The Realm of Last Chances Read online

  In summers when she was a child and out of school, her father would have been sitting in a porch rocker, too, drinking his coffee and reading the Harrisburg paper. But he never would’ve seen anybody out walking a dog; back then they roamed the neighborhood at will, and nobody saw anything wrong with that. Her family lived on a narrow strip of land between Penns Creek and the Susquehanna, and dogs didn’t run away or get lost because the bridge over the creek was an open-grate construction they couldn’t cross. Sometimes you’d see the Airedale that belonged to their next-door neighbors, the Connultys, standing there looking as if he might try it, but eventually whatever reason he possessed would take over, forcing him to turn around and head for home.

  Sooner or later on those mornings in the late sixties her mother would get up, go outside and join her father, and through her window she would hear them exchange pleasantries.

  “How are you, dear?”

  “Fine. And you?”

  “Perfectly wonderful. I don’t think I ever rested better.”

  “Want part of the paper?”

  “No, thank you. I believe I’ll just sit for a while and listen to the morning.”

  Whatever sounds the morning made, her own ear wasn’t attuned to them. Sometimes she’d fall asleep again, but more often than not she’d pad downstairs, and before long her father would come back inside and begin making breakfast.

  At the time it hadn’t occurred to her that her family was living the kind of life that many people around the country were starting to question. As far as she knew, it was just normal, and if it was normal for them, she figured, it must be for everyone else. But once or twice she’d wandered into the living room, where her father was watching the evening news, and seen footage of young people lying around in the mud up in Woodstock with glazed expressions on their faces, or wielding bullhorns on the steps of some building in Berkeley or Madison, or burning a flag on the National Mall.

  “Why are they doing that?” she once asked.

  Her dad was having his evening drink, a double shot of Tullamore Dew. A copy of Look lay spread open on his knee. The sound on the Zenith was turned down so low you could barely hear it. “Doing what?”

  She pointed at the screen. “Burning the flag.”

  He squinted at the TV. “They’re against the war.”

  “Will setting the flag on fire make the war stop?”

  “No.”

  “Then why do they do it?”

  “It’s a symbol.”

  “Of what?”

  “Everything they don’t like about America. Or at least a lot of what they don’t like.”

  “What else don’t they like?”

  He drained his glass of whiskey, closed the magazine and laid it on the floor by his easy chair. Then, moving with the stealthy grace of a big man who’d once played football at the small college on the other side of town, he leaped out of the chair, gathered her in his arms and pretended he was rocking her in a cradle, even though she must have been seven or eight years old. “They don’t like this,” he said.

  She was looking right up into his rosy face. When the high school where he and her mother taught held its Christmas parties, he always played Santa, so deeply had he impressed himself on everyone as a man of good cheer. “This what?”

  “Family bliss,” he said, faint fumes on his breath. “They hate it worse than cancer.”

  As if his statement were the moral equivalent of a dollar bill, she accepted it at face value, leaving aside any question she might have had as to why anybody, anywhere, at any time, could hate the sight of a happy family. She was in her father’s arms, and he was holding her so high above the Zenith that she no longer could see those people burning the flag and within seconds had forgotten they even existed.

  • • •

  She walked around for more than an hour, familiarizing herself with Cedar Park. There was an elementary school five or six blocks from their house, and a little beyond that, on the other side of the commuter rail line that she’d been told had its terminus in Haverhill, she passed Cedar Park High, deserted now except for a couple pickups she assumed must belong to the janitorial staff. Otherwise Tremont Street was lined with body shops, auto-parts stores, lube centers. She saw a car wash, too, and decided that either today or tomorrow she’d ask Cal to run her Volvo through. A thick layer of road scum covered the car, and some of it had probably attached itself before they even left the valley. It was odd to think that a speck of dirt picked up on one end of the continent could have made it to the other, but she supposed it wasn’t out of the question.

