It had not come up tonight, thankfully. I want a family—of course. I want to make sure I’ve got my goals on a roll, however, before a row of gynecological
I went and sat out by the pool. Steph disappeared indoors, leaving me time to think back over the day and be pleased with progress. Your life is your real job—and you’re being lazy and dumb if you don’t make the best of it. One of the reasons I believe this, I guess, is my dad. Don’t get me wrong, he was a decent guy. He was patient and generous, not overly bad-tempered, and could make you laugh when he had the time and inclination. He sold paint for a living—the kind you use to decorate your house. He kept up with the fashionable colors and finishes and accessories and tools. He was cheerful and friendly and he’d help carry your goods out to the car if you were old or female or simply looked as if you could do with a hand, and if it turned out you’d bought too much paint he’d cheerfully take back the excess and try to sell it to someone else. He did this for thirty years and then one day went out back to get something for a lady who wanted to finish the basement of the house she’d just bought—and he bent down to pick up a pair of gallon cans of brilliant white, and never came back up.
He died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-nine, seven years ago, and though people in town were content to say it was the way he would have wanted it—right there in his store, in the act of being helpful—my mother privately expressed the view that my father would have preferred it to have happened many years later, possibly in Aruba. She was joking, in the way you do around a death, and I knew by then that Aruba wouldn’t have been where he’d chosen. When I was a kid I’d started to notice that in my dad’s den (and dotted around other bookshelves, in low-prestige spots) were a lot of books on French history and culture, all of them ten or fifteen years out of date; annotated grammars and vocab books, too, with studious jottings in pencil, in a version of my father’s handwriting that looked exotic to me—a tighter, earlier style than I was accustomed to seeing in shopping lists or reminder notes on the fridge. I don’t think I ever heard my father say a single word in French, but when I looked at those grammar books for the last time—when I was at the house in the week after he died, helping my mother make sense of what was left behind—I realized they were pretty advanced, and that the marginal notes said this was not a guy who’d just been looking at the pictures.
I’d asked my mother about all this one day, way back when I was around thirteen. She shrugged, said my father had been on long family vacations to France as a child and liked the idea of spending more time there. I took from this observation, and the offhand manner in which it had been delivered, that moving to France had been a dream of my father’s back in the pre-Bill era of the planet. Something he’d thought about, talked about, probably kind of bored her with over the years . . . before the ship of his dreams ran aground on the sandbank of lack of dedication, becalmed by a slowness to act.
In the aftermath of his death, reconsidering him with the vicious perspective that comes when someone has committed their last actions and has nothing else to say—I realized that my assessment had been correct, but only up to a point. Half-correct, but also half-wrong and naive and cruel—in the heartless way children often measure the worth of the adults they are here to supersede.
There are men who would have made their dream happen without reference to how inconvenient it was to others. Patriarchs who would have put their foot down, made their love a hostage, and turned their family’s lives into a living hell until they got what they goddamned wanted. My father was not that guy, and as the years went on, I came to realize how it had more likely been. That the money was never there. That my mother would have gotten herself involved in events around town, part-time jobs, school jamborees—never mission-critical, but enough to stay the hand and compromise the ambition of a man who loved her, and valued the things she did, and wanted her to be happy. That there was a kid in the house who had friends and a community nearby: and there’s always some marker, some birthday or test or rite of passage that seems essential to pass on home soil, some relative who might not last the year. Something to clip the wings.
But there was also the fact that my dad was fundamentally an abstract noun, and not a verb: a feeling word, not a doing word. It was sad he didn’t get what he’d wanted, but it was not Mom’s fault or mine or the world’s. He was a nice guy and I’m sure he had nice dreams, but we’re only asleep half the day, and dreaming is therefore only half the job. Nobody gets points for living in a conditional tense.
Dad lost his cherished future by himself, dropped the ball one night in his sleep, and probably didn’t even realize it until it was too late. Maybe he
But I doubt it. Dreams are immortal, fickle, self-possessed: the cats of the subconscious. Once it becomes clear that you’re not going to step up to their demands, they desert you and go rub up against someone else.
I had no intention of letting mine do the same.
Bill Moore is not that kind of guy.
Bill Moore is a verb.
Believe it.
Steph returned carrying a couple more glasses of wine. She’d changed out of her dress in the meantime, put her long blond hair up in a ponytail, and was wearing a thin robe and nothing else. She looked tall and slender and beautiful.
“The day just keeps getting better,” I said.
“Don’t make any promises you can’t keep,” she said, smiling as she handed one of the glasses to me. “You’ve not stinted on the wine already, tycoon-boy.”
I stood, meaningfully. “You ever known me to break a promise?”
“Actually, I have not,” she admitted, coming closer.
Afterward we cooled off in the pool, not saying much, content to float around in each other’s orbits and look up at the moon and stars.
Suddenly it was late. Steph headed upstairs to the bedroom around one thirty. I went through to the kitchen to get us a couple of glasses of mineral water. As I poured them from the bottle in the fridge I noticed a small manila envelope propped against the coffee machine.
“What’s this?” I called.
After a pause, Steph’s voice came down from the gallery. “What’s
“Thing on the coffee machine.”
“I have no idea,” she said. “Came in the mail after you’d left. Oh, and will you get me copies of the pictures you took at Helen’s party? She’s baying for them. I need a CD, or can you at least throw up a Web gallery so she can pick the ones she likes?”
“Will do,” I said.
“Really, this time?”
“Really.”
I picked up the envelope. Tore it open, and found a black card inside. I flipped it over.
On the other side, there was a single word: MODIFIED.
CHAPTER FOUR
He waits in a car. He has been here three hours already. He doesn’t know how much longer it will take, and it doesn’t matter. It has taken John Hunter three weeks to get this far. He bought the car a hundred miles away, dickering about the price just long enough to remain unmemorable. By the time he left the lot, steering the car accurately into midmorning traffic, the salesman would already have been hard-pressed to describe him. For the last four days he has been staying in local motels, a single night in each. He pays with cash earned during a two-week stint of manual labor in another state. He behaves at all times in a manner so unexceptional that no one has any reason to mark his presence, or his passing.
He has spent his time watching a man.
Hunter has observed this person leaving the house in the mornings, and then been a distant, unmarked presence on the periphery of his every waking hour. He has seen him take meetings and supervise work on two building sites, watched him drive between venues in his understated but expensive car, and observed him enjoy lunches on the terraces of upmarket restaurants. The man drinks red wine with clients but switches to beer as soon
