Kids These Days (15 page)

The problem was with the foundations. There were four of them—two right down on the water, and two closer to a big pit that was supposed to end up being the pool. It had about a foot of black water in it. Hurley kept trying to say things were mainly fine. Mid broke a piece of concrete off with his hand, held the chunk out in front of him. “When'd you pour them?” he asked.

“They still need to cure up,” Hurley said.

“Right, but when?”

Hurley looked off across the Intracoastal. “Last week,” he said. “It rained the second day.”

“We'll have to tear them out,” Mid said, but gently, almost.

“I know that.”

“How much are you in right now?”

“Forty-five hundred.”

“That's it?”

“I worked a deal with my cousin.”

Mid knocked off another section of what might have been living room. “I think your deal is maybe not such a deal.”

“Shit,” Hurley said. “Don't show it to me, for fuck's sake.” He left us there at the water, walked back up to the main building.

“Is he alright?” I asked Mid.

“He comes and goes.” He kicked at the back wall. I expected the whole thing to come down, but it held. He said, “Progress-wise, I guess we'd have to call this a little bit of a setback.”

I said, “I still don't see what your stake is. If all he's trying to do is cover up his—”

“Don't talk about that out here,” Mid said. “Not a great idea.”

“Fine,” I said, “but—”

“I'll map it out for you later on,” he said, tossing his piece of concrete in the water.

“I'd like that.”

“Wouldn't we all.”

A car came up the drive, that crunching sound of shell and sand, stopped on the rise, sat there idling. A silver Crown Vic. Blue lights in the grill flicked on, flicked back off again. Mid said, “I imagine that's for me.” I didn't know whether to wish it was or wasn't. “Hang on a second?” he said.

“No problem,” I said.

He climbed up there. Somebody on the passenger side rolled the window down. I think I'd been trying to hope he'd made up the part about the agents, or at least stretched it into a bigger, badder story—but now there they were, in plain sight, and I got a fairly clear vision of all this unspooling itself badly, of Mid, Inc., going under, of Mid himself doing actual jail time in actual jail. And if that happened, if Alice was right and all this went to shit, what then? What if there was nothing left to caretake? Maybe I could find a local and beg my way into a drive-through teller spot. I'd break my suits and ties back out, cling like a goddamn child to the very final shred of what I knew. Roll nickels. Run the vacuum tubes back and forth full of deposit slips and driver's licences. Lollipops for the kids, biscuits for the dogs. Is there anything else I can do for you today, ma'am? Sir? Thank you for banking at Coastal Coin & Trust.

Mid was nodding his head a lot. It looked cool inside the cruiser, and suddenly I wanted to be in there instead of out in the heat, wanted a badge in my pocket and the safety and security of a grateful citizenry to serve and protect. That would be one way to chalk through the days. I pressed a finger against my sunburned arm, watched the skin go white, then fade back pink. A cattle egret—I'd been studying Aunt Sandy's books—landed right down at the water, walked back and forth. Across the waterway a couple guys were trailering a flat-bottomed boat down to the edge of the sand. I spied. I waited. Mid finished what business he had up on the hill—sales figures, ages of consent—smacked his open palm twice on the hood, and the cops backed up, drove away. Once they were out of sight, he looked back at me like he was only just remembering I was still there. “So,” he said. “Let's you and me go talk Hurley into getting these things built right.”

I said, “You're not going to tell me what the hell that was?”

“More of the same. Nothing new. Well, sort of. Now they want to bug the store.”

“They what?”

“I told them I was no longer truly in a place where I could be telling anybody what they could or could not store in my home. Said if they wired me up, all they'd hear was Carolyn telling me how it was. So they said, OK, Plan B.”

I said, “If you bug the store, won't everybody quit when they find out you're secretly taping them?”

“Fuck, man, won't I have to fire everybody anyway once they're all arrested?”

“I guess that makes sense,” I said.

“It sucks,” he said, “but it does make sense.”

I said, “I think I need to know how bad this is.”

“The cabins?”

“All of it.” I'd tried to go small, figure out one thing at a time, and that wasn't working. “I don't really understand anything out here,” I said.

“Welcome to Florida,” he said. He pulled on his shirt collar. “Alright. These foundations aren't as bad as you think. Even if we have to get somebody to haul all this off and start completely over, it only puts us under a week or two. And it probably doesn't make much difference. He can't open until next season as it is.”

“But what about the rest?” I said.

“Hard to say. Looks like all they want is to set up their little cloak-and-dagger gig, sit in some van all day long wearing headphones, maybe find the guy who sells to the guy who sells to the kids. They want to make the papers, run for office.”

“That's what they want,” I said. “To set up a cop show at the pizza shop.”

“That's what they said, anyway.”

“With your help.”

“With our permission, more like.”

“Ours?”

“Mine.”

“Are you in it?”

“I'm attached to it, let's say. It belongs to me. It's happening on my watch.”

“I can't be involved in this,” I said. “Whatever this is, it can't be me.”

