The Next Right Thing (30 page)

I never did—surprise, surprise—make amends to that Mexican guy. About seven years ago, Manny found his address for me, but Manny also told me that I didn’t need to meet him, that it would cause more harm than good. Manny meant well, but he wasn’t an alcoholic. Colin Alvarez had been right: it was unfinished business, and I had never felt completely free of Santa Ana because of it. I had never stopped seeing myself as that bad cop.

Of course, my failure to make amends didn’t stop me from telling Troy that he would have to make amends to his father.

Troy just nodded.

“Did he ever do anything nice for you?” I asked.

“He did nice things for me all the time,” Troy said. “That’s not the point.”

“That’s exactly the point. He loved you the best he could, and you’ve got to let him off the hook. Are you still taking money from him?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, do assets that were in his account show up in your account a few days later for reasons that have nothing to do with you selling him a product or rendering him a service?”

“His office sends me a check every month.”

“That’s gotta stop, too. You’re going to get a job. Either that or go to school. Now let’s get some more coffee.”

I felt a bit hypocritical, having no immediate intention of making amends to Balthazar Bustamante, but that’s one of the
cool things about A.A.: it is possible to walk another person toward “the sunshine of the spirit” while still keeping your own head firmly implanted up your ass.

The uncool thing about A.A. is that there are other people in it.

“You going to make amends to that guy in Santa Ana?” Troy said.

“What makes you think I haven’t?”

Troy looked at me.

“Get out of my truck,” I said. “It’s my turn to drive. If you’re fast, you can get to the other side before I lock the doors.”

Troy stepped cautiously into the street. When he met me by the tailgate, he seemed totally unprepared for the hug that I gave him. I even kissed him on the neck. “I love you,” I said. “Doing this thing we just did means I love you.” They were the same words Terry had said to me, and probably the same words that DUI Dave had said to Terry. I was shocked to discover that I was telling the absolute truth.

THEN CAME ALMOST THREE WEEKS
of Crash talking to me only through Betsy, who was talking to me only through Jeep. Actually, Betsy still talked to me, though just to the extent necessary to extricate me from my legal troubles. All other conversations were, according to my sister, “toxic,” and she was very disciplined about avoiding them.

I consoled myself with the entirely bullshit rationalization that not talking was a form of love, too. I was pathetic. Then Jean found out about Betsy playing go-between for me and Crash, and that ended, too, so I became something worse than pathetic.

The police stopped calling me eventually. Once Laguna Beach PD had control over Colin’s little empire, with a generous cut for the DEA, they stopped worrying quite so much about
Mutt’s murder. Colin pleaded to manslaughter, adding more to his already extensive tally of guilty pleas. He did Emma a solid by pretending that the gun was his when she’d actually bought it from a meth dealer in Lake Forest. For that kindness alone, I would visit him regularly in jail. No one was charged for Simon’s death by stupidity. The fact that I had saved the reality-television star from the clutches of the evil drug dealer must have taken the fun out of seizing any of my assets. They couldn’t prove that the money I’d given Terry had been anything other than an expression of love, but when had that stopped them before?

The only question left to me was how the fuck did Terry get so far on the wrong side of things? No, it was bigger than that. The real question was how could he have let his mistakes, as horrible as they were, get in the way of his being there for that beautiful child? It didn’t escape me that it was a good question to be asking myself, too. John Sewell’s prediction that I would drive a permanent wedge between myself and my daughter had come true.

Meanwhile, Sewell seemed to have delivered on his promise to give Cathy her money. She moved to a nicer place in Irvine and was looking into starting an associate’s program for nursing at Saddleback College. I went to see her and Paloma and Danny a few times, but I didn’t ask many questions about Terry. It felt more important to simply be in the room with them. Particularly because I’d avoided diaper duty with Crash, I liked pitching in for Danny. Paloma had a lot of curiosity about my daughter, and I answered all her questions without letting on how much they pained me. Maybe that was more of my penance. While I spent time with the family Terry had left behind, John Sewell
was off somewhere beginning the process of replacing me in my daughter’s eyes.

Colin’s downfall soon became just another cautionary tale about basement entrepreneurship in South Orange County. Life went on, and my own role—my failure to help my friend Terry and, maybe more important, a stranger, Mutt—was something I was learning to live with a day at a time. Sometimes I tried to imagine what that would have been like, helping Mutt. I had a track record with pseudo-tough guys; I would have been a good sponsor for him.

When I wasn’t imagining myself sponsoring dead guys, I hid out at my shop. My A.A. family tried to turn me around. I was going to meetings again, and Wade and Troy and Emma used my house and my shop as though both belonged to them. Emma told me that MP—her new sponsor—had given her permission to consort with only two men in A.A.: me and Troy. This made me feel better about the possibility of getting back together with MP until I asked her if I should take it that way. At one point I had convinced her to stay at my house for a few minutes after she dropped Emma off. She drank a cup of herbal tea with me before she said, “Look at the safety you’re giving Troy and Emma. Those two are flourishing. And they owe a lot of that to you.”

I tried to care because MP wanted me to care. “Maybe they’d flourish even more if you lived here, too.”

She finished her tea and said, “You’re not the patient here today.” Then she smiled and left me again. At least she smiled, right?

