Sins of Our Fathers (9781571319128) (20 page)

“You are! You really are. So there's just one last thing I need to tell you. To be totally honest. And Carol, I swear, this is it. You're probably going to think I'm an idiot, but . . . last year I took out a hundred-thousand-dollar second mortgage on the house.” There. He'd done it. He'd told her everything. Almost.

“Oh my god—”

“Now don't overreact. Please. I promise, it'll be okay. I'm working it out with Frank right now—but he might say or do something in the next few days, and I need you to wait until we talk before you agree to anything. Okay? Honey? This is it, all of it. I love you and I'm trying.”

“Trying? You are trying?”

An ocean had opened between them. “You know what I mean.”

He could see her reading his lips, as if she were looking at him through a distant telescope. Jim appeared behind her and JW held up a hand. “Just a minute, Jim. Okay?” It came out sharp. Jim held his hands up like an astronaut cut loose, floating back and away.

He shook his head at Carol. “I'm sorry. I'm just trying to be completely honest here, and to make amends. It's very difficult, I mean, I'm used to being the guy in control, the man you look up to, and right now I have nothing. Carol? Are you listening? I still love you and I will make it all back. Okay? Nothing's changed, it's just that now you know. That's something
that Jim here, well, I could tell you stories about him, things from his credit record—”

“Just stop!” She was pale with anger, he could see, but her tone was also pleading.

“I really need you to forgive me, to give me a little credit for the twenty years we've been together,” he said, more softly now. There was a new lump in his throat, and he was trying to hold back.

She stared at him. “I see.” She nodded slowly, and he nodded back.

“Please,” he said. “Just give me a little more time.” He saw Julie standing a dozen feet away on the lawn, still texting. He needed to reclaim some part of his dignity. He called to her. “Sunshine! Come give your daddy a hug.”

Julie slipped her phone into her back pocket and came over. She hugged JW stiffly. He held her close and smelled her hair, which still had the blush of childhood. He wanted to drink her in. His baby. He held her shoulders and looked into her eyes.

“I miss you every day, you know that?” He pushed a lock of hair out of her face. His heart ached, and he knew in that moment that he would do anything not to lose her. She was small for her age, and he sometimes still thought of her as an intellectually precocious child, rather than the thirteen-year-old she had become. The smell of her fine blonde hair and the feel of her thin limbs reminded him of the times he had carried her up to bed after reading her to sleep.

“I miss you too,” she said, and her cheeks flushed. It felt like the sort of obligatory greeting a teenager gives to a strange uncle.

“No, really,” he said, softly. “Julie, I'm getting better, I
promise.” The hair fell back out, and he tucked it behind her ear again. “I am. It's me. Daddy. I love you.”

“I know.” She looked around for a girlfriend. “Amy! Amy, wait up!” Then she back to JW. “I gotta go.”

“Wait.”

She looked hurried.

“You think we could do something sometime, just you and me? Go on one of our dates? A hike or something? I still have my dichotomous key.”

“I'm not really into that anymore.”

“Shopping?”

She looked aghast. “With what?”

“I have a job,” he said. “I can take you shopping.”

“Yeah. Sure. Why not?” She looked at him as if the suggestion were completely crazy. He chose to ignore it.

“Okay. I love you.”

“Me too.” The pain flitted across her face like a bird. And with that she was off, flying over the lawn toward Amy. He nodded to Carol and Jim, then turned to walk back to his truck, a rolling boil in his chest.

He got to the wild rice truck and pulled open the door, exhaling deeply as he suppressed tears. He had done it. He turned back, caught Julie's eyes, and waved. She turned to Amy. He was suddenly acutely aware of how different the truck looked from most of the other vehicles in the lot. Native American organic wild rice. He got in and started the engine, then shifted into drive. He couldn't really blame Carol and Julie. But he would win them back or die trying. He pulled out, the dream catcher swaying and spinning as he headed off down the driveway.

17

The Denny's was on the north end of town, near the Curves and Hokanson's Garden Center. JW pulled the truck into the lot and parked away from the building. He checked his wallet and his pocket. He had found five dollars and twenty-seven cents in the ashtray of his car before leaving it with Big Al, and now he scavenged another four dollars and thirty-nine cents from the door handle of the truck. He got out and dumped the change into his pocket.

The restaurant was a favorite meeting place for casual business conversations, and on Sunday it was busy with the church rush. He waded through the tables, waving and nodding to local farmers and businesspeople he knew. The place smelled of coffee, bacon, eggs, and pancakes, and it rang with the hubbub of conversation. JW could hear a blender going somewhere, and the clatter of dishes from the kitchen. He found Jorgenson in a faux-wooden booth by a window, eating a large plate of pigs in a blanket.

“Coffee,” JW said to the waitress as he slid into the booth, buoyed by the friendliness of the many people who had waved to him. He saw Jorgenson note his crisp white shirt and his unusually dirty fingernails. He realized he'd forgotten to scrub them.

“
Mazaan
,” he said by way of explanation, then realized it provided none. “Wild rice hulls. It's like soot. Sticks to everything.”

“I know. I recognized the color. Like toasted buckskin.”

JW looked at him with some surprise. Jorgenson shrugged.

“What, you don't think I know anything about Indians? I used to spend time on the reservation when I first came up here, back before we took you on. Chasing squaws and doing sweats.”

“You're kidding.”

“Don't you remember? I used to talk to you about vision quests, all that new-age stuff.”

JW remembered, flashing back briefly to some of their long talks over beers in Jorgenson's office after-hours at the bank. They had discussed meditation and the nature of the universe, and whether the solar system was really just an atom in the body of an enormous person we call God.

“Turtles all the way down,” JW said.

“That's right! The old Hindu line.” Jorgenson chuckled as he carved off another bite of his pigs in a blanket.

