The Next Right Thing (8 page)

Jean Trask had shed my last name as quickly as a prisoner sheds his orange jumpsuit. Her maiden name had always sounded like military discipline to me. I couldn’t remember what it felt like to love her.

Sewell cut us both off at the pass, which I suspected was his specialty. He did it in an interesting way, too: he cleared his throat, looked at the room around us, and then launched into something entirely different. It wasn’t denial so much as a weird dominance. He’d decided that the conversation should be over, so he declared it over.

“Randy,” he began, “Alison says that project in Capistrano is something to see. How did she put it—Frank Lloyd Wright in skateboard shoes? I’m not sure what that means, but I was impressed by her enthusiasm.” Sewell’s default mode was to conciliate. I remembered that about him. Or rather, I remembered what Terry had said about him:
Guy can’t even take a bathroom break until he’s sure everything’s in order
.

I wish I were better defended against this kind of compliment, but I’m not. Convince me that my daughter loves me a tenth as much as I love her, and I’m your bitch.

One of Jean’s former boyfriends had written me a poem about his “yearning” for us to be good friends. Another asked if I wanted to do a sweat lodge with him sometime. So I liked the idea of John Sewell. He was cordial, and he acted like a man. All I really wanted was a safe place for my daughter to live when she couldn’t live with me. An end to my alimony wouldn’t hurt, either.

John suggested to Jean that maybe I would like a ginger ale, too, and she left the room with such fury that you could hear the fabric of her slacks whipping against itself. In an instant, John and I were alone together.

“Can I ask you a question, John?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“You ever meet an electrician named after a dog? Maybe someone who worked for you?”

Sewell smiled kindly and shook his head. “I don’t think so, Randy. Why?”

“You don’t even want to know,” I said.

Sewell looked thoughtfully into my eyes. “I was sorry to hear about Terry. I missed the memorial. I was in Sacramento working on—”

I interrupted him. “We were good friends to him while he was alive, right?”

“That’s right,” Sewell said. “Although now I wish we had spent more time fishing. Was that a pretty regular outing for you guys?”

“For a while,” I said. “Then we got busy.”

“That’s too bad,” Sewell said. “I thought of you being out there every weekend, Terry planning everyone’s lives.”

“What was his plan for you, John? I can’t remember.”

“I was going to be a senator. And if I remember correctly, you were going to run a huge development corporation.”

“How’s that working out for us?”

Jean arrived with my ginger ale. “John’s got too much integrity to be a senator. He’s going to be a judge.”

“Should I be congratulating him now?” I asked her. “Did I miss an announcement?”

“Yes,” she said, “you should be congratulating him now.”

“It’s not official,” John interjected, “but it’s in the pipeline.”

“They’re going to give him Judge Fogarty’s bench,” Jean said. “Now that the old bastard has finally done the right thing.”

John looked down modestly. “It came at a good time,” he said. “I was looking for new challenges.” His statement of intent was flavorless, but I didn’t begrudge him: Jean had enough
picante
for both of them.

“Fogarty resigned?” I said.

“He should have resigned years ago,” Jean said.

“I think judge
is
better than senator,” I said. “Congratulations.”

“And I’m pretty sure,” Sewell said, “that being a builder who’s regularly featured in design magazines beats running a development company.”

“That may be true,” I said, “but you just came a lot closer to fulfilling Terry’s predictions than I have. You ready to give up lawyering?”

“Happily,” he said.

Although I didn’t necessarily want to end Jean’s discomfort
with our mutual admiration, I decided to employ my collegefund conversational gambit. Things had already gone way south with Jean, but I figured maybe I could endear myself to the soon-to-be Honorable John Sewell.

As it happened, Crash walked back into the room in time to hear her mother laugh. “Who is this college fund for? You? That youngster you live with? Alison has less than four years until graduation. What did you think I would do, wait for someone to die and will it to me?”

Sewell smiled in a neutral way. A thought occurred to me that must have already occurred to a smart man like him: this was a discussion we should have been having in private.

“That’s great,” I said. “How much do you need from me?”

“You’re already contributing,” Jean said. “I’m putting in your alimony. It’s not like I need it.”

Humiliation from my ex-wife wasn’t anything new, but it was particularly painful in front of her boyfriend. I considered my options. With Crash standing beside her mother, I didn’t have any. I could have asked Jean for a steak knife in order to commit ritual suicide, I guess.

“Can I make a suggestion?” Sewell said.

For a second, we both looked at him as though we couldn’t imagine how he had materialized in our lives. I managed a nod. Jean barely moved.

“The way things are going with the market these days,” he said, “it makes sense for both of you to have college funds. One of you could have a 529, and the other could start a trust in Alison’s name. Listen, if you want to talk sometime, Randy, I can give you some suggestions. I do okay with this kind of thing.”

Jean wasn’t happy to watch Sewell pull me from the fire. She
gathered up the empty bottles, and my own not-empty bottle, and took them to the kitchen. Crash followed her mother, probably to make sure she didn’t return with that steak knife.

“She hates you.” Sewell said it like he was telling me my truck needed new tires.

“I didn’t notice it while we were married,” I said, “because there was so much disgust, too.”

“I’m going to make her hate you less.” Sewell stood up, which I took as a signal that I should start heading to the door. “It’s no way to start
our
marriage. I’m good at this kind of thing, too.”

