Kitabı oku: «So Much for That»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

chapter one

chapter two

chapter three

chapter four

chapter five

chapter six

chapter seven

chapter eight

chapter nine

chapter ten

chapter eleven

chapter twelve

chapter thirteen

chapter fourteen

chapter fifteen

chapter sixteen

chapter seventeen

chapter eighteen

chapter nineteen

acknowledgments

about the book

Praise for So Much for That

About the Author

Also by Lionel Shriver

About the Publisher

chapter one

Shepherd Armstrong Knacker

Merrill Lynch Account Number 934-23F917

December 01, 2004 – December 31, 2004

Net Portfolio Value: $731,778.56

What do you pack for the rest of your life?

On research trips – he and Glynis had never called them “vacations” – Shep had always packed too much, covering for every contingency: rain gear, a sweater on the off chance that the weather in Puerto Escondido was unseasonably cold. In the face of infinite contingencies, his impulse was to take nothing.

There was no rational reason to be creeping these halls stealthily like a thief come to burgle his own home – padding heel to toe on the floorboards, flinching when they creaked. He had double-checked that Glynis was out through early evening (for an “appointment”; it bothered him that she did not say with whom or where). Calling on a weak pretense of asking about dinner plans when their son hadn’t eaten a proper meal with his parents for the last year, he had confirmed that Zach was safely installed at a friend’s overnight. Shep was alone in the house. He needn’t keep jumping when the heat came on. He needn’t reach tremulously into the top dresser drawer for his boxers as if any time now his wrist would be seized and he’d be read the Miranda.

Except that Shep was a burglar, after a fashion. Perhaps the sort that any American household most feared. He had arrived home from work a little earlier than usual in order to steal himself.

The swag bag of his large black Samsonite was unzipped on the bed, lying agape as it had for less drastic departures year after year. So far it contained: one comb.

He forced himself through the paces of collecting a travel shampoo, his shaving kit, even if he was doubtful that in The Afterlife he would continue to shave. But the electric toothbrush presented a quandary. The island had electricity, surely it did, but he’d neglected to discover whether their plugs were flat American two-prongs, bulky British three-prongs, or the slender European kind, wide-set and round. He wasn’t dead sure either whether the local current was 220 or 110. Sloppy; these were just the sorts of practical details that on earlier research forays they’d been rigorous about jotting down. But then, they’d lately grown less systematic, especially Glynis, who’d sometimes slipped on more recent journeys abroad and used the word vacation. A tell, and there had been several.

Resistant at first to the Oral B’s jarring cranial buzz, at length Shep had come to relish the slick of his teeth once the tedium was complete. As with all technological advances, it felt unnatural to go backward, to resume the fitful scrub of splayed nylon on a plastic stick. But what if Glynis went to the bathroom when she came home and noticed that his blue-ringed toothbrush was missing, while hers, with the red ring, still sat on the sink? Best she didn’t begin this of all evenings with perplexity or suspicion. He could always take Zach’s – he’d never heard the kid use it – but Shep couldn’t see swiping his own son’s toothbrush. (Shep had paid for the thing, of course, along with pretty much everything here. Yet little or nothing in this house felt like his. That used to bug him but now just made it easier to leave the salad spinner, the StairMaster, and the sofas behind.) Worse, he and Glynis shared the same recharger. He didn’t want to leave her with a toothbrush that would last five or six days (he didn’t want to leave her at all, but that was another matter), its weakening, terminal shudder providing a soundtrack for his wife’s lapse into another of her periodic depressions.

So having unscrewed the wall mount only a turn or two, he tightened it back down. Restoring his own handle reassuringly to the recharger, he scrounged a manual brush from the medicine cabinet. He would have to grow accustomed to technological regression, which in a manner he couldn’t quite put his finger on was surely good for the soul. Something about backtracking to a stage of development that you could understand.

He wasn’t planning simply to cut and run, to disappear himself from his family absent announcement or explanation. That would be cruel, or crueler. He wasn’t presenting her with a total fait accompli either, a wave goodbye at the door. Officially he would confront her with a choice, one for which, in the service of credibility, he had paid through the nose. Odds were that he had purchased nothing but an illusion, but an illusion could be priceless. So he’d bought not one ticket, but three. They were nonrefundable. If his instincts were all out of whack and Glynis surprised him, Zach still wouldn’t like it. But the boy was fifteen years old, and how was this for developmental regression: for once an American teenager would do what he was told.

Anxious about being caught in the act, in the end he had too much time. Glynis wouldn’t be home for another couple of hours, and the Samsonite was replete. Given the confusion over plugs and current, he’d thrown in a few manual hand tools and a Swiss Army knife; in the average crisis, you were still better off with a pair of needle-nose Vise-Grips than a BlackBerry. Only a couple of shirts, because he wanted to wear different shirts. Or no shirt. A few bits and pieces that a man with Shep’s occupation knew could make the difference between satisfied self-sufficiency and disaster: duct tape; a selection of screws, bolts, and washers; silicon lubricant; plastic sealant; rubber bands (elastics, for N’ Hampshire old-timers like his father); and a small roll of binding wire. A flashlight, for power cuts, and a stock of AAs. A novel he should have selected more carefully if he was taking only one. An English – Swahili phrasebook, malaria pills, deet. Prescription cortisone cream for persistent eczema on his ankle, a tube that would soon run out.

Obviating any further inclusions, his Merrill Lynch checkbook. He didn’t like to think of himself as calculating, but it turned out to be fortunate that he’d always kept this account in his name alone. He could – he would, of course, offer to leave her half; she hadn’t earned a dime of it, but they were married, and that was the law. Yet he would have to warn her that even hundreds of thousands of dollars wouldn’t last her long in Westchester, and sooner or later she’d have to do not “her work” but someone else’s.

He’d had to stuff the Samsonite with newspaper to keep the paltry chattel from rattling in the British Airways hold. He stashed it in his closet, covering it with a bathrobe for good measure. A packed bag on the bedspread would alarm Glynis far more than a missing toothbrush.

