The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel (18 page)

It wasn’t like living again in his childhood bedroom was all that bad. On the first night he had actually felt, even with the room repainted a neutral beige and the shelves lined with reproduction antiques, that he had been graced with the gift of returning to the same place he was when he was twelve, which was to say, protected from the cruelties of the world with only opportunities in front of him. He told his mom as much over Chinese take-out that first week, and even though it sounded like the same old bullshit, when he watched her face light up as she twirled her fork with lo mein, he felt as close to her as he had to anyone in years.

The part that he didn’t get then was why he had ended up at the jai alai fronton betting money he didn’t have on a game he didn’t really understand and why, on top of that, he would take the money of a man he was teaching to read and sabotage everything good he had left in his life to gamble it. That was the mystery, and that, he supposed, watching a bar of light break across the sound, was also an indication that, as his father had shouted at him more than once, it was probably time to grow the hell up.

It only took ten minutes to get across town in his rumbling, geriatric 4Runner, and as he turned down Main Street, whose shops were just now opening for the day’s onslaught, he kept the clutch in and coasted the road’s length so as not to emit any unpleasant fumes in its gleaming aisle of commerce. In a sign of how early it was, he had no problem finding a spot and managed, without punching the gas or setting the timing belt squealing, to guide his car into it with inches to spare at both bumpers.

Gil was open—he could tell by the neon sign in the window that read, simply,
LIQUOR
and by the long phone cord stretched from the wall near the register all the way down the store to the stockroom. An electronic bell chimed when he opened the door and he could hear Gil’s voice in the back explaining to someone the relative merits of the malbec he had in stock versus the one the customer usually ordered. “Not fruity, not fruity,” he was saying. “
Earthy.
You know what I mean by that? Not like dirt; like earth. Look, you’re going to like it.” The place smelled the same as always—some combination of dust and cork and corrugated cardboard, which was everywhere, floor to ceiling; the room was a tunnel of cardboard, which was why, Preston had assumed when he was a kid, his mother called it a package store. Gil’s displays were nothing more than boxes cut in half so you could see rows of bottles and their labels, an index card with the price taped to each box. Everything in there was old and solid—the register, the handwritten receipts, the knuckle-buster he used for credit cards. There were big metal shears at the register and a weighted tape dispenser, and the whole shop, even in the middle of a bright morning, was cast in the dim, warm light of a library.

“Help you find something?”

Gil came from the back, gathering the phone cord into a growing tumbleweed, and Preston waited until he looked up. “Well, good God,” Gil said. “Look who got a haircut.”

Other than his mother, Gil had been his only legitimate-business employer in thirty-three years. Gil had hired him, Preston knew, as a favor to his parents, in the time after he had been expelled from St. Paul’s and before his parents had found a third-tier institution that they could pay enough to take him. You couldn’t legally sell liquor until you were eighteen, but Gil had found a loophole that said pretty much anyone could transport it, so his job had been to drive around town when the 4Runner was new with cases of wine and magnums of vodka tinking in back, tape blaring from the stereo and the windows down even in winter, racking cases of chablis in people’s wine cellars and, for at least one customer, leaving a daily bottle of gin on the back porch. At a time when he professed to dislike everything, he liked this, and so he showed up on time and billed for the right hours and never once felt like a disappointment.

Gil put down the phone, took his glasses from the top of his head, and held Preston by the shoulders at arm’s length, squinting at him as though absorbing all the time that had passed. “Your mother told me about Northwestern,” he said, and he took a deep, whistling breath through his nose. “Heckuva school.”

Preston nodded. The receiver had started to beep from the box where Gil had set it.

“Okay, okay,” Gil said and brought the phone back to the wall. The moment he set it down, it rang again, a loud clattering sound. “It’s like this till January,” he said and picked it up.

Preston wandered down the aisles, tapping his finger on a bottle here or there, the same way he had as a child while his mother chatted endlessly with Gil—with utter ambivalence for the substances inside.

“That,” said Gil when he hung up the phone, “is a fantastic single malt.”

