interested.”

  The front page of the New York Post blew off the platform and drifted down to the surface of the river, the president’s picture darkening on the water.

  “You know, my mind’s been such a mess that I haven’t been able to focus on anything.” His hair flapped wildly about his head, clawing his brow and flailing all over his crown. “But after that crazy thing at the cemetery, the fog’s been starting to lift. This guy took the shovel right out of my hand. What were people thinking? I mean, Sandi’s home all day while this cop’s out there working on the fence, and when Inez took the kids out, it was just the two of them …”

  Lynn felt a trap start to open at the bottom of her stomach, remembering the last thing Mike had said to her at Home Depot. You know, she was a friend of mine too. It sharpened that dire sense of possibility she’d been feeling since that day she talked to Inez in the kitchen. That he wasn’t just investigating Sandi’s murder or mourning her. He was the original source of the agony.

  “Everyone must think I’m a fucking idiot,” said Jeffrey, the wind raking his thin patches of hair mercilessly.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “But it’s true, isn’t it? Halloween’s coming up, so I might as well wear a pair of cuckold’s horns when I go trick-or-treating with the kids because everyone already knows.”

  “Jeffrey, stop …”

  “The thing is,” he said, spreading his nostrils again as he struggled for control. “The thing is, I know everybody does it; everybody cheats. Everybody has secrets. So that’s not the point anymore. Whatever problems there were between Sandi and me died with her. But this was the mother of my children. And somebody killed her. And they should not get away with that.”

  “What makes you think they’re going to?”

  “I’m just saying, things are starting to come together in my mind. There are questions that aren’t getting asked.”

  “Are you saying there’s a cover-up?”

  “I’m saying, people look after their own.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at the patrol car waiting by the station entrance.

  “It’s pretty damn obvious this cop was doing my wife. So who knows? Maybe she tried to break it off and he didn’t want her to. Maybe he got rough with her. All I know is that he’s the one they ought to be looking at. And if they aren’t prepared to do the right thing, then I will.”

  She turned as if a firecracker had just gone off next to her ear.

  “Jeffrey, don’t talk that way.” She touched his arm. “The children don’t need you to do anything crazy.”

  “Everyone can’t keep looking the other way. Someone has to pay.”

  “I understand, but I really don’t think this is all going to get swept under the rug. I’ve known Harold Baltimore most of my life. He’s a good, honest man.”

  “He damn well better be.”

  She realized that this was as far as she wanted to go in this conversation. There was something fetid and bacterial in the air.

  “Jeffrey,” she said, “I promise you, I’ll call you the second I find out any more about what’s going on. But what you have to focus on is putting one foot in front of the other and letting the kids know that you’re still holding steady for them.”

  “Of course. I know that.”

  “So, what are you doing with your Web site in the meantime?” she asked, just to change the subject. “Are you going to shut it down and regroup?”

  “What are you talking about? Things are going great.” Half-smiling disbelief broke across his face. “Why would we be shutting down?”

  “I don’t know. I thought …”

  “The business is growing so fast we can hardly keep up with it. Did somebody tell you otherwise?”

  “No, of course not.”

  You call it underwriting. I call it bloodletting. She tried to put Saul’s exact words out of her mind so she could stay in this conversation.

  “It’s just so weird that you would say that.” He pushed back the centerpiece of his glasses. “We got Honus Wagner’s mitt the other day. You know what that could be worth?”

>   “No idea.”

  “We’re talking mid-five figures once it’s authenticated, minimum. And we’re supposed to be getting one of Rogers Hornsby’s bats next week …”

  “Sounds great.”

  She averted her eyes in pity, realizing how much he needed this at the moment, a woman’s look of encouragement, a sign that someone still believed in him, a little wink of light at the end of the tunnel.

  “I guess you’re cruising then,” she said.

  “Yeah, we’re rocking and rolling.”

  He checked his watch and looked up the tracks, starting to lose momentum.

  “Hey, wasn’t there supposed to be a nine-fifty-five?”

  “That’s what my schedule said.”

  “It’s nine-fifty-seven already. You know, I just realized I left my PalmPilot at the house, and it’s got all my appointments in it.”

  “Uh-oh.” Lynn pulled a sympathetic face.

  “Yeah, I guess my head is still in the wash. I better go back and get it.” He belted up his Burberry. “There’s a ten-thirty-five, isn’t there?”

  “I think so. My schedule’s back in the car.”

  “Yeah, maybe I’ll get that.” He edged toward the stairs. “I’ll call the lawyer and tell him I’ll be late.”

  “I’m sure he’ll understand.”

  Okay. She got that this was an excuse. That this conversation had stripped him of so much of his dignity that he couldn’t bear to ride the train into the city with her for the next thirty-five minutes. A kind of squalid, grimy guilt backwashed over her as she realized that she hadn’t properly helped him sustain the illusion he needed.

  “Hang in there, Jeff,” she called after him. “We’re all right behind you.”

  “I know.” He waved. “And no offense, what I said before about Barry and lawyers. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  43

  GRRRRIGGGGGGG. GRRRRRRRIGGGGGGGG.

  The ground was starting to get hard from the lack of rain, Mike noticed, as he leaned over the power auger, digging a hole for a fence post on the de Groots’ property.

  Grrrgg. Grrrrg.