Shep settled in the living room with a bourbon bracer. It wasn’t his habit to begin an evening with anything stronger than beer, but habit would have delayed this evening indefinitely. He put his feet up, casting his eyes around the pleasant but cheaply furnished room, unable to mourn leaving behind any aspect of the familiar surround, save the fountain. As for parting with the throw pillows or the nondescript glass coffee table on which it trickled, he felt positively cheerful. By contrast, the fountain had always filled him with that distinctive middle-class covetousness, desire for what you already own. He wondered whimsically if, wrapped in the wadded newspaper that padded his scant booty, it would fit in the Samsonite.

They still referred to it as “the Wedding Fountain.” The sterling silver apparatus had substituted for a floral centerpiece at their modest gathering of friends twenty-six years before, twining the bride and groom’s labors, talents, and very natures. To this day, the Wedding Fountain constituted the only project on which he and Glynis had collaborated fifty-fifty. Shep had taken responsibility for the technical aspects of the gizmo. The pump was carefully hidden by a sweep of mirror-finish metal around the basin; since the mechanism ran continually, over the years he’d replaced it several times. Wise in the ways of water, he’d advised on the width and depth of sluices, the length of drops from one level to the next. Glynis had dictated the flow of the metal itself, its artistic line, forging and soldering the parts in her old studio in Brooklyn.

For Shep’s tastes, the fountain was austere; for Glynis’s, ornate; so that even stylistically the construction embodied a meeting of minds halfway. And it was romantic. Melded together at the top, two undulating silver sluices split and intermingled like swans’ necks, one supporting while the other broke to spill its liquid into the waiting pan of its mate. Narrow at their apex, the two central lines of their creation splayed and swooped in wider, ever more playful variations toward the basin. There the contributions of the fountain’s two tributaries formed a shallow indoor lake, thus pooling their resources in the most literal sense. Glynis’s workmanship was top-drawer. However busy, Shep had always honored her virtuosity by keeping the water topped up, and by periodically draining the contraption to polish the silver. Absent his conservation, the sterling’s accelerating yellow taint might suggest a tarnish on more than metal. Once he was gone, chances were that she’d turn the thing off, and shove it out of sight.

As allegory, the two streams feeding a common pool represented an ideal they had failed. Nevertheless, the fountain successfully integrated their elements. Glynis not only worked with metal (or used to); she was metal. Stiff, uncooperative, and inflexible. Hard, refractive, and shiny with defiance. Her body long, attenuated, and angular like the jewelry and flatware she once crafted, in art school Glynis had not chosen her medium by accident. She naturally identified with any material that so fiercely refused to do what you wanted it to, whose form was resistant to change and responded only to violent manhandling. Metal was obstreperous. Were it ever mistreated, its dents and scratches caught the light like kept grudges.

Like it or not, Shep’s element was water. Adaptive, easily manipulated, and prone to taking the path of least resistance, he went with the flow, as they said in his youth. Water was yielding, biddable, and readily trapped. He wasn’t proud of these qualities; pliancy didn’t seem manly. On the other hand, the apparent passivity of liquid was misleading. Water was resourceful. As any homeowner with an aging roof or corroded plumbing knew well, water was insidious, and in its own quiet way would find its route. Water had a devious willfulness of its own, a sneaky, seeping insistence, an instinct for finding the single seam or joint you’ve left unsealed. Sooner or later, water will get in if it wants to, or – more vitally, in Shep’s case – it will get out.

His first boyhood fountains, knocked together with inappropriate materials like wood, leaked badly, and his frugal father had chastised him for these “bubblers,” as Dad called them, that wasted water. But Shep became more ingenious with found objects: chipped serving bowls, the limbs of his sister’s discarded dolls; later creations lost water only to evaporation. The whimsies grew kinetic, using paddle wheels, cups that would fill and flop, jets that kept a suspended object bobbing at bay, sprays that tinkled chimes of seashells or shards of stained glass. He’d kept up the hobby to this day. As a counterweight to the relentless functionality of his vocation, fountains were fabulously frivolous.

This off beat pastime almost certainly hailed not from some highfalutin metaphor for his character, but from the commonplace associations of childhood. Every July, the Knackers had rented a cabin in the White Mountains, beside which ran a wide, rushing stream. Back then, kids were privileged with real summers, expanses of unscheduled time receding to the hazy horizon. Time whose seeming endlessness was a lie, but the lie was still beguiling. Ripe for improvisation, time you could play like a saxophone. So he’d always linked the lilt of running water to peace, lassitude, and a languid lack of urgency – which, between math camps, get-ahead tutoring, fencing classes, and organized playdates, kids these days never seemed to sample. That’s what The Afterlife was all about, he recognized, not for the first time, and poured another finger of bourbon. He wanted his summer back. All year round.

None of the Sunday school classes or Christian youth groups had taken, but the one truly character-forming education that Gabriel Knacker had provided his son was a trip to Kenya when Shep was sixteen. Through the aegis of a Presbyterian exchange program, the Reverend had accepted a temporary teaching position at a small seminary in Limuru, an hour’s drive from Nairobi, and had brought his family along. To Gabe Knacker’s despair, what made the most intense impression on his son wasn’t his seminary students’ fervent embrace of the Gospel, but grocery shopping. On their first outing for provisions, Shep and Beryl had trailed their parents to the local market stalls for papayas, onions, potatoes, passion fruit, beans, zucchini, a scrawny chicken, and a great slab of beef of an undifferentiated cut: in all, enough provender to fill five string bags to their maximum capacity. Always fiscally minded – one of his father’s objections still was that his son thought too much about money – Shep converted the shillings in his head. The entire haul had cost less than three dollars. Even in 1972 currency, for more than a week’s supplies that was chump change.

Shep had expressed dismay at how any of these traders could turn a profit with such miserable prices. His father was keen to emphasize that these people were very poor; swaths of this benighted continent lived on less than a dollar a day. Yet the Reverend did allow that African farmers could charge pennies for their produce because they counted their expenses in pennies as well. Shep had been familiar with economies of scale; this was his first introduction to the scale of economies. So a dollar’s value wasn’t fixed but relative. Back in New Hampshire, it would buy a box of paper clips; in the Kenyan countryside, an entire secondhand but perfectly serviceable bike.

“So why don’t we take our savings and move here?” he’d asked as they lugged their shopping down a farmland path.

In a rare softening, Gabe Knacker had clapped his son’s shoulder and gazed across the verdant coffee fields bathed in lambent equatorial sun. “Sometimes I wonder.”