Preston realized he had made it down to the stuff behind glass, the only merchandise in the store important enough to be unpacked from the box it was shipped in.

“Oh,” said Preston. “I don’t drink anymore.”

Gil nodded and let his glasses fall to the chain around his neck.

“So what can I do for you?”

“I was actually wondering,” said Preston, feeling suddenly dirty and out of place, “if you needed any help.” The sentence came out sounding more cryptic than he’d intended.

“You mean work?” Gil said. “You know it’s only ever been me and Wayne, and he’s just here on Saturdays.”

“I was thinking about deliveries.”

“Deliveries?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I have an SUV.”

Gil looked at him. “Are things that bad out there?”

Employers, Preston knew, were always looking for a clear shape to your life (something that resembled the skyward arrow of a stock rally); his looked more like a de Kooning painting—little squiggles everywhere that didn’t quite connect. He wasn’t just assuaging his conscience when he told himself this was actually how everyone’s life looked. Things happened, some of them intentional, most of them not, and the successful people were those who were best at pretending the marks all connected.

The phone rang again.

“I’ll sweep up,” he said. “Break down boxes.”

Gil held up a finger. “Wineshop,” he said, and then he covered the mouthpiece. “You said you have an SUV?”

He made three quick deliveries right out of the gate, all garage drop-offs, but already in his pocket he had forty bucks. He rolled down the windows in spite of the cold, cranked up the radio, and cruised along the back roads, which were a blur of old stone walls and sticks, punching it on the straights and kicking up a swirl of dead leaves behind him. He had forgotten how pleasing it was to earn a paycheck, and as he worked through his next three deliveries, he felt like he could go and go through the night if he wanted, that at this rate he could earn enough to pay back Mr. Baptiste and his brother and his mother and all those old roommates who had stopped talking to him. Eventually he had only one more delivery on his run, three cases of wine to a house by the beach, and it wasn’t until he tapped the address into his phone and watched its pin fall onto the map that he recognized it.

He had heard enough about the fiasco of the Ashbys’ holiday party to know that it had already happened, but judging by their order, he thought they might be gearing up for another. Part of him hoped they would be out now so he could leave their cases anonymously on the back deck and avoid the long, smiley conversation with Sophie Ashby that would be recounted in near-scientific detail to his mother. That was the way with Sophie—she looked at him as though she’d just been looking at his baby picture and was disgusted by the adult she now saw—but at least if she was there he would be able to walk away with a tip.

The Ashbys’ house was always catalog-photo clean, especially the exterior, whose still-green lawn and fresh-painted yellow front would have seemed out of season were it not for the miles of garlands that framed the doors and windows. As a child, he had felt that his family was engaged in a domestic competition with the Ashbys that his side was perpetually losing, though he thought then the same thing he did now about the Ashbys’ level of meticulousness—namely, that it was intimidating and also kind of sad. It made sense to him that their son was putting on grand displays of independence and Samantha had disappeared to the other coast. Preston had actually seen her out in Seattle. She had had a shaved head and a clipboard under her arm and was asking tourists if they had a moment for the environment. He still wasn’t sure why he didn’t stop and talk to her—there were photographs of them bathing in a sink together—but he had only watched her for a while as she asked her question again and again, undeterred when people streamed around her without answering. Eventually, he walked another way.

No one answered the front door. He cupped his hands around his eyes at the window but saw only a dark family room, the sort of room in which the cushions were plumped daily and sat on twice a year, so he headed around to the back deck. When he had lugged all three cases to the door, he stopped and rested on the step to the hot tub. He could hear the marsh birds behind him and the hum of the tub. He would be lying if he said he wasn’t a little disappointed. He liked the idea of his mother hearing about his gainful employment secondhand, and as he hesitated before leaving, looking at his ghostly reflection in the sliding glass door, a lamp clicked on and Sophie Ashby was sitting there in its glow, staring at him.

