“All right, a wine. A pinot noir. Get me a glass of pinot noir.”
There was music playing over the sound system, a thin drift of high harmonies rising above an insistent guitar, the volume turned just low enough so that you couldn’t actually hear it except at odd intervals, though you knew it was there. He shuffled his feet. Put his hands in his pockets. He felt bad. Felt conflicted. Carolee was going to get her wine, that was as certain as the law of diminishing returns, and he was thinking he could maybe maneuver her back toward the door, as far from Adam as possible, and hope for the best. But then what was he thinking? What was wrong here? Why couldn’t they just stop by their own son’s table and say hello as if they’d drifted in at random? (Yeah, they’d been to a movie and had a craving for pizza and what a surprise to see you here, but we won’t keep you, no, no, just go ahead and we’ll see you later, okay?) Because Adam wouldn’t believe them, that was why. Or maybe he would. You could never tell with him.
If all this was about making a decision, it was taken out of his hands, because Sara looked up then, her eyes languidly scanning the room, till they settled on his and then Carolee’s. He watched her face change. First she looked puzzled, as if she couldn’t quite place them, but then she smiled and waved and ducked her head to say something to Adam, who seemed to stiffen in his seat. His head was down still, the muscles at the back of his neck bunched, but he didn’t move or respond. He might have been frozen in place, might have been a statue. There was a lull. The music emerged. Somebody shouted out something inane, the way people tend to do in bars. And then, very slowly, Adam turned in profile to glance over his shoulder. The look he gave them—his parents, his own parents—shaded from incomprehension to hate, to a look of such ferocious contempt you would have thought they’d come to tear the flesh from his bones. In the next moment he was up and out of the seat and hurtling down the hallway, past the kitchen, past the restrooms and right on out the back door. And Sara, the horse lady who was fifteen years older than he was and no paragon herself, gave them a fleeting apologetic smile before she snatched up her purse and hurried out after him.
But now it was morning and Sten was in the supermarket, arching his back to take the crick out of it, Carolee’s list clenched in one hand and the steak seeping blood at the bottom of the cart, getting on with his life. Eggs. Hadn’t she mentioned something about eggs? He scanned the list, her handwriting a neat rounded script that flowed like music on the page, handwriting that was as familiar as his own, but he saw no eggs listed there. What the hell, he was thinking, reaching for the carton anyway, thinking better safe than sorry, when he became aware that someone was standing right there beside him, too close for casual contact, someone who started off as a pair of running shoes and shorts climbing out of the floor and turned out to be Carey Bachman, who used to teach social studies at the school till his wife’s cosmetics business took off and made earning a paycheck extraneous. He was in his mid-forties, with a narrow slice of a face dominated by his milky protuberant eyes (“Fish-Eyes,” the students had called him behind his back) and he was dressed in a T-shirt though it was fifty-eight degrees outside and colder in here, what with the refrigerated air of the meat and dairy displays, and he should have been smiling, but wasn’t.
“Carey,” Sten heard himself say.
Still no smile. Sotto voce: “Hi, Sten.” A glance over his shoulder, conspiratorial. “Listen,” he said, “you see what’s going on here?”
See what? What was he talking about?
Carey led with his chin, eyes up, then down again, and Sten looked across the aisle to see three—no, four—Mexicans pushing a pair of overloaded carts. They were dressed in work clothes—boots, jeans, long-sleeved shirts—and each wore a brand-new Oakland A’s cap pushed back on his head with the bill jutting out at an odd angle, as if it were a fashion trend. Other than the caps, which they might have got at a ballgame at the Coliseum the night before, there was nothing to distinguish them. Three were young—teenage or early twenties—the other middle-aged. They could have been anybody. “Yeah,” he said, “I see them. What’s the deal?”
Carey gave him a look of disbelief. “What’s the deal? ‘Take Back Our Forests,’ that’s the deal. Remember, you came to the first meeting? Before you went off on vacation—on that cruise?”