Mount Pleasant (10 page)

“It seems fine,” Harry said, assessing the car. There was a time when he recognized every car on the road. Now they all looked the same. He simply wanted something reliable and inexpensive, and he was already bored by the act of shopping for a new one, even though this was their first stop. He was prepared to buy the beige two-year-old Camry SE they hovered over.

Gladys had pages of notes in her purse, annotated in neat schoolgirl script, with boxes and arrows and asterisks. She had printed out a list of Tips and Necessary Questions, and pulled it out now, trying to memorize the important ones before Robert returned. An organized woman, admirably, unbearably.

Robert half-sprinted toward them, still in his sports jacket, and handed Harry the keys.

They drove east along the lakeshore and Harry was neither happy nor unhappy with the car. “It’s got the best ride of any
car in its class,” Robert said from the passenger seat. “The engineers at Honda have been taking it apart for years trying to figure out why.”

Harry pulled over into a supermarket parking lot and told Gladys she should give it a try. They switched places, and when Robert turned on the radio, Gladys reached over and turned it off. One of her tips warned her against this old salesman’s trick, to get you to listen to how fabulous the six-speaker stereo was so you didn’t hear the wheezing engine. Though neither of them would be able to identify engine trouble by anything other than it stopping.

Gladys drove east, both hands on the wheel.

“The handling, they modified the Formula One,” Robert said. “I mean, it’s for the city. But the technology, basically … it takes some getting used to, because it handles
too
well.” He gave a laugh that was intended to be conspiratorial, as if all three of them were now part of the Toyota family, and god have mercy on those poor Honda people.

This couldn’t be easy for the man, Harry thought. Robert didn’t know which of them to address with his flurry of specs: 2.4 litre, 158 hp, 15 cubic feet cargo. Harry was distracted, and Gladys held to the script she had tucked back into her purse. It seemed to Harry that even the manufacturers had thrown in the towel and that was why so many cars looked alike, why a Lincoln and a Honda were almost indistinguishable. How many cars were sold in China in the time it took Robert to describe the safety features of the SE? A hundred? A thousand?

Robert should move to Guangzhou. It had been more than a generation since the car had represented a romantic notion in the West, since it had embodied a form of freedom (not just mobility, but sexual freedom for the sixteen-year-old Harry).
But China was just arriving at that moment. It was, Harry reflected, a good time to be a sixteen-year-old in China.

“The extended warranty—listen. You’re going to find a lot of people pushing this on you. Between us?” Robert waved his hand and made a soft blowing noise that indicated, Harry assumed, nothingness. “Waste of money. You did not hear this from me.”

When was the last time Harry had sat in the back seat of a car? He felt like the oversized, unsuccessful offspring of the two adults in the front seat. On the way home from the cottage on Sunday nights when he was a kid, he and Erin would fall asleep in the back of the Cadillac. There was a particular kind of silence in the interior of their car at night, a muteness that incorporated the subtle hum of the engine, the feel of the tires. The back seat was huge, like a private palace. If they were stuck in traffic, they sometimes played games with the cars beside them. Once, Erin took the crayons and construction paper that Felicia had given them to occupy themselves and wrote
HELP
,
WE ARE BEING KIDNAPPED
and held it up to a woman in a white Thunderbird who was stuck beside them. The woman looked alarmed, but didn’t try to save them.

Back at the dealership, Robert tried to close, a creepy, nice-guy-no-pressure kind of pressure that was easy to resist.

By mid-afternoon, he and Gladys were in a Starbucks, considering their options, Harry sipping an ill-advised espresso, Gladys drinking herbal tea. The Mazda was peppy and handled well. The Passat was precise. The Honda was Toyotaesque, the Honda salesman intent on becoming their new best friend. By the time they’d driven the Mazda, Harry could sense that Gladys’s interest was flagging too, but she bravely pressed on, asking the short, bewildered salesman with the unpronounceable name if the front brakes oscillated during
low-speed turns, checking her notes to see if she’d gotten the question right.

Harry felt that not buying a car this afternoon would be failing at something that was already, unto itself, a failure. Shopping for a used car indicated a failure to evolve. Twenty-five years on, he and Gladys were still students wondering if they should buy that used Corolla with 270,000 kilometres on it from the guy who said fuck engineering, he was going back to the Punjab.

“Which way are you leaning?” Harry asked.

“The Toyota and Honda have the best resale.”

“But it’s a used car—we probably won’t resell it. We’re the ones paying that premium. We’ll just drive it until it dies, like the Volvo. Which one is most likely to die first?”

Gladys consulted her notes, which were spread out on the small table. “I don’t like the Mazda’s chances,” she said. “What did you think of the Passat?”

Harry was thinking he could take it or leave it, but said, “There’s something about the Passat. Like you can hear the machinery ticking or something. It’s not as fluid, maybe. I don’t know. They all drive better than our old Volvo.”

“I didn’t like the Honda salesman. I don’t like it when they tell you all about their family.” Gladys took a sip of her tea. “I’m not sure he even had one. I think he made them up.”

“You think he pretended to have a son in university?”

“If we’d said we’d adopted eight kids, he would have had eight adopted kids.”

“So we can scratch the Honda.”

Harry thought of how Dale used to just drive to the Cadillac dealer and pick out the colour. Years later, Harry found out that the same guy bought Dale’s old Cadillac every time he traded it in. Dale took care of his cars. This guy made a deal
and he picked up Dale’s old car hours after Dale drove away in a new one. Sometimes the guy was there and saw Dale drive away in the car he would be buying two years later.

Harry sat in the cramped, caffeinated interior of Starbucks and tried to think of this purchase as a new beginning. Like on a road trip with their parents, when he and Erin used to restart their game of finding cars in alphabetical order (Acadian, Bel Air, Chevrolet, Dodge, Econoline, Falcon) every time they got stuck, with one of them saying, “Starting now.” It suddenly seemed critical to come out of all this with a car. This would be the new beginning. Starting now.