She was in a club chair with her narrow legs crossed and, he could see from the lamplight, a cigarette burning in her fingers. She was still, concentrating on something so intently that Preston wondered if she could even see him. She brought the cigarette to her mouth and back to the arm of the chair, and by the time he thought he should maybe get going, he had waited there too long for his leaving without saying something not to be awkward. He went to the glass and knocked gently.

“Sophie,” he said, waving. “Hi.”

Given the way she shot out of her chair, Preston wasn’t sure if she was about to tackle him or hug him, but as soon as she was up, she stopped.

“Didn’t mean to startle you,” he called, and he gestured to the wine. “I come bearing gifts!”

It was only then he could see she was crying.

Little Charlie, it turned out, had decided to up his game. Or, as his mother put it as she levered open the cork of a warm bottle of white without bothering to remove the foil, he had evaporated. She had tucked him into bed, a boy just out of the hospital, still frail, the night before he was to go to a facility to get well, and when she came to wake him, he was gone. His clothes were still there, and his medicine, so when Preston had shown up at the back door, she had gotten her hopes up. “I know it sounds crazy,” she said, pouring the wine with an unsteady hand, “but when I saw you standing out there, I was looking at my son.”

She was wearing yoga clothes and had her mat rolled on the table, which made the second cigarette and the 11:00 a.m. glass of wine seem especially incongruous. The way Preston saw it, most of parenting, particularly the kind practiced around here, was regulated by fear, so the more time you spent worked up in a cloud of anxiety, the better you were at being a mom. The truth was, on the nights he used to pull a similar disappearing act, it was precisely his parents’ outsize reactions that made the whole thing worth it, so as he watched her dial her son’s number for the third time, he wanted to tell her Charlie was fine and that all she was doing in alternating between stern and desperate on his voice mail was ensuring he would do it again.

She punched off the phone and sat down at the kitchen island.

“I hate his little guts,” she said.

“He’ll come back.”

“Tell me something,” she said. “Are you living out of your car?”

Preston looked down at the front of his sweater. It’d pilled a little but he didn’t think it was that bad.

“I only ask,” she said, “because your mother said she thought you were living out of your car and I thought that was preposterous, but now that I see you, it sort of looks like you’re living out of your car.”

“It’s only temporary,” he said.

She broke into a grin. “Really?”

“I’m working on it.” He pointed to the boxes of wine.

“Well, Jesus, that’s stupid. Do you want a shower? A sandwich?”

“I’m okay.”

“You’re homeless,” she said.

Her frankness was new for him, and, with it, he could finally see what his mother so liked about her. She pulled two slices of pizza from the fridge and threw them in the microwave. “How much is Gil paying you?”

“The money’s really in tips.”

“Cheap bastard,” said Sophie, shaking her head. She lit another cigarette and the microwave beeped. She slid the slices in front of him. “Eat.”

Preston did as he was told.

“It’s good you’re home,” she said. “I know your mother seems pissed, but the holidays are about mothers and children if they’re about anything.” She gulped the last of her wine. “So she’s still insisting on a big Christmas Eve and I guarantee that has something to do with the fact that you’re here.”

He noticed then that Sophie was wearing skateboarding sneakers, an odd choice that made him think of his own mother’s interest, toward the end of his teens, in Adam Sandler comedies and the record of the Houston Rockets.

“He’s fucking with me,” Sophie said, as if she were just now permitting herself to consider the possibility. “Isn’t he? He’s pissed off that we’re insisting on rehab, so he’s throwing a tantrum. That’s it, isn’t it?”

Preston shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“But when you used to pull this crap, that was it, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

Whether it was because of the wine or the chain of cigarettes she had sucked down, after hearing this, she seemed to relax. “Okay,” she said and dialed the phone again. “Hey, buddy,” she said to his voice mail. “Listen, I know I’m bothering you, but ignore those previous messages. Here’s the truth: Your father and I have decided to give away the turtle.” She looked at Preston and raised her eyebrows. “He’s just so old and smelly and a pain in the ass. So you don’t want to keep him, do you? Anyway, give me a ring. Love you!