The Last Good Day (9 page)

“That right?” The husband looked up, only half-interested.

“Yeah, we did such a great job cleaning the town up that most of us can barely afford to live here anymore.” Mike’s cheeks bunched up as though there were two little fists inside his face. “Isn’t that terrific?”

The husband stopped tapping the wheel and looked back at Lynn.

“Well”—he sighed—“I guess we better be getting home. I’m sorry I don’t have anything more intelligent to add. I’ll give you a call at the station if I think of something.”

“That would be great.” Mike clicked the flashlight off and then on again. “Lynn and me were talking about us getting together one of these days anyway.”

“Were you?” The husband’s mouth puckered slightly. “I’m always the last to hear about these things.”

“Yes,” Lynn said, raising her chin and deciding to defy him for a moment. “I thought it might be fun sometime. Mike’s big into sports with the neighborhood kids. He coached one of the AYSO soccer teams. Barry, you remember how we used to try to get Clay to play?”

Aha. So she really had been checking up on him.

“We’ll get him out there again.” Schulman rubbed his eyes.

“Hey, Barry, your wife tells me you were quite the athlete in your time.”

“Does she?” Schulman took a moment to size him up, one old player to another. “You two must’ve covered a lot of ground today.”

“Maybe one of these days we’ll get you out on the field and see what you’ve got left.”

“Actually, basketball’s my game, but what the hell. Nice meeting you, Lieutenant.”

Schulman eased the car past him, the idling motor revving suddenly to life and then settling back into a steady
pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.
From behind, Mike saw the brake lights flaring and the two heads leaning together to begin a serious discussion as they came to a halt at the stop sign.
No one saw anything. No one knows anything.
And just before they made the right past the chain-link fence and out of the lot, he put the flashlight under his arm and copied down their license plate number on his clipboard.

7

“HEY, WHAT’S UP
with Barney Fife?” asked Barry, flexing his hand after he made the turn. “I thought he was trying to twist my arm off.”

“It’s a guy thing,” yawned Lynn. “I guess he wanted to show you they build ’em rugged here in Riverside.”

“Yeah, I got that. Macho man. It looked like he was making a muscle with his ears.”

They made the left off River Road, passing the immigrant day laborers playing dominoes by the light of the Barnes & Noble superstore, and headed straight up Prospect Avenue toward the West Hills. They didn’t have the type of relationship in which the husband always had to drive, but tonight she’d found herself feeling a little out of sorts at the station and she’d asked him to take the wheel.

“So, what, is he an old flame of yours or something?” Barry asked.

She started to roll up her window. “Sort of.”

They drove on through the sloping darkened streets of the Hollow, where black kids in head scarves popped wheelies on ten-speed bikes and a badass in a do-rag and a yellow Lakers jersey blew autumn leaves off his lawn with a three-foot-long blower.

“I got the impression he’s maybe still a little sweet on you,” said Barry. “How come you never told me about him?”

“We did not end on a graceful note.”

“Oh?”

“Can we not talk about this right now?”

The incline steepened as they drove up through the more middle-class neighborhood of Indian Ridge, where the houses fattened into chubby little Cape Cods and split-level ranches with flags draped over the front porch railings.

“So how come you didn’t tell me you saw a woman’s body without a head this morning?” she asked.

He watched telephone wires stretch out through the glow of streetlights, like lines of radioactive sheet music.

“I don’t know. I guess I didn’t want to scare you. Everybody’s so jumpy already. How are the kids doing? They hear about it?”

“Yeah, but you know, they’re still city kids.” She hunched forward, warming her hands between her knees. “They don’t let much faze them. They don’t talk about these things too much in school anyway. Everybody’s too focused on testing and getting into the right college.”

“I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.” Barry shrugged. “I remember my freshman year in Newark after the riots; we had police on motor scooters in the hallways. I used to walk right past them on my way to practice.”

“So was that good or bad?”

“Hey, I ended up here, didn’t I?”

He reached over and cupped his hand over her knee as they passed her parents’ old house, the rambling Victorian on Birch Lane where a Japanese architect and his family had planted a bonsai tree on the front lawn.

