Kids These Days (3 page)

I stood down in the parking garage, waiting for Mid to pick me up. Alice had said she'd watch for our parachutist, and even that signaled a kind of truce—we'd gotten into it the night before on the way back from Mid and Carolyn's about how I'd apparently been distant at dinner.

“Just quiet,” I said at breakfast, once we'd resumed combat operations. “I was taking it all in.”

“Meaning the kids, right? Meaning Maggie?” Maggie'd stayed up past her bedtime, melted down in a serious performance that left everybody a little bleary.

“Meaning everything,” I said. “I get to think about things.”

“It was like you were on a whole other planet. Carolyn asked me if you were OK.”

“What'd you tell her?”

“I said you were having your thing.”

“I wasn't.”

“You absolutely were.” She took her still-full cereal bowl to the sink, poured it out, and walked off down the hall, or what hall there was. Being at Mid and Carolyn's had made the condo seem tiny, even though it wasn't.

“What's the matter?” I said.

“You could act excited,” she said. “That's all. Every now and then, you could act excited.”

I said, “I am excited.”

“You're terrified. You have been the whole time.”

“Why is that bad? Why can't I be both?”

“You know what? You're completely welcome to be both. I would love it if you were both.”

I said, “Why are you standing in the hall?”

She went in the bathroom, closed the door. I got up and stood outside it, looking for some kind of traction. “You're having a thing, too, you know,” I said. “What was all that about how there's something wrong with their house that way? About how you didn't understand what they were trying to do?”

“That's me being worried about my sister, Walter. It's hardly the same.” I heard her turn on the water, turn it back off again. “Shit.”

“What?”

“There isn't any toilet paper in here.”

I got a roll from the closet, opened the door just wide enough, handed it through. It was what I could offer. “Thank you,” she said.

“You're welcome,” I told her, and that was most of what we'd said to each other all morning.

Alice and Carolyn were headed to the doctor later on, to Carolyn's ob-gyn up in Jacksonville. Carolyn raved about him. She said he was great, said on top of that, he was put together like a marble statue. I'd offered to go, too, but Alice said there wasn't any need, that she just wanted to meet him, make sure she felt comfortable. If she liked him, we'd go back together for the regular appointment. So I was riding with Mid for the day, my first true day on the job, whatever the job might be. All we'd gotten to at dinner was that he'd pick me up in the morning.

The parking garage was open on the ground level, the walls only about waist high, which gave a pretty good view of the tennis courts. There were two kids out there, college age, hitting it back and forth with an easy, practiced rhythm. The ball had that good sound coming off the racquets. I was trying to remember when I'd last been in the kind of physical shape where playing tennis in the full summer sun would have seemed like a good idea when Mid came around the corner, driving a yellow Camaro that had definitely not been in his driveway the night before. It had to be fifteen years old, early or mid-nineties, but it looked brand new. Like a brand-new banana. He pulled up next to me, the engine rumbling away. He had the windows down. He smiled. Big. “Is this yours?” I said.

“Belongs to a friend of mine. He's letting me test it. Thought maybe I'd get it for Olivia.”

I looked down the length of the car. “It's really yellow,” I said.

“Yeah, but it's only got 45,000 miles on it. And it's huge. Unless she rolled it, she probably couldn't kill herself.” He smiled again. “And it's way too wide to roll.”

“What does it get, like eight miles to the gallon?”

“There is that. Get in.”

Inside, the car seemed made for some other species: You felt like you were riding right down on the road, the seats were so low, and the windshield was flat enough that we were all but looking out the roof. Mid was clearly enjoying it. I was having a hard time imaging Olivia behind the wheel. “When does she turn sixteen?” I asked him.

“End of the summer. You think she'd like this?”

“Does she like yellow?”

“Who doesn't like yellow? It's a color.”

I held my hands out in front of me like I was driving, pushed at the floor with my feet. “Could she reach the pedals?”

