Turn Signal (11 page)

The two men retreat to the den, where Brady, sipping a beer, lays out the whole sad story for him.

He's managed to get himself on the shit list of a large African-American man from Richmond by the name of Heater Curry, who is promising to do bad and painful things to him if he doesn't pay.

He owes Heater Curry almost $7,000.

“Seven thousand dollars?” Jack says, too loud. He lowers his voice. “How in God's name, Son, did you manage to run up a seven-thousand-dollar bill smoking marijuana?”

It's the first time he's called Brady “son” in some time. He has always shied away from that endearment, actually, not feeling he's earned the right to use it.

Brady looks at him sadly and a little fondly.

“Dad,” he says, shaking his head. “It's cocaine. You know I couldn't screw up bad enough, fast enough smoking weed.”

Jack is taken aback. He tries not to know everything about Brady, doesn't even want to know everything. But still, he thought he'd bottomed out when he was arrested and got the break of his life: no jail time. Jack has always believed there was a chance, some small chance, that Brady Stone would right himself someday, that all these youthful indiscretions would somehow be outgrown like acne and bad manners. Hell, Milo had said one time shortly after the arrest, he could still grow up to be president. Now, though, Jack feels hope sliding downhill, away from him.

“You could go to prison. The judge could give you an active sentence.”

“If it makes you feel any better,” Brady tells him, actually smiling as if there were anything on the planet Earth worthy of mirth on this godless day, “I owe him from before, from before I got arrested. I'm not doing that stuff anymore. Never did that much of it, never was quite stupid enough to do crack. But I'd get it for people, trying to be a big shot, I guess. And I sold some for Heater, and some people didn't pay me back.”

“And you didn't make them pay you back?”

“Those people are gone. Gone out to California. Actors.”

Jack has raised himself from his easy chair and is standing behind it now, gripping the back of it.

“So, I don't suppose it would have done much good even if I could have talked Mike into letting you stay on the farm. Sounds like your savings are spoken for.”

Brady shakes his head.

“It isn't a matter of savings. I got them off my back last month with a thousand bucks, but these guys aren't into the installment plan.”

As it turns out, Heater Curry and two of his associates paid a visit to Brady just two days ago. They have explained the terms of their loan to him in a fairly unambiguous manner. Brady lifts his shirt, almost shyly, and shows Jack the burn mark along his ribs on the right side.

“The other two held me down,” he says. “He told me I owed him seven thousand dollars, plus an extra ten for the cigar he had to waste teaching me a lesson.”

Jack is shaken. He has never been able to protect his son.

“And you don't, of course, have seven thousand dollars.”

“I don't have seven hundred dollars.”

Jack walks around in small circles. The wind shifts and blows a hard, insistent rain sideways against the window to his rear, startling him.

“Well, let me see what I can do,” he says, wondering what, indeed, that would be.

He's in charge of making the mortgage payment. Gina pays for everything else out of the $600 a week she earns as office manager for Dr. Kerns. Jack's bank account, somewhat flush after he sold the rig, is shrinking. The Cisco stock, which soared so long that even Mack seemed to think it would just keep outdoing itself forever, is sliding backward. Jack, who had never invested much until the last two years, kept telling himself this could happen, but still he wasn't really prepared. What he has come to think of as Shannon's college money seems to shrink every time he dares look at the tiny, unforgiving NASDAQ numbers. Cisco fell five points last week. And now Brady needs $7,000.

“Can you get them to wait until we sell the house? I could maybe do something then.”

He's stalling. He can't imagine telling Gina he's loaned-slash-given Brady $7,000, even after the house is sold. Not after all she's put up with to this point. He's certain that everything will work out. Despite Gerald Prince's silence, Jack knows as well as he knows anything that
Lovelady
is going to be a success, that he is going to be a success and make everything right, now that he is finally doing what he was meant to do. But he just needs time.

Brady shakes his head. And Jack, remembering the burn mark, knows Heater Curry, whoever he is, must be paid now.

“Give me the weekend. I'll talk to Mack McLamb on Monday morning.”