You’d think it would make me feel better, seeing the new
lives that Emma and Troy created in the wake of my disaster. Emma was working the steps with MP like her hair was on fire, and Troy had a plan for the next stage of his life that would have impressed the hell out of me if I hadn’t been so malignantly self-centered: in a matter of weeks, he had become the computer fix-it guy of choice for Laguna Beach A.A., and he was getting himself together to apply for community college.

Troy’s success meant that my house was filled with computers that he was working on. With his help, Emma had also turned one of my bedrooms into a small-scale video production facility from which she was posting to YouTube a meditation on every day of her sobriety. About half the time, the three of us would cook dinner together, and I had to admit, it was more entertaining than talking to myself. The two of them usually avoided doing the dishes by running off to a meeting.

The only thing that came close to comforting me was the hope chest I was designing for Paloma’s quinceañera. In the Mexican culture, that’s a combination fifteenth birthday party and debutante ball, and Paloma had been planning hers since before Terry died. Now that Cathy had been given Terry’s insurance money, Paloma’s quinceañera would be slightly less elaborate than her wedding—if she married the prince of Monaco. I was glad that Paloma could have her party, but I hated that the largesse had come by way of John Sewell.

The hope chest was based on an idea I’d had for Crash—and God knows I was planning on building one for her next. If you didn’t look too closely, it was a regular old, distinctively American hope chest. Made with good wood and better fittings but pretty much the same design that had served young women for
centuries. The kind of piece that should live at the bottom of a big comfortable bed.

That was only if you didn’t look closely. When you did, you saw that the chest was bisected on the top and the sides by faint seams. When you tried to open it the old-fashioned way, it wouldn’t: the hinges and the big brass lock were purely decorative. As you felt around, though, you realized that if you exerted a little pressure, those faint seams would separate and the chest would slide open sideways. The top rolled away at either side, like the ceiling of a football stadium, to reveal a warren of boxes. I’d made the boxes as complicated as possible, too. A few of them were large enough for sweaters and prom dresses, but it was the smaller ones that interested me. What would Paloma keep in them? Mementos of her mother? Love letters? Report cards?

If it’s true, as an Art Center professor once told me, that “design is just a fancy word for problem solving,” I’m not sure what problem I was trying to solve. How to show a fifteen-year-old girl that life was complicated but also beautiful? Maybe it was a lesson in how far a man who had lost what he loved most would go to occupy himself? Just figuring out how to rig the hinges took two full days. Good thing I had thrown away my life. I had the time.

One day, as I was finally getting satisfied with how the chest was opening and closing, Emma showed up at my shop. I pretended I wasn’t happy to see her. Troy was away for a few days to visit his father in Seattle. While they were together, Troy planned to make the big amends. His absence meant that Emma had doubled up on the task of trying to distract me from myself. She was riding a moped with cool leather saddlebags.

“You notice anything amazing about me?” she said.

“There’s nothing about you, dear, that doesn’t amaze me. I’m amazed, among other things, that your head doesn’t explode with all the crazy wonderful shit that’s bouncing around in there.”

She smiled. “That’s actually a pretty good answer.
Bravissimo
, Randy.”

After Emma figured out that she couldn’t get me to focus on how she’d managed to snag such a mod ride, she took a laptop from the saddlebag and opened it on my worktable. I didn’t have any reason to recognize the laptop that Cathy Acuña had given Troy the first time we met her, the one she said her boss had given her. By now, my house was awash in laptops just like it.

Emma said, “Troy would be really mad at me if he knew I was showing this to you.”

I still wasn’t that interested. I was using most of my brain to wonder whether brass hinges were better than platinum hinges, even though the platinum hinges were already a done deal. “Why would Troy be mad?”

“He’s afraid you’ll freak out and do something stupid.”

Now I was interested. “Show me,” I said.

“Promise you won’t do something stupid?”

“Just show me.”

It took forever for the fucking thing to boot up—God, I hate PCs—and once it did, the hard drive made enough noise to convince me it would die at any moment. Emma opened a video file, clicked on play, and immediately a woman who looked exactly like Claire Monaco was having sex with a well-beyond-middle-aged man. The video had those spooky drifting squarish
gaps that corrupted video files sometimes get. It was a long video, and Emma gave me a quick tour through the rest of it: lots of positions and plenty of good shots of both their faces. I tried to imagine the circumstances of its filming. The camera was stationary, maybe on the other side of the room. Did these two even know they were being filmed?

“Where did Troy find this?” I asked.

“Right here on the computer,” Emma said, “the one he got from your friend Cathy? Troy says that’s why you should never put anything on your hard drive. We couldn’t figure out why that chick Claire Monaco would be on Cathy’s computer. God, that woman freaks me out every time I see her at the women’s meeting—and I’m the one who freaks everyone else out. Troy remembered that this computer must have belonged to some guy you really hate? The one who’s like stealing your daughter or something? Why don’t you ever tell me anything? You don’t think I want to hear about some guy who’s stealing your daughter? Is this the guy?”

I’d tried hard to keep my Crash problems as far away from Emma and Troy as possible, but not hard enough. It wasn’t John Sewell himself in the video. That wasn’t how he rolled.

Emma kept going: “I was going to ask MP, but Troy said we’d better wait until he got back to town. I guess I thought this was something you’d want to see, that it could be important to you and your kid. I mean, it’s probably some weird random video—I’m so fucking sick of porn—but I couldn’t stand the idea of it sitting there and nobody dealing with it. You know what I mean? Randy?”