  When she trudged back up the hill into Montvale, she was bone-tired. Suzy was doing even worse, panting like her heart was about to burst, her loose tongue sprinkling the sidewalk. At one point Kristin thought she was going to lie down and refuse to walk any farther. If that happened, she’d have to sit there beside her until Suzy made up her mind to get moving. She couldn’t carry an eighty-pound Lab.

  But they finally reached her street, where a fair amount of activity seemed to be in progress. In one yard, two boys were tossing a baseball back and forth, their father backing out in a black pickup that said KELLY’S HEATING AND PLUMBING on the door, and in the next yard another boy was laying out balls and mallets, getting ready for a game of croquet. The old woman who’d been sitting in the rocker the last time she walked by was now down on her knees beneath a lush hydrangea, wielding a small spade.

  Across the street, on the porch of a blue Queen Anne with bay windows on all three floors and badly chipped shingles, a man leaned over to pick up his paper. He had salt-and-pepper hair, looked to be about forty and wore a beige terry-cloth bathrobe. He opened the paper, glanced at the front page, then stood up straight, and his gaze met hers before traveling downward in a manner she found vaguely insolent. “Hey,” he called, “where’d you get that T-shirt?”

  Uncertain what she was wearing, she looked down to see. It was one she’d bought years ago in San Francisco, at a Clean Well Lighted Place for Books. There was a drawing of Milan Kundera on it and, beneath his image, the legend KUNDERA ROCKS. “I got it in California,” she said. “We just moved here.”

  “I saw the plates on the car and truck.” He stepped off the porch and into the street. “I’m Matt. Welcome to the neighborhood.”

  As she and Suzy moved toward him, it occurred to her that, in a manner of speaking, she might soon become his boss, that he could easily be a professor at North Shore State College, which was only a few miles away. Even in the most educated part of the country, how many nonacademics would you meet on the street who’d respond like this to Kundera? “I’m Kristin,” she said.

  “Pleased to meet you.” He pointed at the dog. “And who’s that?”

  “Suzy.”

  He bent and patted her head. “Looks like a real sweetheart.”

  “I think we walked too long. She’s not used to hills and humidity.”

  “Plenty of both around here,” he said, once more glancing at her chest. “You like Kundera?”

  The question wasn’t complicated, but an honest answer would be. She didn’t read nearly as much as she used to, and she hadn’t read the Czech writer’s last three or four books. She didn’t even know the titles. Once she left the faculty and moved into administration, she began spending a lot of time in meetings and even more time poring over personnel files, checking people’s credentials and publications. When she did read a novel, it usually had short chapters and a linear plot. “I liked his early work a lot,” she said.

  “Me too. What’s the cutoff for you?”

  She tried to recall the name of the last one she’d read. “Immortality, maybe?”

  “It’s even further back for me. I thought the work thinned out badly when he began writing in French. But then, you know, he lost his fictional universe, just like le Carré.”

  He was making her feel stupid and, since she knew she wasn’t, she wanted to end the conversation. “Well, you may have a point,” she
said.

  “Sure. Because of the pyrotechnics, people don’t think of Kundera as a Cold War novelist, but that was his landscape. When he lost it—well, it’s about like taking Mississippi away from Faulkner. You’ve got to know where you are to write about it well. Don’t you think?”

  What she thought was that she’d better find out whether or not they’d be working at the same place. One lesson she’d absorbed in California was that you needed to keep your distance from the faculty. When the time came to make a tough decision, you shouldn’t let sentiment intrude. So many good people were looking for jobs that you couldn’t justify rewarding the unaccomplished or inept. “You sound like you’ve got a serious interest in literature,” she said. “Are you a professor, by any chance?”

