Kids These Days (21 page)

“Nic said you were supposed to use a thermometer.”

“Good. That's right. Read those cookbooks.”

“He's really smart,” she said. “You'll like him when you get to know him.”

“
If
I get to know him.”

“He's going to be a teacher,” she said.

“Everybody keeps mentioning that. Deaf kids, right?”

“That's what he wants.”

“He'll be in all the magazines. He'll be Man of the Year.”

“Tell Mom I'm sorry.”

“No. You tell her yourself.”

“I will.”

“Tell me, how about.”

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“Say it like you mean it.”

“I did.”

“I know,” he said. Then, “I love you, sweetheart.”

She wound and unwound the dishtowel. “I love you, too,” she said, and she turned around, walked back up the dock, opened the door, went in the house, and that was all.

Out on the river, heading back, the hum so present I could feel it buzzing my jaw, Hurley said, “How old's your daughter again?”

“Almost sixteen,” Mid said.

“And how old's the kid inside?”

Mid said, “Older.”

Hurley said, “Damn, dude, I'm not sure I could have done that.”

Mid said, “I'm not sure I could have, either,” and the sound of the water off the back of the boat filled in whatever other space there was. I kept looking away to make sure nobody saw me trying to keep from crying.

Alice wanted to know what Mid said, what Delton said, what the boat looked like, what the house looked like, how in hell we'd managed to get all the way out there and then come back without her. She said it didn't make enough sense. I said I knew that—but that also there was something about watching it happen, something I wanted to explain but couldn't. If you'd been there, I kept saying, you'd have done it, too. If you'd seen her. If I'd seen her what? she said. No what, I said. Just if you'd seen her.

When Mid and I came back to the house that night, it was Carolyn who'd opened the door, who stood there, taking the two of us in, back home with no Delton. “No,” Carolyn said. “No, no, no, no, no.”

“Yes,” Mid said, and something burned up between them right then, some supply line. But he went and got Delton the next day, like he said—he still had to draw the line somewhere.

That week, Alice started spending more time with Carolyn. At dinner, back home, she'd talk about how tired Carolyn was, how worried Carolyn was, how nobody could quite get a read on what the fuck was going on. She'd ask about Mid, how he was acting. He'd been going quiet, I told her—he'd check out for a few minutes while we rode between Me Kayak and Island Pizza, while we drove out to the Twice-the-Ices. “Quiet how?” she asked.

“Quiet,” I said. “He goes away.”

“That's what Carolyn says, too.”

“I think he doesn't have any idea what to say to her.”

“I'm not surprised,” Alice said. “I don't think he possibly could.”

I started sleeping as much as possible. I took naps. I slept late into the mornings, through Alice calling me from the balcony, telling me the parachutist was coming by, that he had a new flag, a fireman's helmet, a tape deck belting out show tunes. I went to bed before the late-night talk shows came on. The way I had it tallied was this: I needed all my rest now, because once we had little Bosporus or Dardanelles in the house, I'd need to spend every night lying awake, being ready at a moment's notice to fail to rescue her by boat.

Hurley poured new foundations. The Twice-the-Ice people sent a man to tinker with the brain inside Number Two, and he got it to make ice as advertised. I went to see Robbie at Me Kayak about the stolen kayaks. They were still stolen. And Robbie was right: There were too many employees by half. Mid told me we shouldn't fire anybody. He said one or two of them would quit soon enough, or, less officially, just disappear, their final paychecks sitting in the office, ready but never picked up. He said kids disappeared all the time. I flipped through the stack one afternoon—a dozen checks for a hundred, two hundred dollars. “You just leave them here?” I asked Mid.

“Writeoff,” he said.

I went to the grocery. I bought off-brand Triscuits. Weav-Its. Alice had a thing for the store brand, ate them by the boxful. She started drinking cranberry juice. All the combo flavors. Grape-cranberry, blueberry-cranberry. She'd never liked cranberry juice before. At the classes—we started going to the birthing classes, where everybody was much more pregnant than we were—they said cravings were perfectly normal. The books said that, too, and the pamphlets, and everything all over the Internet.

I hated the classes, not because they scared the shit out of me, which they did, but because of how much shined-up glimmering joy they forced into the room. Everyone smiled at every moment, and when they didn't smile, they cried, and then everybody smiled about the crying. We were in Condensed Baby and Delivery. There was regular Baby and Delivery, but it was full. There was a cheery desperation that hung on the instructors, a husband-and-wife team who seemed sorry for us. “Now, if this was
regular
Baby and Delivery,” they'd say, again and again, and then drop some joyful piece of information about birth plans or cervix dilation, and Alice would smile, and everybody would smile, and I would stare off at the wall of brochures.
Mom, You're Beautiful. Post-Partum Questions. Choices and Changes.
The perfect families on the fronts of the brochures were in assorted states of smile.

