The Ultimate Good Luck (27 page)

At four o’clock it was still dark. The air was misty before light. The marginales who had been dismantling the Willys had left with metal pieces tied together with strings. Rae was asleep on the bedspread. His clothes had begun to dry.

Rae turned on the bed and looked at him, the spread drawn around her shoulders in the chill. “What’re we going to do in New Orleans?” she said.

“Go to the dogs,” he said.

“You won’t leave me to the guys in the plaid suits, will you?”

“Not a chance.”

In the hall he heard footsteps on the tiles. She turned and stared at the globe in the ceiling.

“Do you just like me because I’m the best around?” she said. “I’m sorry to want to know that, I can’t help it.”

He listened to the footsteps approaching. “That sounds right,” he said.

“Then that’s fair,” she said. “I just wouldn’t like you ditching me for somebody you liked less.”

“I couldn’t like anybody less,” he said, “and I couldn’t like anybody any more. That’s what I’ve learned since I was a kid.”

She turned and faced him. “You thought you could live without me, didn’t you?”

“I did a moment,” he said.

“But you can’t, can you?”

“No. I can’t.”

She lay on her back again and thought a moment. “Do you know what today is?” she said softly.

He was listening for the steps. He had no fear of them at all. “I must’ve lost track.”

“It’s your birthday,” she said. “Isn’t that odd? Do you think you’re old enough to live your life now?”

Someone knocked at the door. The clerk stood in the hall nervously. Clerks didn’t like the corridors after dark. “There is a call,” he said softly. “Consulado americano. An emergencia in the prisión. You to come.” He walked away down the empty hall.

“What did he say?” Rae said from the bed. “I didn’t hear.”

“It’s a call. I’ll have to see,” he said.

“But you have to tell me something, though, right now,” she said, staring at him oddly. Love seemed to him like a place to be, a place where nothing troublesome could come inside, not even Sonny’s taking it down. “I just want to know how I look now,” she said. She studied him seriously, afraid. “You see everything. I want to know.” Her eyes were wet and her hair was bright around her face.

“Just great,” he said.

“Wonderful?” she said. “Would you say wonderful?”

“Wonderful,” he said.

“Do you think you’re old enough to live your life unprotected, Harry?” she said. “You can’t back off from what scares you.”

“Nothing scares me,” he said.

“Happy birthday, then,” she said. “Happy birthday to you.” She got out of bed to come with him.

The author of six novels and two collections of stories, Richard Ford has received the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction. His work has been translated into sixteen languages. He lives in Maine and New Orleans.

BOOKS BY
R
ICHARD
F
ORD
 

THE SPORTSWRITER

As a sportswriter, Frank Bascombe makes his living studying people—men, mostly—who live entirely within themselves. This is a condition that Frank himself aspires to. But at thirty-eight, he suffers from incurable dreaminess, occasional pounding of the heart, and the not-too-distant losses of a career, a son, and a marriage. And in the course of the Easter week in which Richard Ford’s wonderfully eloquent and moving novel transpires, Bascombe will end up losing the remains of his familiar life, though with spirits soaring.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76210-2

INDEPENDENCE DAY

In this visionary sequel to
The Sportswriter
, Richard Ford deepens his portrait of one of the most unforgettable characters in American fiction, and in so doing gives us an indelible portrait of America. Frank Bascombe, in the aftermath of his divorce and the ruin of his career, has entered an “Existence Period,” selling real estate in Haddam, New Jersey, and mastering the high-wire act of normalcy. But over one Fourth of July weekend, Frank is called into sudden, bewildering engagement with life.
Independence Day
is a moving, peerlessly funny odyssey through America and through the layered consciousness of one of its most compelling literary incarnations, conducted by a novelist of astonishing empathy and perception.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-73518-2

THE LAY OF THE LAND

A sportswriter and a real estate agent, husband and father—Frank Bascombe has been many things to many people. His uncertain youth behind him, we follow him through three days during the autumn of 2000, when his trade as a Realtor on the Jersey Shore is thriving. But as a presidential election hangs in the balance, and a postnuclear-family Thanksgiving looms before him, Frank discovers that what he terms the “Permanent Period” is fraught with unforeseen perils. An astonishing meditation on America today and filled with brilliant insights,
The Lay of the Land
is a magnificent achievement from one of the most celebrated chroniclers of our time.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-77667-3

A PIECE OF MY HEART

Richard Ford’s mesmerizing first novel is the story of two godless pilgrims. Robert Hewes has driven across the country in the service of a destructive passion. Sam Newel is seeking the missing piece of himself. When these men converge, on an uncharted island in the Mississippi, each discovers the thing he’s looking for—amid a conflagration of violence that’s as shocking as it is inevitable.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-394-72914-5

THE ULTIMATE GOOD LUCK

In this masterful novel of menace and eroticism, psychological revelation and shimmering atmosphere, Richard Ford updates the tradition of Conrad for the age of cocaine smuggling. The setting is Oaxaca, Mexico, where Harry Quinn has come to free his girlfriend’s brother, Sonny, from jail and, ideally, to get him away from the suavely sadistic drug dealer who suspects Sonny of having cheated him. What ensues is an exquisitely choreographed dance in which everyone—from expatriate whores to silent Zapotec Indians—is waiting for a chance at the ultimate good luck.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-394-75089-7

WOMEN WITH MEN

These three stories take us from the plains of Montana to the streets of Paris to the suburbs of Chicago. In these locales, Ford’s characters experience the consolations and complications that prevail in matters of passion, romance, and love. A seventeen-year-old boy starting adulthood in the shadow of his parents’ estrangement, a survivor of three marriages now struggling with cancer, an ostensibly devoted husband entering middle age, a woman scandalously betrayed by her husband—each contends with the vast distances that exist between those who are closest together. With peerless emotional nuance and authority, Richard Ford has once again demonstrated his mastery of short fiction.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-77668-0

A MULTITUDE OF SINS

With remarkable insight and candor, Richard Ford examines liaisons in and out and to the sides of marriage. An illicit visit to the Grand Canyon reveals a vastness even more profound. A couple weekending in Maine try to recapture the ardor that has disappeared from their life together. And on a spring evening, a young wife tells her husband of her affair with the host of the dinner party they’re about to join. The rigorous intensity Ford brings to these vivid, unforgettable dramas marks this as his most powerfully arresting book to date—confirming the judgment of
The New York Times Book Review
that “nobody now writing looks more like an American classic.”

Fiction/Short Stories/978-0-375-72656-9

VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com