But Thad doesn’t want to dwell on in the event that.
He moves piles and reassembles stacks, but the long, white boxes are not here. Unless they’ve been boxed inside other boxes, they’re gone. Which can’t be. Surely his parents haven’t thrown out their son’s comic books. Surely he’s not that dated cautionary tale.
He does find the old family telescope, secure in its dusty, patent leather case. He lifts it and the handle comes off. The case clatters to the floor. He drops the handle, leans the case like a rifle on one shoulder, lowers the garage door, and runs through the rain into the house.
His mother is in the kitchen. A large roast chicken has been pulled from the oven, and the air is fragrant, the house warm.
“I found the telescope,” he says. He’s back in boy mode. Despite himself, he wants her to be proud of him.
“Okay, but don’t rearrange the garage. The movers charge more if the boxes aren’t consolidated.”
He sets the telescope on the table, then moves to the kitchen counter where his mother whisks melted butter in a bowl. The counter’s horseshoe-shaped, and he stands across from her.
“Did you put the croquet set away?” she asks.
“I did.”
Two more days and they’ll all adopt their family roles: his father withdrawn, his mother smothering, Michael moody, Thad jockeying for everybody’s love.
“Mallets in the box,” she asks, “hoops in the bag?”
“Wickets.”
“In England, where the sport began, they’re hoops.”
Thad smiles. “Pretty liberal interpretation of the word sport.”
His mother butters the chicken with a basting brush. The skin is gold, not yet her trademark golden-brown.
“I haven’t seen Jake all afternoon,” she says.
“He’s painting,” Thad lies. “Hard at work on the next show.”
“That’s wonderful,” his mother says, but she’s not really listening. She slips her hands into yellow oven mitts, opens the oven door, and slides the chicken in.
The house is quiet. The thunder’s given up. Now it’s just rain on the roof and buckets catching drips.
“Mom,” he says, but the timing’s wrong. His mother’s eyes are shut, arms folded over her chest. This day’s too big, and he’d sound monstrous raising the question of missing comic books.
Let them eat first. Let them play a game. Maybe this week can still work out all right.
Thad thinks this, then thinks of the other family, the boy. Immediately he feels selfish, then weak for feeling selfish, then self-conscious for feeling weak. “Analysis paralysis,” Steve would say, a term Thad’s pretty sure his therapist shoplifted from AA.
Tomorrow, Thad will wake and go to the window. If the boats are back, they haven’t found the boy.
His mother weeps. He shuts his eyes.
There’s only one thing to do in the face of all this grief. Thad is going to get stoned out of his fucking mind.
9.
Richard shuffles, and Diane cuts the deck.
The Spades they play is modified for six. They work in teams of three, rotating who plays. Richard keeps track of rotation and score.
They’re at the kitchen table. Lisa’s made tea, which only she drinks, and filled a bowl with pretzels, which no one eats. No one ever eats the pretzels, but they’re nice to look at, a little hillock of clipped trefoil knots. Outside, the rain is steady.
Richard deals. He, Michael, and Jake make up one team, Lisa, Diane, and Thad the other. This is how it’s been since Jake entered the picture. Richard plays best with Jake. Jake gets the game. He follows Richard’s lead. And, most important, he plays to win. Ambition matters. Sure, it’s only family fun, but it’s no fun if it’s all in fun. Richard would rather play and lose than no one ever win.
Jake’s a good kid, charming, successful. A little full of himself, but who wouldn’t be with money and prestige like that at twenty-six? Richard watches him across the table and wishes, forgive him, that his boys were more like Jake. Wishes he’d been more like Jake, everything he wanted at so young an age. Richard was late to marry, late to have kids, late to his career. Perhaps it’s not too late for his sons. Michael’s smart. He’s sensible enough. And Thad’s okay when he’s not off his meds. There was that nasty business in the winter of ’05 and a second attempt a decade ago. But Thad says that’s over now, and Richard wants to believe it’s true.
Lisa stirs her tea.
When it comes to cards, he and his wife make terrible partners. Thirty-seven years of marriage should translate to mind reading and knowing winks, but Richard has no patience for Lisa’s underbidding or her forgetting, each hand, what’s been played. There are only fifty-two cards, he wants to say. Keep up! He loves his wife. He’d step in front of a bus for her. But he hates how she plays Spades.
She pulls the tea bag from her mug, lets it hang over the tea, dripping, then drops the pouch onto the tabletop. Where she sits, a constellation marks the place tea bags have steamed the finish from the wood. Richard can see her heart’s not in the game. His either. He’s just better at pretending. Fake contentedness until you feel it, that kind of thing.
Dinner was a quiet affair, the chicken tough, the veggies rubbery, which is not the norm. Still, everyone ate. Everyone said how good the chicken was, everyone lying, everyone knowing everyone was lying and saying nothing, because that’s what families do. Lisa said little, Jake and Thad appeared to ignore each other, and Michael, high on painkillers, raised a hand every few minutes to probe the sizable bandage on his head, Diane scolding, pushing the fingers away.
Dinner last night was uncomfortable for other reasons. “Your father and I,” Lisa began, and Richard watched his children’s faces fall as the family home was taken from them.
Richard deals the last card. Let them play a hand. Maybe if they just start playing—
“Should we leave?” Diane has addressed the table as a whole, and Richard knows better than to respond.
“What do you mean, dear?” Lisa asks.
Always, Lisa’s called Diane dear, though never Jake. Jake will get a term of endearment if he and Thad marry, Richard guesses, not before. With Lisa, everything is earned.
“Given what’s happened,” Diane says. “Do we want to stay?”
To witness a drowning and keep going, keep playing cards. Is it unreasonable? Are they in shock, Diane the only one who’s thinking straight?
Lisa smiles the smile of someone trying not to cry and working her way toward angry all at once.
“Where would we go?” she asks.
Let them leave, Richard wants to say. Release them if that’s what they want.
He doesn’t want to hurt his wife. He only means to stick up for Diane. He loves Diane. She’s good to Michael, kind to all of them, and still Lisa’s tough on her, which Richard finds hard to watch.
“You kids can go,” he says. “We’d love for you to stay, but—”
Lisa frowns. Her knuckles whiten around the handle of her mug.
“We won’t blame you if you want to call the week off,” he says.
His wife watches him. She wants him to meet her eyes, and he won’t. He keeps her in his periphery, and his eyes settle on Michael’s bandage, the cotton square stained orange by Betadine. When the stitches come out, his son will have a scar.