  This provoked the most curious response; she’d think about it off and on for the remainder of the day and would even wake up the next morning with it still on her mind. He looked up the street and then down at his feet as his facial muscles lost all semblance of tone. He tucked the paper under his arm and said he worked at an Italian deli on Main Street in Montvale and that sometime she ought to try their lobster salad. Then he climbed the porch steps and went inside.

  the drinnans had taken up residence on Essex Street in 1961. The husband—Terrance, though everybody called him Terry—had opened an independent insurance agency two years earlier, when he and his wife were still living in an apartment in Cedar Park. They chose the Queen Anne on Essex because it straddled the border between the two towns in which almost all of his customers lived. Terry knew ahead of time that it was going to be sold—he carried the fire insurance on it—and this information allowed him to make an offer and have it accepted before the house actually appeared in the real-estate listings.

  His office was just three blocks away, on East Border Road, the main link between the two towns. The proximity of his business allowed him to walk to and from work and to return home most days for lunch. He did so even in winter, no matter how deep the snow was, persisting in his habit even though this involved descending a treacherous hill—a task that became more arduous as the sixties turned into the seventies and then the eighties and he entered what would, in his own case, be a foreshortened middle age. He liked to joke that the majority of auto accidents he was forced to make payouts on occurred on the same street where his agency stood. Cedar Park residents gave East Border Road a workout every Friday and Saturday night, traveling between their homes and the liquor stores in Montvale.

  Almost everybody in both towns knew and respected Terry Drinnan, but when most people thought of the family it was his wife who came to mind. Whereas he’d moved to the North Shore only after graduating from Holy Cross, Elizabeth’s relatives had lived in Montvale for close to a hundred years: she’d grown up in an octagonal house on Pond Street that had once been owned by Colonel Elbridge Gerry, who, though a citizen of some distinction, was unrelated to the famous statesman of the same name.

  No one ever called Elizabeth Drinnan “Liz” or “Betsy.” She wouldn’t have minded if they did, and in fact she often wondered why they didn’t, though she never voiced her puzzlement to another living soul. She thought maybe there was something off-putting about her, some quirk in her makeup that made her seem distant, even when surrounded by friends, of which she had many. The baby shower given in her honor following the birth of her son was the largest anyone could recall, cars lining Essex for two or three blocks and a few parked all the way back on East Border.

  Like her mother and both of her sisters, Elizabeth became a mainstay of the Fortnightly Club of Montvale, a women’s group “devoted to the preservation of natural resources, the promotion of the arts, education, civic involvement and world peace.” She served twice as president of the local chapter and, in the midnineties, after the death of her husband, was elected for a term to the same office in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs of Massachusetts. Plenty of evidence proved that people liked her, and if she’d never achieved best-friend status with anybody, neither had she ever made an enemy.

  That was what she told herself when she learned of her son’s troubles: Thank God I’ve never made enemies. By then she’d been a widow for thirteen years, living on a fixed income that seemed to shrink daily. Paint was peeling off the house in great swathes, the front steps were half eaten by Ice Melt, the furnace had entered its third decade and she was still driving the last car Terry had bought, a 1991 Skylark, but she continued to dress well and take proper care of herself. People kept inviting her to social events just as they always had, and every few months one friend or another would attempt to introduce her to a man her age or slightly older who’d recently lost his wife. She declined those offers but was unfailingly polite.

  It was a good thing, she decided, that she’d never asked favors for herself and that she’d lived within her means, constrained as they might be. She entertained this thought as she waited in the lobby of Cedar Park Savings and Loan one day in late January 2005. Outside, big soft snowflakes were disappearing as soon as they hit the pavement. The temperature was due to fall, though, and by tomorrow morning, according to what she’d heard on the radio, the North Shore could expect somewhere between ten and fourteen inches. The grayness of the afternoon matched her mood exactly. The previous day, George W. Bush had been inaugurated for the second time, and she’d sat alone in her living room watching TV with the sound turned off, knowing as surely as she’d ever known anything that she wouldn’t live long enough to see the country choose a better leader. She was seventy-one years old, and it hadn’t been quite twenty-four hours since her son asked if there was any chance that she could possibly help him raise thirty-five thousand dollars.

