7

In the doorway of his parents’ bedroom Mark Mallon asked, ‘How long will you be gone, Dad?’

‘A couple of days,’ Eddie said. He marvelled at how tall his son had become; magically, he’d stretched from five feet to just under six in the space of a year. He was almost as tall as Eddie himself. Facially, he resembled his mother; he had a delicacy about him that gave him an androgynous look. Girls loved it. They worshipped the way his long hair lay against his shoulders. They telephoned him constantly. High-pitched little voices filled with squeaky hope: Is Mark home?

Claire was packing. She took special care with Eddie’s best suit, a navy blue number for the funeral. It wasn’t too late to change his mind, he thought. Cancel the airline ticket. But he’d already phoned Joyce and given her his arrival time, and she’d yelped with excitement at the idea of seeing him, and he felt good he’d been able to give her this much pleasure just by buying an airline ticket and rearranging his life for four days or so.

‘Did somebody really shoot Gramps?’ Mark asked.

‘It seems that way.’

‘Boy,’ Mark said. ‘You know why?’

‘I don’t know anything yet,’ Eddie said. He flipped the pages of his passport, saw a picture of himself taken seven years earlier. Black hair, no grey. Face leaner. He thought he looked passably attractive in this picture, but gravity hadn’t given him jowls back then.

‘Was he, you know, like a crook?’ Mark asked.

‘A crook? What makes you ask that?’

‘Something Granma once said. He was in jail for a while.’

‘Sixty days. It was nothing, a mistake,’ Eddie said.

‘Why didn’t he ever come visit?’

Eddie shrugged. ‘He never got around to it, that’s all. He was perfectly happy to stay home. He didn’t like travel.’

‘So why didn’t we visit him?’ Mark asked.

Good question, and Eddie Mallon had no easy answer; only excuses. He’d graduated high school, gone to the Police Academy, got married, bought a house in Queens, settled down, raised a kid, took his vacations in places as far away from any city as he could get, isolated cabins in Idaho or Montana, National Parks in Tennessee or Kentucky. A life went rushing past and it preoccupied you, and suddenly you realized you were never going to read War and Peace or sit drinking blood-orange juice at a sidewalk cafe in Florence or sail the Greek islands for a month. And all you could say to your son when he asked why the family had never visited Glasgow was, ‘Somehow we just never found the time, Mark,’ which wasn’t a good explanation but close to the truth.

Thirty years of life. A bubble in the wind, drifting.

He touched his wife’s hand. ‘I wish you were coming with me.’

Claire zipped his case, smiled at him. ‘It’s only a few days. Anyhow, somebody’s got to hold down the fort here.’

‘Hey, I could do that,’ Mark suggested. He was suddenly eager.

‘Why does that offer make alarm bells ring in my head?’ Claire asked.

‘You think I’d throw all-nighters, big parties, invite hundreds of kids,’ he said.

‘Did I say that?’ Claire asked.

‘You don’t have to,’ Mark said. ‘But it’s what you think.’

Eddie stuck his passport in a hip pocket of his black jeans. He put his airline ticket in the inside pocket of his pale grey linen jacket, patted the place as if to reassure himself of something.

He looked at Claire. He was about to say it a second time: you could still come with me. Claire and Jackie Mallon had never met; the old man had always existed on the periphery of her life. Once or twice they’d talked on the phone and he’d made her laugh, but that was it. He was a dead stranger who’d spoken in a funny accent she sometimes didn’t understand.

‘If you’re ready, I’d better get you to JFK.’ She glanced at her watch, rattled car keys in her hand.

He gazed round the room in the manner of a man taking his leave of a place he’ll never see again. Why did this departure from wife and son make him feel so goddam melancholy? He’d be back before they knew he’d even gone. They had lives of their own. Mark had friends, girls, serious hanging-out to do. Claire had a part-time job with Century 21 and every Wednesday and Friday she went to a health club where she rode an exercise bike and checked her pulse rate and blood pressure, then drank lo-cal fruit smoothies with her pals in a health-food bar.

‘Ready,’ he said.