The Next Right Thing (23 page)

I turned in to the shopping center above Pacific Coast Highway and parked in one of the slots. Eventually, MP’s borrowed white Volvo parked a few spaces away. She stayed in the car, which I decided meant she wanted me to walk over. But just as I opened my door, she got out and approached my passenger window.

She was wearing her yoga togs and a pair of Chinese slip-ons. I felt a down-low tingle that was half fear and half lust.

“I think I’ve missed this truck as much as I’ve missed you,” she said.

“Great,” I said.

She smiled. She had thin lips that puffed up whenever I kissed her long and hard. She reached through the window and took my hand, which was awkward because there was an empty seat between us.

“This truck is who you are, Randy. Almost everything that happens to you happens in this truck.”

“
Almost
everything.”

When she got in, she put her hand on my shoulder. “Can I just tell you something? Can I tell you one thing?”

“I want you to come home.”

“I know that,” she said.

“Then why don’t you?”

She looked down. “Can I say what I wanted to say? Maybe it will help.”

I nodded.

“I used to wake up in the middle of the night”—MP moved her hand a little farther up my arm—“and feel like my heart had exploded. I’d lie there breathing hard, and I couldn’t imagine how I was still alive. I thought that God was punishing me. I
mean, at the end of the day, my name
is
Mary Pat Donnelly, and I’ve got all the baggage that goes with that kind of name. I thought I was going to hell, that I would spend eternity being cut off from the people I love. You don’t think it was a big deal, the stuff I did when I was drinking, but this would happen to me every night. Do you want to know how it finally stopped?”

Hoping that she wouldn’t let go of my arm, I nodded again.

“Do you really?” The rims of her eyes were watery. “You have to
really
want to know. Because I’ve never told anyone before.”

“I do,” I said. “I really want to know.”

“The first few times we slept together,” MP said, “I was still having those awful nights. And then the last time it happened, I woke up and looked at you sleeping next to me. I saw your back. Your head on the pillow. I listened to your snoring. And you know what I thought?”

“Please,” I said. “Tell me.”

“I thought,
If a man like this could love me, then God must love me, too
.”

And then she kissed my hand. And then she walked into All People’s Yoga.

Here’s another thing you learn in A.A.: when the drunk loses the woman he loves, you know you’re not at the end of the story. You know it’s going to get much worse.

IT WAS ANOTHER BAD NIGHT
. My girlfriend had moved out. Troy Padilla was now my roommate. We hadn’t heard from Emma in hours, and it seemed increasingly likely she was doing something stupid. I suggested Troy make some calls to her friends, but since she didn’t have any friends except Troy, that didn’t yield much.

Troy turned out be quite the little organizer. He’d gotten most of my home office sorted out before I came home. Then he went to work on both my computer and the computer he’d rescued from Cathy Acuña. He knew what he was doing, and it occurred to me that this might be a way for him to go. “You ever think about going back to school?” I said.

He gave me a sharp look. “What makes you think I haven’t
finished
school? What makes you think I don’t have a Ph.D.? Have you ever asked me? No. You just assumed.”

“Do you have a Ph.D.?”

“I dropped out of college after two semesters,” he said. “But that’s not the point, is it?”

I let it go. We were worried about Emma. Around midnight, we both went to bed—Troy in Crash’s room—and I slept for ten hours. The last thing I told him was to wake me up if Emma called. She never did.

I was sitting with my coffee on Saturday morning, in my bathrobe, using my Eames chair for the first time in what seemed like an eternity, when the doorbell rang. I got up to answer it.

There was something about Jean Trask’s confident greeting, the fact that she was smiling, that gave me pause. A woman like my ex-wife doesn’t smile unless she’s about to kick you in the balls. Or maybe right after.

Jean was holding something behind her back.

“You’re too happy,” I said.

“You don’t want me to be happy?”

“What you call happiness is what other people call Randy getting it up the ass.”

“Won’t argue with that.” She gave me a manila envelope, and I briefly thought there might be pictures inside, maybe eight-by-tens of every stupid thing Randy Chalmers had done in the last seventy-two hours.

But it wasn’t photos—it was a restraining order. A duplicate, not the official one, which I could be sure would arrive soon enough.

“Doesn’t it defeat the purpose of a restraining order,” I said, “for you to be delivering the restraining order yourself?”

“I’ve made it clear to the court,” Jean said, “that your impulse control problem has returned.”

“How’d you get it done so fast?”

“Do you really have to ask that?” she said.

“Your boyfriend is a judge,” I said.

“It didn’t hurt,” Jean said, “that you’re locally famous for extreme violence.” She took back the piece of paper.

“What the fuck, Jean?”

“I don’t want my daughter growing up around you. You can spend as much time with her as you want once she’s a fully formed adult, but I’m putting an end to this crap right now. If she doesn’t become an alcoholic, she’ll marry one.”

“You think you can prevent that?”

“Not completely, but without your charming example in her face all the time, she’ll have a better chance. This piece of paper gives me control, and I will exercise that control. John’s a good man, and—”

I had to laugh. “You think Sewell’s a better role model than me? I know he’s dirty. The way he handled Cathy Acuña? I don’t know how he got into the South County courthouse, but that man’s some kind of fucking psycho.”