“What does that mean anyway? You didn’t end on a ‘graceful note’?”

She sighed heavily. “If I say that neither of us was at our very best at that particular point in our lives, can we just leave it at that?”

“Sure. Fine. You’re the boss.”

He drove on in silence for the next two minutes as they passed the bulldozers resting by the new golf course, the old Van Der Hayden estate with its new stone wall, and the great open pasture that Barry had only recently learned was populated with cows leased by the telecommunications mogul across the road to make it look more picturesque.

Just past the old millpond, Barry made the right onto Grace Hill Road and saw the empty lot where that grand Tudor used to be. Some investment analyst bought the place last year and knocked it down, presumably to throw up a Steroid Colonial with a Garage Mahal. But he must’ve run out of money, because no work had been done since then. So now a small deer family stood over the hole in the ground where the house once was, trying to figure out if their trail used to run by here.

Barry cruised by them slowly, reminded that even after eighteen years of marriage, his wife was still sometimes as much a mystery to him as the suburbs.

“So how was work?” she asked.

“You know. The struggle continues. What does not kill us makes us stronger.”

“Does that mean we’re still going to be able to go to Paris for Christmas?”

“Of course,” he said, having forgotten about the plan until this very moment. “I’ve got it covered.”

Even with fares to Europe down to encourage flying, tickets and a decent hotel for a week were going to be at least six grand. He hoped he wasn’t going to have to sell a treasury bill to pay for the trip. He’d already promised Lynn he wouldn’t touch the Keogh accounts or the kids’ college savings funds.

“Good,” she said. “Because this may be the last trip we get to take as a family. I can barely get Hannah to go to the store with me anymore.”

“What goes around comes around. I bet you felt the same way about your mother when you were that age.”

“That’s not true. By the time I was her age, I was
taking care of
my
mother.”

“And resenting every other minute of it, probably.”

“Didn’t stop me from doing what I was supposed to, though.”

They made the abrupt right into the hidden driveway a quarter mile past the horse farm.

“Have I told you lately how much I love our house?” she said.

“Don’t hold back.”

“It’s just such a relief when I make that little turn and see it standing there.”

“I hear
that,
” he said, feeling the cool touch of her fingertips on the back of his neck.

He remembered the first time they came up this long gravel road with the grass centerline and the canopy of oak branches, a year and a half ago. As Lynn put it, it was like stepping from black-and-white into supersaturated Kodachrome amber and green. He hadn’t realized how accustomed to washed-out grays he’d got while growing up in Newark and living in Manhattan. Everything stood out here so vividly. The red feathers of a cardinal in its nest. The yellow leaves rustling in a light breeze, and the Canada geese honking overhead. The distant whinny of horses from down the road, the vapory shimmer of the river at the bottom of the hill. And at the summit of their little rise, the old brown farmhouse—stolid and impervious, a Winslow Homer painting brought to life.

“Everything’s going to be all right, isn’t it?” She gripped his arm as he pulled up in front of the basketball hoop at the top of the driveway.

“Yeah, sure,” he said quickly. “We’re fine.”

But as he opened the door and the dome light came on, he saw his own uncertainty reflected in her eyes.

“Really,” he said. “We’re the lucky ones.”

He got out and checked the bumper sticker on the car blocking the garage entrance—a lime-green ’86 Datsun belonging to their daughter’s boyfriend, Dennis Paultz. “If You’re Not Outraged, You’re Not Thinking.”

“I can’t believe she’s still going out with this kid.” He wagged his head. “When is she going to outgrow him?”

“Maybe she won’t. Maybe this is true love.”

“Please, God, have mercy on my little black heart.”

They crossed the lawn, passing Slam, the garden gnome with the basketball and sunglasses that Lynn got Barry for his last birthday. The figure was in the shade of the apple tree that Barry fell in love with when they first visited. A hell of an idea, being able to grow food in your own front yard instead of stumbling out to Gristedes with an ATM card on a Saturday morning.
His
tree. Just like the one his father always wanted to grow in their scrappy little front yard on Clifton Avenue. He would’ve loved to have seen Dad sitting under this one, but getting 50 percent of a dream to come true wasn’t too shabby, was it? With the temperature dropping quickly tonight, though, he wondered if the small green nutlike apples would have a chance to fully ripen.

