So Much for That (48 page)

“You mean they’re afraid she’s going to…”

“Yeah. In which case, the size of a jury award could sort of skyrocket. You’ve got them sort of scared.”

“So what are they offering?”

“One-point-two million.”

Since twelve divided evenly by three, calculating what would remain after the lawyer’s one-third contingency fee was elementary arithmetic; Mystic’s cut amounted to somewhat more than the U.S. government’s
contingency fee
for his sale of Knack. “So what do you advise?”

“Well, if you take them to court, especially once you’ve suffered—a greater loss, I’m kind of certain you could double that. But I’d be kind of remiss if I didn’t warn you what a jury trial would involve. It’s kind of bru
tal. Once liability has been established, the process is all about assessing what your marriage was worth. In dollars. So it’s kind of in their interest to prove that your marriage was sort of shitty. A sort of shitty marriage doesn’t, legally, merit nearly as high a compensation as a good one.”

“What business is it of theirs, what quality of marriage I had?” The past tense made him glad that the study door was closed. “You’re telling me they, what, deduct ten grand for every time Glynis and I had a fight?”

“You may find that kind of ludicrous, but you’re kind of right. I mean, they’d grill you on how often you had sex. They’d go after your friends and see if they could find anybody who described your marriage as kind of unhappy, or kind of fractious. I had one client who had a sort of iron-clad case on an evidential level; her husband had worked for twenty years in fireproofing with sprayed asbestos. But they dug up that she’d had a, sort of, lesbian affair during the marriage. She hated to let her family know, and withdrew the suit. It was a kind of blackmail, really. And in your case, what you told me about being sort of packed and ready to move to Africa? By yourself if necessary, right before you found out that Glynis had cancer? I promise you they’d find someone who knew that story, and it would look kind of bad.”

“If I accept the settlement, how soon could they cut me the check?”

“You’d have to sign a nondisclosure agreement. But after that? They’d cut you a check in a heartbeat. Especially with Glynis in sort of rough shape. They wouldn’t want to be, uh, overtaken by events—when you might have, you know, kind of a change of heart. The worst coming to worst could make you decide to sort of go for the jugular.”

“I’ll have to talk to Glynis. But if you get us that money ASAP—and I mean, like,
Monday
, not weeks from now, because we don’t have weeks—then I say take it.”

Once he hung up the phone, Shep once more thought mournfully about Jackson. It was criminal that his best friend never lived to witness this conversion: from Mug, to Mooch.

Shepherd Armstrong Knacker
Union Bancaire Privée Account Number 837-PO-4619
Date: 21 February 2006
Our reference: 948378
Funds transfer: $800,000.00

S
hep packed with a surety born of rehearsal. Rather than select a few arbitrary implements, this time he would take his whole trusty toolkit, toted from job to job from the earliest days at Knack. After all, these ancient wrenches, awls, and pliers were of a sturdy quality that you couldn’t buy anymore. Rolling the tools with pristine newsprint from an unread
New York Times
, he lodged the bundles snuggly inside the familiar two-tiered box. Most of the once-bright red paint had chipped off the metal, like a beloved childhood wagon. He nestled the tools so that they didn’t rattle, then hooked the metal clasps. He bound the box in a blanket from among the many pieces of bedding that he planned cheerfully to abandon, then wrapped it tight with twine. The toolbox had survived intact for thirty years, and he didn’t want it to dent in its dotage on baggage belts; this was the same care that he would soon apply to his animate cargo. The likelihood that
the toolkit would incur overweight charges was a matter of supreme indifference.

Next he wrapped and boxed the Wedding Fountain, having installed a new pump. He retrieved Glynis’s flatware from the kitchen drawer—the Bakelite-inlaid fish slice, the knurling sterling chopsticks, the copper and titanium ice tongs—already conveniently bundled for transit in loving layers of sea-green felt. He even trotted up to the attic to rescue the plain sheet of heavy-gauge silver, with its single wobbly saw cut of less than an inch. As before, of course, the StairMaster, the salad spinner, the burdensome furniture would stay mercifully behind, but every work of Glynis’s hand was guaranteed a place in the ZanAir ark.

He had researched the weather, and a few pieces of light clothing would suffice for most of the year, although yesterday he’d also purchased top-shelf rain gear from Paragon for the monsoon season. Having emailed Fundu Lagoon’s management, he was now up to speed on electrics. Prepared for European 220 current, he packed three Radio Shack converters that would connect with British-style three-prong sockets. After grabbing a fistful of spare brush heads, he unscrewed the Oral-B charger from the bathroom wall. Nothing about the Third World obviated oral hygiene, and he would take the electric toothbrushes.

It was a relief this time around to shed the sheepish skulking—to pound boisterously down the hallway with the floorboards squeaking beneath the carpet, still stained from Glynis’s nosebleed last spring; to let the screwdrivers clatter unashamedly against one another as he rolled them in bunches with newsprint. Otherwise, the exercise was a faithful repetition, like having conducted conscientious fire drills when the house was truly ablaze: duct tape; a selection of screws, bolts, and washers; silicon lubricant; plastic sealant; rubber bands; a small roll of binding wire. A flashlight, for power cuts, and a stack of AAs. A stock of Malarone tablets, and a fresh tube of cortisone, for the skin condition on his ankle that had thrived under the stress of the last Jobian year. This time, a packet of enemas, an overkill of antibiotics, and, reverently nestled between rolls of socks, the liquid morphine.