Shep wondered, too, and he’d kept wondering. If you could at least survive in places like East Africa on a dollar a day, how well could you live for more like twenty bucks?

In high school, Shep had already been hungry for direction. Much like Zach, alas, in his studies he was competent at every subject, but distinguished at none. In an age that increasingly valued mastery of the abstract – the befuddling world of “information technology” was only a decade away – Shep preferred tasks whose results he could grasp in both his head and his hands: replacing a rickety banister. But his father was an educated man, and didn’t expect his son to work construction. With that heart of water, Shep was never a rebellious kid. Given his penchant for making and fixing things, a degree in engineering had seemed apt. As he’d assured his father many times since, he’d really, really intended to go to college.

Yet meanwhile that whimsy first conceived in Limuru had consolidated to firm resolve. Saving may have gone out of fashion, but surely a middle-class American income still allowed for salting something away. Thus with the application of industry, thrift, and self-denial – once the country’s moral mainstays – it should be possible to inflate a robin-sized nest egg to the dimensions of an ostrich ovum merely by hopping a plane. The Third World was running a sale: two lives for the price of one. Ever since coming of age, Shep had dedicated himself to the realization of the second. He was not even sure you called it industry, when you were working so hard only that you might stop working.

So with an eye to his true purpose – money – Shep had instinctively gravitated to where America kept most of it, and applied to the City College of Technology in New York. For while Gabe Knacker faulted the character of his son “the philistine” for his worship of the false god Mammon, Shep believed fervently that money – the web of your fiscal relationships to individuals and to the world at large – was character; that the surest test of any man’s mettle was how he wielded his wallet. Thus a decent, capable kid didn’t tap a father’s measly salary as a small-town minister (an injunction to which Beryl would prove oblivious when blithely expecting their dad to pay for her film degree at NYU four years later). Ever since earning his first five dollars from shoveling snow at the age of nine, Shep had always paid up front, be it for an Almond Joy or an education.

Thus determined to work beforehand and finance his own degree, he’d delayed his acceptance at City Tech in downtown Brooklyn and found a one-bedroom nearby in Park Slope, which – hard as it was to remember now – was a dodgy area in those days, and dirt cheap. The area’s housing stock was run down, and full of families in need of small repairs but unable to afford the larcenous rates of unionized tradesmen. Having mastered a variety of rudimentary wiring and carpentry skills while helping to maintain his own family’s eternally crumbling late-Victorian in New Hampshire, Shep posted flyers in convenience stores, advertising his services as an old-fashioned handyman. Word of mouth spread quickly about a young white kid who could replace washers and rotten floorboards for a modest fee, and in short order he had more work than he could handle. By the time he’d delayed entry into City Tech for a second year he’d incorporated, and “Knack of All Trades” was already contracting out for part-time help. Two years after that, Shep took on his first full-time employee. A harried entrepreneur enjoyed little free time, and besides, Shep had just got married. So in the service of sheer efficiency, Jackson Burdina doubled, then as now, as his best friend.

It was still a sore point with Shep’s father that his son never went to college, which was ludicrous; Knack of All Trades had expanded and flourished without any benedictory piece of paper. The real problem was that Gabriel Knacker had little regard for manual labor – unless it involved digging wells for impoverished villagers in Mali with the Peace Corps, or patching a pensioner’s shingles out of the kindness of your heart. He had no use for commerce. Any activity that could not trace its lineage directly to virtue was destitute. The fact that if everyone devoted himself solely to goodness for its own sake the whole world would come to a skidding halt didn’t faze the guy a whit.

Up until a little over eight years ago, Life A had had its merits, and Shep hadn’t regarded himself as sacrificing his prime for pie in the sky. He’d always liked physical toil, relishing a distinctive kind of tired you got not from the gym but from building bookshelves. He liked running his own show, answering to no one. Glynis may have turned out to be a handful, and might not have described herself as happy in the big picture, but it was probably safe to say that she was happy with him – or as happy as she was going to get with anybody, which wasn’t very. He was glad when she got pregnant with Amelia right away. He was in a hurry, anxious to rush through a whole life in half the time, and he’d have far preferred that Zach had been born pronto and not ten years later.

As for The Afterlife, Glynis had seemed onboard when they met. His status as a man with a mission surely attracted her to him in the first place. Without his vision, without the ever more concrete edifice of Life B rising in his head, Shep Knacker was one more small businessman who’d found a niche market: nothing special. As it was, picking a new target country for every summer’s research trip had been an invigorating ritual of their marriage. They were, or so he’d thought until this last year’s dawning apprehension, a team.

So when he got the offer to sell up in November 1996, it was irresistible. A million dollars. Rationally he recognized that a mil wasn’t what it once was, and that he’d have to pay capital gains. Still, the sum had never lost the awesome roundness of childhood; no matter how many other ordinary folks also became “millionaires,” the word retained a ring. Combined with the fruits of lifelong scrimping, the proceeds from selling Knack would furnish the capital to cash out and never look back. So never mind that the purchaser – an employee so lazy and sloppy that they’d been on the verge of firing the guy before, surprise, he comes into his trust fund – was a callow, loudmouthed, ignorant twit.

Who was now Shep’s boss. Oh sure, it had seemed to make sense at the time to sign on as an employee of what had been his own company – renamed overnight “Handy Randy,” a moniker not only tacky but inaccurate, since Randy Pogatchnik was anything but handy. The initial idea had been to hang on for a month or two while they packed, sold off their motley possessions, and located at least a temporary house in Goa. Meantime, they wouldn’t spend down their capital, which Shep sank into can’t-lose mutual funds to fatten before slaughter; the Dow was effervescent.

“A month or two” had now stretched into over eight years of submission to the sadistic whims of an overweight, freckle-faced brat, who must have got wind of his imminent sacking and had probably bought Knack – you had to give the guy this much – as fiendishly effective revenge. After the sale, standards of workmanship plummeted, so that Shep’s “Customer Relations” position for handling complaints, never a post at all during his own tenure as CEO, had burgeoned into a demanding and decidedly unpleasant full-time job.

