“Well, the last horse Grandpa Ray bought was an Appaloosa yearling. Two-year-old now. I’ve been working with her. Haven’t mounted her at all, but she’s pretty sturdy. I guess I’ll be on her by summer.” He headed toward the barn, and Janet followed him.
The filly was in with two other horses, a bay and a gray. They were standing in the far corner of the pen, playing with a plastic bucket. The gray would pick the bucket up and drop it; then the other two would nose it and push it over. When it fell over with a rattle, the Appy and the bay sprang into the air as if surprised, and trotted away, tails in the air. There was whinnying and snorting, and then the three youngsters returned to the bucket and started over. Chance put his fingers to his lips and whistled. All three spun around, and then trotted up. Chance palmed them each a lump of sugar.
The Appaloosa was not like any Appy Janet had seen before—rangy, with a chestnut coat that was overlaid by what looked like a blanket of snow, across the haunches, mainly, but with a splash up the neck, and then around the nostrils. She was a striking animal. Chance said, “Last thing Grandpa Ray needed was another horse. He paid twenty-five grand for her. Grandma said she was beside herself. I guess they were barely speaking even by the time he passed away.”
Janet reached out cautiously to pet the horse, but the horse was friendly. She sniffed Janet’s hand and presented her forehead to be tickled. Janet said, “Chance, I don’t know that your grandmother should be so, I don’t know, blunt with you.”
“She doesn’t tell me I have to agree with her. She’s willing to live with an Obama supporter.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!”
“You don’t have to know what you think about everything in order to get the work done. That’s what I think about most.”
“You don’t mind being stuck out here?”
“I don’t mind. Given what I like to do, I’m going to be stuck out somewhere. I like here better than Montana or New Mexico.”
“What do you do for fun?”
“We have Internet.”
“I still think you’re too young for this.” Then she said, “What about Hanny? Was that her name? You dated her.” Janet could not remember if Chance had known anything about the pregnancy or the abortion.
“She’s in Phoenix. She’s married. She hasn’t come around since I’ve been back. How do you know Hanny?”
So that was the answer.
“She came to look at colleges and stayed with us.”
“That was nice of you.”
“I liked her.”
“I liked her, too. She was a little ambitious for me at that point.” He laughed, then waved off the two-year-olds, who wandered back to the bucket but seemed to find it boring. Janet watched them for a moment, then turned to Chance and grabbed his arm. She said, “Chancie, I don’t have the feeling that you comprehend what is going on here, what has gone on. Your grandmother loves you, but she’s also using you to get back at your mother. Your father is in deep shit. He ruined me! He ruined my life!” Even as she said this, though, she thought that she was not quite speaking the truth—in spite of constant ripples of worry, she didn’t mind scraping an existence together in Half Moon Bay. The truth was too complex to speak, which was probably why she didn’t talk much anymore. She said, “Anyway, what he did isn’t about me. It’s about something bigger….Oh, I don’t know. Are you still married?”
“Sort of.”
That was all he said. In the end, Janet could only shake her head. As she drove home, she thought, a year and a half, and we’re all still dazed. We can make the first connection, but not the second one—take the first step, but go no further. And despite all her deep and ancient resentments, she would have defended her own father. Her muscles had twitched when Gail attacked him, even though Gail’s observation was right on. “Cold” was the perfect word for him. Here he was, dead for fifteen years, buried, his assets dissipated, his “work,” whatever that had been, finished, forgotten. There was a way he’d had of walking through a room…and then a scene flashed into her mind, long forgotten and now utterly present: Some summer house somewhere, a little ramshackle, she and her mom coming in the door from shopping, exhilarated by the damp weather and happy with something they’d bought. The twins were sitting apart, each on a sofa pillow, their hands in their laps, not looking at one another. As her mom exclaims, “Hello! We’re back!” her father’s beautiful head turns. He looks over his shoulder at them, and there it is, revulsion—not dislike or hatred, nothing so conscious—rather, an involuntary shudder, and Janet knows in her deepest being that they should not have come back, they should have stayed away, left for good. She also knows that her mother hasn’t noticed, bustling with the packages. She sees her father’s face mask over with some sort of fake normality, 1950s male patience. She goes up to him and reaches for his hand, but he avoids touching her, takes one of the boxes from her mother, and the two of them walk away into the kitchen. There is a moment of silence; then Michael reaches out and knocks Richie over. The ensuing brouhaha covers the moment, the look. The oddest thing in the picture in Janet’s mind is how young her father is—almost a boy, really. If she had been the age she was now, or even his own age at the time, she would not have taken it personally.
