Moving Day: A Thriller (16 page)

“Your eighteen-wheelers,” Stanley says to his son.

“Go ahead,” says Daniel. As if challenging him to come up with it. Come up with anything.

The eighteen-wheelers are something new—part of the loading-dock upgrade and general expansion of the business that Daniel engineered.

“You can spare one?” says Peke.

A pause. Though Peke senses it is only a pause to guess at why—not whether. “Of course,” says Daniel.

“And a crew?”

Another pause. “Sure. A crew.”

He knows what Daniel is thinking. That it is already clear his father wants no questions about this. Is he afraid that if Daniel knows more, he might turn him down? Derail his wild plan?
Dad, you’re crazy . . .

So he is asking of Daniel something new between them. He is asking, from two thousand miles away, for a deep and instant trust, a sudden companionship in a sudden foxhole, that they’ve never known before. Maybe, thinks Peke, simply because they’ve never had a reason to know it before.

“And I want Grady to head the crew.”

“Grady,” says Daniel warily, his discomfort rising, his anxiety awakened.

“Grady, Daniel. Tell Grady I need him.”

Because his is the only brand of fatherhood they’ve ever known, Peke’s children have experienced it not as sadness, or distance, or frustration, but rather as a kind of benign absence. Absence despite presence, because their father has always been there for them. They’ve always detected a fierce protectiveness of them that conveyed love but wasn’t love. Love itself—simple, unconditional—was not in the equation.

Neither Daniel nor his two sisters have ever felt a full connection with their father. But for Daniel, the one who took over the business, and the only son, it has been a more mystifying and painful relationship. Daniel had eagerly anticipated—given the atmosphere of mute circumspection he grew up with at home—that he would finally discover more about his father down at the plant. That there, among other men, his father would be looser, freer, reveal more of himself. That working alongside him, Daniel would get to know at least some piece of him.

But his father was, if anything, even more distant at work. And though his connection to any of his family was meager, Daniel remained the one whom—paradoxically—he seemed to connect with least. (With his sister Anne, his adorable, brilliant, secure, walk-on-water doctor sister, it was different. There was always a gleam in their father’s eye. Stanley glowed in her presence, as she glowed in his. Though Daniel knew it was something his sister didn’t understand any better than the rest of them.)

Nevertheless, they worked together, desk touching desk, in the years when Daniel learned the business. And in the years since his father’s retirement, Daniel had succeeded in growing the business—smoothly and surely taking it to the next level beyond his father’s management of it. It had been Daniel who’d opened the distribution center, who’d built up a genuine Western presence, expanded the loading dock, and established a delivery fleet. He had thought all this success would win his father over in some way and might finally bring connection. His father, looking in from time to time, curious, merely nodded noncommittally as Daniel caught him up on the latest developments. He left it entirely to Daniel. To a fault.

Daniel had his own children now, and had learned that he was one of those fathers for whom his children were everything. He loved them vastly and unreasonably and would always wonder if this was in reaction to being his father’s son—or was it simply who he was, anthropologically or chemically? Having his own children had softened the pain, but increased the mystery, of his relationship with Stanley. He wasn’t singled out for harsh treatment, after all. His father treated everyone equally. Was unfailingly fair. Which was painful for a son who wanted more than equal or fair.

Grady had been with them from the beginning. Even when Grady began, Daniel had somehow known to be careful around him. Even as a boy visiting with his father, he had picked up something, sensed something, about Grady.

And now, very specifically, very sternly, this request. These stipulations.

“You just say when and where,” says Daniel. His offer a declaration, an affirmation.

“I’ll call,” says Peke. “But when I call, they can come right away?”

“Day or night,” says Daniel. “What, to Montana?”

“Yes, to Montana. I don’t know when, exactly. Soon.”

“A truck is ready, Dad. My best crew.”

He deserves to know
, Peke feels.
He deserves an explanation.
“I’m getting my things back, Daniel.”

“I assumed.”

“You can’t say anything to anyone.”

“I assumed that, too.”

“And you can’t come.”

There is a pause. Frustration, annoyance, pain. “All right.”

Daniel doesn’t say be careful. Doesn’t say don’t do anything foolish. Doesn’t say any of the things a son or daughter would otherwise say. They are useless sentiments with a man like Stanley Peke.

“You call, and it’s there,” says Daniel summarily.

“I know I’m difficult,” says Peke. “That I’m distant. I know the burden I can be.”

Two thousand miles away, Daniel Peke is astonished to hear it so suddenly like that. From his father, it practically qualifies as a speech. He can only respond smoothly, conciliatorily, from his adult outer shell. “Well . . . it’s all right, Dad . . .” Brushing the moment away. Prisoner to their strained and disconnected history. He’s been ambushed by the truth, sideswiped by the moment. Nonetheless, there it is. Recognition, confirmation, that it is not merely his own failure, dark and silent and invisible in his father’s long shadow.