“I don't know, Dad. I don't know.” Brady is holding his shiny head in his hands, looking down at the floor. “They said tomorrow.”

“Well,” Jack says, “tell them you can pay them in full, cash if they want it, on Monday.” He doesn't even know why he says this. He can't take a year's tuition at a state college out of a shrinking account without having an extended, and quite possibly fruitless, session with Gina, to whom he is as much in debt as Brady is to Heater Curry, albeit in a different currency.

But how can he not?

“Let them know,” he says. “Tell them Monday.”

“I'm supposed to meet them at noon tomorrow, with the money, at Heater's place in Richmond. No excuses, he said.” Brady reaches up and touches the mark on his rib cage.

“Well, you can stay over here tonight.” Even that will be a stretch with Gina. “Stay here the whole weekend, and we'll get the money Monday morning.”

“I don't know.” Brady is as nervous as Jack has ever seen him, even more nervous than he was the day he shot at his father. “I don't know, Dad.”

“Two days,” Jack says. “They'll wait.” And he's almost convinced himself that they will.

Brady agrees, finally. He has no choice. Jack sends him back to the farm to pack a few things for the weekend and assures him Gina won't mind, really.

Shannon is watching highlights of the waning Olympics when they come out. She asks if she can ride back to the farmhouse with Brady. He tells Brady not to dawdle, fixing him with his steeliest no-dope stare, and his son assures him he won't.

The rain has stopped, and it looks as if there might be sunshine again before the day is out.

Gina won't be home from work for another hour. Jack convinces himself that this is the moment he is destined to finally, shamelessly call Gerald Prince, even if it is 5 o'clock on a Friday afternoon.

He sits by the phone for a moment, clearing his throat a couple of times, and then he plunges in.

A man answers on the third ring. His voice is so prissily precise as to make Gerald sound like a jet fighter pilot by comparison.

“Mayfair Publishing. Gerald Prince Books.”

Jack asks for Gerald Prince.

“Whom shall I say is calling?”

Jack has to repeat his name.

After a wait of no more than 30 seconds, Gerald answers.

“Jack. Jesus, when David said Jack Stone, I had to wrack my brain for a couple of seconds. Wasn't expecting a call from Speakeasy.”

“The reason I was calling,” Jack begins, “is that I was wondering if you'd had a chance to take a look at the manuscript …”

“Just a minute, Jack. I've got to take this call.”

Before he can accede, he's put on hold. Just as he's beginning to think he's been cut off, Gerald comes back on the line.

“I'm terribly sorry,” he says, and tells Jack that he just had an urgent call from someone who Gerald obviously believes is very important but whose name does not register with Jack, who fakes it anyway and acts impressed.

“I was asking about my manuscript …”

“Oh, yes. Well, Jack, it looks very promising. I haven't really had a chance to read it all yet, but I'm going to take it home this weekend and get started on it. It might be a couple of weeks, but I'll definitely get back to you soon.”

“Thank you,” Jack says, crushed. He tries to steer the conversation to a point where they are old buddies, reviving a rapport they never really had. “It was really good seeing you at the reunion.”

“Yes. Me, too.… Oh, shit. Excuse me, Jack, but I've actually got to take this call.” He drops another name Jack should know.

He isn't even sure Gerald Prince hears his goodbye.

Gina pulls into the driveway just as Brady and Shannon arrive, so Jack has no chance to break it to her gently. He only has time to follow her into their bedroom and explain, without revealing any of the particulars, that Brady is going through a rough patch right now and needs to stay with them for the weekend.

“It won't happen again,” he promises her.

She says she doubts that. Where Brady is concerned, she notes, it's more a matter of a washboard highway with the very occasional smooth patch.

But when Jack kisses her, she kisses back.

At his suggestion, they order delivery pizza and spend a relatively harmonious night watching the Olympics. They avoid the past and the future with equal determination.

Brady was 9 when Jack and Gina married, old enough that he would never call her Mom. And then, four years later, Shannon came along. With Jack on the road, there wasn't much time or patience for a stepson who already was getting into junior-high trouble. Jack's conversations with his son too often consisted of reminders of the serious consequences if he sassed Gina again. Ellen had more power over the boy than his stepmother did.

