“Oh, that someone stole my wallet, then decided to look like a hero by finding it.”
“You knew the person who took it?” she asked. “Did you tell him that you knew?”
“Why would you assume it was a man?” he said.
“What?”
It wasn’t the time to play with her, she was in a bad way—she didn’t realize that he was trying to tease her into examining her assumptions. He said, “No, because I couldn’t prove it. But I more or less told his best friend, the one he wanted to impress, that I’d realized what was going on.”
He put his hands on his knees, getting ready to stand. She shifted her weight onto her hip, following him with her eyes. “Do you know what I should do?” she asked, as he stood. “I don’t have a lot of time.”
He thought about it. “I’d think you’d want to talk this over with Sheldon, as soon as he shows up.”
“Nothing tells you that he won’t show up?”
He smiled. He’d impressed her too easily, when usually he understood very little. Common sense told him that his son—his lazy, spoiled son—would return to the family home, if only because there was nowhere else for him to go. Even now, he could sense Sheldon watching, the way ducks circled decoys, waiting for some instinctive sense that everything looked right, that it was safe to move in; fooled by the sentry heads (that would be Bern, sitting in her chair with her embroidery, her head cocked in semi-disbelief at the way her life was turning out). The mallards would look harmonious, feeding as they bobbed on the water, much the way lawyers struck a pose to suggest how effortlessly they kept themselves afloat. Then the eye would travel to the oddly lovely egret, who just happened to have landed in his bed, having drifted in after a long flight. Francis smiled at his own conjecturing: who was really the writer in the family, he wondered. His son would keep himself apart a bit longer, making his calculations: Things in place? Feeding time? The most ordinary of things going on? The egret would verify the ordinary by interjecting something different. But then—to extend the metaphor—his son would be wrong, and he would fall into a trap, though not a deadly one: nothing worse than domesticity, nothing he couldn’t escape. Francis thought that he, himself, might have left long before, when he first realized that he’d married a good woman, but not a woman he would die for, and that their only child was deeply flawed. Did he regret having stayed? No. He had never believed in the idea of perfection. Nor did he believe that he was owed a reward for staying: Jim’s mallard would merely represent the receipt of something he had paid for.
It did not ever arrive, with or without its white towel, with or without its burnished coffin, and he did not pursue it. In two days’ time, though, his son returned home.
About the Author
Ann Beattie has been included in four O. Henry Award collections and in John Updike’s
Table of Contents
The Lawn Party
A Platonic Relationship ¦ April 8, 1974
Fancy Flights ¦ October 21, 1974
Wolf Dreams ¦ November 11, 1974
Dwarf House ¦ January 20, 1975
Snakes’ Shoes ¦ March 3, 1975
Vermont ¦ April 21, 1975
Downhill ¦ August 18, 1975
Wanda’s ¦ October 6, 1975
Colorado ¦ March 15, 1976
The Lawn Party ¦ July 5, 1976
Secrets and Surprises ¦ October 26, 1976
Weekend ¦ November 15, 1976
Tuesday Night ¦ January 3, 1977
Shifting ¦ February 21, 1977
Distant Music ¦ July 4, 1977
A Vintage Thunderbird ¦ February 27, 1978
The Cinderella Waltz ¦ January 29, 1979
The Burning House ¦ June 11, 1979
Waiting ¦ June 20, 1979
Greenwich Time ¦ October 29, 1979
Gravity ¦ June 2, 1980
Running Dreams ¦ February 16, 1981
Afloat ¦ September 21, 1981
Girl Talk ¦ December 7, 1981
