that’s a habit of mine. And somehow you got stuck with me. So it gave you the idea that I’m a normal sociable person, which I’m not. You’re actually about the only person I’ve said anything to for almost four years. You and Regina.”
“And here I am boring you about my mother.”
“I’m sure she’d have been pleased to know she had a daughter who thought about her,” I said, scrambling for something to say. “I bet the two of you had a lot in common.”
Some people were trying to squeeze past us to get out the door. Amanda held her ground.
“My mother was a very brave woman,” she said, “not like me.”
As the morning aged, the light out on Main Street had hardened up. But Amanda’s skin still looked like it’d been airbrushed on and her auburn hair sparkled with tiny little fireworks. It caught me by surprise and distracted me from coming up with something else to say, so she slipped away and walked back to the bank without looking back. A familiar sight. A beautiful woman in full retreat.
I was overconfident when I set the alarm for 5:30 a.m. Sleep clogged my veins and packed gauze in my eyes. The cigarettes had left their usual rat’s ass taste in my mouth. My stomach was skittery, unsure how to play the day.
When I left my wife, she predicted I’d last five years on my own. One to go.
That was around the same time the psychiatrist threw me out of his office. He said there was nothing he could do for me. Actually, he said he didn’t
The therapy was part of a deal I had to make with the Stamford district attorney. She hoped it would cover her decision not to prosecute me for a series of things, including gutting my wife’s house. Me and a pair of hard cases from the gym had packed all our furniture and household goods in a big semi, tore out the woodwork, ripped up the floors and stripped the walls. We filled up a few dumpsters, then trucked the semi down to one of those mountainous landfills in the Jersey Meadowlands where we buried all my wife’s treasured belongings under a hundred tons of Manhattan garbage.
We left the studs and rough plumbing and all the equipment in the basement. Plus a note on the plywood substrate floor, in what used to be the kitchen, telling her I’d cover full replacement costs.
I’d already given up my share of the house and three-quarters of my money. I still had a little left to live on, after I paid off whatever my wife’s insurance wouldn’t cover. I’m not proud of it, I just did it. I still don’t know exactly why, but it can’t be for any good reason.
I did, however, like that DA. My wife and her lawyers had a hard time getting her to muster the appropriate prosecutorial outrage. It helped that she’d been putting in twelve-hour days and weekends during the two weeks my wife had been out on the slopes. We talked about overwork and lost time and sacrifice. Her husband had spent most of their married life finding himself. She’d supported him while he earned a pair of master’s degrees and a Ph.D. He’d complain she was too stressed out. That she’d forgotten how to have fun. I just smirked at her and she looked down at her tired hands and said, “Right.”
So I copped the shrink deal and spent three months sparring with this little jerk who couldn’t look at a urinal without analyzing the psychosexual impulses underlying the urge to take a piss.
I never understood any of it. It bothered me that people considered lightheartedness and optimism the norm. I wondered how anyone could be more than half awake and not be at least a little bummed by the desperate hopelessness of human existence.
Mornings like this were especially hard. I was so tired and sick to my stomach. It didn’t help that I’d risen to this a million times before. The pain was cinched up tight around my heart.
After making up a pot of coffee, I put on a T-shirt and shorts and went out for a run. I usually saved this kind of thing for the gym, but I was afraid the big black dog was going to chomp down hard if I didn’t get my cardiovascular fired up.
A study someone did in the eighties concluded the better grip you had on reality, the more likely you were to be depressed, and vice versa. Science has confirmed that ignorance is, indeed, bliss.
My jogging route took me along sandy unpaved roads threaded through the tall oaks and scrub pines tucked up to the bay shore. Every fifty to a hundred feet was a driveway to a house built on the coast. Other houses were stuck in the woods or perched on pressure-treated pilings above swampy bogs that were grandfathered out of the Wetlands Act.
Twenty minutes into the run I started to feel better. Too distracted by the effort of running to bother with anxiety. By that time I was passing the gate to WB Manufacturing, the abandoned plant built on the peninsula immediately to the east of Oak Point. There was a new cyclone fence and gate securing the entrance, but otherwise it looked like it had forever— all concrete, red brick and rust.
When my father was building his house most of our neighbors worked at the plant. Even then, jobs at WB were considered tenuous at best. Manufacturing never really took hold out here, which helped save the East End for all the potato farmers and tennis courts. My father put in a little time there himself, but I think they fired him. If it was like any of his other jobs he’d gotten into a scrape with somebody, or spouted off about something too loudly, or too often. That was why he could only really work for himself. Today you’d say he was a little light on the interpersonal skills.
That’s probably what killed him. They never caught the guys who did it, assuming they even tried. Probably a pair of punks stopping off for a quick drink. He’d probably provoked them. The wrong look, the wrong word, a gesture, a snort—that’s all you needed to do. Took about five minutes. They left him in the can, already dead as you can get before the door slammed shut on their way out.
I felt better when I got back from the run. Good enough to take a shower, shave, get dressed and take off in the Grand Prix. Good enough to give it another day.
It took me most of the morning driving around Hampton Bays to find Jimmy Maddox. I started with the construction site Sullivan told me about. They didn’t know him, but they sent me over to an earth-moving outfit. They’d heard of him, but didn’t want to be helpful. I was polite and moved on.
At the third place there was a sandy scar cut into a tall grove of gnarly red pine. A big florid-faced guy in a gray T-shirt two sizes too small for his gut was rolling out of the cab of a huge Cat steam shovel. The machine looked like a giant yellow critter that hadn’t had breakfast yet. Diesel and pneumatic fluids blended with the smell of wet sand that stood in defeated heaps around the freshly cut excavation.
He squinted to hear over the engine noise.
“No, I don’t know where Maddox is, but I could probably find out,” he yelled to me as we walked away from the Cat toward a battered little office trailer. He seemed glad to be away from his big machine. There was no one else on the site. Maybe he was lonely. “What’s it for?”
“Just some family business I gotta take care of,” I told him, not knowing what else to say.
“You related?”
“No, it’s more a thing I have to do for the Town. His aunt died. I’m helping settle her estate.” I dropped my voice when he closed the trailer door behind us. “He just needs to sign some papers and stuff.”
The Formica table was covered in blueprints and brown burn marks from forgotten cigarettes. The walls were papered with Labor Department propaganda and calendars with topless women wearing tool belts and wielding impact drills. There were two coffee pots in an automatic maker and coffee stains everywhere. He filled a pair of Styrofoam cups.
“No shit. She leave him anything?”
“Probably a little. Not too much. Didn’t have that much.”
“Hey, you never know. Sometimes old ladies got bunches of money squirreled away.”
“That’s true. You never know,” I said. “You think you could find him for me?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Just a second.”
He pulled out a muddy Verizon yellow pages and thumbed through it with his muddy hands. He called from a black wall-mounted phone.
“Yeah, Davy, this is Frank. You got Jimmy Maddox working on your job? Nah, I don’t need him. This guy,” he
