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THEY TOOK A late-evening ride, Emma up ahead of him, her shadow and the horse’s undulating across the blowing grass. The visit to her grandmother and the ride had taken the edge off Emma’s anger, and she deigned to point things out to him—a mule deer’s ears flicking above the brush line, a kestrel hovering in the wind, a clump of flowering bladderpod.
They were picking their way down Quail Hill when someone stepped out of the Bommer camp and hiked into the canyon. The man seemed to speed up when he saw the two of them, but then he reached down to retrieve something—an errant golf ball from Bommer Canyon Links, just on the other side of the ridge. The club sent caddies up to collect lost balls, but his presence broke the illusion of wilderness, of Ben and Emma alone in their own golden-lit bubble.
Back at the house, they had ?Fiesta! Night, complete with a wrinkling construction-paper sign Emma had made two years before, pre-divorce but imminent separation and forced family “fun” together. He let Emma play her radio station again—the whining pleas of some group he didn’t care to know the name of—while they worked together at the stove. He asked her about her classes, about her friend Heather, whose father had suffered a mild heart attack and had just been released from the hospital. “Fine” was all she’d give him, as she diced jalape?o, scooped the bits onto the knife blade, and slid them into a glass bowl.
He waited a few moments, letting them work in the echo of the music, the singer moaning about reeling around a fountain and being slapped on a patio.
“What is this stuff?” he said.
“The Smiths,” she said. “They’re from England. Manchester, to be precise.”
“Fifteen minutes with you?” he said, repeating the lyrics. “I wouldn’t say no?”
Emma just shrugged.
He wasn’t crazy about the lyrics, but she was growing up and he didn’t need to tick her off any more than he already had.
“You know,” Emma said, “it’s pretty crappy that you went to his house. You scared him.”
Good, Ben thought. You follow the rules when you’re scared. “It’s kind of crappy,” he said, “that I don’t know what’s going on with my own daughter.”
“I don’t tell you because you go all Big Brother on me.” She cut into a tomato, seed and juice wetting the board. “I swear, it’s like you’ll arrest me if I don’t floss.”
“Did you?” he said in an official voice. “This morning?”
Eyes rolling.
“I don’t like secrets,” he said, pouring oil into the frying pan. “They lead to bad things.”
“Is that what happened with you and Mom? You kept secrets from each other?”
He reached for the top cabinet, but pain shot through his shoulder. Emma stood on her toes and grabbed the packet of taco sauce for him.
“You should put stuff in the lower cabinets,” she said.
“Thanks,” he said, tossing the ground beef in the frying pan. “I don’t know what happened with me and your mother.”
When they told Emma they were getting a divorce, Ben and Rachel had settled on the easiest explanation: They had fallen out of love. “It happens sometimes,” Rachel had said, hugging Emma. Since the divorce, Emma and Rachel seemed to have grown closer, while Emma had dug a moat around herself with Ben, and he’d wanted to tell Emma the real reason for the split: Your sweet, sweet mother couldn’t keep her hands off the fucking history teacher down the hall. She and Mr. Timeline had worked together on a grant to get Macintosh computers for the library at the crappy, underfunded North Hollywood high school. The history teacher listened to her, Rachel had said at the time. Clearly a rebuke of Ben, whom Rachel had called “abstracted” and “distant.” Ears, the gateway to love! In the year since the divorce, Ben had wanted to tell his daughter the truth; he wanted her sympathy, her loyalty, especially since she and Rachel both seemed to blame him for the death of the marriage. Fallen out of love? Jesus. As though he and Rachel had sighed together one morning in mutual realization that Love had slipped out the back door and was never coming back. Oh, well. We’d better tell Emma.
“Mom says you guys grew apart,” Emma said, “whatever that means.”
He sprayed the raw meat with lime, the citrus stinging a hangnail on his thumb.
“Is that a quote?” he said.
“Paraphrasing,” she said.
He flipped the meat, browned side up, and watched the place on his ring finger where the band had been, the fat still indented. He’d tossed it in the trash one drunken night but then retrieved it immediately and hid it in a box in the rifle cabinet.
“I guess that’s one way to think about it,” he said.
He had been completely broadsided by the affair. “I wanted you to know,” Rachel had said late on a Friday night, while they sat watching a Dodgers game and ate Vietnamese takeout. “I needed you to know.” One moment he’d been sitting on the couch, Rachel’s warm shoulder leaning against his, watching Fernando Valenzuela strike out the side, and, whiplash, the next he was some idiot who’d been T-boned by a cheating wife. He’d first met the history teacher, Dennis Jackson, a couple years earlier at a school fundraising BBQ, shook Mr. Timeline’s hand, talked with him for a few minutes about Skylab falling back to earth. “Hope it falls west of Alameda and east of Wilmington,” Ben remembered saying. “We have to educate the kids,” Mr. Timeline had said, “not arrest them.” Rachel swore it hadn’t started back then, swore it’d only been a few months, but she could have kept on sleeping with the man, and Ben, the goddamned veteran detective breaking open drug cases, wouldn’t have been the wiser to what his wife was doing in her afternoons after classes. Grading papers, my ass!
Rachel wanted to explain why to him that night. She needed him to understand, she said, but he wasn’t sticking around to listen to what she needed.
“Stay,” she said, following him to the front door, tugging on the edge of the windbreaker he was yanking over his shoulders. “Ben, I told you because I love you.”
He imagined slapping her then, when she said that, a vivid, satisfying smack of skin against skin, and he knew he had to get out of there before he did something stupid.
“Let’s talk,” she said, still holding on to the zipper of his coat. “We need to talk, please.”
“Let go,” he whispered through clenched teeth.
He got trashed that night in a seedy bar on Venice Boulevard. When the bar closed, he got a motel room overlooking the stream of cars on the 405 Freeway and stayed through the weekend, and when he finally stumbled back to the house on Monday after Emma had gone off to school, prepared to kick Rachel out, she was sitting on the steps to the front porch, looking like hell. He sat down next to her and watched with her in silence as a trash truck made its way down the street.
“Let me explain,” she finally said. “I need you to understand.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to know why.”