In retrospect, of course, it had been imbecilic to sell their place in Carol Gardens a few years earlier – barely out of a recession, and on the heels of a housing crash – then move up to Westchester and rent. Shep would gladly have stayed in Brooklyn, but Glynis had concluded that the only way she could finally focus on “her work” was to remove herself from the “distractions” of the city. (Sure of his weakness, she had made a sly financial case as well: Westchester’s high-quality public schools would save them the pricey tuition of private education in New York. All very well, for Amelia. But later, when Glynis thought that Zach needed help – which he did – finding a “better school” was the easiest way to seem to be doing something, and now they were out $26,000 a year for private tuition anyway.) Jackson and Carol had stayed put in Windsor Terrace, and even that ramshackle dive of theirs had soared to a value of $550,000. At least having benefited from the real estate boom himself made Jackson more patient than Shep with Homeowner Smugness; these days, a handyman wasn’t in the door five seconds before the wife was crowing about how much the dump was worth now, so watch the wainscoting with that toolbox. It was like that in most big cities now: LA, Miami – a communal hysteria, as if the entire citizenry were on Dialing for Dollars and had won the car. Shep was probably just envious. Still, there was something unsavory about that gleefulness, a mania he associated with slot machines. A preacher’s son, he failed to see the satisfaction in a jackpot that bore no relation to something good or hard that you had done.

Property in Westchester had appreciated by three times over ten years as well, so, yeah, in hindsight they should have bought – thereby making about as much profit from sitting on his ass as he had from selling a whole company, fruit of twenty-two years’ sweat. That was the way people made money in this country now, according to Jackson: ass-sitting. You couldn’t get rich on earned income, he railed. Taxes on wages made sure of that. Jackson claimed that only inheritance and investment – ass-sitting – paid. Shep wasn’t so sure. Certainly he himself had worked hard, but he’d been compensated for his trouble. Limuru lay ever in the back of his mind, and he’d earned far more than a dollar per day.

Shep had opted to rent for the same reason that drove every big decision he’d ever made. He wanted to be able to pick up stakes – easily, quickly, cleanly, without waiting for a house to sell in a market whose climate he couldn’t foresee. That’s what irked him a bit about Homeowner Smugness: all these schmoes with keys to a front door acted as if they’d seen the boom coming, as if they were financial geniuses and not the beneficiaries of dumb luck. He may have regretted missing out on the property windfall; he didn’t regret the reason he’d missed out. He was proud of the reason, proud of planning to leave. He was only ashamed of having stayed.

He tried not to blame Glynis. If that meant blaming himself instead, that seemed fair. The Afterlife was his aspiration – the word he preferred to fantasy – and any dream was dilute secondhand. He tried not to be angry at her for a lot of things, and to a great extent succeeded.

When they met, Glynis had been running her own small business from home, making jewelry of a strikingly stark, streamlined nature during an era of clunk, slapdash, and feathers. She had contacted Knack of All Trades to build a worktable bolted to the floor, and later, because she liked the proprietor – his broad veined forearms, his wide-open face like a field of wheat – a set of racks for hammers, pliers, and files. Shep appreciated her meticulous requirements, as she appreciated his meticulous execution. The second time he showed up to finish the table, she’d left numerous samples of her work lying casually around the studio (deliberately, she confessed with a laugh once they started going out; she’d dangled the glittering baubles before her handsome handyman “like fishing lures”). Though he’d never considered himself the artistic type, Shep was transfixed. Delicate and morbid, a whole series of elongated stickpins looked like assemblages of bird bones; when she modeled the bracelets for him, they wrapped all the way up her arm, slithering like serpents to the elbow. Sinewy, elusive, and severe, Glynis’s creations were an uncanny manifestation of the woman who made them. It was touch and go whether he fell in love with Glynis or her metalwork first, because as far as Shep was concerned they were one and the same.

During their courtship, Glynis was teaching at summer camps and doing piecework in the Jewelry District to pay the rent. Meantime, she was placing single necklaces in second-tier galleries, and her silversmithing barely broke even. Yet she fevered long hours, and paid her own phone bill. Surely any man would have assumed that for a self-starter like Glynis – disciplined, ascetic, and fiery – pulling her financial weight in a marriage would be a point of pride. (On reflection, it probably was.) So he’d never expected to have to save for The Afterlife all by himself.

Less compassionate men might have felt they’d been sold a bill of goods. Pregnancy had seemed a reasonable excuse for letting her metalsmithing tools languish, but that accounted for only eighteen months of the last twenty-six years. Motherhood wasn’t the real problem, though it took him a long time to figure out what was. She needed resistance, the very quality that metal most demonstrably offered up. Suddenly Glynis had no difficulty to overcome, no hard artisan’s life with galleries filching half the too-small price of a mokume brooch that had taken three weeks to forge. No, her husband made a good living, and if she slept late and dawdled the afternoon away reading Lustre, American Craft Magazine, and Lapidary Journal, the phone bill would still get paid. For that matter, she needed need itself. She could overcome her anguish about embarking on an object that, once completed, might not meet her exacting standards only if she had no choice. In this sense, his helping had hurt her. By providing the financial cushion that should have facilitated making all the metal whathaveyou she liked, he had ruined her life. Wrapped with a slackening bow, ease was a poisonous present.

chapter two

He’ll never go, said Carol, rinsing arugula.

“Bullshit,” said Jackson, as he stole a piece of Italian sausage from the sautéed peppers. “He’s bought the ticket. I’ve seen it. Or them. I told him not to waste the money on the other two. She’ll never go, that’s for sure. I figured it out way before Shep did. Glynis thought it was a game, all those trips. A game she got tired of.”

“You always think I mean he’s too much of a coward. That’s not it. He’s too responsible. He’ll never leave his family high and dry; it’s not in him. Pick up his carry-on and never look over his shoulder? Start a whole new life from scratch, when he’s almost fifty? Have you ever known anyone to do that really, and why would they anyway? Even if he does go, to make a point or something, he’ll come right back home – Flicka, it’s been at least half an hour. Have you put in your tears?”

Their elder daughter emitted a nasal sigh, halfway between a groan and a bleat. Its tonalities were refined, managing to convey both no and yes. She rustled begrudgingly into her sweater pocket for the Ziploc, then dosed both eyes from one of several dozen tiny plastic squeeze tubes of Artificial Tears, whose shape always reminded Jackson of Fat Man dropped on Nagasaki. As usual, Flicka’s eyes were aflame, the lashes caked with petroleum jelly.

