A TEXT COMES FROM Vince. All it says is Cal and Esther, and I have no idea what it means. Vince’s messages are often cryptic like this. I assume it’s because he wants to pique my interest in hope of receiving a response, but that doesn’t make his coyness any less irritating.
I knew Cal and Esther at UCLA. We were friends, kind of, but lost touch after graduation. It’s been years since I’ve seen them, long enough that they don’t know about Julie, about Eve. Last I heard they’d gotten married. I think Vince still sees them now and then.
So? I text him back.
They’re having a housewarming June 12. Boys’ night out?
I think about it for a minute, then text Sure without consulting Julie first. She doesn’t have to approve everything.
My nigga, Vince texts back.
My boss, Big Gay Bob, sticks his head into my office and asks if I saw the editorial about teacher layoffs in this morning’s Times. I didn’t, but I say I did.
“The councilman wants to respond,” Bob says. “Give me something to run by him.”
“Your wish is my command,” I reply in a funny voice, then spin around to my computer like I’m going to get started right away. Instead, I sit there and pick a scab on my knuckle until it bleeds.
OUR CONDO HAS a small balcony that overlooks Wilshire Boulevard. The street is four lanes wide and noisy all the time. There’s always a bus making a racket or a couple of Korean kids racing tricked-out Nissans. Still, the balcony is the only place I can be alone. Five floors above the Miracle Mile, facing south, the orange lights of the ghetto like a fire burning in the distance.
Julie and I have an arrangement: As soon as I walk in the door from work, I get a gin and tonic and a little time to decompress. Fifteen minutes on the balcony to myself, that’s all I ask. After that I’m ready to be a good husband, to do the daddy thing.
Tonight that means letting Eve crawl all over me and tickle me with a big pink feather. She learned this from a cartoon, tickling someone with a feather. I pretend to laugh as she attacks the bottoms of my feet, my nose, my chin. When she sees how much fun I’m having, she gives me the feather and demands that I tickle her so she can pretend to laugh too.
“Don’t rile her,” Julie says. “Dinner’s ready.”
We’ve started saying grace before we eat because Julie wants Eve to have traditions.
“What are we, fucking Amish?” I said when she first came up with this.
“It’s important,” she said.
Julie and I grew up in regular families, families that ate dinner in front of the TV and talked about going to church on Christmas but somehow never made it. I used to fetch my dad beers from the fridge for quarter tips. The rules are different now. We’re supposed to raise Eve to be one of those kids who weren’t allowed to drink soda or play with toy guns, which is fine, I guess, if all the other kids are like that too. I want her to fit in. I want her to be happy.
I clean up the kitchen after we eat, load the dishwasher, and Julie gets Eve ready for bed. We tuck her in and kiss her good night together, then settle on the couch. Julie flips through a magazine while we watch our shows. Other nights she messes around on her iPad or works a crossword puzzle. What this means is that she’s always so distracted that she can’t follow the plot of even the dumbest sitcom.
“Who’s he again?” she asks.
“The blond girl’s uncle,” I say.
My mind wanders too. I find myself thinking about little adventures I had as a kid, songs I used to be able to play on the guitar. My fingers twitch as I try to pick out the chords to “Under the Bridge.” Julie laughs at me.
“What are you doing?” she says.
I feel fat sitting there on the couch with my wife in the watery light from the TV five stories above Wilshire Boulevard. Bloated. Like a greedy mosquito too full of blood to fly.
THE COUNCILMAN STOPS by the staff meeting to tell us what a great job we’re doing. I write his press releases, help with his speeches, and take care of his website. He’s okay. He’s got more personality than brains, but what politician doesn’t? He also has this way of talking down to you sometimes. He knows three things about me—that I went to UCLA, that I have a little girl, and that I sometimes eat Taco Bell for lunch—and that’s enough for him. Every conversation we’ve ever had has revolved around one of those subjects.