“Oh, hell, I don't know. Probably.” He gunned us around a golf cart half-hanging out of the bike lane. “We'll just get her in here and see, let her take a look. That's all. I'm only trying it out.”

“I didn't mean anything by it,” I said.

“You're OK,” he said. “No worries.”

“I think it could be a great car,” I said.

“You do?”

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?” The car smelled not exactly new, but like somebody had tried to make it smell new. It had black leather seats. In Florida. I watched Florida go by out the window, tried to keep count of the blue Hurricane Evacuation Route signs. The signs made it seem like evacuating would be more complicated than just driving away from the water, which worried me in a way it was hard to put a solid shape to. I said, “How long's she been going by Delton?”

“That won't last.” He pressed the trip meter button on the odometer a couple of times. “Every few weeks it's something new. At the end of the school year she was wearing these knit caps every time she left the house. Ninety degrees outside, and she's walking around like Swiss Chalet Barbie.”

“I don't think I remember being sixteen,” I said.

“I'm blocking it out, man, everything I can. We keep getting these goddamn boys ringing our doorbell. And that's if we're lucky. Half the time they just sit in the driveway, hit the horn, wait for her to come outside.”

“She seems like a good kid, though, right?”

“It could be a hell of a lot worse. She's got a friend who's already been to rehab twice. Pills. Spent last fall living in a halfway house.”

“Damn.”

“You know what, though? You never know what's coming. And even when you do know, you still don't know.” He shifted gears, let that idea sit between us.

The thing about Mid was that he basically meant well. I had him as a pretty good father, a pretty good husband. He probably knew how to listen when he needed to, how to broker peace deals in the house when that was what was required. It felt possible that his politics might not quite match up with mine, or his understanding about how the cosmos spun around, but he'd always seemed like a good guy, somebody who'd happily enough go to his kids' tae kwon do meets, somebody who'd be alright to drive around with in a borrowed Camaro on a given summer morning. Even so, something still wasn't sitting exactly right about the job, and in the wash of another poor effort on my part at being what Alice needed me to be, I figured I ought to check. Be sure. We stopped at a light. Mid drummed his fingers on the wheel. “So I wanted to ask you a question,” I said.

“Do it.”

“Don't take this the wrong way.” Alice and I hadn't fully chased this through—we'd been afraid, I think, to completely sketch it out. “I wanted to make sure you really did need somebody,” I said. “Because I could find something to do. It wouldn't have to be much, on account of the condo and everything.”

“I need somebody,” he said.

“You're sure.”

“I am. I cleared it through the boss.”

“You are the boss.”

“That did simplify things,” he said.

“I guess I'm just trying to say—” I shuffled a few possibilities: I could work aisles at the Home Depot, send people to where the hammers hung in their little rows. I could mow lawns. I could work some breakfast buffet place and make sure the bacon never ran low. What I knew: I could not go back to selling loans. That was done and gone forever. I'd spent those last few months at the bank trying hard to believe the bootstraps-austerity-we-shall-overcome singsong that kept floating through my e-mail, but when the Feds finally knocked on our door on a Friday afternoon, I wasn't surprised. Nobody was. We'd been headed that way for the better part of a year.

And they were good at it, the Feds. Efficient as hell. They locked us down, interviewed us one by one, took their notes, took our keys, and then opened us back up Monday morning as a branch of Piedmont National. New signage, new plants, new everything—except for loan brokerage. No new signs on loan brokerage. They shuttered us entirely. I went home, worked my stack of business cards, made my calls. I did what you were supposed to do. Nothing. Turned out, all at once, that nobody was doing much of any of that anymore. They certainly weren't doing more of it. And I was supposed to somehow have a family.

“Listen,” Mid said. “I don't want you thinking this is some kind of a charity case. It's easy math, alright? I could use the help, and you're a smart guy. Plus you got a raw deal, if you ask me. You got fucked where it counts. I feel great about this. You don't need to be thanking me.”

“OK,” I said.

“OK?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Glad we got that out of the way.”