“What, tail between legs?” said Jackson. “You got no appreciation of male pride.”

“Oh, don’t I?” Carol shot him a look. “Where is this ‘Pemba’ anyway?”

“Off the coast of Zanzibar,” said Jackson. “It’s famous for growing cloves. Whole island stinks of them, or that’s what Shep tells me. I picture my man leaning back in his hammock, breathing in the smell of hot whisky and pumpkin pie.”

“I bet he’ll go,” said Flicka. “If he says he’s going to. Shep’s not a liar.” Though often mistaken for her eleven-year-old sibling’s younger sister, she was sixteen: just as one calculated the relative age of pets, her true age in terms of human suffering was closer to 103. The here and now having proved an eternal trial, Flicka was naturally captivated by the idea of somewhere else.

Jackson ruffled his daughter’s fine blond hair. They’d kept it close-cropped in her childhood to prevent it from becoming constantly contaminated with vomit, but since the fundoplication surgery she could only dry-heave, and Flicka had been letting it grow out. “There’s a girl with a little faith!”

“But what would he do?” Carol pressed. “Make clever water fountains for the Third World? Shep’s not the kind of man to be happy lying around in a hammock.”

“Maybe not fountains, but, hell, he could dig wells. Shep’s useful. He can’t help it. If I was living in a little mud hut, he’s the guy I’d want for a next-door neighbor.”

“Flicka, get away from the stove!”

“I’m nowhere near the damn stove,” said Flicka in her usual slurred deadpan. She always sounded not only adenoidal but slightly drunk, like Stephen Hawking after a bottle of Wild Turkey. She also sounded surly, and that part was real. It was one of the things that Jackson adored about her. She refused to play the sunny, chin-up disabled kid who lit up everybody’s day with her amazing pluck.

“Cut it out!” said Carol, removing the paring knife from Flicka’s hand and slamming it back on the counter.

Flicka lurched back to the table with a gait that most people considered awkward but that Jackson always found strangely graceful: her trunk slopping to one side and then the other, while her hands compensated with an elegant little flail, feet placed carefully heel to toe as if walking a tightrope. “Whadda ya think,” she said. “I’m gonna lop my fingers into the salad ’cause I mistook them for little carrots?”

“That’s not funny,” said Carol.

It wasn’t funny. When Flicka was nine, she’d tried to help out by making coleslaw, and it was only due to the fact that the cabbage had changed varieties – from green to red – that Jackson had noticed the end of her left forefinger was missing. They’d sewn it back on in the ER, but he’d never been able to stomach coleslaw since. Maybe it seemed a mercy that your kid’s limbs were so insensitive to pain that stitches required no local anesthetic, but when he forced his co-workers to really think about it, they blanched. Some of these kids, he’d explain, can break a leg, drag it behind them for blocks, and only notice something’s wrong because it keeps getting in the way. For Flicka, of course, banging into things and bleeding everywhere was purely an annoyance, along the lines of tearing a hole in a bag of rice and having to sweep up the floor.

“I’ve never understood why you seem so eager for Shep to leave the country,” Carol resumed. “He’s your best friend. Wouldn’t you miss him?”

“Sure, babe. I’ll miss him like a son of a bitch.” Jackson grabbed himself a beer, reflecting that one thing he would not miss would be defending Shep to all the doubting Thomases at Knack. (The company was still Knack of All Trades to Jackson, whatever embarrassing, cheesy, goofball name that fat prick wanted to call it.) Maybe he should have waited until Shep was on the plane, but he hadn’t been able to contain himself after lunch today when the website designer made another snide remark. So it was with enormous satisfaction that Jackson had announced, no, actually, Shep had already bought the ticket, loser, and would never see the inside of this overheated office as of this very afternoon. That had shut up the cretin pronto. Besides, he hadn’t introduced the idea to Carol yet, but he had a notion that they could visit when Shep had had a chance to establish himself. In fact, though it wasn’t a picture he was willing to confront yet, he’d a hazier notion of taking his family and joining the guy in Pemba for keeps. Obviously, Carol wouldn’t think about it now, but there was looming on the horizon a dark time when a change of scene could be therapeutic.

“Still, somebody’s gotta be able to get out of here, to do better than this, right?” he continued after a slug, putting his feet up. “Jesus, let the immigrants have it. I love the idea of the whole native population of this big scam of a country packing up, closing the door behind them, and throwing the teeming masses the keys. Moving to these hip, super-ethnic villages in Mozambique and Cancun, into all those houses standing vacant because the owners are cleaning toilets in Cleveland. They want to live here so damn much, let ’em. They can work their butts off and pay half their wages to a government that paves the occasional sidewalk if they’re lucky, and invades other countries without asking at their personal expense. Where two-bedroom dumps cost more than they’ll earn in their entire lifetimes, and their kids are never taught to count but are masters of ‘self-esteem’—”

“Jackson, don’t start.”

“I haven’t started. I’ve barely started—”

“You don’t want to get Flicka overexcited.”

“I making you overexcited, Flick?”

“You stopped talking about taxes and spongers and ‘Mugs and Mooches,’” Flicka drawled. “About how the Asians are taking over the world. How ‘nobody in this country makes anything anymore that doesn’t break the first time you use it.’ How ‘we’re turning all our kids into pussies’? Then I’d get overexcited, yeah.”

The girl may have looked ten years old and sounded semi-retarded, but Flicka was a smart cookie – or “high functioning,” an expression that had always struck Jackson as insulting. It wasn’t fair, since Carol did most of the parental heavy lifting, but Flicka was always in cahoots with her father. She may have been a pale, scrawny kid with limp hair, red blotches, and – a biological network he’d never heard of before her diagnosis – an “autonomic” system on the fritz, while he was a dark, burly, half-Basque tradesman of forty-four, but their emotional default setting was identical: disgust.

