Mary Coin Read online

  “Harry had to pick her up downtown,” Lisette says, as soon as she answers her phone. “She was plastered.”

  “It’s good that she called you instead of driving,” he says.

  “She didn’t call. Some guy called.”

  “At least she has decent friends.”

  “The same decent friends who buy a sixteen-year-old booze.”

  “That’s what a teenager would call good friends.”

  Lisette exhales heavily; she’s not ready for jokes. “She graces us with her presence Monday through Thursday nights. All bets are off on the weekend unless she needs money. I have no idea what she’s doing out there. I don’t know who she is.”

  Walker can hear the panic in Lisette’s voice. She has a mind that races from fact to disaster in mere seconds. It is his job to slow her down, to remind her how many steps there are between Alice, their difficult teen, and Alice, the drug-addled streetwalker.

  “How is Isaac?” he says.

  “Fine when Alice is not around. When she’s home, he basically lives in his room with his close personal companion, MacBook Pro.”

  “Is he looking at porn?”

  “Probably.”

  “Do you check his history?”

  “I’m not going to do that. I don’t think I want to know his history.”

  They are silent for a while. They never disagree about the children. They both feel powerless in the face of the popular culture that has kidnapped Isaac’s and Alice’s attention. Neither of their children reads books. Alice plays a three-note bass in a variety of quickly disintegrating bands. Isaac knows how to create apps for his smart phone. At least they aren’t sitting at home playing Nintendo, Walker and Lisette weakly reassure each other. But of course Nintendo is a dated and benign fear. As hard as they try to keep up, Walker and Lisette fall further behind their kids, like two people chasing a train.

  “Why don’t you make Alice come home at least one weekend night?” he suggests. “Tell her she has to have dinner with you and Harry and Isaac.”

  “Because, quite honestly, it isn’t so pleasant to sit at the table and watch her scowl.” She lets out a pale laugh and then a sigh full of resignation.

  “I know,” Walker says.

  “Tell me she’s going to be okay,” she says.

  “She’s going to be okay.”

  They are quiet. Of course neither of them knows if this is true.

  “She threw up all over Harry’s car,” Lisette says. “He told her to clean it out or pay for the detailing herself.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Needless to say, she’s making a production out of the whole thing. She’s got Isaac running back and forth with wet paper towels.”

  “He shouldn’t have to do that.”

  “He wants to.”

  “Tell him to stop.”

  “I’m on top of it, Walker,” she says, her tone snapping to attention.

  Their amicable post-divorce relationship takes these sudden sharp turns that he is never prepared for, where he comes face-to-face with her dissatisfactions. Although the dots don’t quite connect, he knows this zinger refers to a time when he and Lisette were still married and his frequent absence from his family’s life provoked her. Her resentment made his attempts to parent when he was around feel hollow, as if he were a bad actor. His work preoccupied him so much that sometimes he sat at the dinner table looking at Lisette and the children as if they were a photograph some future historian would discover and place in a social and economic context. While he was following his intuition, digging through the leavings of forgotten lives, not promoting his career in any straightforward way, Lisette was raising children, teaching high school physics, and, as he learned, having an affair with Harry, who is now her very decent and very present husband.

  “Should I talk to her?” he asks, the formulation an admission that he is ancillary to the family, a semi-useful acquaintance who can be called on if necessary. At any rate, it’s a rhetorical question. They can each lecture Alice and cajole Alice and threaten Alice. But in the end, there is nothing either of them can do.

  3.

  Two nights later, Walker is woken from a thick sleep by the phone. His father has died. The combination of being semiconscious and hearing the words he has been anticipating finally spoken as blunt, stupid fact makes him feel a confused sense of emergency. He throws on yesterday’s clothes, gets in his car, and drives through the predawn hours until he is back in Porter. It is only when he pulls up to the house, where the rising sun is just beginning to flare against the windows, that he realizes he has come to the wrong place. His father’s body is still at the hospital. For the first time in more than a century there is no Dodge living in this home.

  During the next few days, his sisters, Evelyn and Rosalie, fly in from Chicago and Houston. His brother, Matthew, who has taken over the company, drives down from Fresno, where he runs Dodge Holdings from its corporate office. The meeting with the lawyer is short and unsurprising. George’s assets are tied up with the company, and he has left only small amounts to each of his children. The Dodges were always and only about the land.