And to say it so suddenly like that . . . It is instantly obvious to
Daniel that some act that impels a personal accounting—something final—is taking place.

So is now the time to intervene? To disobey his father? To see what, exactly, is going on? To finally reverse the roles and protect his father from himself? But one thing Daniel has come to understand, working beside him: his father’s self-reliance is his very being. His self-reliance
is
his self. Alone, in some sense, is the only way Stanley Peke can be.

The arms that carried Peke, the big hands that passed him, the rough palms that pushed him into a trunk with holes punched underneath to breathe, from the woods of Cracow, to attic, to attic, finally to a boat. The powerful arms, the big hands, of nameless, faceless adults who saved him. Those who despised him, he knew their faces, their smells, their nicknames, their habits, he dreamed of them even as he dodged them. But those who loved him so selflessly, he never knew, he cannot picture.

From subsisting on scraps in Cracow trash cans to surviving with a child’s wolf wiles in the woods outside the city to the thick, close sounds and smells of that trunk.

Peke is startled, remembering the trunk. The smooth wood inside, some lone craftsman with old-world values finishing the interior with pride, knowing all the while that a trunk was for storage and it was unlikely that anyone would ever know of the craftsman’s extra efforts. Except, as it turned out, the little boy shoved into it, hidden in it. How he ran his fingers, repeatedly, incessantly, down the smooth wood, its darkly burled pattern barely visible by the light from the narrow breathing holes placed low, nearly invisibly, along the back side of the trunk. Is this where a dangerous obsession with possessions, with things, came from? Because a
physical object had saved him? Or is this just more searching, his casting about for explanation?

And now his own son responds like those nameless, faceless saviors.

In a moment, Peke finds the ancient phone’s black receiver in its cradle and finds his own eyes wet with a gush of gratitude.

T
he cabin is comfortable. Beautiful. There are pictures throughout of the Western family who owns it. Photos on the mantel. Local items, local artisans’ crafts, chosen with care. Soft, deep couches and settees where grandparents can jostle and tease with grandchildren. Upstairs bedrooms with scuffed walls where grandchildren can tussle and jump. The snowy old television that bespeaks life without it. Life lived outside. Life with fresh air and no rules.

Someone else’s things. Someone else’s life.
How strange to inhabit someone else’s life,
thinks Rose. To wander through someone else’s rooms. They take on a new interest, a new fascination and meaning and tone, she finds, when you no longer have rooms of your own.

She moves through these rooms, and waits, while her husband sees through this silent task of his. As he heads out on his silent, unacknowledged missions, as he makes his furtive phone calls out of her earshot, as he wordlessly and continuously asks her forbearance.

In the years of the manufacturing plant, he never discussed his work much at home. Rarely revealed even the shape or tenor of his day. But that silence became a comfortable one. A certainty in itself,
a silence to nestle into securely and predictably each evening. While this, she knows, is a silence born of danger. Fraught with it, she is sure.

She can stop him. She can demand that he stop. Demand, threaten, insist, stamp her feet, issue an ultimatum. And perhaps he would respect that demand, and perhaps he wouldn’t. But she is unwilling to do that. Threats and ultimatums are not what Rose and Stanley have been about. Interrupting what is truly important to one or the other, what truly matters to one or the other—for whatever private or unfathomable reason—is not what their marriage is about. Their marriage is not built on interruption.

So she is consigned, for the moment, to the role of the waiting wife. Her husband is in the middle of a project. Not repairing a toilet, or a window shade, or a garage-door opener, but trying to repair their life. It’s a dangerous project—dangerous in direct proportion to the degree he tries to pretend otherwise. After fifty years of marriage, she knows his techniques, and she knows at least that.

So she cooks. Reads. Patiently and brilliantly resurrects the owners’ garden.

It is easier for him, she thinks. He at least has some control on this transcontinental errand. He at least has reins to hold. While standing in another family’s cabin in another part of her country, she has nothing.

Maybe even less than that. Because a new question has been pushing at her, one that she has in turn been forcing away from herself—it is too powerful, too much to bring close. With the longer stretches of their silences, the new degree of their isolation, with what seems in him a deeper sense of brooding as they have traveled farther west, closer and closer to some unknown eventuality, she has wondered: Does she even have Stanley?

Marriage to Stanley Pecoskowitz has always incurred a cost in aloneness, in distance. But fate is lately laying on extra penalties.

The loss of their things. Yes, she is shocked. She will always be shocked by it, in some sense. But her relative silence about the event is not from that. It is from an inherent paradox that she finds difficult to digest. On the face of it, it’s not a paradox; it’s reasonable: while she knows and genuinely believes that it all means nothing—all this stuff—she nevertheless wants it all back. Of course. That’s fine. But then it immediately deepens for her, into a paradox both of existence and of feeling, that hangs over her, ceaselessly, at every moment: