2

you won't get very far into this before you start thinking that I am, not to put too fine a point on it, an asshole. At the very least, a jerk. I don't happen to think I'm an asshole, but I'm also willing to acknowledge your typical asshole's not blessed in the self-awareness department. How many assholes know they're assholes? So I guess what I'm saying is that if I know I've behaved like an asshole on certain occasions, then there's no way I could actually be one. But I'd understand if you remain unconvinced. By the time you've heard this story, you might say, “Man, that Zack Walker, he's a major one.”

Let's say my motivations haven't always been fully understood or appreciated, although that sounds a bit like boneheaded politicians who lose because they fail to “communicate their message.” It's fair to say my methods of instruction, of trying to teach my loved ones how to conduct themselves more responsibly, could have been better thought out. But overall, I'm not a bad guy. I've always loved my family, and all I've ever wanted was the best for them. A good life, happiness, and, above all, security. It's just that my efforts to make sure they live their lives mindful of the risks that exist out there may have occasionally overstepped the bounds, or even backfired. So I won't blame you for coming away with the impression that I've behaved as a know-it-all, a dickhead—an asshole, if you will—who, rather than going around trying to tell everyone else how to run their lives, could have benefitted from minding his own business.

My married history is littered with examples of what an enlightened asshole I am, but the pertinent examples really begin with the day I was walking back to our new home from the corner of Chancery Park and Lilac Lane, where I'd just dropped a check for our latest property tax installment into the mailbox.

The housecoat lady was watering her driveway. She did this almost daily, sometimes more than once in a given twenty-four-hour period, usually decked out in a flowered housecoat. She'd unreel the hose from its wheel beside the garage, grip the nozzle, and squeeze, forcing lawn clippings and other microscopic bits of debris down the asphalt slope toward the street. She and her husband fussed a lot with their yard, weeding, tidying up the line where lawn meets sidewalk. “Thou shalt edge” was one of their commandments, but having a perfectly clean driveway was the ultimate virtue. Free of oil stains, and, usually, of cars, it would have been an excellent place to perform surgery on a sunny day. I waved to her as I walked past and shouted “Looking good!” over the sound of the spray.

Our house is at the corner of Chancery and Greenway Lane, fronting on Greenway, and approaching our driveway I could see something shiny at the front door. Looking more closely, I could see a set of keys hanging there.

My wife Sarah's Toyota Camry had been parked beside my aging Civic while I was gone. She'd evidently gotten home from work, and must have had her hands full with her briefcase or groceries, because her keys were still hanging from the front lock. The house key was fully inserted, and dangling from the ring were the keys to her car (an actual key plus a big plastic remote thingie with buttons for doors and trunk and a red strip that would set off the alarm if you pressed it hard enough), my Civic key, and one that opened her locker at the newspaper's workout room.

This wasn't the first time she'd left the keys in the door. One morning about six weeks ago, when I went down to get the paper that not only provides us with the news, but also pays Sarah's salary, I'd found her keys hanging from the lock. She'd gotten home from work about eight the night before, which meant the keys had been dangling there more than ten hours. Not only could someone have had access to the house, but they could have stolen both cars from the driveway. I'd strolled into the kitchen with The Metropolitan and tossed it, along with the keys, onto the table in front of Sarah. She recognized the error of her ways and I got a reluctant confession out of her.

The trouble was, even this wasn't the first time. A couple of months before that, our son Paul, who's fifteen, had found her keys in the door, about five minutes after she'd come home. But that time she claimed she knew, and that she'd come through the door carrying the dry cleaning and was headed back to get them when Paul came in. Nobody bought it, but there remained an element of reasonable doubt. We weren't going to get a conviction.

Maybe that was what had happened this time. It was still possible that at any moment she'd reappear to retrieve her keys, so I decided to give her a chance. I leaned up against the rear fender of her Camry, waiting, and gazed up and down our street.

There's not much to obstruct your view. The town of Oakwood planted maples on the boulevards, between the sidewalk and the curb, to give every homeowner a tree—two, if you had a corner lot as we did—but they'd only put them in a year ago. You could wrap your hand around the trunk, thumb and index finger touching. Someday, long after Sarah and I—and probably our kids, too—are gone from the planet, they may throw a lot of shade, but for now, they're the kind of trees that create little work for neighborhood youngsters looking for raking money. And there are few cars parked on the street, except for the ones in front of Trixie's place, two doors down. She runs an accounting business from home and has clients dropping in. Many of the houses come with double, or even triple, garages, and no one's renting out their basement.

While I waited to see whether Sarah would remember to retrieve her keys, Earl, the guy who lives across from Trixie's, came around the corner in his pickup. He backed into his driveway, got out, opened the garage, and started unloading bags of potting soil from the back of the pickup. When he spotted me leaning against the Camry, I waved, and he nodded back, but not all that invitingly. It had been my intention to stroll over and shoot the breeze, but now I held back. Then Earl looked over his shoulder, I guess to see whether I was still watching him. When he saw that I was, I suddenly felt awkward. So I said, “Hey.”

He nodded again, kind of shrugged, and when he didn't turn away, I crossed the street.

“Hey, Zack,” he said. Earl wasn't big on conversation. You had to drag it out of him. His head, which he shaved, gleamed with sweat, and his T-shirt was damp. The end of a cigarette was stuck between his lips. Earl was never without a smoke.

I shrugged. “Hey. How's things?”

He waved his hand dismissively. “Keeping busy.”

We were both quiet for a moment. I broke the silence with a question of startling brilliance.

“Back from the garden center again?”

Earl smiled. “Oh yeah. Never a day I'm not down there.” He paused. “So how goes the writing?”

“Not a bad day.” I think Earl had a hard time understanding how I can make a living sitting inside the house all day, not getting my hands dirty. I said, “Walked down to the corner, sent off my property taxes.”

Earl looked off in the direction of the mailbox. “How's the house?”

I shook my head. “I've gone through three tubes of caulking on our bedroom window. I don't even bother to put the ladder away. Every time it rains, a little more water gets in.”

“You complain?”

“I've phoned the developer. They say they're going to come, nothing happens. I'm gonna drop by the office; maybe appearing in person will make a difference. You hear that thing on the news?”

“What?”

“Guy comes into a variety store, shoots the owner right in the head, right in front of his wife.”

“Jesus. Here?” He tossed his butt onto his driveway, reached through the front window of his truck to grab a pack up on the dash.

“No. Downtown. Sarah phoned from work, she'd sent a reporter and a photographer out to cover it, was telling me about it, then I heard it on the radio.”

“Jesus,” Earl said again. “I'd never live downtown.” He stuck a new cigarette into his mouth, lit it, took a long drag, then blew the smoke out through his nose. Earl's history, as he'd explained it to me, involved living out on the East Coast, a bit of time out west. He was divorced, had no children, and seemed an unlikely candidate for the neighborhood, rattling around in a big, new house all by himself. But he'd told me he felt he needed to put some roots down somewhere, and a new subdivision, where a lot of people could use his talents as a landscaper, seemed as good a place as any to make a living. Paul had called on him several times for advice, although “pestered” might be a better word. Earl had been reluctant at first to let my son into his world, but finally, maybe just to get Paul off his back, he'd agreed to give him a few tips, and a couple of times on weekends I'd noticed Earl and Paul shirtless and sweating under a cloudless sky in the far corner of our yard, digging holes and planting small bushes.

“Well, we've been that route,” I said. “Living downtown. It was a worry, especially with kids, you know? Teenagers? There's so much they can get into in the city.”

“Not that they can't get into trouble out here,” Earl said. “You know kids, they'll find trouble wherever they are. Who's that clown?”

Earl had been looking down the opposite side of the street, a couple of houses past Trixie's. It was a guy going door to door. Tall and thin, short gray hair, about fifty I figured, armed with a clipboard. He was too casually dressed, in jeans and hiking boots and a plaid shirt, to be anyone official.

“Beats me,” I said. He had drawn a woman to the door, who listened, hanging her head out while she held the door open a foot, while he went through some spiel.

“I'm betting driveway resurfacing,” Earl said. “Every other day, some asshole wants to resurface my driveway.”

The woman was shaking her head no, and the man took it well, nodding politely. He was moving on to the next house when he saw me and Earl. “Hey,” he said, waving.

“Or ducts,” Earl said to me. “Maybe he want to clean your ducts.”

“I don't have any ducks,” I said. “I don't even have chickens.”

“You guys got a moment?” the man said, only a couple of yards away now. We shrugged, sure.

“My name's Samuel Spender,” he said. “I'm with the Willow Creek Preservation Society.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. I didn't give my name. Earl didn't give his either.

“I'm trying to collect names for a petition,” Spender said. “To protect the creek.”

“From what?” I asked.

“From development. Willow Creek is an environmentally sensitive area and one of the last unspoiled areas in Oakwood, but there are plans to build hundreds of homes backing right onto the creek, which will threaten a variety of species, including the Mississauga salamander.”

“Who?” It was the first word from Earl.

“Here's a picture,” Spender said, releasing a snapshot from under the clip of his clipboard. We looked at a four-legged, pale green creature with oversized eyes resting in a person's hand.

“Looks like a lizard,” Earl said.

“It's a salamander,” Spender said. “Very rare. And threatened by greedy developers who value profit over the environment.” He thrust the clipboard toward us, which held a lined sheet with about twenty signatures on it. There were other pages underneath, but whether they were blank or filled with names I couldn't tell.

I hate signing petitions, even for things I believe in. But when it's an issue where I don't feel fully informed, I have a standard dodge. I said to Spender, “Do you have any literature you could leave me, so I could read up on it?”

“Yeah,” said Earl. “Likewise.”

Something died in Spender's eyes. He knew he'd lost us. “Just read The Suburban. They've been following the story pretty closely. The big-city papers, like The Metropolitan, they don't give a shit because they're owned by the same corporations that put up the money for these developments.”

This didn't seem like a good time to mention where my wife worked. Spender thanked us for our time and turned back for the sidewalk to resume door-knocking. “That house?” I said, pointing. “That's mine, so you can skip it.”

“Salamanders,” Earl said to me quietly. “Think you can barbecue them?”

“They'd probably slip through the grills,” I said.

We chatted a moment longer. I told Earl, even though he hadn't asked, that Paul intended to pursue his interest in landscaping, maybe go to college someday for landscape design. It was, for me, a surprising development. Most kids his age wanted to design video games.

“He's good,” Earl offered. “He doesn't mind getting his hands in the dirt.”

“It's not my thing. Writers, you put a shovel in our hands, we start whining about blisters after five minutes.”

It was looking very much as though Sarah was not going to come to our front door and retrieve her keys. I felt I'd given her long enough to redeem herself, told Earl I had to go, and headed back to our house. On my way in, I took Sarah's set of keys from the lock and slid them into the front pocket of my jeans. I could hear her in the kitchen, and called out, “Hey!”

“Back here,” she said. It was a good-sized kitchen, with a bay window looking out onto the backyard, lots of counter space, and a dark spot in the ceiling above the double sink, where water from our improperly tiled shower stall had dripped down over several months. I tried not to look up at it too often; it made me crazy. I had to go over to the home sales office and make a fuss.

My earlier theory that Sarah had come through the front door weighed down with groceries was right. Empty bags littered the top of the kitchen counter. Some carrots and milk still had to be put into the fridge.

I turned to the fridge, which I seemed to recall was white, but was covered with so many magnets and pizza coupons and snapshots that it was hard to be sure. A large part of the door was taken up by a calendar that mapped out our lives a month at a time. It was on here that we recorded dental appointments, Sarah's shifts, lunches with my editor, dinners with friends, all in erasable marker. I noticed, just before I opened the door to put away the carrots and milk, that we were to attend an interview with Paul's science teacher in a little over a week. And a couple of days after that, Sarah's birthday was indicated with stars and exclamation points, drawn by her.

“Hey,” she said.

“I heard about the thing, the shooting, on the radio,” I said.

Sarah shrugged. “They're gonna take one story for the front, do a color piece for the front of Metro.”

“Uh-huh.” I had my hand in my pocket, running my fingers over the keys. “You got anything left out in the car that needs to come in?”

“Nope, that's it, I'm done. I shopped, you can cook. I've had it.” She'd worked nearly a double shift in the newsroom.

“What am I making?”

“There's chicken, I got some burgers, salad, whatever. I'm beat.”

This particular week, Sarah was on a shift where she had to be at the office by six, which meant she was up by half past four in the morning.

“Did you bring in your briefcase?” I thought mentioning the items she typically carries into the house with her might help jog her memory about the keys.

“I got it,” she said, sitting down on one of the kitchen chairs and taking off her shoes.

“You wanna beer?” I asked.

“If it comes with a foot massage,” Sarah said. I grabbed one from the fridge, twisted off the cap, and handed it to her.

“Massage to follow,” I said. “I got something I gotta do. Back in a minute.”

Sarah didn't bother to ask what, and took a sip of the beer instead. I slipped out the front door, used her keys to unlock her Camry, and backed out of the drive. I didn't need to go very far. Just down to the end of Chancery, then a right onto Lilac, just down from the mailbox. Far enough around the corner that the car wouldn't be visible from our place, even if you went and stood at the end of the driveway. I pulled it up close to the curb, made sure all the windows were up, locked it, and jogged back to the house, passing Spender, Defender of the Salamander, on the way. Sarah was still at the kitchen table when I came in.

“Where'd you go?”

“I bought some printer paper today and left it in the car,” I lied. “And then I saw Earl and got talking to him.”

Sarah nodded. She didn't know the neighbors as well as I did, and she'd never taken to Earl.

Her mind was still back at the office. “So this guy, the clerk, his wife's right there when he gets it.”

“The variety store thing. Yeah, awful.”

“Sometimes you're right.”

“Huh?”

“Moving out here. The last thing I wanted to do was move out of the city, but I'll admit I'm not looking over my shoulder out here like we did on Crandall. There's not addicts leaving their needles all over the slides at the playground, girls giving blowjobs in the backs of cars for fifty bucks, no guy waving his dick at you on the corner—”

“I remember him. What was his name?”

“Terry? Something like that? I always just thought of him as Mr. Dickout.”

“I ran into him once at the Italian bakery. He was buying some cannolis. Think there's a connection?”

“God, cannolis,” Sarah said, taking another swig from the beer bottle. “I looked, on the way home, at the grocery store, for some. They don't have them out here. No cannolis. It's so hard to find anything like that. Twinkies, those I can get. You want white bread, I can get that for you.”

“I know,” I said, quietly.

“And there's no place to get decent Chinese,” Sarah said. “The kids are always complaining that there's no decent Chinese out here, or Indian. The other night, Paul says he'd kill for a samosa. What happened to my foot massage?”

I was unwrapping some lean ground beef, not thinking about meal preparation so much as the plan I had put into motion. Later that night, maybe, or the next morning, when she got ready to leave for work, there'd be the payoff. At some point Sarah would happen to look out the window, or step out into the night air, and it would dawn on her that her car had gone AWOL. She'd dismiss it at first, figure I or our seventeen-year-old daughter Angie had it, and then she'd realize that I was in my study rereading what I had written that day, and that Angie was up in her room, or fighting with her brother, and she'd take a sudden, cold breath and say quietly, “Oh no.”

And right about then she'd picture her car keys in the door, and it would all come together for her.

“I can form burgers, or I can rub your feet,” I said. “Or I could do both, but I think I can speak for the rest of the family when I say the burgers should be done first.”

There's a set of sliding glass doors that open out from the kitchen to our small backyard deck. I went out there and opened the lid of the barbecue, unscrewed the tap atop the propane tank nestled underneath, and turned the dial for the grill's right side. When I heard the gas seeping in, I pressed the red button on the front panel to ignite the gas.

I clicked it once, then again, then a third time. “This thing doesn't work worth a shit,” I said to Sarah through the glass. I tried a fourth time, without success, and now I could smell the unignited gas, wafting up into my face. I turned the dial back to the “off” position and went into the kitchen for a pack of matches. I had done this before—dropped a lit match into the bottom of the barbecue, then turned on the gas. Worked every bit as well as the red ignition button, when the red ignition button was working.

I struck a match and dropped it in, thinking that the gas that had been there a moment earlier would have dissipated by now. But when the air around the grills erupted with a loud “WHOOMPFF!” and took the hair off the back of my right hand, I understood that I'd been mistaken.

I jumped back so abruptly it caught Sarah's attention. She threw open the door. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, shaking my hand and feeling like an idiot. “Man, that smarts.”

The leftover propane was definitely gone now, so I tried a second time, dropping a lit match into the barbecue, then turning the dial. The flame caught with a smaller “whoompf” and I closed the lid.

“You want something for your hand?” Sarah asked.

“No, I think it's okay.”

“Let me get something for it.” She headed upstairs to our bathroom, where she keeps first-aid supplies. From there she called down, “I've got some aloe here somewhere!”

The front door opened and Paul walked in. “Hey,” I said, standing in the front hall, holding my right hand with my left.

“Uhhn,” he said, walking past me. Then he noticed that the back of my hand was bright red. “Whadja do?”

“Barbecue,” I said.

“That button doesn't work,” Paul said.

“I know.”

“When's Mom getting home?”

“She's home. She's upstairs.”

“Car's not here.” He tipped his head in the direction of the driveway.

“I know. But don't say anything.”

“About what?”

“That the car's not there. She doesn't know the car's not there.”

Paul looked at me. “What happened? Did you smash it up or something? Because I was gonna ask her to drive me over to Hakim's after dinner.”

“I didn't smash it up. I just moved it.”

Now he looked at me harder. “You're doing something, aren't you?”

“Maybe.”

“Don't do another one of your lame-ass things, Dad. Are you trying to teach her a lesson or something? Because, like, we're all tired of that kind of thing. What'd she do? Leave the keys in the car?”

“Not quite. But sort of. Just go into the kitchen and butter some hamburger buns.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“I didn't ask if you were hungry. I asked you to butter—”

“I can't find the aloe!” Sarah shouted from the bathroom.

“Don't worry about it,” I said, but the truth was, the back of my hand was really stinging. “Maybe we've got something else. Like, I don't know, isn't butter supposed to help?”

“Butter? Where'd you hear that?”

“I don't know. I just thought I had.”

“I'm going to go out and get some aloe.” She was coming down the stairs now, reaching into the closet for her jacket, grabbing her purse on the bench by the front door.

“Really, it'll be fine.”

But Sarah wasn't listening. She was rooting around in her purse, looking for her keys.

“Where the hell are my . . .” she muttered. She threw her purse back on the bench and strode into the kitchen. “I must have left them in here when I brought in the groceries. . . .”

I hadn't planned to make my point about the keys this quickly. Things were ahead of schedule because I'd burned my hand and Sarah was frantic to ease my suffering. It was starting to look as though my timing could have been a bit better.

“I wonder if I left them in the car,” Sarah said, more to herself than anyone else. “Except I remember unlocking the door and—”

The bulb went off. You could see it in her eyes. She knew exactly where to find those keys. She strode confidently through the front hall to the front door, opened it, her eyes drawn to the lock.

Things did not turn out as she'd expected.

“Oh shit,” she said. “I was sure I'd left them there. Did you leave the door unlocked when you went out?”

“I don't think so,” I said.

“Then they have to be in the car.” She took one step out of the house and froze. I couldn't see her face at that point, with her back to me and all. But I had a pretty good idea how she must have looked. Dumbfounded. Dumbstruck. Panicked.

“Zack,” she said. Not screaming. More tentative. “Zack, Angie's not home yet, is she?”

“No,” I said. As far as she knew, I was unaware that her Camry was no longer in the driveway. I came up behind her. “Listen,” I said, shaking my hand at my side, trying to make the sting go away. “I should tell you—”

“Shit! Shit! Shit! You were right! Shit! I did it! It's all my fault. Jesus! Oh shit!”