They've never really bonded, and Jack supposes they never will. If he had been home more, he's sure he could have made it turn out better than it has.

Brady asks about Jack's book, and he tells all of them that he had a conversation with Gerald Prince that afternoon, not volunteering that he initiated it.

There seems to be genuine enthusiasm. There is, after all, a fair amount of family future at stake.

He tells them that Gerald says it looks good, that he hasn't finished reading it yet, that he'll probably hear from him in a couple of weeks.

“Well, I think it's cool,” Brady says, and Shannon seconds him.

Gina, Jack notices, does not make it unanimous.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Gina and Jack drive into Richmond on Saturday morning. She wants to go to her favorite gourmet kitchen shop, and then they'll kill an hour or so before they meet Mack and Sarah McLamb for lunch.

Jack would just as soon avoid the bustle. Carytown, a district of small, brightly painted shops, bars and restaurants that somehow have managed to outlast the mall chain stores, is near the University of Richmond football stadium. Students and fans in town for the afternoon's game will make parking and negotiating the narrow sidewalks less pleasurable than usual.

Gina's been looking forward to this, though. She enjoys the city and would prefer to live here. Jack is sure that, before they are home again, something of import will have been charged to the one card that will stand a large purchase, and he feels relatively lucky when Gina comes away with only a large red hat from a store that seems to focus only on head- and footwear, nothing in-between.

They dine outdoors, under the porch awning of a restaurant that once was a fine old Richmond church, all but Jack sharing a bottle of white wine as they work their way through salads, wraps and cheesecake. It's turned into a fine day, the calm after the storm. They can look down the steps at passers-by. The football crowd has mostly left for the game by now, and the street below them seems peaceful in the early-autumn sun. A black Labrador retriever is napping on the edge of the sidewalk.

When Sarah and Gina go looking for the restroom, Jack tells his friend and broker he might be needing to sell some stock on Monday morning.

“If you're talking about the Cisco,” Mack says, “I'd wait a little bit. I don't think it can keep falling like this. It's a good time to buy, not sell. The thing to do is not panic.”

“I'm not panicking, but I don't have much choice. Don't have any choice.”

Mack waits for more, but Jack only tells him to keep it to himself, that it isn't something he'd care for Gina to know about right now.

Mack just nods, spearing one last scrap of cheesecake with his fork and savoring it.

“OK, Monday morning,” he says as he wipes his mouth. He looks up and around them, seeming to notice his surroundings for the first time. “You know, my daddy would have whipped my butt if he'd seen me sitting somewhere drinking wine off the front of a church, whether it was still in use or not.”

Mack's father, like Bobby Witt's, had been a minister.

“Yeah,” Jack says, reaching for his wallet. “I don't suppose my folks were all that religious, but it does seem weird.”

“Good thing your first wife isn't here to see this,” Mack says. He can get away with mentioning Charlotte Hamner Stone, whose last-known name and address were Sister Carlotta and London. “She might've thrown the cheesecake-eaters out of the temple.”

Mack bothered to look up her address in London on a trip two years before. He went there, to a place in Brixton that he told Jack later he would only have visited by cab or armored car. He didn't see Carly/Carlotta, but he did see the building, old and crumbling, where Sister Carlotta and her husband were trying to bring New World evangelism across the Atlantic, like Pilgrims returning.

“They're probably doing some good,” he says now. “The people there looked like they needed some kind of salvation, or to win the lottery or something.”

Jack grunts. He hopes the former Carly Stone is able to help somebody, even if it's only herself.

In high school she was Charlotte Hamner.

She was a pretty blonde with blue eyes who stood just over 5 feet tall and exercised the prerogative of a short girl in a chauvinistic world to throw tantrums and pout her way to small victories. She was a cheerleader who made good grades and finished runner-up in the Miss Gladden High pageant her junior year. She was part of their crowd, even if some people did think she was a little stuck on herself. Despite the unsupervised lust-fests at the Edmonds house, she and Jack Stone had never dated.