  “I pissed, shit and came, all at the same time,” Dushay said while he, Matt and Frankie worked on a trio of four-foot subs for a retirement party at Fellsway Fence Company. Frankie always insisted they finish the special orders before the lunch crowd arrived. Selling sandwiches was 70 percent of his business and working people didn’t have all day to stand in line.

  “See, I’d gotten banged up the previous night in the big game against Reading,” Dushay continued, “and to kill the pain I went to sleep on a heating pad. Damn thing burned a hole in my hip, and then all my fucking effluvia got in the wound and created a septic situation, and next thing I know I’m in the hospital dying. Which is tragic—right?—because at the time I’m just sixteen. My old man told me later that the doctors said I was a goner. And I’ll tell you something, Ziz. I’m not one of those people who questions the existence of God. I know He’s up there, because while I was dying I saw Him. His Son, anyways—Him and the Virgin Mary. Only thing was, Jesus looked older than she did. I don’t know how to explain that. Some shit’s just plain mysterious.”

  “Douche, I got limited interest right now in theology,” Frankie Zizza said, dropping black olives down the middle of a sub in a perfect row. His wife, though raised Catholic, had recently converted to some off-brand Protestant denomination with a high percentage of Tea Party members. Frankie himself had been proclaiming his atheism ever since high school. “You ask me, religion’s ruining the goddamn country.”

  “It’s not religion I’m talking about, Ziz. It’s mystery. It’s the mystery at the fucking heart of things.”

  “The mystery at the middle of my fucking heart,” Frankie said, “is what made me hire this douche bag in the first place. If somebody could answer that one, I’d say he was positively Socratic.”

  The previous afternoon, a customer had ordered a pound of roast beef. Since the tray in the display case had only a few strands left, Dushay strolled into the back room, pushed aside the better part of a sixteen-pound hunk that Matt had opened just that morning and took out a new one. Frankie bought them from a high-end wholesaler who used no preservatives or caramel coating, so they didn’t last long, and each one cost close to eighty dollars.

  Lawrence Dushay was in his late twenties and a dead ringer for the actor Steve Buscemi, which helped the Saug
us police identify him a couple years ago when he tried to fence a bunch of laptops stolen from Best Buy. He was one of several guys Frankie had hired after they got out of jail; most of them had worked out well, as he liked to note, and two owned businesses themselves now. Dushay, however, was proving peculiarly inept. His first day on the job, ogling a female customer while slicing pastrami, he caught his sleeve in the Berkel and might’ve lost a finger or two if Matt hadn’t reached over and shut off the machine. He overcharged some and undercharged others. He cut thick slices when people asked for thin and vice versa. One day he showed up in flip-flops.

  “You’re not still pissed about that roast beef, are you?” he asked now.

  “Pissed?” Frankie said. “No, Douche, of course not. Why would I be pissed? I’m really happy about it. I’m especially pleased for Eddie and Wolf.”

  “Who’re they?”

  “Eddie and Wolf are my fucking mutts, Douche. They’ll be the ultimate beneficiaries of your generosity. Day after tomorrow they’ll chow down on eight or ten pounds of rotten roast beef.”

  They finished the subs, and Dushay was dispatched to deliver them. As soon as the door closed behind him, Zizza shook his head. “That guy,” he said, “is a walking oil spill.”

  Matt pulled off the gloves they had to wear when handling food. They were made of powder-free polyethylene and supposedly could not cause an allergy, but lately he’d developed red patches on both hands, around the base of each knuckle. As he’d learned some time ago, every profession has its hazards. “He might’ve been better off if they’d kept him in jail,” he said, then instantly wished he hadn’t offered that opinion.

  Frankie had been his best friend from first grade through high school, though nobody could figure out what drew them together: Matt Drinnan, bookish, upper middle class, college bound, and Frankie Zizza, a working-class Italian who did so badly in school that his father finally persuaded the principal to release him each day at lunchtime, so he could hustle down to the deli and learn to make the sandwiches he’d spend the rest of his life selling. Each of them had always been able to tell when he’d aroused the other’s displeasure, and Matt knew he’d incurred Frankie’s just now.