She spun around and pushed by me on her way back into the house. She was headed straight for the kitchen, and I nearly had to run to catch up with her. She had the phone in her hand. “I'm going to have to call the police.”

“Sarah.” I didn't want her to make the call. The last thing I wanted was the 911 operator getting another false alarm from this address.

“The car's been stolen,” she confessed to me. “Shit, I can't believe this. I don't even know what I had in there. What did we have in the car? We had that stuff, from the trip, those Triptiks from the auto club, and a bag of old clothes in the trunk I was going to drop off at the Goodwill, and—”

“Don't call,” I said.

“—not that that's very valuable, but Jesus, we were going to give those to people who needed them, not some asshole who steals—”

“Put the phone down,” I said. But she wasn't listening. She was about to punch in the number, so I reached down into my pocket, pulled out her set of keys, and set them on the kitchen counter where she could see them.

She stared at them a moment, not comprehending. If her car had been stolen, how could I have the keys?

“It's around the corner,” I said, softly.

“I don't understand,” Sarah said. “You were using the car?”

“It's around the corner,” I repeated, whispering. “I moved it. Everything's fine.”

Sarah replaced the receiver, her face red, her breathing rapid and shallow. “Why did you move my car around the corner? And why have you got my keys?”

“Okay, you see, what happened is . . . you know how you thought you'd left your keys in the door?”

Sarah nodded.

“And you know how I've mentioned that to you before?”

Sarah nodded again, a bit more slowly this time.

“Anyway, when I came home, a couple of minutes after you . . .”

“I'd just come in with the groceries,” Sarah said slowly. “I stopped for them on my way home, even though I had a totally crappy day at the office, did five extra hours because Kozlowski booked off sick and we had the variety store thing, and picked up some things so we could have dinner.”

This was not good. Sarah was developing a tone. That meant she was already ahead of me. She knew where this story was going and how it was going to end. But I decided to tell the rest of it anyway. “So when I came up the driveway, I saw that your keys were hanging from the door, you know, where anyone could find them. This is the thing. You know, it's lucky for you, really, when you think about it, lucky for you that it was me coming up the driveway then, and not some, you know, crazy axe murderer or car thief or something instead, because that's what could have happened. You know I've mentioned this before, about you leaving your keys in the lock, and all I was trying to do was make a point, you see, to help you, so that you wouldn't do this sort of thing again and expose us to any, I guess you could say, unnecessary risk.”

Sarah was breathing much more slowly now. And just staring at me.

“So, you see, that's why I did what I did.”

“Which was what, exactly?”

“I moved the car, just, you know, just a little ways down the street. Like, around the corner.”

“Where I wouldn't be able to see it.”

“Yes. That, that was the plan.”

“And when I went to look for the keys, I wouldn't be able to find them, and then when I saw that the car was missing, I'd think it was stolen, and would have a fucking heart attack so that you could make a point, is that about right?”

“It was never my intention to give you a heart attack or anything. It was merely intended as a, well, as a lesson.”

“A lesson.”

I swallowed. “Yes.”

“I'm finished with school, Zack. I graduated. I have a university degree. I'm an adult now, and the last person I need to take lessons from is you.”

“I just felt that this might help you remember in the future.”

“You know what else might have helped me remember in the future? You could have taken my keys out of the door, walked up to me, and said something like ‘Here, honey, you left your keys in the door.' And I would have been grateful, and said, ‘Thank you very much, next time I'll try to be more careful.'”

“Well, in fact, the first time you did it, that's exactly what I—”

“And here's the part that really gets me. I'm running around this house, trying to find my keys, so I can race over to the drugstore, to get you some fucking ointment so you can put it on your stupid hand where you burned it because you dropped a lit match into a gas-filled barbecue, which, if memory serves me, I have told you before never to do!”

Paul had been standing at the door to the kitchen the whole time, and now that there was a brief pause in the screaming, he decided it was safe to navigate his way between us so he could get to the fridge. “Nice going, Dad,” he said. “It's the backpack thing all over again.”

Before sending me out to fetch her car, Sarah said to me, “God, you are such an asshole.”

You see what I mean. You're not the only one.