Improving on his dry run last January, he had bought a thicker,
more serious Swahili-English/English-Swahili dictionary in preference to a mere phrasebook. He had pulled the Arts sections from the last month’s newspapers, and torn out the crosswords; it had been years since he’d had the leisure for this frivolous pastime. Shep had always been terrible at crosswords, and without practice he’d be worse, which was a fine thing; they’d last longer that way.

He had given much more careful consideration to reading material. A brush with what real guns did to real people had cured him of any desire to seek out casual depictions of bogus violence by people who’d no idea what they were talking about—so thrillers were out. Nor did alarmist tracts appeal, about climate change, or the rise of Islamic terrorism; if they were right, catastrophe would ensue of its own accord without his having to read about it. He had never been one for serious novels; he’d never had time. But he was buying time. Consequently, on yesterday’s trip to Manhattan for provisions, he had consulted a bespectacled clerk at a Barnes and Noble who, unlike most of their staff, seemed to have learned how to read. Thus in the corner of the hard-shell Samsonite on the bed upstairs he stacked four fat new paperbacks: Ernest Hemingway’s
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, whose brave, self-sacrificing protagonist described on the back had seemed comfortingly kindred. William Faulkner’s
Absalom, Absalom
, since the grand, rolling sadness of the first few pages he’d read in the aisle now suited his mood. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
The Idiot
, a title that seemed to encapsulate all of Jackson Burdina’s long-winded subtitles in just two words. Besides, the young man at B&N had explained that the novel was about goodness, and how goodness just made people hate you; that suited his mood, too. When Shep had mentioned Africa, the shop assistant steered him toward Paul Theroux’s
The Mosquito Coast.
Given the plot synopsis, inclusion of the Theroux was a fine joke at his own expense. These novels wouldn’t last forever, but thankfully he was a slow reader. Tourists would likely leave spent paperbacks behind, and who knows, maybe for a price Amazon would deliver to Pemba.

Of course, the abortive rehearsal of 2005 had been quiet, furtive, intensely concentrated. Given that the household was now a cross between
a hospice and a refugee camp, the repeat performance was eternally interrupted by Heather’s clamoring for a second slice of Entenmann’s crumb cake, or Zach’s sullen complaint that with a little more advance notice he might have ordered
Mighty Mordlock and the Sword of Doom
in time for UPS to deliver before Thursday. Shep couldn’t help but be distracted by snippets of conversation that he caught while whisking in and out of the bedroom, where Glynis and Carol were huddled in sotto voce consultation on the pillows: what really lay at the bottom of Jackson’s misery, whether he had acted out of sadness or out of spite. Shep was jealous. Jackson was his best friend. If there were answers to those questions he would like to hear them himself. The jealousy thickened when at heated junctures in their conversation the women went silent when he walked in.

A
fter getting off the phone with Rick Mystic last Thursday night, he’d had one hour to prepare for the arrival of Carol and the girls at nine, and that was not a matter of making up beds. He couldn’t invite Carol to stay here and then expect her to say nothing to Glynis about why she was an exile from her own house and why her husband was so conspicuously AWOL. Real hospitality entailed telling Glynis in advance. He liked to think of himself as courageous. But without such a hard deadline, he probably would have put it off.

Shep’s inclinations had been at war. The advice he’d been given that same day was perfectly conflicting.
You deal with it by telling her
, Carol had abjured.
Being sick is not the same thing as being stupid or a small child.
Goldman had countered a mere two hours later,
I think I’d counsel you to keep my prognosis to yourself…Preserve the quality of the time she has left…Keep her upbeat.

It was a hackneyed formulation, but this was not a time to worry about originality:

“I have some good news and some bad news,” he’d announced soberly in their bedroom after delivering her dinner of canned split-pea soup—all he could rustle up in five minutes. “Which do you want first?”

Blowing to cool a sip, Glynis eyed him over her spoon with gladiato
rial wariness. “Since we get so little good news in this household lately, maybe you’d better start with that.”

“Forge Craft wants to settle. They’ve offered us one-point-two million.”

Given that the offer was an accolade for her spectacular performance that morning, he would have expected at least a limp high-five. Yet her reaction was bafflingly mild. “That’s nice,” she said, and took her sip of soup.

“Do you want to accept?”

“I seem to recall there was an issue, with the rent,” she said, dabbing the corners of her mouth with her napkin. “So I suppose so, yes.”

To the extent that he might have described her as “quietly pleased,” he dreaded moving on to Part II. Although his “good news and bad news” cliché had about it a sense of equivalence, the bad news far outweighed the good. In point of fact, there was only one piece of good news, which was now over, and had fallen disappointingly flat. As for the bad news, the pieces were two. Torn between Carol’s honesty as best policy and the doctor’s let sleeping cancer patients lie, for now he would split the difference.