Later we all gather in the break room for Maria the receptionist’s birthday, cake and everything. I show up because you have to in a small office like this. I eat some ice cream and tell a funny story about Eve, but what I really want to talk about is what happened on my way to work this morning, that guy taking a shit in front of me.
I was waiting at a long red light, and a bum squatted on the grassy strip between the sidewalk and the street, dropped his pants, and let go. I tried to turn my head but couldn’t. It was as if a bully had grabbed the back of my neck and was making me watch. I want to talk about how seeing that made me feel. Like everything was about to fall apart. Like pretty soon we’d all be shitting in the street.
The rest of the day slips away from me. I stare at the ceiling of my office mostly, at a water stain that looks like an octopus. My cell rings as I’m getting ready to go home. I don’t recognize the number.
“Hello?” I say.
“This is Sophie.”
My lungs seize up. I force a breath.
“Remember me?”
A couple of months ago Julie took Eve to her parents’ place in Oxnard for the weekend. I stayed behind to catch up on some stuff, and Saturday night Vince and I went to dinner, had a few drinks. I felt pretty good driving back to the condo, a little drunk, a little high. The music on the radio was the perfect sound track for the movie I was in. The streetlights played their part, the cars, the buildings pulsing to the beat.
I passed a club I’d heard about, a place people went. Sometimes it hits you how long it’s been since you had that kind of fun. I wasn’t tired, nobody was waiting on me at home, so I turned around and parked. If there was a line or a cover charge—any kind of hassle at all—I was ready to leave, but I wound up breezing right in and even found a seat at the bar. It turned out to be next to this girl, Sophie, the one who’s saying to me now, “We need to talk. And not on the phone.”
THEY’RE SHOOTING SOMETHING around the corner, in one of the big houses in Hancock Park. Equipment trucks and portable dressing rooms line the street, and huge lights set up on the lawn stand in for the sun.
Julie and I are walking Eve, pushing her in her stroller. We go this way every Sunday morning, bring our coffee along. The kid waves at birds and has to pet all the friendly dogs we pass. Meanwhile, Julie plays games with her: Do you see a mailbox? Do you see a trash can? Sometimes I want to say, Jesus, leave her alone. She’ll be in school soon enough, and people will pick her brain all day long.
Some guy with a walkie-talkie steps onto the sidewalk and blocks our way.
“Could I get you to cross the street?” he says.
“Why?” Julie says,
“We’re filming here.”
“So?”
“So you have to cross the street.”
Julie’s jaw tightens. She beat up a girl in junior high. The girl called her a slut, and Julie broke her nose. She’s not proud of it, but she did it.
“We don’t have to cross,” she says. “You don’t have any authority.”
“Come on,” the guy says. “Please.”
Julie pushes the stroller toward him. He has to jump out of her way.
“Really?” he says as she rolls by.
I trail after her and give him a shrug and a smile.
We pass the cameras and craft services and a man holding a microphone on the end of a pole. A girl carrying a clipboard yells “Hey!” but Julie ignores her too. The rent-a-cop hired to stop traffic is lounging on his motorcycle. He gives us a sarcastic salute and chirps, “Thanks for your cooperation.”
Julie fumes all the way into Larchmont Village. Who do they think they are? We’ve got as much right to the sidewalk as they do. I quit listening when she starts talking about writing a letter to the newspaper. I haven’t slept in two days, and it feels like bugs are crawling on my eyeballs.
“Do you see a fire engine?” I say to Eve. It’s a test; there is no fire engine.
“There,” Eve says. She points at a car driving by. The sky is milky white, and nothing has a shadow. Julie goes into the bakery for bread, and I wait outside with Eve. We watch an old man cross against the signal and someone in a silver Mercedes give him hell.
I SPEND THE morning drafting an op-ed piece on the redistricting proposal. The councilman is against it because the new map will put more Latinos in his area, and he’s afraid they won’t vote for a gringo. He can’t come out and say that, of course, so he gave me a few useless notes and asked me to turn them into an acceptable counterargument.