“Don’t you go repeating that stuff about ‘the Asians taking over the world’ without adding that your dad said they deserve it,” Jackson chided; in the presence of anyone who could decode her slurred whine, that kind of charged racial rhetoric could get Flicka, or more to the point her father, into massive trouble. “The Chinese, the Koreans – they work hard and ignore their teachers’ sad-ass advice to wait to learn the multiplication tables until they feel like it. They’re the real Americans, like Americans used to be, and they’re colonizing all our top universities not from some patronizing helping hand of affirmative action, but from merit—”

As usual, Carol wasn’t paying the slightest attention. Fucking off at Knack, he garnered plenty of little-known information on the Web, but his wife figured she’d heard it all before, and dismissed it. Some women would be grateful for a man who brought home new, fascinating (if enraging) factoids every day, and who had an unusual, incisive point of view that made (if depressing) sense of the world. But no such luck with Carol, who would apparently have been more content with a docile drudge who credulously washed out his mayonnaise jars even though most of his “recycling” ended up in landfill, who cheerfully donated to the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association in defiance of the fact that the word benevolent didn’t belong within five miles of a cop, and who championed the sacrifice of nearly all his disposable income to bureaucratic shysters and incompetents as an act of civic-mindedness. In sum, she’d have preferred a husband who bought into the whole brainwashing hoax of “patriotism,” which slyly converted an arbitrary accident of birth into the kind of mindless go-team frenzy of pom-pom waving that had driven Jackson to get stoned in stairwells during pep rallies in high school.

Sure, her politics had always been wet, but otherwise Carol didn’t used to be like this. When they met she’d been doing the landscape gardening for a house where he also had a big Sheetrock job; they’d found common cause in the owner’s being an asshole, and their both being underlings had put them on the same level. So it hadn’t been a factor then that, despite the just-out-of-college scut work, she turned out to have a degree in horticulture from Penn State, or that her father (who always thought his daughter had married beneath herself) wasn’t any old seat-of-the-pants “handyman” but a property developer. Back on that job, Jackson had been drawn to a pretty woman who wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, and who hefted her own thirty-pound bags of peat. But most of all he’d liked that she could spar. She disagreed with him on everything, but had seemed to enjoy disagreeing with him, and over beers after work they’d really got into it. Nowadays it was as if she’d summarily won already so why bother, which was a puzzle, since Jackson couldn’t remember losing a single argument.

And she never used to exude this killjoy seriousness. She’d been a hoot before, or she’d at least laughed at his jokes, which gave him an even better feeling than laughing at hers. He put it down to Flicka. The responsibility, it changed you. One of the reasons that Carol hardly drank anymore: at any given time their daughter’s life might depend on her mother’s mind being sharp. It was like being a doctor yourself but without the golf. You were always on call.

So Jackson returned to the subject that at least seemed to engage his wife. “You don’t understand why it’s so important to me that Shep follows through with his exit from this travesty of ‘freedom.’ But let’s turn it around. Why is it so important to you that he doesn’t?”

“I didn’t say it was ‘important’ to me,” said Carol. “I said he’s a kind, considerate person who would never leave his family in the lurch.”

Jackson slammed his boot back down on the blue parquet of their Forbo Marmoleum (and who had helped him to install it? Shep Knacker). “You just can’t stand the idea that somebody might get out! That somebody might not trudge through their life like an automaton and march in lockstep to the grave! That there might be such a thing as a real man. With courage! With imagination! With volition!”

“So you want to pick a fight? Great, that’s a surefire, hundred-percent-guaranteed route to upsetting your daughter. But go ahead, make her tense,” Carol murmured temperately, with that calmness she had that bordered on insanity. “You’re not the one who has to shove the diazepam up her anus because she can’t keep down the oral kind.”

At the mention of pharmaceuticals, on cue Heather flounced into the kitchen and demanded, “Isn’t it time for my cortomalaphrine?” Jackson had no idea; he could never remember if they were pretending she had to take it before or after meals.

“Heather, I’ve got to get this dinner ready because we’re having a guest, who could be here any minute, so why don’t you take them when Flicka grinds her meds after we eat.”

“But I’m starting to feel funny,” Heather objected, introducing a slight weave to her stance. “Dizzy and prickly and sweaty and stuff. I can’t concentrate or anything.”

“Oh, all right then; pour yourself a glass of milk.” Carol unlocked the high cabinet; keeping sugar pills under lock and key was obviously gratuitous, but part of the theater. So was “cortomalaphrine,” a name they’d effortlessly made up after years of the Catapres, clonazepam, diazepam, Florinef, Ritalin, ProAmatine, Depakote, Lamictal, and Nexium that filled out Flicka’s pill chart like nonsense rhymes from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “Cortomalaphrine” and its recommended dosage were printed on formal Rx labels. Jackson had been dumbfounded to learn that pharmacists keep sugar-paste placebos as part of their standard stock, so presumably it wasn’t only Heather who was scarfing down little brown vials of Good & Plentys at ten bucks a pop.

As Carol shook out three capsules, Jackson looked away. He didn’t believe in this crap. Oh, he took Carol’s point that Heather always had to assume a backseat to her sister’s ceaseless medical crises. But if Heather needed more attention, a fake prescription wasn’t the answer. She should be taught to treasure her good health, to be grateful for it. Sure, back when Carol was pregnant with Flicka the labs didn’t have a test for familial dysautonomia, and once they were told that the baby was fine they’d relaxed. (Ha ha, big surprise in the offing. When their pediatrician finally stopped hiding behind his lame nineteenth-century diagnosis of “failure to thrive” and identified why their newborn couldn’t suckle, was losing weight, and puked all day, that false reassurance from the first trimester made the news much harder to take.) But Jesus, by Carol’s second pregnancy a test had just been developed, and they already knew the chances of another FD kid were one-in-four; getting the results of the amnio, they’d been nervous to the point of stroke. When the obstetrician beamed a big smile and gave them the all-clear, Heather’s mother-to-be was so relieved she cried. Did Heather have any idea that if her fetus, too, had carried the two copies of the FD gene she seemed so foolishly to envy she wouldn’t be here? Well, no, you didn’t tell children that they had ever been an inch away from an abortion.

And you didn’t let your older kid know that, either, since the obvious implication was that if they’d known they’d have marked Flicka “Return to Sender,” too. He wouldn’t go so far as to say that they would have, or should have, but he’d wondered about it. During some of the worst of it – once the corrective surgery for scoliosis had barely healed, they then had to break it to her that it was time for a “Nissen fundoplication” to cure her chronic acid reflux – he’d suspected that Flicka was angry not just in that why-me way, but angry at her parents in particular, who made her be here. Just be here at all.

