sibling thrust upon him, either. A couple of years ago, Tucker had introduced him to twin brothers he’d previously been unaware of, neither of whom had remained a consistent presence in his life.
“I’m sorry, Jackson. She must seem like a different kind of sister to you. She’s your sister because you’ve got the same dad.”
“Who’s her dad?”
“Who? Who do you think? Who’s your dad?”
“So you’re her dad, too?”
“That’s it.”
“Like you’re Cooper’s dad?”
“Yep.”
“And Jesse’s?” Cooper and Jesse, the recent twin fraternal inductees.
“You’re getting it.”
“So who’s her mom this time?”
Jackson asked the question with such a pained world-weariness that Tucker couldn’t help but laugh.
“This time it’s Natalie.”
“Natalie from my preschool?”
“Ha! No. Not Natalie from your preschool.”
Tucker had a sudden and not unwelcome flash of the Natalie from Jackson’s preschool. She was a nineteen- year-old assistant, blonde and sunny. There was a time, as James Brown once sang.
“Who, then?”
“You don’t know her. She lives in England now. She lived in New York when I knew her.”
“And what about my sister?”
“She’s been living in England with her mom. But now she’s going to college in the U.S. She’s real smart.”
All of his children were smart, and their intelligence was a source of pride—possibly misplaced, seeing as he’d only really been around for Jackson’s education. Maybe he could at least take credit for choosing to impregnate only smart women? Probably not. God knew he’d slept with some dumb ones.
“Will she read to me? Cooper and Jesse read to me. And Gracie.”
Grace was another daughter, his eldest: Tucker couldn’t even hear her name without wincing. He had been an inadequate father to Lizzie and Jesse and Cooper, but his inadequacies seemed forgivable, somehow; he could forgive them, anyway, even if the children and mothers concerned were less indulgent. Grace, though… Grace was another story. Jackson had met her once, and Tucker had spent the entire visit in a cold sweat, even though his eldest daughter had been as sweet-natured as her mother. That just made it all worse, somehow.
“Why don’t you read to her? She’ll be impressed.”
He put the hot dogs in the shopping cart and then took them out again. What percentage of smart girls were vegetarian? It couldn’t be as high as fifty, right? So the chances were that she ate meat. He put them back into the cart. The trouble was that even young female carnivores wouldn’t eat red meat. Well, hot dogs were pinky orange. Did pinky orange count as red? He was pretty sure the strange hue was chemical rather than sanguine. Vegetarians could eat chemicals, right? He picked them up again. He wished he’d sired a hard-drinking thirty-year-old mechanic from somewhere in Texas. Then he could just buy steaks and beer and a carton of Marlboros and be done with it. That particular scenario, however, would probably have involved him impregnating some sexy thirty-year-old Texan waitress, and Tucker had misspent his youth on deathly pale English models with cheekbones instead of breasts, and he was now paying the price. Now that he thought about it, he had paid the price then, too. What had he been thinking of?
“What are you doing, Dad?”
“I don’t know whether she eats meat or not.”
“Why wouldn’t she eat meat?”
“Because some people believe that eating meat is wrong. And other people believe it’s bad for you. And some people believe both.”
“What do we believe?”
“I guess we believe both, but we don’t care enough to do anything about it.”
“Why do some people believe it’s bad for you?”
“They think it’s bad for your heart.” There was no point in talking to Jackson about the colon.
“So your heart could just stop beating? If you ate meat? But you eat meat, Dad.”
There was a tremulous note of panic in Jackson’s voice, and Tucker cursed under his breath. He’d walked right into this one, like a sucker. Jackson had recently discovered that his father was going to die at some point in the first half of the twenty-first century, and his premature grief could be unleashed at any time, by anything, including the main tenets of vegetarianism. What made it worse was that Jackson’s existential despair had both coincided with and bolstered Tucker’s own. His fifty-fifth birthday seemed to have sparked a particularly acute bout of melancholy that he couldn’t see being lifted too much by any of the birthdays to come.
“I don’t eat so much meat.”
“That’s a lie, Dad. You eat tons. You had bacon this morning. And you cooked burgers last night.”
“I said it’s what some people believe, Jack. I didn’t say it was true.”
“So why do we believe it? If it’s not true?”
“We believe that the Phillies are going to win the World Series every year, but that’s not true either.”
“I never believe that. You just tell me to believe that.”
He put the hot dogs back on the shelf one last time and ushered Jackson over to the chicken. Chicken was neither pink nor orange, and he was able to tell Jackson of its health-giving properties without feeling like too much of a liar.
They went home, dumped the shopping and then drove straight over to Newark to pick up Lizzie. Tucker was hoping he’d like her, but the signs weren’t promising: they’d e-mailed back and forth for a while, and she seemed angry and difficult. He had to concede, though, that this needn’t necessarily mean she was an angry and difficult person: his daughters had found it hard to forgive the parental style he’d adopted for his early kids, which had ended up revolving around his complete absence from their lives. And he was beginning to learn that some of his children always reintroduced themselves to him at some big watershed moment, either in their own lives or in the lives of their mothers, and that tended to weigh the visits down somewhat. He was trying to cut down on introspection, so he really didn’t need to import it.
On the way to the airport, Jackson chatted about school, baseball and death until he fell asleep, and Tucker listened to an old R&B mixed tape that he’d found in the trunk. He only had a handful of cassettes left now, and when they were gone, he’d have to find the money for a new truck. He couldn’t contemplate a driving life without music. He sung along to the Chi-Lites softly, so as not to wake Jackson, and found himself thinking about the question that woman had asked him in her e-mail: “It isn’t you really, is it?” Well, it was him, he was almost positive, but for some reason he’d started fretting about how he could prove it to her: as far as he could see, there was no good way of doing it. There was no detail in his music too trivial to have remained unnoticed by those people, so telling her who had contributed uncredited backing vocals to a couple of the songs wouldn’t help. And just about every single scrap of the biographical trivia about him that floated around the Internet like so much space junk was all untrue, as far as he could tell. Not a single one of those creeps was aware that he had five kids, by four different women, for example; but they all knew that he’d had a secret child with Julie Beatty, pretty much the only woman he’d avoided knocking up. And when would they stop going on and on about something that happened in a restroom in Minneapolis?
He tried very hard not to overinflate his importance in the cosmos. Most people had forgotten him; very occasionally, he supposed, they’d come across his name in a music review—some of the older journalists still used him as a point of reference sometimes—or there’d be an album in somebody’s old vinyl collection, and they’d think, “Oh, yeah. My college roommate used to listen to him.” But the Internet had changed everything: nobody was forgotten anymore. He could Google his name and come up with thousands of hits, and as a consequence he’d started to think about his career as something that was still current, somehow, rather than something that had died a long time ago. If you looked at the right websites, he was Tucker Crowe, mysterious reclusive genius, rather than Tucker Crowe, former musician, ex-person. He was flattered, at first, by the people who devoted themselves to