Bob is breathing down my neck, but I can’t build up any steam. Something’s wrong with my chair. It’s not quite right, like maybe the cleaning crew bumped the height knob over the weekend. I get down on my hands and knees three times to fiddle with it but keep making things worse.
My excuse for taking a long lunch is a doctor’s appointment. Bob looks like he wants to squawk, but I tell him not to worry, I’ll be back this afternoon and stay until I finish the piece. I drive into Hollywood and find the Starbucks where I’m meeting Sophie. It’s in a shitty strip mall between a RadioShack and a Panda Express. I park in back, next to a padlocked dumpster.
I’m nervous walking in that I won’t remember her. She had dark hair and dark eyes that I said something stupid about that night, how a man could get lost in them and never find his way home.
“Wow,” she said. “The big guns already?”
That was the moment, me stammering and faking chagrin, her laughing and saying, “Just kidding.” That was the last exit, and I sped past it. Even though it had been a while since I’d been out and about, since I’d done any flirting, I knew right then where we were headed.
Turns out she’s easy to spot, the prettiest girl in the place. She’s smaller than I recall, maybe older. She’s wearing a white blouse and gray slacks, work clothes. She looks up from her phone as I approach, frowns, and I see the beauty mark on her upper lip, where I first kissed her.
“Should I sit?” I say.
“Sure,” she replies.
The chair scrapes loudly across the floor as I pull it out. Everybody stares at us, our awkwardness palpable. I sit and put my hands in my lap, then on the table, then back in my lap.
She’s pregnant.
Even if you’re prepared for something like that, the actual words can still lay you out. I tilt my head back, close my eyes, and exhale through pursed lips.
“Okay,” I say. “What do we do about it?”
“Don’t worry,” she scoffs. “I don’t plan on being a mommy right now, but the problem is, I don’t have insurance.”
This is one of the scenarios I’ve been playing out ever since I got her call, trying to be ready for anything.
“Whatever you need,” I say.
“I need money,” she says.
“How much?” I say.
She gazes past me, running numbers in her head. I find this charming. I would’ve already had a figure in mind.
“Fifteen hundred?” she says, as if asking if the amount is acceptable.
“All right,” I say. “Give me a week.”
My easy acquiescence seems to take her by surprise. Her eyes well up with tears, and I’m suddenly filled with tenderness toward her. I have to admit that for two seconds after we climbed out of the backseat of my car that night, after we kissed good-bye, I was in some kind of love with her. And in spite of all the guilt, remorse, and penitence that came later, the memory of her reaching up to pull me down on top of her is one I’ve often lingered over.
She shifts and sniffles and uses her napkin to wipe up a coffee spill on the table. Someone has etched a tag into the glass of the window behind her, and when the sun hits the scratches, they sparkle with a diamond’s soulless brilliance.
“I guess I should have been more careful,” she says. “But so should you.”
“Absolutely,” I say. “I totally blame myself.”
“You’re married?” she says, pointing at my ring.
“Yes,” I say.
“Why weren’t you wearing it that night?”
“I took it off.”
She draws back her head and squints down her nose at me.
“That’s fucked up,” she says.
“I know,” I say.
“It’s disgusting.”
I’m glad she’s saying this. It’s good for me. I need to hear what a rotten bastard I am because part of me still isn’t convinced.
I realize I’ve had my sunglasses on since I got here. I reach up and take them off.
“Are you okay for now?” I say. “Do you need anything?”
“Give me twenty dollars,” she says.
I reach for my wallet, slide the bill out.
“Wait,” she says. “Give me forty. No, sixty. I don’t even need it. I just want to take something from you.”
“I only have forty,” I say, and hand the money over.
A woman at the counter is trying to use a coupon to pay for her coffee. She gets loud when the cashier tells her it’s expired, keeps asking the girl if she speaks English. I have to get back to the office.
“So, I’ll text you,” I say as I stand.