However much it cost her, he’d assured Flicka many times – and thanks to her very refusal to embrace that hackneyed angel-of-innocence shtick, which would have bored her father senseless – that she really did brighten their lives. It was his fault that she was a brat – a caustic brat, an entertaining brat, but still a brat. Yet how could you not spoil the girl, at least a little? As hard as he tried not to see it, FD was a degenerative condition, and Flicka was duly deteriorating. She used to be so cute. If she was still cute to her father, he sometimes recognized that her chin had started to round upward and jut forward like Popeye’s, lending her face a permanent pugnacity. Her smashed-looking nose was growing in the opposite direction, its tip rounding downward and curving inward, as if the nose and chin were trying to touch each other. Her mouth had grown disproportionately wide, her eyes had migrated too far apart, and as the chin grew up and out she had started resting her front teeth on the outside of her lower lip. He wasn’t concerned about her having grown less fetching; he was concerned that these were outward manifestations of something much more dire happening that you couldn’t see, something he still didn’t quite understand, although it wouldn’t matter if he did.

He’d started out thinking about Heather and then ended up thinking about Flicka again, so maybe Carol was right about Heather’s feeling neglected. A few sugar pills were probably harmless enough, and she got to name-drop to her friends about taking “cortomalaphrine.” Most of the kids at Heather’s primary school were drugged to the eyeballs, and apparently a diagnosis was her generation’s must-have, the equivalent of fringed suede jackets in the sixties. But what really floored him about this placebo business was that as soon as she started popping those pills Heather, already on the stocky side, had started to put on weight. It wasn’t the pills themselves, which couldn’t have been more than five calories apiece; it was pure suggestion. All her classmates on antipsychotics and antidepressants and every other anti-be-difficult prescription were porkwads.

Jackson was disheartened to detect that already at eleven Heather showed signs of being a joiner. He’d never understood this impulse to be just like everybody else when everybody else was a fucking moron. Even as a boy, Jackson had always wanted to stand out; his daughters’ peers seemed driven to blend in. The sole exceptions, the only truly ambitious kids determined to draw attention to themselves as a cut above, clinked to school with an arsenal under their trench coats.

On the other hand, maybe he was more of a conformist than he liked to admit. Take Heather’s name. They’d picked it because they thought it was unusual. Now there were three other Heathers in her class. What was it with this name thing? You think you’ve never heard it before, but it’s in the air or something, like a smell or a gas, and meanwhile every other pregnant couple on the block is deciding to name their kid Heather because it’s unusual. At least by some miracle their firstborn’s high school wasn’t chockfull of Flickas. Thank fuck for Carol’s hang-up on stupid horse books as a kid. Look at you, he kicked himself. Flicka again. You can’t keep thinking about your second daughter for ten seconds. Still, there was sure to come a time, no telling how soon, when he would have to think about Heather because Heather was the only daughter he had.

“Jackson, should I go ahead and feed the kids? It’s getting late.”

“Yeah, probably. Shep and Glynis likely got into a thing. If I know Glynis, she won’t let him go without a fight. No telling when he’ll get here, really.”

“Sweetheart,” Carol said gently. “You should prepare yourself for the possibility that he gets cold feet. Or sobers up and realizes that he has a son and a wife and a life, and this Pemba thing is ridiculous. Cloves. I mean, really.” It was a particularly female form of condescension: men and their juvenile notions, their vain, impractical little projects.

Jackson glared. It was one more of those moments when looking at his wife was an outright torture. She was unbelievably beautiful. It sounded mean-spirited, but he’d been a little exasperated that as she’d grown older she’d remained as sexy as ever, tall – taller than he was – with long amber hair and perfect round breasts the size of halved grapefruits. She never gained an ounce. Not from dieting or jogging either, but from hauling eighty-five pounds of writhing, gagging human flesh to an upstairs bed or emergency room. He was no longer sure whether Carol’s face had always been set in that serene, impassive expression, as if carved in marble, or if she had developed that stillness and infuriating composure in order to project a soothing, tranquil presence for Flicka. In any event, for years now she’d been so hard to rile that she inspired him to try.

He was always proud to be seen with her in the company of other men and their washed-out, lumpy wives, but here at home the only adult for Carol to be better looking than was her husband. He wasn’t outright ugly or anything, but he worried that they were one of those couples about whom other people wondered in private, Carol’s a knockout, but what did she ever see in him? Why would such a fox pick a short, stocky working-class stiff with hair on his shoulders? He’d read somewhere that one of the things that made for a successful marriage was that both parties were roughly the same level of physical attractiveness, which had made him nervous. Most men would think him crazy, but he wished she were a shade homelier. The fact that homelier and homier shared so many letters didn’t seem a coincidence.

Jackson laid out plates for the kids, catching Flicka’s look of dread. Sausage and peppers was one of Carol’s signature dishes, always a crowd-pleaser, but fennel seed and garlic were wasted on Flicka. With little sense of smell and a tongue smooth as shoehorn, she couldn’t taste for shit. She may have learned, painstakingly, to fold down her epiglottis to prevent food from leaking into the trachea, but she still chewed every bite so long that she might have been gnawing her way through the table itself, and if her mother turned her back for an instant she’d scrape the remains of her plate in the trash. The weird truth was that she made no association between hunger and food. Accordingly, she found the amount of time squandered on cooking bafflingly disproportionate. The cultural folderol to do with eating – separate salad bowls and fish forks, anguish over orders in restaurants, shared disappointment over a soggy homemade pizza crust that was keen enough to ruin an evening – was as impenetrable to Flicka as the sacrificial rituals of an arcane animist cult. Her chunky sister’s stuffing down chocolate when the organism didn’t strictly require more calories seemed simply nonsensical, as if Heather were continuing to squeeze the nozzle when gas was bubbling out the cap and running down the side of the car.

“Flicka, I made you a separate portion, without any sauce.”

“Keep it,” said Flicka sullenly. “I can just load in a can of Compleat.”

“I don’t want to have this fight with you every night.” Carol’s delivery was so smooth that anyone listening would have thought, what fight?