“The Camry. I think that’s the way we should go,” Harry said. “They’re still hungry after that big recall. The service is going to be good. It doesn’t handle as well as the Mazda, but it scores higher on reliability. I like the safety specs. It’s maybe the largest car company in the world, and at this moment, maybe only at this moment, they have the power that comes with scale and they are humbled by the recall. We should climb on now. He wants eighteen; we offer seventeen and be prepared to walk if he doesn’t drop down five hundred bucks and throw in a one-year warranty on everything, drive train, all of it. We tell Robert/Dick/Dirk that it’s our way or the highway, then drive off into the sunset.”

“So, the Camry, then.”

They sat in the silence of this decision for a few minutes, then Gladys said, “You’re still wondering where the money went.”

“You’re not?” Harry raised his cup to his lips to find it empty. “I just can’t believe my father died more or less penniless.”

Gladys shrugged. “I think it’s a shame that Ben didn’t benefit. But your father hardly acknowledged him when he was alive. I think I would have felt more settled if he’d left something to
Ben.” She looked out the window at the students milling in front of the college across the street. “It might have opened up Ben’s options.”

Outside on the sidewalk, a woman pushed a stroller filled with twins. She made that face, the rhetorical talk-to-your-baby face one makes, that Harry had made. Who’s a sweet baby?

Ben’s options were an ongoing topic. His chief gift appeared to be for renunciation. Any child could grow up to be prime minister, but not every adolescent. By the time they got to Ben’s age, only a handful truly had a shot. This was life’s essence—a narrowing of possibilities until the final choice: another breath on the respirator or endless sleep.

If Gladys found a job, it would help. Gladys had worked as a librarian, and as the libraries were hit by budget cuts and gradually became more automated, she accepted a retirement package that had seemed like a windfall at the time but had quickly gone to the mortgage, credit card debt and a holiday. She still had a little money left, and used it for the odd luxury. She had taken an editing course and occasionally got work editing textbooks or a cookbook, but it was uneven, uninteresting and low-paying work. For a while she had talked about going back to school, but every plan invited unpleasant math: If I’m out in two or three years with a teaching certificate/law degree, I’ll be over fifty. Who will hire me? Why not take the energetic twenty-five year-old—why not integrate those perky breasts into the system?

“Did I tell you I talked to Dick Ebbetts?” Harry said, knowing he hadn’t.

“Dick Ebbetts?”

“From BRG. Short, troll-like. I think you met him once. Or at least at the funeral.”

Gladys made a doubtful expression.

“He thinks Dad had money. He apparently made a big score on an oil sands play.”

“So what does Dick Ebbetts think happened to that money?”

“I didn’t press him. I’m not sure I trust anyone at BRG.”

“Isn’t that the cornerstone of their business: trust? Anyway, can’t you pretty much do anything with computers these days?”

“I’m thinking of hiring someone to try to find it. The money.”

“Could someone even look without drawing attention to the fact that you’re basically accusing the company of taking Dale’s money? Why don’t you talk to them first, Harry? Just mention that it seems odd. Maybe there’s a perfectly logical reason.”

“I did talk to Prescott Lunden and August Sampson. They didn’t have a perfectly logical reason.”

“You don’t think they were involved, do you?”

Harry shrugged. “Who knows. They’re an odd pair.” And now they knew that Harry was looking for that money.

There was a squeal of brakes and a soft crunch. Across the street, a BMW had collided with a parked car, damaging the bumper. A man emerged from the parked car and pulled out his cellphone and began taking pictures of the mess. A woman in a short dress and heels got out of the BMW, holding her cell, and began taking pictures of the two cars from different angles. She took a picture of the man, who took a picture of her. They moved closer and snapped aggressively like paparazzi, leaning to get new angles, thrusting their phones out for close-ups, bobbing and weaving like boxers. They walked backwards to their separate vehicles, still shooting, then got in and closed their doors.

Harry and Gladys took a cab to the Toyota dealer and collected their prize.

When they got home, Harry went up to his study and called his brother-in-law, Ty, who had begun his career in investment banking and was now a financial consultant of some kind. It was never entirely clear to Harry exactly what Ty did. But he had once mentioned a forensic accountant he knew, some guy who was brought in to analyze a high-profile scam that was in the papers for a week.

Erin’s husband was a serious basketball fan, and Harry could hear the game on in the background. Ty had once taken Harry to a game, where they stood in someone’s corporate box and idly watched the home team get shanked by the prison-yard Knicks.

The sound of the game suddenly disappeared, Ty pressing the mute button, Harry guessed, but still watching. “This is our destiny,” Ty said. “We get a new superstar every four years, and around him, our faith builds. The new Messiah. We finish twelfth. We’re in a rebuilding phase. We finish thirteenth. The superstar gets traded to New Jersey. This is the business model. This is how you get twenty thousand people paying to witness futility.”

“Ty, the reason I called—”

“Christ, you’re making six point two and you miss a fucking layup? Sorry, Harry.”

“You once told me you knew a forensics guy. He was brought in for that Emptor Inc. thing.”

“Tommy Bladdock. They had like fourteen gnomes on that twenty-four/seven. There were twelve hundred boxes to go through. But these guys, it’s amazing. Tommy told me you have enough paper on a guy, you can see his soul. You know more about him than his wife. What do you want with Tommy?”

“Is he discreet?”

“Discreet? That’s basically his job description. While we’re sleeping, guys like Tommy are chewing through paper. They’re
like termites. You don’t know they’re there until the house collapses.”

“What do these guys charge?”

“I don’t know. One fifty, two fifty an hour.”