“Okay,” Sophie says. She stands too.
“And I’ll see you in a week. Here?”
“Here’s good. I work close by.”
We shake hands like it’s business. I walk out the door, then think I’ll get a coffee for the road. When I turn to go back inside, I see Sophie hugging some guy who’d been sitting at another table, watching us the whole time. Long hair, ponytail, beard. Her back is to me, but he and I lock eyes over her shoulder. I decide I don’t need any coffee. I walk to my car, get in, and drive away.
ON TUESDAY, AFTER we put Eve to bed, Julie asks me to go down with her to her car and help her carry up a new coffee table she bought at Ikea. We ride the elevator to the garage and pull the box out of the back of the Jetta. Julie takes one end, and I grab the other. The alarm on a Land Rover goes off as we pass by, and my guts jump. I don’t like being down here with all that concrete and steel above me and the unquiet earth below.
“If you don’t go slower, I’m going to drop it,” Julie says.
I hold my finger on the call button until the elevator car arrives. The Land Rover’s alarm is still echoing through the garage when the doors close.
We set the box down in the middle of the living room, and Julie opens one end and slides out the pieces of the table.
“Relax,” I say. “I’ll put it together.”
“I want to do it,” she says. “Read me the directions.”
“Oh, boy,” I say. “I better get another drink.”
Julie frowns but doesn’t reply. Her dad is a drunk, so she’s touchy about booze. If I have more than the one G&T after work, she gets weird. Not to be rude, but she should mind her own fucking business.
I go into the kitchen and pour myself a tall one. Julie is already screwing stuff together when I return. I sit on the couch and, after consulting the assembly instructions, tell her what comes next.
“This can’t be right,” she says at one point.
I lean over to show her the diagram. “You have to turn that end around,” I say.
“Yuck,” she says, waving a hand in front of her face. “You stink.”
It won’t be difficult to sneak the money for Sophie out of our account. When we were first married, Julie ran the household, paying the bills and overseeing our finances, but when Eve was born, she asked me to take over. Now, as long as the ATM spits out cash when she sticks her card in, she’s happy.
And that wasn’t the only change the baby brought about. Julie was a loan officer when I met her, at a bank in Beverly Hills, and she kept working right up until she had Eve. She never complained, seemed to enjoy the job even, so I was shocked when she told me that she didn’t plan to go back.
“I only want to be a wife and mother,” she said. “My mom worked, and I always felt slighted. I want to devote myself to you and Eve.”
I went from one life to another in just one year. I hooked up with Julie; she got pregnant three months later; we married, bought the condo, and had Eve. Truthfully, I was a bit disoriented, but when I tried to talk to Julie about it, she came on strong about my having to accept my new responsibilities the way she had to accept hers.
“I don’t feel like I had much choice is all,” I said.
“Sometimes adults don’t get much choice,” she said.
She tightens the last screw and flips the completed table right-side up.
“Ta-da.”
I help her move the old table into the hallway and position the new one in front of the couch. We didn’t need a new table, she just got bored with the old one. That’s the kind of people we are now.
She picks up my empty glass, takes it into the kitchen, rinses it, and puts it into the dishwasher.
“I’m going to read in bed for a while,” she says.
“I want to watch the news,” I say.
I wait for her to close the bedroom door, then go into the kitchen, get a fresh glass from the cupboard, and make another drink. It’s nice out on the balcony, warm, but with a breeze coming off the ocean. I stand with my forearms on the rail and watch the traffic. A car cruises past with its windows down, radio blaring. You can hear the kids inside singing along to whatever song is playing.
Have fun, boys and girls, I think. Let this be the best night of your lives.
VINCE CALLS ME at work, wants to know if I’m still on for Cal and Esther’s party.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I reply, wondering if he knows something. I’ve been paranoid since meeting Sophie at Starbucks. That guy she was with made me uneasy.
“Come on,” Vince says. “You flake all the time.”
It’s true. I say yes on Monday, but when Friday rolls around I’m so beat that all I want to do is stumble home and coast through the weekend on routine.
“I’m going, I’m going, I swear,” I say. I lean back in my chair and pick up a photo of me and Julie and Eve at Christmas. It could be a picture of anybody. I don’t even remember Christmas.
“Do you know any jokes?” Vince says.
“Jokes?”
“The dude in the mailroom here tells me a joke every day, and I thought I’d tell him one back, freak him out. I looked online, but they’re all about having sex with babies and sick shit like that.”
“That’d freak him out for sure.”
“Yeah, and also get me fired.”
Vince has been married to Kaylee for two years, and they were together for three before that. They’re putting off having a kid because they want to travel. They went to Machu Picchu last year, and Vietnam is next. Julie doesn’t like Kaylee; she says she needs to grow up. Vince, though, he loves her. He started crying one time telling me how much. We were in a bar, having some beers, and all this love came pouring out of him. I hoped he couldn’t see how uncomfortable it made me.
“I have to go,” I say into the phone.
“Knock-knock,” Vince says.
“Who’s there?”
“9/11.”
“9/11 who?”
“Hey, you said you’d never forget.”
The octopus on the ceiling is getting bigger, expanding like an incriminating bloodstain. I should call building maintenance about it. There may be a leak somewhere.
ON MY WAY home on Friday I pass by the spot where that bum shit on the grass, and I think that if I see him again, I’ll kill him. An instant later I’m like, What the fuck is wrong with you? Where did that come from? It must have been a misfire or crossed wires. Or maybe it was somebody else speaking through me, maybe everybody else, the whole city.
Julie asked me to pick up a pizza at Scalo’s. I place the order and get a beer for the wait. It’s mostly a take-out and delivery joint, and I’m the only customer. I sit at a table in front of the window. The gas station on the corner is a mess. Cars are backed up into the street, trying to get to the pumps. And this is a regular day. What if something really goes wrong?
A girl running past the window startles me. She pushes on the door to Scalo’s once, twice, again, until the guys behind the counter all yell “Pull!” at once. Stepping quickly into the restaurant, she turns and presses her face to the glass and looks back up the street in the direction she came from.
“You have bathroom?” she asks breathlessly, with some kind of accent.
“For customers only,” Joseph, the owner, says.
The girl grimaces in disgust. She’s nineteen, twenty, Russian, Iranian, something. Her mascara is smeared like she’s been crying, and she keeps wiping at her nose. She gathers her bleached-blond hair in one hand and uses an elastic band that she takes from her pocket to make a ponytail, all the while staring out the window.
I swivel to follow her gaze, fighting the urge to duck. You’ve got all these guns and all these hotheads, guys who don’t care who gets in the way when they lose it. But the only person I see is an old woman waiting at a bus stop half a block away.
“What’s going on?” Joseph says.
The girl whips off her jacket, turns it inside out—from white to black—and slips it back on. She opens the door and sticks her head out for a better view of the street.
“You want me to call the police?” Joseph says.
The girl disappears, is suddenly gone, running again.
Joseph shakes his head.
“Gypsies,” he says to me.
I nod like I know and sip my beer. But I don’t know anything. Joseph is from Lebanon. His brother was killed by a sniper one morning while walking home from the store with a loaf of bread and some eggs. His father was blown to pieces by a rocket.
“They are both making a long vacation, beautiful holidays,” he said to me once. “That is what I tell myself to keep from going crazy.”
CAL AND ESTHER live out in Highland Park, a neighborhood that used to be mostly working-class Latinos but is now filling up with young white couples who want affordable houses and yards for their dogs. Vince says he’ll drive. We take freeways and streets I’ve never heard of to get there, and when we do, taco stands and pawnshops alternate with art galleries and cupcake bakeries. It’s confusing.