Leaving without saying goodbye to Jean was an excellent plan. I could call Crash from my truck. Shaking John Sewell’s hand, I felt grateful for his attempts to make my life easier. And that wasn’t even the worst mistake I made that night.

TURNING UP CHAPMAN TOWARD
the toll road, I took a moment to enjoy one of the last pieces of open farmland in this part of Orange County. Thousand-foot peaks brooded over both sides of a box canyon that bottomed out into a lake. It was getting near dusk, and I almost didn’t mind being myself for a few moments.

On the way toward Laguna, though, my cell phone rang. The caller ID said MVP Entertainment, which didn’t sound like anyone who wanted me to build them a home, so I answered it.

“Randy, it’s Claire Monaco. I want to straighten a few things out.”

Call waiting cut in. It was MP. Considering our talk this morning, and the fact that I’d recently been seen soliciting prostitutes
in Santa Ana, I figured I’d better take it: “Hold on a second, Claire. Hi, sweetheart.”

“Claire Monaco just called.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. “Did you, uh, give her my cell number?”

“No,” MP said. “I told her I would ask you to call her. Which is what I’m doing now. Do you
have
her cell number?”

“Yeah. I think so. I was talking to her this morning about Terry, in fact. She’s trying to help me figure out what happened.”

There was a long beat of silence before MP spoke. “Do you know what she did last week?”

“Something awful?”

“She came to the Saturday-afternoon women’s meeting at Saint Ann’s, and when it was her turn to share, she made amends—in front of everyone—to Sherry. She wanted to apologize for sleeping with Jack the week before. She said she felt really bad about hurting another sober woman. ‘A sister’ is what she called her.”

I thought about this while I swung my truck around on the cloverleaf between the Santa Ana Freeway and the Newport Freeway. A low-wattage energy-saving lightbulb appeared above my head. “Sherry hadn’t known about it until that moment?”

“That’s correct.”

“Aren’t you supposed to keep that stuff to yourself?” I said. “I mean, it being a closed meeting and all?”

“Sherry’s going to divorce Jack,” MP said. “If it were me, I would have cut off his balls.”

Apparently, advanced yoga training was more ethically complicated than I had imagined. Maybe I shouldn’t have laughed. MP hung up.

When I clicked back over to Claire, she said, “I think you’ve got some bad ideas about me, Randy. Was that MP on the other line?”

Why, besides causing trouble, would Claire call my home when she already had my cell number?

“Is it possible,” I said, “to have
good
ideas about you?”

“This is what I’m talking about,” Claire said. “What you just said.”

“Tell me something,” I said. “Have you made any 911 calls in Spanish lately?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but if it has something to do with Terry’s death, I was out of his life a long time before any of that shit went down. You know that better than anyone. You know exactly when I broke things off.”

“Thanks for calling, Claire. Take it easy.” I started to hang up.

“I was trying to apologize for being an asshole,” she shouted. “Can you just—”

“Okay.” Calling yourself an asshole was always good for another minute of my time.

“I shouldn’t have brought MP into our conversation this morning.”

It sounded like an authentic apology. “I’m sorry, too, Claire. I like you. You’re trouble, but I like you.”

It took her a moment to fill the silence that followed my admission. “I like you, too, Randy.”

Claire hung up. She didn’t ask for anything. She didn’t feed me another line about an electrician named after a dog. She didn’t try to hurt me. Either this was a new strategy to destroy men’s lives or she’d actually apologized. When she started coming to meetings a few years ago, there had been a moment when
she got it—she knew why she was there—but that moment passed, and she became the kind of A.A. you needed to watch out for: someone who will take you down quicker than you can lift her up. Claire still had volunteers, though. For one short, bad moment a couple of years before he died, Terry had been one of them.

Every alcoholic has one thing that cuts to the marrow. The thing that he wants but can’t quite achieve, the thing that he’s always on the cusp of, the “until I get this, I am nothing.” For some of us, it’s professional success. For some, it’s a good marriage. For Terry, it was children.

Terry wanted kids more than anything.

His own father had been an Irish Catholic bank president with eight kids. Terry could no way ever hope to become a bank president—he’d been arrested for everything from a teenage armed robbery to kiting checks right before he got sober, and the fact that he’d been able to join the bar was an A.A. miracle—but he always believed he should have kids. He just never found the right mother.

That deal with Claire Monaco, his attempt to extort her son from her, was at the extreme end of a long line of attempts to put together a relationship that would produce kids. His choices weren’t always awful, but they were always off by enough that we had to wonder if Terry wanted what he said he wanted. He went out with fifty-year-old empty-nesters. He went out with psychotically driven career women—the kind who couldn’t stop long enough to fill a gas tank, let alone get pregnant. He went out with social-climbing party girls making their way
through A.A. as though nothing needed to change about their shallow lives except their consumption of alcohol. Those girlfriends were the hardest for us to take. There was a certain kind of female narcissism that Terry was blind to. I don’t know how many times we tried to tell him:
She’s only using you, dude. She doesn’t even
see
you
. When that kind of girlfriend moved on for a nicer home and car, Terry was always surprised.

He told me once that he and his wife tried to have children, pushing themselves through fertility treatments and in vitro right to the door of adoption, but his drug addiction destroyed the marriage before that could happen. All he ever told us about his ex-wife was that she’d been a psychiatric social worker when they met, and now she was a high school teacher somewhere in the Bay Area.