“A little rowdy?” And here was that look again, the one that bunched her eyebrows. “I’d say he was more than a little rowdy—and what did that wind up costing us?”
He felt the irritation come up in him, despite the Xanax, despite the gin and the whiff of vermouth riding atop it. “I don’t know,” he said. “Can’t we talk about something else?”
13.
THE NEXT MORNING, EARLY, he found himself back in Fort Bragg, at the grocery there—the cheap one, the one the tourists didn’t know about—pushing a cart and working his way through the itemized list Carolee had pressed on him as he went out the door. The place was over-lit, antiseptic, as artificial as the flight deck of a spaceship, and at this hour there were more shelf-stockers than shoppers. That was all right. He liked the early hours, when things were less complicated. He’d been up early all his life and though everybody said the best thing about retirement was sleeping in, he just couldn’t feature it. If he found himself in bed later than six he felt like a degenerate, and he supposed he could thank his mother for that. And his father. The work ethic—once you had it, once it had been implanted in you, how could you shake it? Why would you want to? Relax, he kept telling himself. Keep busy. Relax. Keep busy. The last thing he wanted was to wind up sitting in a recliner all day staring at the TV like some zombie or pulling on a sun visor to chase a golf ball around the fairways with a bunch of loudmouthed jocks. Or bridge. He hated bridge, hated games of any kind. But how did you relax? That was the problem he was trying to resolve—and certainly world-class indulgence wasn’t the answer.
He seemed to have a package of meat in his hand, T-bone steak, slick and wet and red, and when he set it in the cart, there was a fine glaze of blood on his hand, and no place to wipe it off. Some stores provided paper towels to ease the unpleasantness of this little reminder of precisely where that steak or chop or chicken breast originated, but not this one. He stood there a moment, rubbing the pink glaze over his fingertips before surreptitiously wiping it off on the soft plastic wrapper of one of the packages of hamburger buns stacked on the display case behind him.
When he turned back to the cart, reaching down to reassemble the things there and check them against Carolee’s list—1% milk in the plastic jug, pickles, cookies, more meat, pasta, beans, rice—he felt the twinge in his lower back again, the muscle there balky still. It seemed to bother him more in the mornings, stiffening up overnight despite the form-fitting neoprene pad Carolee had stretched over the mattress, but then he hadn’t slept on that pad or in that bed—their bed—the previous night. He’d wound up on the narrow single bed in the guest room because Carolee was in one of her moods. And it wasn’t all her—he’d been in a mood too, absolutely. And why? Because after they’d finished their celebratory dinner, she’d insisted they go across the street and into the pizza place where Adam was, where Adam had been for the better part of an hour. “For an after-dinner drink,” she said, taking hold of his arm as they came down the stairs at the restaurant.
“They don’t have after-dinner drinks there. Only beer and wine, remember?”
“An after-dinner wine then.”
They were passing by the bar on the lower level—the door swung open on muted lighting and inflamed faces—and he said, “Why not have one here? A real drink, a cognac or that Benedictine you like. I’m wined out, if you want to know the truth.” They were in the hallway now, moving toward the front door. “Or actually, I’ve had enough. More than enough. Let’s just go home, huh?”
She was chopping along in her short swift strides, tugging at his arm as if leading him on a leash. “I want to go to Piero’s,” she said.
And he stopped, right there, right at the door, to tug back at her. “Let it go,” he told her. “Drop it. He’s a big boy now. He’s an adult. You can’t just go around spying on him—”
“I’m not spying on him. I just want a drink at Piero’s, all right? Is that a crime?”
“No,” he said, “but stalking is.”