He looked at me and grinned.
“What?” I said.
“It’s in the MISCELLANEOUS box. It’s yours now.”
“No kidding?” I said. “Does it still work?”
“Why wouldn’t it?”
“Didn’t you tell me once that Gee bought it for you way back when? It must be an antique by now.”
“I’m an antique and I still work,” he said. “I drive a little slower is all.”
“Yeah but you still get to go skinny-dipping with Lucy Liu.”
“Every night,” he said. “I pop in that Charlie’s Angels DVD, turn out the lights, and then Lucy and me head off to the swimming hole.”
I put on the turn signal and turned down the cul-de-sac. “These are things I’d rather not hear about, Pops.”
“Just you wait,” he said.
I pulled up in front of the garage. I knew the girls would come running out any second now. “Did you even have to register your firearms back in those days?” I asked.
“Probably supposed to,” he said, and then he popped open his door, because here came the girls, laughing and squealing.
You know how they say if you fool around with a Ouija board you open up a door that any spirit good or bad can come in? And that the ones that most want to get at you are the bad ones? I’m wondering if the same holds true for bad stuff in general. Like if I’m in a hurry to get to the bathroom some morning and I stub my toe on the dresser. An hour later I might spill coffee all over the floor, then scrape a fender pulling the truck out of the garage, then accidentally run over the garbage can because I’m so ticked off about the fender. It’s like that book Dani loves so much, something about a series of unfortunate events. And let’s say the first event was something a whole lot worse than stubbing a toe, something major, something like stealing a significant amount of money. Are even bigger and badder things now likely to follow in the wake of that?
By doing that one bad thing, did I maybe open up my life to a whole world of bigger and nastier trouble?
I’m going to have to answer yes to that.
So the weekend passed, and Monday morning I kept telling myself to say something to Cindy about the plant closing. Sooner or later she was going to hear about it at the bank. Thing is, I knew how she would react. She can go into panic mode over the tiniest thing. Why put her through that sooner than necessary? Fridays were the busiest days of the week at the bank, so maybe I could squeak by until then.
I knew I was just kidding myself, but I wanted so bad to believe it. I wanted to believe I could hide the truth from her until I found another job. I’d been spending a lot of my time at the plant searching online and then calling up potential employers and e-mailing my résumé, but I still didn’t have any interviews lined up. I was seriously considering driving around to the fast food places to see if any of them was hiring.
And when I wasn’t all stressed out about a job, all I could think about was stealing that money. I wanted to believe the people from that meth house were so screwed up on their own product that they might never even notice the missing box. And what if they did notice it? How was anybody going to connect me to its disappearance? The girl had been too doped up to see straight, and dogs can’t talk.
Hoping for the best like that was the only way I could keep myself from going crazy.
It’s funny how foolish a man can become when he gets himself stuck in an impossible situation.
So I kept my mouth shut, kissed Cindy and the girls goodbye, and headed off to work like it was just another day. At the plant, though, everybody’s attitude had gone way past sour. We had four guys running equipment, and they were all at least ten years older than me, in fact two of them were closing in on sixty. But that didn’t keep them from giving me an earful at some point during the day, and they all had more or less the same thing to say. We should’ve had more warning than this. There’s no such thing as loyalty anymore. A man works his entire freaking life . . . I never thought Jake would treat us like this . . . Those damn Chinamen are taking over the world . . . When’s the government going to do something about what’s happening to this country?
And all I could do was to nod and say the same thing over and over again. I know. I agree. Me too. It’s not right. I’m in the same boat you are.
Truth is, I wasn’t in the same boat at all. As far as I could tell, I wasn’t even in a boat. What I felt like was that first day of my and Cindy’s honeymoon when we went to Ocean City for a long weekend. While she was laying there sunning herself, I went swimming so far out that the only way I could see our blue patch of beach towel with the tiny dot of yellow from her swimsuit was when a wave lifted me up. By the time I realized that the patch of blue was getting smaller and smaller and farther and farther to my left, and that without swimming a stroke I was moving past that long fishing pier, I felt more used up than on the first day of basic. At first I panicked and started swimming straight toward the shore, but all that accomplished was to wear myself out even more. When I finally remembered that the only way out of a riptide is to swim to the side instead of into it, I was a good three hundred yards from Cindy and fairly certain I was never going to see her again.
Maybe a half hour later I came trudging up the beach toward where Cindy was sitting up now and staring out at the horizon. Every breath felt like broken glass going down my throat. My arms felt like they were going to drop off, and my legs felt like they were filled with cement.
I dropped down beside her and laid out on my back. She said, “There you are. You take a walk down the beach?”
“Long walk,” I said.
“You weren’t looking at all the pretty girls, were you?”
“Not all of them,” I said.
“Well, you better not have worn yourself out,” she told me. “I have plans for you when we get back to our room.”
And that’s exactly how I felt when I got home after work Monday night after making a stop at the storage unit, that same combination of total exhaustion and the dread of an impending duty I was in no mood to undertake. And then all that misery tripled when I went into the kitchen to see Cindy’s father standing there at the kitchen sink, blowing cigarette smoke out the window screen.
“Hey there, Russell,” he said, as if we’d seen each other a few days before and not years ago. He took another long drag from the cigarette, then turned on the tap and flushed the butt down the garbage disposal.
I said, “You don’t put paper down a garbage disposal. It’s not made for that.”
He grinned and said, “You put paper down the toilet, don’t you? And it all ends up in the same place.”
“More important,” I told him, “there’s no smoking in this house.”
“I blew it out the window,” he said.
“There is no smoking. In this house.”