The house is a tiny stucco box on a street lined with the kind of big, old trees you rarely see in L.A. Elms and things. We park down the block in front of a duplex with a Tinker Bell bounce house set up in the yard. Mexican music blares out of a pair of speakers in the bed of a pickup parked at the curb, and dozens of kids dart about in unison like flocking birds.
“That’s the party we should be going to,” Vince says. “Teach them youngsters how to do the ice cream and cake and cake.”
A sign on the front door of Cal and Esther’s house directs guests to the backyard. Music and the sound of voices grow louder as we pass through a gate in the wooden fence and walk down a narrow passage past the garbage cans and a wheelbarrow. We brush by a guy smoking in the shadows and pop out into the party, and I’m glad to see there’s a crowd. I worried we’d be the only ones.
The yard is much larger than the house, with a covered patio and a vegetable garden. Candy-colored Christmas lights are twined through the branches of the lemon trees and dangle from the eaves of a toolshed. I brought a bottle of wine as a gift for Cal and Esther, and Vince got them a book on home repairs. A girl Vince knows but I don’t shows us where to put them and points us toward the bar, which is set up on a picnic table.
Vince pumps the keg while I pour some Maker’s over ice. Cal appears out of the crowd. He has a beard now. He greets Vince with a slap on the back and picks up a corkscrew.
“How’s tricks?” I say to him.
His smile flickers, and he squints like he’s having trouble placing me.
“Danny?” he says.
He must be joking. We worked at the campus library together, took mushrooms in Disneyland with a bunch of people, went to Radiohead. He knows who I am.
“I heard you and Esther got married,” I say. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” he says, then looks past me. “Hey, Esther,” he calls out. “Did you see who’s here?”
“Oh my God,” she says and comes over to join us. I can tell she also has only a vague recollection of who I am, and I feel as if I’m disappearing from the past and the present at the same time, like an old photograph in which the people have faded into ghostly blurs. It’s not right. These two weren’t special enough to have forgotten me.
I tell them about Julie and Eve and my job, making everything sound better than it is. They nod and smile and say, “That’s great,” but they’re only being polite. Cal makes his escape first, then Esther, tossing “Keep in touch” over her shoulder as she walks away.
I finish my bourbon and pour myself another and decide to hide out in the bathroom. There are two women with babies in the kitchen. I tell them where I want to go, and they point me down the hall.
I lock myself in and sit on the edge of the tub with my head in my hands. After a while I get up and check the medicine cabinet and pocket a bottle of Xanax prescribed for Cal. Someone knocks, and I pretend to wash my hands, then let the girl in.
A handwritten sign on a door at the end of the hall catches my eye: Keep Out. I open the door and find myself in Cal and Esther’s bedroom. The walls are painted a funny color, like everyone was doing a few years ago, and a big blowup of that famous photo of a couple kissing in Paris hangs over the bed.
I walk to the dresser and lift the lid of a jewelry box sitting on top. I pick one pearl earring out of all the junk and hope Esther will go crazy trying to figure out where it went when she wants to wear it someday.
The door opens, and Cal is standing there, looking confused. “Hey,” he says. “This room is kind of off-limits.”
“Sorry,” I say. “There was someone in the bathroom, so I was looking for another.”
“There’s only one,” he says. “You’ll have to wait.”
I flush the earring down the toilet when I get into the bathroom again, then go out and tell Vince I’m not feeling well. And it’s true. I roll down the window and let the wind blow in my face as we race down the freeway, but no matter how much air I gulp, it isn’t enough. I want to turn myself inside out and shake myself clean. I want to sleep for years and wake with this life behind me.
THE CEILING OF my office collapses over the weekend. I come in on Monday morning to find the soggy panels lying on my desk and chair, and dirty water soaking the carpet. A broken pipe, the man from building maintenance says.
“You didn’t notice anything?” he asks.
“Nope,” I say, not mentioning the octopus.
Juan the IT guy moves my computer to an empty desk in a cubicle in the hall so I can keep working while they do repairs. I spend most of the morning updating the website, but people keep poking their heads in to ask what happened.