“Yeah, yeah, the family that swallows together stays together. Makes a lot of sense.”

“Your feeding therapist says you have to try to eat something every day, and that serving is very small. Being able to eat even a little bit is important for making friends.”

Flicka’s intended snort came out more like a gurgle, and she wiped the drool from her chin with the terrycloth sweatband on her right wrist. Since it was always soaked, the rash underneath had grown chronic. “What friends?”

“We pay for that therapist out of our own pockets—”

“Yeah, well how’d you like some goon sticking their fingers in your mouth all the time? Karen Berkley’s not for me, but for you—”

“Just eat it.” Good Lord, Carol almost sounded flustered.

After filching into her school backpack for a large battered Ziploc, Flicka pulled herself up with Carol’s cornflower-print curtains and lurched to the small pan of undressed sausage and peppers on the counter. Before Carol could stop her, she’d upended the pan in the blender, sloshed in two mugs of water, and turned the appliance on high. The meal churned to an aerated brownish pink that immediately put Jackson off his dinner. With a malignant glint in the Vaseline around her eyes, she fastened the wide-bore syringe to its clear extension tubing, the other end of which she connected to the capped plastic port on her stomach – one not much different from the screw-off pour spouts on cartons of Tropicana. She removed the plunger and drained a measure of the blitzed pink gunk into the plastic syringe. Its clamp released, the tube’s translucence made it all too easy to follow the progress of the vomit-colored drizzle. Flick raised the syringe high in her right hand, with a victorious look on her face, like the goddamned Statue of Liberty.

Okay, it was hostile. Rubbing salt in the insult, Flicka announced, “I’m eating it.”

“That tubing will be very difficult to clean,” said Carol, giving in to a hint of iciness as the phone began to ring. “Sweetheart, could you please get that? It seems I have some tidying up to do.”

Well, that’s that,” Jackson announced curtly on return to the kitchen. “He’s not coming.”

“He’s not coming, or he’s not going?”

“Neither.”

Carol fetched two more plates, and he caught a flicker in her face.

“So what makes you so fucking happy about that?”

“I didn’t say anything!”

“You’re glad, aren’t you?”

Carol nodded discreetly in Flicka’s direction, and shook her head. He may have been shouting. “I’m glad,” she said, her voice like a spatula spreading cream-cheese icing, “for Glynis.”

“Don’t be.”

Though Handy Randy had expanded into other boroughs, the main office and supply warehouse were still on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, less than a mile from Windsor Terrace. Since he could walk to work, it wasn’t hard for Jackson to arrive early the following Monday, hoping to ensure that when Shep walked in the wisecracks would keep to a minimum. He deliberately projected a protective air of pent-up explosiveness and impending violence, which under the circumstances came naturally enough. Still, the atmosphere in the office was of barely suppressed hilarity; the accountant, the Web page designer, the dispatcher – everyone down to the receptionist wore expressions as if they were stuffing fists in their mouths to keep from busting out laughing. When Shep did walk in, he didn’t appear to make anything of the fact that the rest of the staff suddenly fell silent, and he glided toward his cubicle with a robotic passivity that seemed familiar; maybe Shep and Carol had something temperamental in common. No matter what life threw at him – “life” was a gentle way of putting it; other people, more like it – Shep absorbed it, like that blithe, look-the-other way shit his family pulled when he paid for his mother’s funeral, from casket to pâté, as if covering all those expenses was like farting and you didn’t mention it in polite company. When Mark, the website guy whom Jackson had put in his place on Friday, asked archly, “What, no suntan?” Shep returned mildly that the weekend had been overcast. He sat at his terminal and checked his email for complaints; Jackson could tell at a glance from across the room that there were plenty.

It was hot. Jackson had learned to wear short sleeves in the winter months, or he’d have come home drenched. Pogatchnik kept the heat cranked up full blast, if only to irritate Shep, who deplored the waste. According to their dickhead boss, waste was the point: a business that kept its premises tropical in January and arctic in August encouraged customers to feel confident that the enterprise was thriving. It was a sign of prosperity, just as fat used to be a badge of affluence: once you could afford to overeat; now you could afford to overheat. Shep had countered that he couldn’t understand why any red-blooded creature would be comfortable at eighty-five degrees in one season and fifty-five in another, but every position Shep ever took with Pogatchnik backfired, and the last time Shep had politely requested that they lower the thermostat the setting went up another two degrees. For that matter, just about every innovation Pogatchnik had installed was specifically tailored to goad Shep Knacker, down to the special seminar on “Getting Along with Difficult Co-Workers,” when Pogatchnik himself was the difficult co-worker.

Their boss finally deigned to shamble in at 11:00 a.m. He headed straight to Shep’s cubicle. “Seems like you owe me an apology, Knacker.”

“Yes, I do,” Shep said stonily.

“So?”

“I apologize.”

Pogatchnik continued to loom over Shep’s desk, as if wanting something more.

“I humbly apologize,” Shep provided. “I may have had a bad day.”

“Just because you used to own this outfit when it was an itty-bitty local operation doesn’t give you special rights. I’ll cut you slack this time, but any other employee I’d have shown the door. In fact, since you are any other employee—”

“I appreciate the second chance. I never expect special consideration. It won’t happen again.”

Listening to this grotesque public shit-eating from twenty feet, Jackson had a good grasp of why employees were arriving at work with canvas bags full of automatics all across the nation. The “itty-bitty local operation” was particularly hard to take. Shep had sold Knack of All Trades right around the time that the World Wide Web was just taking off big time, and how was he to know that the handyman biz would burgeon online? After Pogatchnik registered the domain name www.handiman. com (www.handyman.com had already been taken, but they got all the clients who couldn’t spell; this being America, that hadn’t curtailed their business in the slightest), their customer base exploded. Pogatchnik took all the credit, as if he’d invented the Internet itself, like Al Gore. Now the company was probably worth four times what that pond scum had paid for it, and Pogatchnik had started running television ads of himself tunelessly belting an excruciating variation on Sammy Davis, Jr, “The handyman, oh, the handyman can!” that drove Jackson to change the channel with an urgency bordering on hysteria. It had seemed so cool at the time, that check for a million smackers, and now it turned out that selling Knack was the dopiest thing Shep had ever done.