  Walker and Lisette decide that Alice and Isaac do not need to come to the memorial service of a man at whose behest they visited only on Christmas and Easter. Now that the day has come, though, and Walker enters the church alone, he wishes they were with him. He sits next to Angela and her mother. Beatriz is a tiny woman, and her feet do not meet the ground when she sits in the pew. He remembers how proud he was—how proud they both were—when he grew taller than his niñera. For years she had promised to treat him to dinner when the blessed event occurred and she kept her word, taking him to her brother’s taquería, where Walker gorged himself on carnitas and happily received the congratulatory pats on the shoulder of every patron who entered the place—most of them employees of Dodge Farms. Beatriz is seventy-five, George’s age, although she looks ten years younger, her face barely lined, her short and thick waist giving her a robust aspect. She cries softly through the service with a lack of embarrassment that Walker envies. The muscles of his face ache from the effort of trying to keep himself under control.

  That the mayor is at the service along with other town dignitaries does not surprise Walker, but he is taken aback by the numbers who come from the groves. Foremen and field managers fill the pews, along with their wives and children. When the service is over, they wait to speak to Walker and his siblings. As they share stories of George’s generosity during a particularly dry season, or recount how he sent a week’s worth of food when one of the men lost his wife, Walker feels his father growing less distinct until, having assumed the shape of this benevolent and thoughtful patrón, he becomes virtually unrecognizable. Walker is disheartened when none of the employees come back to the house for the small reception Evelyn and Rosalie have organized. He would like to talk more to them, to hear the stories they might tell that would fill in the many blanks of his father’s life. But either his sisters didn’t extend the invitation or the men and their wives do not feel comfortable coming to the casa grande, a title that is both frankly descriptive and queasily suggestive of plantation hierarchy.

  A tall, older man still in possession of an erect posture crosses the living room and greets Walker with a firm handshake. “Which one are you?” he says.

  “Walker.”

  “The oldest boy.”

  “That’s right,” Walker says. He loves the way the elderly see everyone else as permanent children.

  “Well, son, I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t remember you,” Walker says.

  “No reason why you would. I’m Edward Dodge.”

  Walker is taken aback. “Uncle Edward?”

  “I guess you could call me that, too.”

  Edward and George had not spoken since their father’s death, when th
e will revealed that the entire operation had been handed down to George. Now Edward’s vitality seems like a rebuke, the winning move in a chess game of dynastic family madness.

  “Funny to be back here,” Edward says. “Place hasn’t changed a bit.”

  Walker looks around foolishly, as if he had not noticed this before. He feels unaccountably embarrassed in front of this man, as if he should apologize for the fact of his father’s luck.

  “Your dad and I used to come in so muddy that one of the ladies would have to carry us straight to the bath or Mother would raise a fit,” Edward says.

  “My father never talked much about his childhood,” Walker says.

  “He ever tell you about the boxing ring?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you know he was a serious boy, your dad. Skinny and not much for fighting. Then I come along like a bat out of hell, and I’m bigger even if I’m three years younger. Once I find out how little it takes to get your dad to cry, well . . .” He smiles at the memory. “So your granddad, he gets some of his men to build a boxing ring out back, wooden floor and ropes—the works—and he buys us each a set of boxing gloves. And then comes this man down from Monterey with muscles the size of cantaloupes. Says he was an amateur boxer, although who knows? Probably he got into a bar fight now and again up there with those fellows from the canneries. Well, it turns out Dad has hired this man to teach us how to box. And lo and behold, the first time George and I step into that ring, George throws me down with one punch. So Dad pays the boxing coach and sends him home, has the workers take down the ropes and pull up the floor, and that’s the end of that.” He lets out a bark of a laugh.

  “Can I ask you something?” Walker says.

  “Fire away.”

  “Why did Grandfather cut you out of the business?”

  Edward smiles in a way that suggests a private history. “He took the answer to that question to his grave.”

  “You must have been angry.”

  “Confused, mostly,” he says. “But I never imagined myself as any sort of farmer. I guess he knew that. And George was special to him.”

  “Why?”

  Edward thinks for a moment, and then laughs. “You know what? I never asked him. That’s the way of it, isn’t it? You always ask the wrong questions.”

  Later, Walker stands on the porch watching the guests leave. He has the feeling that the people are taking away fragments of his father—a story or a joke or a friendly game of five-card draw played one August night when the windows were flung open against the still heat and the cicadas sang and his father wiped a sweating tumbler of Scotch against his brow.

  Just before the EMTs lifted the gurney carrying his father into the ambulance, Walker caught a glimpse of George’s expression. It was etheric, trapped somewhere between living and dying. Walker had a sudden, awful feeling that his father thought he was making the journey to the hospital alone. “Dad. I’m here,” he said. “I’m going to drive right behind the ambulance. I’ll see you very soon.”

