At home, Reuben decides he’s going to cook to give Pearl more of a day off, Sam has never minded Sunday breakfast at the diner. This new experience of having it to themselves at home reminds him of what Sundays were like when he was small. It was the day his father most often made breakfast. He supposes it had something to do with the women—his mother and his grandmother—going to church, and his father usually staying home.
While he eats, Sam works his way through the sports section of the Sunday paper and swaps it with his father for the front section. War is barreling down on the Middle East like a fleet of semis and the world is hunkered on the yellow line like a stunned bunny. A fourteen-year-old-girl has been shot by a sniper on her bus on her way to play a high school basketball game on Cape Cod—killed instantly, murderer and motivation unknown. Throwing down the paper disconsolately, Sam stares at a translucent sliver of fried potato in a red puddle of ketchup on his plate. His nose is full of the sugar and vinegar sharpness of the ketchup.
Pearl and Reuben exchange glances and Reuben clears his throat and shifts his chair a little to face Sam.
“What are you doing with the rest of the day?”
“Drugs,” Sam answers distantly. “A shitload of drugs. Then I thought I’d go on a tear and stick up three or four convenience stores, maybe blow away a state cop or two.”
“Right.” Reuben folds the sports section carefully. “I asked you a simple question, Sammy. What are you giving me shit for?”
“Oh God,” Pearl mutters.
Rising from the table, she unbuckles India from her high chair and wipes the baby’s sticky face with the edge of her apron.
Ignoring his father, Sam clears his plate into the sink and heads for the door.
“Sammy,” Reuben says, “sit down.”
Turning his back, Sam reaches for his jacket. He hears the warning scrape of Reuben’s chair and then his father’s hands clamp down on his shoulders and Sam turns rigidly to face him.
“What did I do?” Reuben asks.
“You tell me,” Sam answers.
With the baby on her hip, Pearl murmurs, “Please, guys—”
“You stay out of this!” Sam lashes out.
The hurt on her face distracts him and he is unprepared for his father’s hands thumping flat into the middle of his chest, propelling him backward against the door hard enough to make him gasp.
“You don’t talk to her like that!”
And then Reuben’s fingers in Sam’s shirt slacken and he steps back, stricken at the use of hard hands on his son.
The baby whimpers, squinting at each of them, her breath beginning to hitch toward shrieking. Pearl scoops her to her hip to comfort her.
Sam swallows hard. “I’m sorry, Pearl.”
She glances up, still hurt, a suspicious brightness in her eyes, but manages a wavering smile.
Eyes downcast, Sam picks up his jacket, jerks open the door and stumbles out.
His father, jacketless, follows him out. “Sammy, please, wait a minute.”
Poised at the edge of the steps, Sam reaches out to grapple the porch pilasters, stopping himself like a fighter jet catching the hook on an aircraft carrier runway.
“I’m sorry I shoved you, Sammy. Now talk to me. Please.”
Where the grief comes from Sam doesn’t know but suddenly he is fighting tears, his nose is running, and he feels like Indy, squinting and hitching at the whole loud frightening world, as he rocks on the edge of the steps between the pilasters. “Where’s Karen? What’s happening to her? She could be dead. You act like she doesn’t exist. Abu threw her out on the street.”
Blindsided, Reuben seems to condense, planting his feet, lowering his head, moving heavily as a bull gathering his responses to a provocation. “I think about her all the time. What do you want me to do? Forcing her into rehab didn’t work, you know it didn’t. She signed herself out. I can’t make her stop. For Christ’s sake, Sammy, you remember how miserable she made us all.”
“Pearl,” Sam interjects.
“All of us,” Reuben insists. “She was destroying us, along with herself.”
“Why didn’t you kill that son of a bitch Bri right at the start? She was underage and you let that shithead mess with her. Where were you when he started her boozing and drugging, where were you when he started fucking her?”
Reuben might say he did the best he could without the foresight to see where it was all headed or being able to be with the girl every minute of every day. It isn’t a matter of refusing to admit errors but the contrary; he declines to defend or forgive himself.
“Why didn’t you just shoot her!” Sam chokes. “It would have been kinder than what’s happening to her now.”
“Sammy,” his father says, moving to embrace him, but Sam lets go of the pilasters to ward Reuben off with a show of palms.
Sam reels down the steps, trips across the yard, literally falling toward his vehicle.
Reuben reaches for the support of the same pilasters as he watches his son flee. He shivers. His ears ache. He retreats to the kitchen, where his wife rises from the table, leaving behind the front page and her cup of coffee to meet him with comforting arms.
“Do you think he’s all right?” he asks her.
Pearl rubs her, cheek against the rough wool of his shirt. “Read the front page?”
“Sure. I managed not to have a nervous breakdown over it, though.”
She steps out of his embrace to pluck the paper from the table and show it to him. “The world’s going nuts—he’s scared for Frankie, and look, some madman’s shot at a school bus, killing a young girl. A basketball player.”
Reuben raps thick knuckles against the paper. “Out of the blue, he starts talking about Karen. On the porch.”
“He must feel helpless,” Pearl suggests.
Reuben picks up her coffee