“This from a man who’s been editorialized as a psycho.”

I felt like my intestines were about to slide down my legs into my shoes. “I can prove what kind of man he is. Just give me some time.”

“You think I don’t know about every element of his career path? You think I didn’t know about his Mexican daughter? You think I didn’t have him completely checked out before I would
contemplate bringing him into my home? Did he steal from anyone? Did he beat anyone nearly to death? He made some money off a corrupt economy that even the police participated in, and he’s paying it back now.”

“Why are you giving me this in person?” I said. “Do you hate me that much?”

“You can have Alison two afternoons every week, and you’re going to agree to that in writing. The visits will be supervised by a therapist until I’m clear that you’re not going to try to take her. This is nonnegotiable. If you push me or you continue to harass John, you’ll lose that.”

“Please don’t do this, Jean.”

“Please don’t do what, Randy? When was the last time you called your daughter except to use her against me? Do you even know where she is now?”

It was a close call, but I had an answer. “It’s Saturday morning. She’s with her friend in Corona del Mar. They’re taking that sailing class together.”

“Wrong, but that was a good guess. During your malaise, you missed the change of seasons. She’s at softball camp. When you didn’t call, I made other arrangements. John drove her.”

Jean threw the restraining order at my feet and walked away.

I don’t know how I made it from Laguna Beach to Anaheim Hills in half an hour, but it involved the Ortega Highway, and probably the last man who accomplished this feat lived in a California before actors became governors. John Sewell was about to take my place as the proud parent of a softball player named Alison Chalmers, and nothing seemed more important than finding
them before the game started so I could interrupt him in that ambition.

In some weird way, I wasn’t that angry. An emotion pursued to the nth degree can become the opposite of itself. The furthest reach of resentment is amusement, for example. Maybe the last frontier of hatred is love.

I had to give it to my ex-wife. It was apparent that she would chew off her arm at the elbow if that would make Crash’s life better. I felt empathy for her delusion that she could protect Crash from a disease that had destroyed both our families. Saying that Jean’s father had been a vicious drunk and her mother a vicious drunk’s wife was like saying that water was wet and the rocks in my head were hard. Why else would she have married an angry drunken cop? And why would she marry a control freak like Sewell, thinking that she could leave all that behind?

At the top of Crown Valley Parkway, though, I reached the end of empathy and decided on another course of action: kill that motherfucker John Sewell.

When I pulled in to the parking lot beside the softball fields, he looked like he’d been waiting for me, wearing an outfit Jean might have picked for him: chino shorts and a powder-blue polo shirt, just the thing for a cardboard-cutout father. A game was under way beyond where he stood. It was the kind of athletic facility that made some folks proud to be American: unblemished grass that had been pumped with enough chemicals to kill a whole species of fish once it ran off to sea, backstops with the steely determined functionality of Third Reich architecture, and about sixty beautiful healthy girls, spread out over four fields, playing softball as though that were more important than anything.

“I was betting that you’d show up,” Sewell said.

“Jean thought I’d have gone down in flames by now?”

Sewell shrugged.

The scent of his cologne across the gravel parking lot reminded me that I hadn’t shaved in two days. Dropping him right then would have taken less energy than putting out the trash.

“The important thing,” Sewell said, “is I knew you would. A man should be the leader of his household. In the course of things, Jean’s going to have to calm down. You’ll have less trouble from her in the future, I promise.”

“What are you going to do? Stuff a sock in her mouth? Duct-tape her wrists and ankles? If you’re going to marry her, you stupid fuck, you’d better get a clue that she’s smarter and stronger than ten of you.”

“No, Randy, I’m going to give her what you couldn’t: walls, safety, a context. She’s going to be married to me for the rest of her life, and we’re going to do great things together. And you—you’re going to continue making money and pursuing your art form, and you won’t have any more trouble from either of us.”

Beyond Sewell, a game seemed to be ending. The girls cheered and slapped high fives. The sunlight behind them raked my eyes, and it seemed like their own radiance had hit me.

“All I have to do is give up custody of my daughter? That’s a great fucking deal.”

“It’s a formality, Randy. You didn’t have custody to begin with. It’s how we make Jean happy. You’ll get to spend as much time with Alison as you want, I promise. Why would I want to prevent that? So that you can become more important to her—and
Jean—than you already are? No, thank you. I’m not trying to take her away from you. I just want to be … on your team. By the time she starts to trust me, you’ll probably have another family with your girlfriend, and you’ll be grateful for the help.”

“If Paloma Acuña were my daughter,” I said, “they’d need napalm to keep me away from her.”

“That’s dramatic,” Sewell said, “but maybe not helpful.”

“I don’t know what else is wrong with you,” I said. “But I’m going to find out. I have a feeling that if I dig deep enough, I’ll find enough racketeering and enterprise corruption to go around.”

“What I think you’re describing is
business
,” Sewell said. “I didn’t participate in anything illegal. I gave good advice to men who often ignored my good advice. You need to grow up, Randy. How can you give Alison the opportunity to grow up when you haven’t done it yourself?”

“Crash,” I said. “Her fucking name is Crash. Stop calling her Alison.”

“Crash?” Sewell laughed. “You named your daughter after a car wreck. Can’t you see how—”