The councilman himself stops by around noon. He and Bob are just back from a press conference where the police announced the capture of some nut who’d been setting cars on fire in the district. The councilman is exuberant. He loves being in front of the cameras.
“I hear the sky is falling,” he says.
“It’s not a big deal,” I say. “They should be done fixing everything by three.”
“Good, good. You going to Taco Bell for lunch?”
“Maybe.”
He pulls a twenty out of his pocket.
“I saw a commercial for a new thing there,” he says. “The Beefy Crunch Burrito or something. Would you mind bringing me one back?”
“No,” I say. “Sure.”
He hands me the money.
“Get yourself one too, or whatever you want,” he says.
He’s talking down to me again, but that’s okay. He’ll be shitting in the streets with the rest of us soon enough.
SOPHIE IS SITTING at the same table she was last week, and that guy is there too, hunched over his phone in the corner by the window. He glances at me when I come in, then quickly looks away. I give Sophie a little wave and sit down across from her. She’s dressed for work again, her hair pulled back. A tiny gold crucifix hangs around her neck. I didn’t notice it last time, or that night at the club either.
“How are you?” I say.
“Fine,” she says.
“Everything okay?”
“Super-duper.”
I wasn’t going to say what I say next. I’d decided to ignore my suspicions and give her the money even after I looked it up and found out that an abortion only costs five hundred dollars. It’s a nasty procedure, and I was willing to throw in the extra for pain and suffering. She had to bring that guy, though. If it was just her, okay, but something about him sets me off.
So I say it.
“You wouldn’t have any proof, would you?”
“Proof of what?” Sophie says.
“That you’re pregnant,” I say.
Sophie’s expression doesn’t change as she reaches into her purse and pulls out a folded sheet of paper and hands it to me.
“I was wondering why you didn’t ask last time,” she says.
It’s a letter on stationery from a women’s health-care center stating that Sophie Ricard is pregnant and has a due date of February 11 next year. I pass her the envelope containing the money, but I’m still not satisfied. I’m still disappointed in her.
I point at the long-haired guy, who’s glaring at me like he’d like to tear my head off.
“Is that your boyfriend?” I ask Sophie.
“What’s it to you?” she says.
“How do I know it’s not his baby?” I say.
She slides the envelope into her purse.
“That’s right,” she snaps. “How do you know?”
I stand and walk out without saying another word. I plan to leave with an angry squeal of rubber, but my car is parked in the sun, and I have to sit with the air conditioner on until the steering wheel cools enough for me to drive away.
HERE’S HOW I’M going to think about it: You dodged a bullet; be grateful. And if I ever tell anybody the story, I’m going to say that the experience made me a better husband and father. I lift my gin and tonic to affirm this, salute the setting sun, the traffic roaring by, the ghetto simmering on the horizon.
The slider opens behind me, and Julie sticks her head out.
“Dinner’s ready,” she says.
We’re eating early tonight. She’s going to a movie with someone, a friend.
“I’m coming,” I say.
She leaves the door open. I set my glass on the railing of the balcony and shake my hand like it’s numb. Then I reach out and give the glass a nudge with my index finger, and another nudge, and another, until it falls. I lean over the railing and watch the glass shatter on the sidewalk below. Man, that was dumb, wasn’t it? I could’ve hurt somebody.
“Daddy.”
Eve comes onto the balcony through the open door. I pick her up and hold her at arm’s length.
“You know the rules,” I say. “You’re not supposed to be out here. It’s dangerous.”
“It’s time to eat,” she says.
“All right,” I say.
We step to the railing, a man and a child—no, a father and his daughter. I show her the view.
“Do you see a helicopter?” I say.
“Mmm, no,” she says,
“Do you see a car?”
“There.”
She points down at the traffic on Wilshire.
The dark inside me begins to bray, and I fight back as best I can. “We’re going to be okay,” I say, “we’re going to be great,” but I can barely hear myself over the din.