“Don't worry,” he said. “Let's get you involved in these cabins right here. That's it. This can be your thing.”

“Except you said these were crooked.”

“I said they were complicated. Whatever he does with his money is his thing, on his books. We're investment partners, free and clear. These are rental cabins. We'll build them and rent them to real people who'll love them. They'll come back year after year. Come on—this is right in your wheelhouse. It's got your name all over it.”

“I'd have to see the books,” I said.

“I love it. You're doing it already. Let's go in there and have you lay some financial mumbo-jumbo on him, maybe frighten him a little bit.”

“He doesn't seem like the type to get frightened,” I said.

“Just jerk a chain in his ass. A knot in his chain. Whatever.”

“You want me to scare the black-market guy.”

“Don't piss him all the way off,” Mid said. “Just make it a little less likely he'll hire cousin Jimmy to pour the foundations.”

“I'll try,” I said.

“Great. Then this can be your baby.”

I said, “I've already got a baby.”

“This can be your other baby.”

I looked around, made measure again of how close we were to the water. “All I know is I'd never build down here like this,” I said.

“Perfect,” he said, smiling down at me like I was the son he never had. “You'll figure it out as you go. You'll improvise. The foundations can't be any worse than they already are. The stakes are very low. You'll be great.”

Alice had a baby monitor set up when I got home. She was sitting in the den looking at it, a black-and-white picture of the front bedroom on the little screen. You could see the foiled-over windows, the crib in the corner, some bags of clothes Carolyn had brought by—the smallest jeans in the world, tiny sun hats. It looked like Alice had set the camera up on the floor, which did strange things to the perspective. There was a low static hiss. I said, “How was your day?”

“No bleeding,” she said. “No nausea. All clear. How was yours?”

“Fine,” I said. I was working out how to tell her: Mid is operating according to some other set of rules, ones we don't know anything about. “I think the cabins might be mine now.”

“How are they yours?”

“He wants me to be the project manager. I'm supposed to get them built.”

She turned around. “What do you know about building cabins?”

“These ones seem like they need new foundations.”

“That doesn't seem like enough to really go on,” Alice said.

“I'm mainly supposed to threaten this other guy to make sure he builds them right.” Our voices echoed back at us on the monitor. “Where'd you get this thing, anyway?”

“I ordered it in the mail.” She spun some dials, and the picture got clearer, then fuzzier. “So that's what you do now? Threaten people?”

“I'm more like the bouncer. I'm the heavy.”

“You're not big enough to be a bouncer.”

“I'm not big enough to be anything.”

“Well, this makes plenty of sense.” She flicked another switch, and the picture zoomed in. We were right up against the crib. “Carolyn called. She wants us to go to that pancake supper later on.”

“I don't know what that is.”

“Mid didn't mention it?”

“I think he was too busy running the world.”

“I said we'd go.”

“What we?”

“Mid and Carolyn, the girls, you and me. All of us. She thought it'd be fun. It's a fundraiser or something for the volunteer firefighters.”

“We don't have a regular fire department?”

“We do. This one's for wildfires, I think. Off the island. Over by them.”

I checked the monitor again. The crib looked like it was glowing. “How does it see in there without the lights on?” I said.

“I just turned it on, and it worked.”

“Is this what we're going to use?”

“I don't know,” she said. “Why?”

“Will we have to be watching it all the time?”

“No,” she said. “Of course not.”

“I didn't mean—”

She clicked it off. “I told Carolyn we'd be there by six. I'm going to take a shower.”

It was five-thirty. I said, “We're going to be late.”

“Then I'll hurry,” she said, and got up, left the room, and shut the bathroom door—hard.

It was Mid. It was the cops on the hill, and it was what was true and what was not true, and all the space in between. It was the fucking crib, my own childhood crib, which my parents had FedExed us right after the move. It came in a huge crib-sized box. I'd cut the hell out of my hand putting it back together. I sat on the sofa and looked at the blank screen of the monitor. When I heard the water come on, I chased her in there, sat on the toilet, watched the steam collect on the mirror. “I'm sorry,” I said.

“It's a monitor,” she said. “That's all it is. It's a video game.”

“I know.”

“I don't know why you can't stand there and watch the thing and at least pretend like you're interested.”

“I didn't know we were getting a video monitor,” I said.

“You didn't know we were getting any monitor.”

“You didn't say anything about it,” I said.

“Would you have cared? At all?”

I opened the sink cabinet, looked in at Aunt Sandy's cleaning supplies all lined up. “Here's what I don't get,” I said.

“What?”

“If she wants to have dinner all the time, why won't she let him come back home?”

“You're changing the subject?”

“I'm asking you a question.”

“And you're taking his side.”

“No side,” I said. “I just want to know.”

She was quiet a minute. Then she said, “Because he hasn't asked. She was the one who said they should have dinner as a family, and now she's ready for him to have an idea.”

“He has ideas,” I said.

“He has schemes. And she doesn't think she should be the one to have to fix everything every time.”