as authority, which compounds things. “Right,” I said. I picked up another card. This one featured a picture of a morbidly obese woman in a bikini. The inside said: I might be responsible for your stretch marks, but at least you’re not this fat. Happy Mother’s Day! “When did greeting cards get so mean?”
“Where are you?” Nate said.
“Target.”
“Aren’t you all domesticated now?”
“I even eat with silverware. You were about to tell me what you got Ma.”
“If you had a yard, you could get one of those blow-up pools. Get Sam to play lifeguard to the neighborhood kids. He was a SEAL, right?”
Nate was talking about Sam Axe, my de facto watchdog and partner, who was indeed a SEAL, but was now essentially Jimmy Buffett with a license to kill.
“Not likely. Listen. I need you to focus. What did you get Ma?”
“Maybe Fiona could take up baking,” Nate said.
“Are you done yet?”
“Oh, I could go all day.”
“Just tell me what I need to know and I’ll let you back to your life of leisure and won’t even tell Fi about that baking remark. Save us all a lot of problems.”
Nate said, “You’re the spy. Figure it out.” And then he hung up. I called him back, but after twenty rings I figured he’d made his point.
A woman wearing an outfit made entirely of pink and green terry cloth pulled her cart up beside me and started leafing through the cards. She was about my mother’s age, maybe a few years older, and she smelled vaguely of cigarettes and a floral perfume that immediately made my head hurt.
When you’re in a hot zone and aren’t sure of local custom, it’s wise to capture and interrogate someone who will give you the information you need to survive. Better to deal with certainty than to be the victim of assumed intel.
“Pardon me,” I said, and when the woman turned to regard me, I smiled at her with all the gusto I could manage. “What’s your name, ma’am?”
“Evelyn.”
“Evelyn, if you were my mother, what would you want for Mother’s Day?”
Evelyn pondered my question for a moment and then brightened up. “A Crock-Pot.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. Or a toaster oven. Cost of gas these days, a toaster oven makes a lot of sense.”
“What about in terms of cards?”
“Something with Snoopy. I’ve always liked Snoopy.” She scanned the racks and then handed me a card with Snoopy grasping his chest with glee, little red hearts bursting all around him. On the inside it said, simply, Happy Mother’s Day.
“Would I need to add anything to this? Some kind of salutation?”
Again Evelyn pondered silently before answering. “Well,” she said, “you don’t seem like someone who really knows how to express emotions very well. So I’d say no.”
That sounded reasonable. “Good. Good. Great, actually. Great. You are correct. Snoopy card and a toaster oven. Precisely.” And here I pointed. I’m not sure why, but it made me feel less like an emotionless cyborg that even a woman caped in terry cloth could see through.
“Is this some kind of contest?” Evelyn said. “Have I won something?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Absolutely.” I took Evelyn’s hand and shook it vigorously. “You have indeed. Target thanks you for your support. Everything in the store is twenty percent off. Enjoy. Happy Mother’s Day.”
After the woman skittered off to shop to her heart’s content, the entire world 20 percent brighter and filled with more possibility, I finally located the appliance aisle about a city block away and grabbed a silver toaster oven and a matching silver Crock-Pot, figuring, What the hell? Might as well come big.
It was still odd for me to be walking through a place like Target without feeling like there was an actual target on my back. You spend the majority of your life in foreign countries, taking care of other people’s problems, you tend to feel a tad claustrophobic in an enormous box with only one marked exit, never mind that seeing so many people wearing red uniforms made me think I was being tracked by the Coldstream Guards.
You either decompress quickly or you become a cautionary tale. I’ve known guys who, the moment they were decommissioned, began to think every letter was a letter bomb, every white powder was anthrax, every woman who showed even the slightest bit of interest in them was out to cut their throat for something they did when Germany still had a wall dividing it. Those guys got departure interviews, retirement packages and health benefits and still couldn’t stop feeling it.
I got a burn notice, a one-way ticket to Miami and an open invitation across the world for people to come looking for me. One way or another, you either adapt or you died, literally, metaphorically, whatever.
This is why I should have immediately recognized David Harris, a kid I went to high school with, when he entered the small cooking appliance aisle.
I was busy pondering the existence of egg cookers in this world when I saw him. The exit behind me was blocked by a woman pushing a baby stroller. She and the baby stopped in front of a display of blenders and both seemed equally transfixed on the wonder of it all. Had I immediately recognized David, I could have knocked down the metal shelves on either side of me like dominoes and then sprinted over them and out of the store. I could have conceivably fired a couple shots into the air-conditioning unit humming above my head, which would cause a huge fireball to erupt in the interstate of ducts crisscrossing the store, and everyone would be so confused they’d have no idea who they thought they might have recognized from third-period science. I could have grabbed a can of PAM, lit a match and created a blowtorch.
But none of that happened.
“Mike? Mike Westen? Westy? Is that you?”
I looked at the man in front of me and tried to place him. He had a receding hairline that he tried to hide by keeping it cut close to his scalp, but he also had one of those Bimini islands in the middle of his head that made him look indecisive.
There is bald and there is not bald.
No in-between.
He hadn’t figured that out yet.
He wore jeans and a Polo shirt, the real kind with the guy on the horse and everything, and a Rolex diving watch, though I had real doubts he’d ever been deeper than his backyard Jacuzzi. I noticed a bulge around his midsection that was hidden slightly by how high he wore his pants, but not by much. All of which gave me the sense that we didn’t storm a weapons warehouse together in the Sunni Triangle.
“Nope,” I said. “Wrong guy.” I tried to push on past him, but he’d angled his cart in such a way that I’d have to actually split the atom to get around him. It was a consideration.
“Do you remember me, Mike?” he asked. “David? Davey Harris? AYSO? Civics with Mr. Dunaway? Ringing any bells?”
Crap.
I’d made it a point to avoid running into anyone I might have grown up with, which is difficult when your hometown is a tourist mecca, never mind probably a decent place to spend your adult life provided you aren’t a former spy on the run. Which I guess is probably a fairly small sample.
“I’ve got a slight case of tinnitus,” I said, “bells are just outside my range.”
He leaned over and slapped me on the back with a bit more enthusiasm than I was comfortable with. “Man, you still got it,” he said. “I heard you were back in town but didn’t believe it. I think the last time I saw you was the day before graduation. Remember? We got that party ball and sat on the fifty-yard line? I think it was you, me, Gordon, Zander, Coop, DeWitt and, I think, Roberts-who I just found on Facebook. You on Facebook, Mike?”
“No.”
“Man, it’s like a digital class reunion. You should get on there. Man. So good to see you.” He reached over and pinched my stomach. “All trim and cut up, and here I am with this gut-real turn of the screw, eh, Westy? Not like the old days.”
If he touched me once more, I was going to break his wrist. “Who told you I was in town?”
