Barefoot: A Novel

“She doesn’t want your opinion, Bren,” Vicki said.

“You should tel the man to fuck off,” Brenda said. “Twenty-seven-year-old adventure girl, my sweet ass!”

“Brenda, enough!” Vicki said.

“Just please don’t tel anyone I’m pregnant,” Melanie said.

“Oh, I won’t say a word,” Brenda said. “I promise.”

A few minutes later, after enough time had passed for everyone in the limo to reflect on this exchange, Melanie had started vomiting. She claimed it was because she was sitting backward.

Vicki propped Porter up over one shoulder, and he gave a healthy belch; then he squirmed and let out a wet, vibrating gush from his rear. The tiny bedroom smel ed funky and breadlike.

Brenda poked her head back in. “They have the book at the airport,” she said. “Some kid found it. I told him I wouldn’t have a car until Friday, and he said he’d drop it by on his way home from work.” She grinned. “See? I told you the book was lucky.”

Josh Flynn didn’t have a mystical bone in his body, but he wasn’t insensitive, either. He knew when something was meant to be, and for some reason as yet unclear to him, he was supposed to be involved with the three women and two smal children he had singled out earlier that afternoon.

They had left behind a very important piece of luggage, and because Carlo had to leave early for a dental appointment, Josh was the one who fielded the phone cal and Josh was the person who was going to deliver the goods. A briefcase with a fancy dial next to the locks. If Josh had been writing a certain kind of novel, the briefcase would contain a bomb, or drugs, or money, but the other students in Chas Gorda’s creative-writing workshop found thril ers “amateurish” and “derivative,” and some nitpicker would point out that the briefcase never would have made it through security in New York. What was in the briefcase? The woman—and Josh could tel just from her voice that it was Scowling Sister—had sounded unnerved on the phone. Anxious and worried—and then relieved when he said that yes, he had the briefcase. Josh shifted it in his hands. Nothing moved; it was as though the briefcase were stuffed with wadded-up newspapers.

It was four-thirty. Josh was alone in the smal , messy airport office. He could see the evening shift getting to work out the open back door, other col ege kids who had arrived on the island earlier than he did. They were waving the fluorescent wands like they’d seen it done on TV, bringing the nine-seater Cessnas on top of their marks, staying clear of the propel ers, the way they’d al been taught in training. The evening shift was the best

—it was shorter than the day shift, and busier. Maybe next month, if he did a decent job.

Josh fiddled with the briefcase locks just to see if anything would happen. At the mere touch of his fingertips, the locks sprung open with a noise like a gun’s report. Josh jumped out of his chair. Whoa! He had not expected that! He checked the office. No one was around. His father worked upstairs through the evening shift. He always got home at eight o’clock, and he liked to eat dinner with Josh by eight-thirty. Just the two of them with something basic that Josh put together: burgers, barbecued chicken, always an iceberg salad, always a beer for his father— and now that Josh was old enough, a beer for Josh. Just one, though. His father was a creature of habit and had been since Josh had bothered to take note of it, which he supposed was at the age of twelve, after his mother committed suicide. His father was so predictable that Josh knew there was no way he would ever come down to the office, and his father was the only person he feared, so . . .

Josh eased the briefcase open. There, swaddled in plastic bubble wrap, was a heavy-duty freezer bag, the kind of bag fishermen down on the wharves fil ed with fresh tuna steaks. Only this bag contained . . . Josh peered closer . . . a book. A book? A book with a brown leather cover and a title in gold on the front: The Innocent Impostor. A novel by Fleming Trainor . After three years of literature courses at Middlebury, Josh’s knowledge of important writers was growing. He had read Melvil e, Henry James, Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac. He had never read—nor heard of—Fleming Trainor.

Josh stared at the book and tried to put it together in his mind with Scowling Sister’s panicked voice. Nope, didn’t make any sense. But Josh liked that. He closed the briefcase, locked it tight.

The briefcase sat on the passenger seat of his Jeep for the ride out to ’Sconset. Josh had lived on Nantucket his entire life. Because there was a smal year-round community, everyone had an identity, and Josh’s was this: good kid, smart kid, steady kid. His mother had kil ed herself while he was stil in elementary school, but Josh hadn’t derailed or self-destructed. In high school he studied hard enough to stay at the top of his class, he lettered in three sports, he was the senior class treasurer and did such a fine job running fund-raisers that he cul ed a budget surplus large enough to send the entire senior class to Boston the week before they graduated. Everyone thought he would become a doctor or a lawyer or a Wal Street banker, but Josh wanted to do something creative, something that would endure and have meaning. But nobody got it. Even Josh’s best friend, Zach Browning, had cocked his head and said, Do something creative? Like what, man? Paint someone’s portrait? Compose a fucking symphony?

Josh had kept a journal for years, in a series of spiral-bound notebooks that he stashed under his bed like Playboy magazines. They contained the usual stuff—his thoughts, snippets of dreams, song lyrics, dialogue from movies, passages from novels, the scores from every footbal , basketbal , and basebal game of his high school career, riffs on friends, girlfriends, teachers, and his father, memories of his mother, pages of descriptions of Nantucket and the places farther afield that he had traveled, ideas for stories he wanted to write someday. Now, thanks to three years under the tutelage (or “hypnosis,” as some would say) of Middlebury’s writer-in-residence, Chas Gorda, Josh knew that journal keeping was not only okay for a writer, but compulsory. In high school, it had seemed a little weird. Weren’t diaries for girls? His father had caught Josh a couple of times, opening Josh’s bedroom door without knocking the way he’d been wont to do in those days and asking, “What are you doing?”

“Writing.”

“Something for English?”

“No. Just writing. For me.” It had sounded odd, and Josh had felt embarrassed. He started locking his bedroom door.

Chas Gorda warned his students against being too “self-referential.” He was constantly reminding his class that no one wanted to read a short story about a col ege kid studying to be a writer. Josh understood this, but as he rol ed into the town of ’Sconset with the mysterious briefcase next to him, anticipating interaction with people he barely knew who didn’t know him, he couldn’t help feeling that this was a moment he could someday mine.

Maybe. Or maybe it would turn out to be a big nothing. The point, Chas Gorda had effectively hammered home, was that you had to be ready.