“The bad news,” he stalled, “is very bad.”

Her eyes charged at him. “Are you sure you want to tell me?”

“Of course I don’t want to. But I have to.”

“You
have to
.”

“Not telling you doesn’t change anything, doesn’t—make it un-so.”

She put her spoon down slowly. Sliding her hands on either side of the tray, she gripped its sides the way a trucker would steady his steering wheel with his foot on the gas. Were the bed a semi-trailer, she would have run him over.

“Jackson shot himself.”

Apparently what he’d said was so far afield from what she’d expected that she almost didn’t hear him. Her question was insensible. “Is—is he okay?”

Shep gave her a moment to rehear him. “No.”

“Oh.” She dropped her hands. Her face was full of complexity, and it
took a tiny instant for deep and genuine sorrow—“Poor Carol!”—to get the better of her guilty relief.

N
ow six nights on, he wouldn’t go so grotesquely far as to claim that the suicide of one of their oldest and closest friends had cheered his wife up. Nonetheless, Glynis seemed palpably thankful to throw herself into suffering other than her own. Pausing only for embraces, she and Carol had hardly stopped talking since the Burdinas’ arrival. Finally feeling useful if only as a confidante, Glynis seemed to be experiencing a resurgence of physical energy whose timing was fortuitous. He planned to draw on all her strength for a demanding journey beginning tomorrow afternoon that would take more than a full day.

But then, nothing could be harder than the much shorter trip he had taken the Friday morning after Carol and the girls arrived. To be fair, Carol had given him ample opportunity to get out of it—they could buy new clothes, she said, get new prescriptions—but he had promised.

With a detailed list of the Burdinas’ vital possessions and their locations in his hip pocket, Shep had sat in the driver’s seat that morning for a solid twenty minutes without starting the car. He was not by nature a procrastinator. But he did not want to go. For most of that twenty minutes not wanting to go had translated into not being able to go: not going. He could not start the car. True, he had summarily forsaken a sense of duty in all other respects: to his company, his country, and—in bilking a management that, whatever their predecessors may have manufactured thirty years ago, had never themselves done his wife a speck of harm—his very conscience. Yet he could not forsake a sense of duty to his friends. He believed in little now, but he did still believe in that. If he broke down this onerous mission into tiny, achievable units—reverse down the drive, signal right, round the golf course, merge onto 287—it would soon be over, and in this mechanical spirit he turned the key.

At the front door in Windsor Terrace his heart thundered in his eardrums, and a rush of adrenaline made Shep feel light-headed and slightly sick. Despite the mantra of his mental reassurance, his inner
organs did not believe that there was
nothing to be afraid of
. The feeling was quite otherwise: of being trapped in a horror film on the wrong side of the screen. Once he’d let himself into the enclosed front porch, he stood clutching the duffel for his plunder and stared ferociously at the floor. Beside his shoe, the aqua linoleum was stained with the slender footprint of a woman’s shoe. The footprint was rust-brown. There was no escaping what had happened here, even by staring at the floor.

He raised his gaze and entered the living room. At the far end of the room, the entrance to the kitchen was feebly barred with yellow police tape. The stairs to the bedrooms and study, where most items on Carol’s list would be found, rose on his left-hand side. So he needn’t enter the kitchen, or even look into it. For a moment he blinked and squinted, so that the kitchen opposite remained a blur. But it was what you didn’t look at that frightened you. He would do this job more competently if he faced the kitchen down. Moreover, loyalty to Jackson demanded that he take on the full splatter of his friend’s unhappiness.

He walked to the tape. Sunlight poured derisively through the windows, ensuring he would miss nothing: a peculiar litter of spatulas, serving spoons, and metal skewers all over the Forbo marmoleum that Shep had helped Jackson to install ten years ago. A cabinet drawer as well on the floor; a second drawer gaping open. A steel and heavy Sabatier cleaver on the breakfast table, both discolored with the same reddish brown of the footprint—as if left to rust, and despite his slapdash side Jackson Burdina had always been respectful of tools. A thick wooden cutting board customarily positioned on the counter by the fridge, but moved to the table, and soaked in the same sullen hue. There was something that Carol hadn’t told him.

Otherwise, it was what he had tried to prepare himself for, although some things were not subject to preparation, and having been braced was no help. When affixing the squares with Forbo glue, he could never have known that Jackson’s choice of a parquet alternating “Lapis Lazuli” and “Blue Mood” would provide such stunning contrast for the heavily tracked splashes and coagulated puddles. Nor could Carol have anticipated when she sewed the cream curtains patterned with pale cornflow
ers that they would double as canvases for the Rorschach of her husband’s despair. For it was everywhere—as if a boiling pot of marinara had been left to spit and bubble over on the stove. Surly pools of slurry had thickened under the table, from which one hardened drizzle snaked to that impossible-to-clean flooring beneath the fridge. The splay was dull and darkened; a brighter, more glistening vista would have greeted Carol on her return home. She had literally tackled Flicka in the doorway, she said, and dragged her daughter to the porch, but not in time.