—
CLAIRE HAD PUT on three parties for the Jaspers, who lived in a stony palatial house on three acres in Lake Forest, a place that would have looked and felt like a tomb if Jed and Caroline Jasper were not the ebullient, generous folks that they happened to be. There had been a fourth party, too—at New Year’s—and Caroline had invited Claire and Carl as guests rather than as employees. Claire would have minded losing the business if Caroline hadn’t set her up with three of her other friends, five parties there, the most recent a Labor Day bash that had cost the Mordecais forty thousand dollars (10 percent to Claire, a nice addition to the bank account).
As Carl drove up to the Jasper house, Claire looked around—left, right, behind. She did not quite recognize the property. But there was the number, and there was the south tower. Everything else was different; the front yard had become a farm. They pulled into the driveway, and Caroline emerged from behind a stand of sunflowers, be-gloved and be-Crocced, a basket in her hand. She ran over and opened Claire’s door, handed her a speckled green tomato. Claire took a bite and gave the rest to Carl.
Caroline said, “Can you believe this? I have almost a bushel of sweet corn, and tomatoes coming out of my ears. I had to invite everyone I knew just to distribute the harvest.”
Claire said, “I feel right at home, except that on my folks’ farm the garden was out back.”
“Not enough sun! My gardener was very adamant. Front yard or nowhere. She was so hypnotic that I just nodded and let her put in the beds.”
Carl took another tomato out of Caroline’s basket and said, “What in the world do the neighbors think?”
“They are so envious! I mean, I keep them plied with vegetables, and the two kids across the street have emerged from in front of the television to pick weeds and eat raw green beans, and almost everyone is talking about how much they hate grass now. I swear the Carnabys are going to buy goats. Or they say they are.”
Claire wondered why she hadn’t thought of this herself.
Caroline led them to the eggplants, and, really, Claire thought, they were the most beautiful and impressive, more self-contained and dignified than tomatoes, so densely purple and heavy. She squatted down and let one sink into her palm. Around her, the fragrance of the compost and the straw mulch blended with the damp scent of the plants.
Caroline was saying, “Jed saw one of those little posters—you know, with the phone numbers you tear off—and why he called them I can’t imagine. The girl must be forty, but she looks thirty. She is so bubbly, and the boy is darling. They make me feel very old and stick-in-the-muddy.” Caroline was fifty-three and looked forty. How did that make Claire feel, seventy-one now, deep into the age where everyone remarked about how well she was holding up? Ca
roline said, “We can die in peace. The younger generation is going to fix everything. Let’s go in. Jed is making mojitos with our very own mint, and he and Carl can discuss building a still for our reserved-label rum in that derelict backyard we’ve been maintaining all these years.”
The Jasper backyard was an acre and a half of beautiful old elms and oaks with a tennis court. Caroline said, “This is a totally locavore meal we are serving you guys, except the rum and the sugar.”
And it was delicious. All the way home, Claire and Carl disagreed, in their very agreeable way, about whether a nice raised bed or two would do well in their own backyard. Claire’s argument was that Carl needed something to build; he had redone the living-room moldings twice already and rewired the kitchen and put up enough shelves in the basement to last three lifetimes, especially since he was a vocal exponent of getting rid of everything. Once she had a crop, she would add that to her party offerings—seasonal, local, delicious menu—and raise her prices. Carl’s argument against was all about deer and squirrels and raccoons and gophers: he had spent years getting rid of the rodents who were turning their yard into a sieve, why go back now, when the deer were finally convinced that there was nothing to be had at 1201 Pine Street? Claire knew what she had to do—order the beams, have them delivered, leave them stacked beside the garage. They would find their way into Carl’s hands, and into the yard. She had gotten the name of the gardening girl. She would invite her for breakfast. Angie, too. Angie was working on the South Side, at a youth center. Claire remembered that Angie had even said that she set up some pots in the spring, of pepper plants, tomato plants, onions, garlic, herbs, but her charges, all in their teens, had shied away from touching them—they hated the feeling of dirt on their fingers. Two of the girls had washed their hands over and over after doing a little weeding.
Claire buzzed around with this plan for three days before she realized how it changed her mood, how the last time she had been this hopeful was before Michael’s crime hit the papers. When Rahm Emanuel became chief of staff, ambivalence about the Chicago election turned to real arguments—all the Emanuels had a talent for arousing controversy, and liked to do so. Claire had told Carl that she thought she had known despair before the election, but she had been wrong: Should your enemy misbehave, sadness ensued. Should your friend misbehave, desperation ensued, a deep feeling that nothing could be corrected or changed. Carl, of course, had never expected anything to change. But she saw him out the kitchen window, hands on hips, looking down at the beams in the late-fall sunshine. He leaned forward and scratched the wood with his fingernail, brought his hand to his nose, took a sniff. Cedar. Carl loved wood. Then he turned around and gazed out toward the back of the yard, where the most sunlight was, where the deer were worst, where they had let the fencing deteriorate because you couldn’t see it from the house. He began rubbing his chin with his hand, then pushed his hat back. He was thinking. Best let him think, say nothing. But she did look in the refrigerator to see how many of those Pink Lady apples she had left. Four—just enough for a galette, a two-person pie. With an oil crust. Some cranberries. She set the apples on the counter.
2011
RICHIE HAD ALREADY READ the lead article about how the Fed and the SEC could have foreseen the financial collapse, and he had put in a comment under his pseudonym, “DCNumbskulls”—“The regulators were too busy lining their pockets and swilling booze to actually pay attention. I know. I was there.” His comment came between “I agree with #1 and #2. The real questions are: where is the money, and why can’t it be found and appropriated for redistribution?” and “Is anyone surprised? It has been evident for a long time that lack of regulation makes the rich richer. Allowing investment banks to gamble with depositors’ money was a huge mistake. It would be nice if self-regulation worked, but it doesn’t. Therefore, the government has to regulate the unchecked greed of those who are capable of causing these disasters. If the government won’t pursue criminal charges, they should at least retroactively tax these exploiters and use the money to help bring down the deficit.” He could check back later to see how he did in the comment sweepstakes—you had to get in early, though, to have a chance of being a top Readers’ Pick. The day before, he had made a comment about the Citizens United decision (now a year old), using the words “irretrievable disaster,” that had come third in the Readers’ Pick running. The first article he’d read today was about butterflies and Vladimir Nabokov, which reminded him to order a copy of a book called Pnin (he read books now, but only short ones); the second was about the food writer’s twenty-five favorite recipes (he saved this one for Jessica). After those, he read about the State of the Union address, which would be taking place that night, about how the young man Daniel Hernandez, who had saved Gabby Giffords’s life, would be sitting with Michelle Obama. He sighed as he read that. The shooting was as vivid in his mind as if he had been there, though his only interaction with Congresswoman Giffords had been a discussion of bicycle brands back in the spring of ’08.
The paragraph about the case against Michael Langdon, of Chemosh Securities, was at the bottom of the business page: the SEC and the attorney general’s office had dropped the case, declined to prosecute, no explanation; however, a fine had been levied, amount not stated. Congressman Langdon not mentioned, which was a relief. The fellow who sat in his seat now, a Republican, had squeaked through the 2010 election by two percentage points, surprising both Vito Lopez and himself. He was Jewish, he was unarmed, he didn’t mind Obama—the Tea Party target was already painted on the middle of his forehead. You could tell this by the fact that Cantor still didn’t know his name, though as minority whip it was Cantor’s job to annoy everyone on his side of the aisle. After reading about Michael, he went on to “Sons of Divorce Fare Worse Than Daughters.” This was an article that he couldn’t bear reading, but did read, curling his toes in his slippers the whole time, and wondering if Leo was really going to fare worse than Chance, something unjust in any conceivable universe. He picked up his landline and dialed Leo’s number. Leo’s voicemail came on: “ ’Sup?” Richie said, “Hope you’re good, son. Call me.” He sounded as awkward as he possibly could. Had he or Michael ever disdained their father? They wouldn’t have dared, and that wasn’t a good thing, Richie thought. He realized that some kind of anger at Michael was kicking in. He must have deposited his anger with the SEC, and now he was getting it back with interest.
He closed his MacBook Air—lightweight, perfect for him—and looked out the window. It wasn’t snowing yet, but it was getting ready to, which meant that Jessica might, indeed, be able to use her much-beloved snowshoes to get home from work that evening, and also that he could make his favorite soup for dinner, potato and leek, the very first recipe in the Julia Child cookbook, and the only one he had tried. There had been lots of snow this month already, though more to the north, of course, than around D.C. Just two weeks before, he had used the big storm as an excuse to dig out his mother in Far Hills—not that she had wanted to be dug out, but it had been something to do, and a reason to give the car and himself some exercise. She had not let him touch the snow on the front porch or the steps; she would go out through the back door if she had to, but having the Hut buried in still-frozen whiteness was a pleasure for her. He had tapped on her propane tank. No echo. It made him feel competent to listen, and then to look at the gauge—40 percent.
He had asked nothing about whether she had been deposed, what she had said. He assumed then that Michael had given her some of the money back, if he had some to give. Now he assumed that Michael had not repaid anything. His mother did not want Michael to be made an example of. If there were other examples, yes, but no one, no one had been prosecuted for anything, not Angelo Mozilo, not Lloyd Blankfein, not Richard Fuld. Why should Michael be the only one? Talking to her about this could raise several sibling issues that he had to discuss with Jessica. He could imagine that his mother preferred Michael. Was the fact that she didn’t want him to go to jail e
vidence of that preference? How often should he fantasize about whether she might want Richie to go to jail had he committed what is normally considered a felony? Jessica would make him walk around the neighborhood until he stopped thinking these thoughts and agreed that he could not experience the feelings his mother had for himself or his brother, and so he could not judge those feelings. Jessica would say that, on statistical grounds, the number of parents who wanted their children to go to jail was far outpaced by the number of those who did not. That’s what Richie loved about Jessica: she was sane, and she recognized sanity when it presented itself. He did not go for a walk, but continued to stew.
—
IT WAS EARLY—before nine—and Jesse was walking the farthest field, up by the Maze, the house where his parents had lived for a while, which was now boarded up. It could be torn down—it was a peculiar house—but it was as sturdy as possible, and Jesse sometimes wondered if he could sell it on the Internet as an antique and have it trucked away. He was carrying his moisture gauges, but he wasn’t using them; the years had passed, and he had gotten like his dad, good at instinctive measurement. Sometimes he tested himself, and he was always very close. He walked up the hill behind the house, his own little piece of unplanted prairie, and looked north. The Missouri River floods were two hundred miles away and heading for Kansas; there was no reason for them to spook Jesse, but they did, which was what made him believe that the tornado season had set him up.
Guthrie didn’t seem suitably nervous—he showed up one day, as thrilled as he could be with the video he and another employee at the hotel had taken of a tornado touching down just before dusk. For Jesse, it was like looking into the eyes of the demon. But it was reassuring, too, the way the sunlight shone below the clouds, and the thin, brilliant ribbon reached down and down, ever so slowly, as if seeking something. At the last moment, a complementary shaft, also narrow, stretched upward, and the two touched. The sound track was the siren, beginning late, fading away early, reminding Jesse that you had to keep your eyes open, there was never enough warning.