“Dinner’s on me,” Lu says, putting down two $100 bills. “Andi—you use Uber or call a car service when it’s time to go home. Promise me. We have a meeting tomorrow morning, you can’t be late.”
“She’ll be fine,” Andi’s new friend says, sounding like the perfect gentleman. Lu sizes him up, then says: “Text me when you get in, Andi. I won’t sleep a wink until you do.”
Of course, she’s not going to sleep anyway. She had been skeptical, when talking to Davey—he spoke of Nita, not Jonnie Forke. But if she didn’t go to church, then she had no pastor to share the story about her sick grandchild on a listserv. Davey was lying about that, Lu is sure.
In her car, Lu instructs the Bluetooth panel: “Call my brother, please.” She cannot break the habit of saying “please,” even to the nonperson who lives inside her car’s dashboard. She is her father’s daughter.
AJ’s voice, on another machine, replied: “Hi, you have reached AJ Brant. I will be traveling until May twenty-fourth and may be slow returning calls. But leave a message or e-mail me in care of the foundation and I’ll—”
She disconnects. A sister shouldn’t have to queue on a brother’s answering machine, another supplicant yearning for his time, money, attention. How can he be away for a month? Oh, it’s almost Earth Day, a big date in AJ’s world. No problem. May twenty-fourth is the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. They’ll have a barbecue. She’ll buy vegan hot dogs for Lauranne if that’s what it takes to get a little time alone with her brother in order to broach the unbroachable subject, that Friday night after Thanksgiving 1979. Did he lie to protect his friend? Would he continue to lie to protect his friend?
The bigger question for Lu is whether she will be speaking as a sister, or the county state’s attorney.
MAY 25
“I guess this day is for you, dear Father.”
AJ raises a beer—a local one that he brought to the barbecue, presumably brewed from ethical hops. Whatever those are. But their father shakes his head. “Memorial Day is for those who died. I merely served. You can toast me in November.”
“Of course,” AJ says. “Of course. My bad. It’s not like I wish you were dead.”
He seems a little loopy to Lu, but it’s probably jet-lag. AJ was at the Sydney Writers Festival and he arrived at BWI only yesterday afternoon. Although his memoir about his wanderjahr is several years old, it was a bit of a sleeper hit in Australia and a big publisher there has just brought out a new edition, with an introduction by some hot-shit novelist that Lu has never heard of and a new afterword by AJ and Lauranne, all about how individuals matter, small changes, blah, blah, blah.
Lu scrapes the leftover baked beans and corn from her plate into the trash and endures two withering glances from Lauranne—one for the paper plate, the other for the lack of composting. She glares back, unhappy they are dining on the screen porch. The day is shockingly hot, a misery, especially coming as it does after two perfectly pleasant spring days. But AJ and Lauranne said they preferred to be outside in “real air,” and they were the “guests,” so the family has congregated here. At least her father had the good sense to install ceiling fans on the porch. And the twins keep leaving the porch doors open, so the house’s downstairs AC unit—one of three required to cool the house—whirrs and groans, sending puffs of cool air toward them. Lu is simultaneously grateful for every artificial breeze and despairing of the utility bill. She keeps thinking the heat will back off when the sun goes down, that the planet has simply not absorbed enough of the sun’s warmth to torture them into the evening. But, so far, there is no respite.
There is, however, that deeply layered fecund smell of the suburbs. The light grassy scent of lawns, the darker fragrances from the trees. Lu may want to believe she’s a city person, but she is, at heart, a child of the suburbs, a child of this suburb, and she can’t live without yards and trees and flowers. Their first two years as a married couple, she and Gabe had lived in the treeless yuppie playground that was Federal Hill in the 1990s and she was secretly miserable, then ashamed of herself for being miserable. But she missed these smells.
“You want to take a walk with me?” she asks AJ, as the sun—finally—begins to set. “Around the lake?”
“I’m sooooooo tired, Lu. I’m still on Australian time. My body’s living in tomorrow.”
“That’s the price of being a visionary,” she jokes. Then, in a lower tone of voice: “Please. I want to hear about the status of your, um, project. The one we discussed all those months ago.”