“Wrong kind of Indians, though,” added JW.

“That's your problem, right there. You're too literal,” Jorgenson said.

“Well, what changed?”

“Changed? Bethany.”

Bethany was a divorcée who had come up for a vacation at the enormous lake home she received in the settlement. She was a born-again follower of Dr. James Dobson, and not long after she arrived on the scene, Jorgenson stopped talking about cosmic consciousness. Gone were the copies of
Be Here Now
and
A Course in Miracles
, replaced with
The Purpose Driven Life
and
The Prayer of Jabez
. The two of them went on mission trips to Haiti and Guatemala, and took in foster children from Bethany's mega-church down in Woodbury. Jorgenson embraced his new religion with the same vigor he attacked
everything, telling JW of the many wealthy people he met at church on weekends down in the Cities, how he was selling more lakefront properties than the realtors up here, and spouting Bible phrases at work. His subsequent promotion was, he claimed, ordained by God. “I'm telling you, you should join the church,” he had said. “In Proverbs 13:18 it says, ‘Poverty and shame shall be to him that refuseth instruction.' All you have to do is look around at these Indians.”

“Anyway,” Jorgenson continued, “what have you found?”

“Nothing solid yet,” replied JW.

Jorgenson was silent for a moment, chewing. “You called a meeting to tell me that?” he said finally, after a swallow.

The waitress was a wiry woman named Judy. She thumped a coffee mug down and poured it full from a plastic pot, which she then set on the table. “You ready to order?”

“The number three,” JW said. He opened a creamer and poured it into his coffee as she left. He stirred it with a spoon, then took a sip. “Except that I think he may be smoking pot.”

“Jesus! Well, that's something!” Jorgenson brightened, leaning forward. “That's definitely something. Did you see him?”

JW leaned in and picked up his butter knife. Played with it absentmindedly between his thumb and forefinger, speaking low.

“His son said something about it over the bug and I think I heard him doing it, but I'm not positive,” he said. “I think he keeps it in his safe.”

JW saw the light catching the edge of Jorgenson's gray whiskers as he resumed chewing, more quickly now. He could tell this was exactly the sort of evidence Jorgenson had been hoping for.

“We get him busted for drugs, the feds'll definitely reject
the charter.” He stabbed a piece of sausage and shoved it in, thinking as he chewed.

“I said maybe.” JW sipped his coffee and watched him.

“Well, find out! Fuck. If they're building, you know they're gonna be applying any day,” said Jorgenson. “We need this. Hell, you need this.” He swallowed and swigged from his cup.

JW set his coffee down and folded his hands on the table.

“First I need to work out a payment plan on my second mortgage,” he said. He watched Jorgenson with the unblinking poker face he had used many times when rejecting loan applications. He had been pondering this move for some time. Jorgenson needed him and it was reasonable to seek some protection for Carol. Jorgenson stopped chewing and studied him for a moment, then nodded with the air of someone figuring out they'd just been taken in by a carnival barker.

“So that's what this is about. You called a fucking meeting because you're worried I'm going to foreclose on you.” He shook his head and put another piece of sausage in his mouth. “You used to be smarter than that. You get the dope on this guy and then we'll talk.” He chewed, avoiding JW's eyes.

JW took the tiny spiral notepad out of his shirt pocket and set it in a slice of sun on the table, the metal spiral curling like a silver spring. He opened to the page he had scrawled on, and noticed his hand was shaking slightly. He had confronted Frank many times over the course of their relationship, but never with stakes this high.

“Then you want to tell me what this is?”

He turned the pad around and plowed it across the table. Jorgenson read the note he had written there—
Bank's b/c of what her boss did
—then turned back to his food. JW watched him closely. He avoided eye contact, but resumed chewing.
“That's a blind alley, John. If I were you, I'd focus on the pot. Don't waste your time chasing bullshit.” He finally glanced at JW and went back to eating with an air of nonchalance, leaving the notepad untouched where JW had placed it.

JW had found a soft spot, he was sure of it. He sat back, consciously controlling his face and his eyes—open, studious, unflinching. But Jorgenson wouldn't make eye contact again. JW could sense that he was hiding a weakness, some exposure that could be exploited. But what? He sought to expand the beachhead. “Is this something personal between you and him?”

Jorgenson glanced up at him and kept chewing, but then he looked around and leaned in, his eyes small and his fists balled around his fork and knife. “She worked for me in Minneapolis, okay? So the fuck what. I canned her. Worst employee I ever had. She tried to bring some equal-opportunity lawsuit. You know how they are. She was a fucking cunt.”

Jorgenson stared at JW for a moment, snorting like a bull, then took another bite. JW watched Judy bring a check to the table of people behind him. He nodded, studying his adversary. “I want you to work out that payment plan,” he said.

Jorgenson stopped eating. Blood rose to his face. For a second JW thought he was going to explode. He pursed his lips as if he had tasted something disgusting, then leaned in again, closer.

“Fuck you,” he said, gesturing at JW with his butter knife. “What you did was illegal. I could have your ass in prison. You really want to fuck with me?” He was breathing hard and staring straight into JW's eyes. “Do you have any idea how many people I know? What kind of resources I can bring to bear against you? You are way out of line, pal, trying
to threaten me over some equal-opportunity bullshit when you committed a fucking felony. I can't believe I'm hearing this, and from a fucking friend.”

JW's bluff had evaporated in an instant. He looked out over the highway. He had been outplayed, regardless of whether there was anything to his hand in the first place. “I'm sorry,” he said, trying to look friendly.

Jorgenson calmed. He sat back. “Look,” he said. “I'm trying to do you a favor here, so quit being such a cocksucker. You take the pot out of the safe, you put it in the desk drawer, and we call the cops. You saw him smoking. It's that simple.”