“Anybody home?” Lynn called out, pushing open the heavy mahogany front door that she’d found in Pennsylvania farm country and bought because it reminded the kids of a medieval castle entrance.

He stood on the threshold behind her, granting himself a small ephemeral moment of satisfaction, the lion setting a heavy contented paw down in his lair.

This is our home. This is where we belong.
It almost broke them financially to get it just so. Another quarter-million and counting beyond the $650,000 they spent in the first place. But what choice was there? The kitchen was from General Eisenhower’s era, and Donna Reed would have found the living room way too squaresville. All the linoleum and wood paneling had to be stripped away. The ceiling beams had to be exposed. The place needed to be taken down to its bare bones so they could make it their own. He remembered how Lynn went at the design with the architect as if she was telling a story, embedding little details that only the two of them would understand. A marble mantel over the fireplace like the kind they had in their first apartment on East 10th Street; an oak bed glimpsed in a sexy Rohmer movie; the acorn newel post from her parents’ house; a small bar counter she’d rescued from an old bootlegger’s yacht and stripped and stained herself; French windows in the living room like the ones Oliver Twist threw open on that first morning at his benefactor’s home; a series of Lynn’s black-and-white prints of Vermont barns and Cape Cod sand dunes on white matte backgrounds. At one point, he’d started to fret about all the dollars flying away in a jet stream, but then he saw the green studded-leather door she’d gotten for his study, just like the kind M had for his office in the James Bond movies. After that, he was on board for anything. The hardwood floors in the main hallway like Alan Bates had in his artist’s loft in
An Unmarried Woman.
The little secret passageway from Hannah’s bedroom to the hall bathroom so she could feel like Alice with her own rabbit hole. The special window seat in Clay’s room, where he could squirrel himself away. A crazy quilt of memories and impressions, but somehow Lynn balanced them and made them all feel like parts of an organic whole, a place to lay your weary burden down.

From upstairs, Barry heard the thump of feet coming off a bed and the sealed-off hysteria of a crowd on television.

“Does that sound like homework getting done?” He stepped into the foyer.

“I’m going to have to talk to her again.” Lynn rolled her eyes.

“Yo, word up.”

Hannah had appeared at the top of the stairs. A brand-new white Susan Sontag ? Pepe Le Pew streak heightened the Gothic drama of her dyed black hair. A creamy white crescent strip of belly showed between her skimpy black top and baggy green fatigues, neatly drawing the line between slim hiplessness below and blossoming womanhood above. At her side was her inamorato, Dennis from Mopus Bridge Road. Something about this boy made the plaque in Barry’s arteries harden. It wasn’t the tongue stud or the Caesar haircut with the bleached strands, the mild body odor, or even the “Nature Bites Back” T-shirt with the peace symbol button on the collar. It wasn’t the “Pass” and “Fail” written on the knuckles of each hand. It wasn’t even the fact that he still suspected Dennis of egging the windshield and leaving that crank note accusing him of being an “ecocriminal operating a mobile pollutant” under the wiper blade of their Explorer. It was the way his daughter melted into him a little as they were standing there barefoot and giggly, not quite keeping herself distinct.

“So, what’s going on?” Barry asked.

“I dunno.”

She held Dennis’s arm as they descended the steps. Barry remembered how she walked around with a nervous smile when she first got breasts a couple of years ago, as if she were carrying a loaded gun that she didn’t know how to handle. Now she swaggered and smirked like Jesse James.

“You guys working on your college essays?” Barry asked.

He saw the flicker of conspiracy between them.

“We were just getting started,” Dennis mumbled.

“Were you?”

He saw the boy eyeing him with the kind of jaunty insouciance that can only be born of believing one is about to bed the Lord of the Manor’s daughter. Well, we’ll see about
that,
won’t we, Young Bunny Hugger?

“Dennis, where are you applying?” asked Lynn, ever the gracious mom.