The extra sleeping left me plenty of time to wake up in the middle of the night, lie in the half-dark, look at all the paintings of birds, and know this: Mid was in a full-fledged racket. Alice was past halfway.

“Something I'd like to run by you,” Mid said. We were sitting in the Camaro at Twice-the-Ice Number Two, watching people buy ice. We were betting out of piles of quarters on the dash on whether people would go bag or bulk. His heart wasn't fully in it, but he was killing me. He had the knack for it.

“Go ahead,” I said.

“It would be totally fine if you said no.”

“Got it.”

“How would it be if Olivia came to live with you guys for a little while?”

“What?”

“Just a couple of weeks,” he said. A guy drove up in a hybrid. Mid picked up a quarter, spun it through his fingers. “Bag,” he said.

“He's a bulker,” I said.

“There's no cooler in there. You watch.”

The man walked around the back of his car, popped the trunk. No cooler. I said, “Live with us how?”

“Like a little summer camp, I guess, is Carolyn's idea. She and Delton cooked this up.” The man went over to the Twice-the-Ice, put his money in, and the machine delivered a bag. I put another quarter on Mid's side. “Be the bag,” he said. “That's your problem.”

“I don't think that's my problem.”

Mid said, “You'll bounce back.”

“Are you serious about this?” I said. “With Delton?”

“As a heart attack.”

“Would she even want to live with us? She barely knows us.”

“Carolyn says she's got some bond with Alice. And she likes you. She says you're normal.”

“Normal.”

“She means it as a compliment.”

“I have to talk to Alice,” I said. “I mean, I'd want to do that first.”

“Carolyn talked to her.”

“She did?”

“She thought it'd be best to clear it through her first, and then ask you.”

I said, “Could you maybe start over and go a little slower?”

He leaned back in his seat. We had the windows down, had found a little shade to park in. “So we grounded Olivia,” he said. “For six or eight years. Or until she hits menopause.” The compressor up on top of the Twice-the-Ice was humming. “But it's not going so well. We're not doing a very good job of it, I guess. There's a kind of general distrust around the dinner table. Plus she keeps lodging all these complaints.”

“Complaints?” I said.

“We suck, we don't understand her, we don't listen, Nic's going to be a teacher.”

“That's not a complaint. The teacher thing.”

“You explain it to her. And she's on the tapes, by the way. She's not buying, thank God, so they can't really hit her with anything, but she's there. Her dumbass friends are still buying. Agents Friendly and Helpful called me up yesterday to let me know. I'm supposed to meet them at some Waffle House in Ocala to see the thing.”

“Tell me again how this is just the cops trying to bust your kitchen guys, and not something bigger.”

“Relax,” he said. “You and Carolyn. I think they got some grant to use their tiny cameras, and they're bored.”

“That's what you think? Honestly? Doesn't all this seem elaborate to you?”

“I'll give you that much.” He took off his sunglasses, put them on the dash with the quarters. “I've got you totally walled off, OK? You're all set. Don't let any of this wad your panties.”

“That doesn't make me feel a ton better,” I said.

“I can't help that. Anyway. Listen. She's grounded, right? But kids keep showing up in the driveway, and she keeps riding away with them, standing around on videotape while they purchase recreational pharmaceuticals, that kind of thing.”

“That doesn't sound very grounded.”

“I told you we were doing it wrong.”

“How would living with us do anything?”

“No clue,” he said. “But we sat her down, told her things weren't working for us, and asked her what she thought we should do.”

“And she chose this?”

“She had a lot to say about needing her space. I don't think she knows what that means, but she said it.”

“And Carolyn talked to Alice?”

“Yes.”

“And Alice said yes.”

“She did.”

“Are we supposed to keep her grounded, too?”

“We'll all sit down,” he said. “We can figure out some rules together, if this is OK with you.”

“But you said she doesn't follow the rules now.”

“These will be new rules. They'll work much better.”

“What's going on with her, anyway?” I said.

He shook his head. “I think she is fifteen in America. I think that's what's going on.” A pickup truck, spray-painted green, pulled into the lot. Mid said, “One more time? Double or nothing?”

“Double or nothing won't do anything for me,” I said. “I'm too far behind.”

“Come on. You choose. I'll take whatever you don't pick.”

I looked at the truck. “Bulk,” I said.

“You're not even trying.”

“Sure I am.”

“Bag,” he said. “Has to be.” An older guy got out, shuffled up to the chute, pressed
BAG
. “See?” Mid said.

“How can you tell?”

“You have to have a feeling.”