We passed a place that sold Dutch Barns. We passed a place that sold bicycles. If the earth fell further out from underneath me, I could sell Dutch Barns sized especially for bicycle storage. “But what is it?” I said.

“What is what?”

“What is it you're planning for me to actually—”

“Patience,” he said. “That's what we're taking you to see right now.” The light turned green, and Mid started back in on Olivia like that was all we'd been talking about, like I wasn't white-knuckling the edges of what I wanted to do when I grew up. He told me about what it was like to ride with a kid who had a learner's permit, how the first time she turned left, she'd just gone ahead and done it without checking, had pulled right through oncoming traffic. He still wasn't sure how they didn't get killed. He told me they were teaching her to parallel park between cereal boxes out on the street in front of the house. I listened and rode, tried to believe. After a few miles he whipped us into a strip center, stopped the car, sat up a little bit, and said, “Well, here we are.”

There was a tax service, a church, two empty storefronts, and a vacuum repair place. There were no cars in the parking lot. I couldn't tell what he was wanting me to look at. “What?” I said.

“Right there.”

“Where?”

He opened the door, walked over to a white metal building about half the size of a truck trailer sitting in the middle of the parking lot. It was surrounded by red poles sunk into the ground, I assumed to keep people from driving into it. It said
TWICE THE ICE!
on the front in large red letters. There were two penguins painted on the side, looking pleased with themselves and sitting on a pile of ice. Mid held his hand out at the building. He could have been posing for a photograph.

I put on my sunglasses and got out of the car. I could feel the heat from the asphalt seeping up through my shoes. “What is this?” I said.

“It's a Twice-the-Ice,” he said. “I ordered two. They come in this week.”

“You ordered two for what?”

“For this. I've already got the locations leased. All we need to do is get the water and electricity run. They come fully ready to go.”

I said, “It sells ice?”

“Sixteen pounds in bags, or twenty in bulk. Twice what you get at a gas station. That's the angle. Twice the ice.”

I looked at it again. It was a giant white brick with a slightly less giant white brick of an air conditioner on its roof. “I don't get it,” I said.

“There's no ‘get.' This is as simple as it comes. You drive up, put your money in, and it gives you ice.”

There were two stainless steel chutes on the side of the building. Signs over each said
BAG
and
BULK
. There was a blue awning over the chutes so you wouldn't have to stand in the sun while you got your ice. “This is what you want me to do for you?” I said.

“Partly,” he said.

I walked a full lap around the thing. There were penguins on the other side, too. “How much does one of these cost?” I asked.

“About a hundred.”

“Thousand dollars?”

“They pay for themselves in three years, on average.”

There wasn't any window in the Twice-the-Ice. No attendant. “It's self-serve,” I said.

“The ice never touches human hands.”

“Is that good?”

“The website says it is,” he said.

“But what would I be doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“The thing makes its own ice, right? What do you need me for?”

“You check on them,” he said. “Once or twice a week, you come by, feed two bucks in, make sure it's making ice.”

“I check on them. On the Twice-the-Ices.”

“Sure.”

“Mid,” I said. “That's not a job. Or if it is, you don't need me to do it. Pay some college kid to do drive-bys.”

“I don't know any college kids,” he said. “I know you.”

There was no job. The white paint of the Twice-the-Ice was like a flashbulb that wouldn't stop going off. “You don't have anything for me,” I said.

“I do,” he said. “Relax. This is only one piece. Let me swing you by a couple of other places and show you the whole system. Tell you what I've got put together.”

I looked back at Delton's Camaro, chewed over my new career as the security detail for barrier-island ice-vending parking lot trailers. Alice and Carolyn would be headed for Jacksonville by now, for the appointment with the doctor. Other than going back to the condo and dragging one of Aunt Sandy's aluminum folding chairs down to the beach, I literally had nowhere else to be. “Sure,” I told Mid. I was riding along. That was what I was doing, what was left I seemed to know how to do. “Let's do it,” I said. “Show me the next thing.”