  George reached up a hand and grasped Walker’s wrist with surprising force. Walker heard his father’s struggling wheezes, smelled the sour, spent odor of George’s mouth, seventy-four years of food and saliva and sucked-back tears and sucked-back feelings stored in the nooks between yellowed teeth. His eyes darted with a wild, unruly energy.

  “Burn me up,” he whispered.

  4.

  When Walker and Lisette split, they sold their house in the Sunset District, and he now lives in an apartment in the Mission, which he has not decorated with much more personality than the motel rooms he occupies during his fieldwork. He knows he ought to pay more attention to his place and try to make it a proper second home for Alice and Isaac. But their weekends are filled with activities, and they want to be close to their friends, so they rarely visit him in the city. During the school year, Walker drives to Petaluma to see them—sometimes twice a week—taking the kids out to dinner, or Isaac to his soccer practice or to an orthodontist appointment. Alice recently got her license, so it is a challenge to invent her need for him unless Lisette has impounded her car keys for one reason or another. Walker’s visits have the quality of courtship. He takes great pleasure in dressing, in planning the activities, in the nervousness he feels as he nears the highway exit, the adrenaline kick when he pulls to the curb outside Lisette and Harry’s yellow cottage. He honks and waits for the door to open and for his kids to appear. They are shy and petulant as they ford the turbulent distance between the house and his car. There is something sweet and tentative about the way the awkwardness of the encounters makes it impossible for any of them to take the time for granted, even though the kids complain to their mother about “having” to see Dad and sit heavily into the car and do not speak for a few minutes, or even fifteen minutes. Once Alice managed to go a whole night without saying a word. Her reticence is sometimes physically painful for Walker, who can still feel the sensation of her warm body against his chest when he lifted her from her crib each morning. Still, the discomfort is worthwhile for the pleasure he feels when Isaac inadvertently hums a song or when Alice delivers the first of her thrusts, which Isaac does not have the requisite aggression to parry—when they cannot help but be themselves.

  He is taking them on a fishing trip to Humboldt County for a long weekend. Isaac says he is excited to go, but Walker suspects the only reason Alice has agreed is that hanging around the pot capital of California will give her bragging rights with her friends. The kids are particularly sluggish when he picks them up. Alice drags her unrolled sleeping bag down the front walkway, a nasty, lolling tongue of girlish purple and pink meant to reassure him of her absolute disinterest in this vacation. Upon seeing his contrary, difficult girl, Walker realizes how much he has missed her and her dedication to her misery, as well as her intelligence, which shines despite her valiant attempts to hide it. He loves her tangled blond hair and her wide face. The small mole on her cheek is probably a point of intense scrutiny and the locus of a vague unhappiness, but he thinks it distinguishes her, and that, in time, some boy or man will tell her that it is something he loves about her. She dresses in a combination of clothes that Walker recognizes as the province of hip kids everywhere: thrift-shop finds jumbled together in mismatch, a kind of assertive ugliness, as if she is daring others to locate the beauty she cannot yet find in herself.

  Isaac comes out of the house in his usual state of akimbo—shoelaces undone, his cartoonish bubble of blond hair flattened from sleep, bright pimples sprayed across his forehead. He wears the fishing vest Walker bought for him the previous Christmas and carries his fishing pole. Walker feels grateful to his son for willingly entering into the possible charade of this trip. Alice turns back to Isaac and says something Walker can’t hear, but he can tell by the way Isaac’s shoulders drop that she has nailed him for his enthusiasm or his outfit or both. Her brother’s lack of cynicism enrages her. Isaac continues to the car, struggling underneath the double burden of his camping equipment and his sister’s judgment. Walker reminds himself that despite the divorce and the move and a sister whose emotional vicissitudes dominate, Isaac is still a boy who bends toward happiness. And Alice, if he wants to relieve himself of the burden of guilt for a split second, is no different from who she was at two, when she seemed less child than highly reactive substance that Walker and Lisette handled gingerly, fearing unexpected explosions. He imagines that she has learned to playact apathy as a way of protecting against the crisis of feelings that attend her barely hidden anxieties.

  “Are we gonna stop for lunch?” Alice says when they have been driving for barely an hour.

  “I made sandwiches,” Walker says. “In the cooler.”

  He watches in the rearview as the kids find the food. Isaac takes a huge, trusting bite while Alice checks between the bread.

  “Nutella and bacon!” Isaac exclaims. It is a favorite combination that health-minded Li
sette refuses to indulge.

  “On white bread!” Walker adds, and to his relief Alice gives him an ironic thumbs-up.