“But—”
“Seriously. It’s not a problem.”
“But with Amy? How—”
“Everything’s fine.”
“Okay,” Natalie said. “I’m sure it is. She’s pretty tough.” For just a moment, she looked fiercely proud of her sister, and I wished I had a sibling to feel that way about me. “She has been…I don’t know, a little different since, though. Don’t you think?”
I shrugged. “I guess.”
Natalie persisted. “Maybe even before that?”
I looked up at her, surprised, and was disconcerted to find her looking at me, hard, with eyes very similar to her sister’s.
“People change,” I said, dismissively. “They get older. Grow up. May even happen to you someday.”
She stuck her tongue out. “There’s one thing I never understood, though,” she said, leaning on the sink and looking out the window again. Her son still playing sensibly in the yard, staying a statutory six feet from the road, as if a force field operated to keep him within a safe distance of the house. Perhaps it did. Amy wasn’t the only Dyer girl who ran a tight ship.
“What’s that?”
“How Amy wound up in advertising.”
“Things happen. I ended up a cop.”
“I never knew you when you weren’t, so that’s not strange to me. Plus, your being a cop made sense. What happened to your dad, and…You just made sense that way. More than you do as a writer, that’s for sure.”
“Ouch.”
“Say it ain’t so. But Amy, I mean…When she was a teenager, she was always the complete geek.”
I frowned. “Really?”
“You don’t know this? Totally. Forever making something out of weird bits of crap. Poring over books with titles that would make you lapse into a coma.”
“That doesn’t sound like the woman I know.”
“For sure. For years she’s the science-fair queen and poised to do something appallingly nerdy, and then suddenly one day she’s all ‘I want to be in advertising,’ as if it’s ‘I want to be a movie star.’ I didn’t even know what advertising was. She’d just turned eighteen, and she comes out with it at dinner one night. I remember it because the old folks had spent years backing her up on all the tech stuff, giving her rides to clubs, being proud—more than they ever were with anything I did—and then bang, that’s all history. I remember watching Papa across the table as she’s saying all this, seeing his shoulders slump.” She smiled, gaze still on her kid outside. “I was fourteen. First time I ever realized that being a parent maybe wasn’t a complete walk in the park.”
“She ever give a reason? Why she switched?”
“She didn’t have to. She was golden.”
“Natalie…”
She smiled. “I’m just kidding. No, she didn’t. Though I did ask her about it this one time. She said she’d met a guy.”
My heart thumped, once. “Someone at school?
“No. Somebody older, already in the business maybe, though that’s totally a guess. I figured she was attracted to this guy, didn’t work out…but she stuck with it. You know what she’s like. Dogged. Doesn’t matter how long something takes, how long she’s got to wait. Always been a girl with an eye to the long-term view.”
I’d turned to look out the window, though I had no interest in what was outside. I didn’t want Natalie to be able to see my face as I asked the next question.
“Don’t suppose she mentioned the guy’s name?”
“Actually, she did, and the strange thing is, I remember it. Pure coincidence. We’d had this one dog for years, and he’d died like two, three months before. He’d been around almost all my life, and I still missed him really bad. So I guess it stuck in my head.”
“This guy had the same name as your dog?”
“No, sweetie. The dog was called Whooper. Calling a person ‘Whooper’ would constitute cruel and unusual punishment, even in L.A. It was the breed. A German shepherd.”
I had been so prepared for hearing the name “Crane” that I had to check if I’d heard her right.
“The guy’s name was Shepherd?”
“Yep.” She looked blank for a moment. “Funny. Nearly twenty years go by, and you can still miss a damned dog.”
Ten minutes later her husband returned home with a clarinet-toting child. My relationship with Don had always revolved around his getting me to tell cop stories. We hadn’t arrived at a new MO since. His daughter greeted me with grave politeness, as if part of a self-imposed practice regime for interacting with the nearly elderly. I had no idea how to broach the subject of her birthday, and so I didn’t.
Natalie walked me to the door soon afterward. “Been nice to see you, Jack,” she said unexpectedly.
“You, too.”
“Sure everything’s okay with you guys?”
“Far as I know.”
“Well, okay then. So—where are you going tonight? Amy was dressed up mighty nice.”
“It’s a secret,” I said.
“I hear you. Keeping that magic alive. You’re an inspiration to us all. Well, come see us again soon—or we’ll come to you, and you don’t want that. Oh, that was the other thing today.” She laughed. “I thought you guys moved to Washington. Not Florida.”
“What do you mean?”
She held up her hand, fingers splayed. I shook my head, no clue what she was talking about.
“Amy in bright pink nail polish?” she said. “What’s up with that?”
I left not knowing where I was headed, walked down residential streets in soft, midevening air. People parked their cars, drove away, got home or went out. Others stood in kitchen windows, glanced down out of bedrooms, stood watering plants in their yards. I wanted to head up those paths, stand in those kitchens, sit in a big easy chair in one of those living rooms, and say, So—what’s up? Tell me how you live. Tell me all. Other people’s lives always seem more interesting, coherent, simply more real than my own. Television, books, celebrity culture, even plain watching the world go by: all a desire for an existence that has a directness and simplicity we never feel, that seems real and true in a way our own smudged and fractured days never do. We all want to be someone else for a while. Seem to believe, almost, that we already are, that something stands in the way of the lives we were supposed to have.
My phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number. “Yes?”
“Whozis? Who?”
The voice was thick and hard to understand. “It’s Jack Whalen,” I said. “Who the hell are you?”
“This L.T. here. It’s the building, you said.”
“What building?”
“Shit. You told me money.”
I realized who I was talking to. “You’re the guy who was sitting at the cafe in Belltown.”
“It is. You want what I got?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not involved with that anymore.”
My interlocutor became loudly disquieted. “You a lying mother fucker! You said you had money. I made the call, cop motherfucker.”
“Okay, sir,” I said. “Tell me what you have.”
“Fuck you! How I know you going to pay me?”
“You got me. But I’m not in Seattle right now. So either you give me what you have, and I pay you later, or I put the phone down and block your number.”
He didn’t hesitate long. “It’s a girl, bro.”
“What?”
“She a kid. Come up the street, last night, late, she stand a front the building. Look like she try a key. Don’t
