Kids These Days (2 page)

“We don't have this kind of money.”

“But would you?”

I said, “It depends.”

“On what?”

“On factors,” I said, reaching, trying to keep things steady. “Various factors.”

“That doesn't mean anything.”

“I wasn't ready for the question.”

She said, “Do pelicans—do they even have anything to do with pine trees? That's not where pelicans live.”

I said, “We should look in the books when we get home.”

She piled her hair up on top of her head and rolled her window down. In profile, she looked like pictures of herself as a little kid—short sharp nose, long eyelashes, not quite smiling, not quite sure of the camera. I reached over and traced the few freckles on her neck. She closed her eyes.

The cicadas had cranked up for the evening. The tree frogs, too. A little breeze blew. It smelled like the water might be about where it was, a few miles behind us. There were turns off the main Pelican Pines road, or places for turns, places where the paving just quit and dumped into sandy gray soil. The area they'd cleared for the subdivision was maybe the size of twenty football fields. After that, there was forest. It was nice, in a devastatingly isolating way. “We can't just sit here,” she said.

I said, “We can if you'd like.”

“I would like,” she said. “But we definitely can't.”

I dropped the car back into gear and rolled us into Pelican Pines. By the time we'd made it to the driveway, Mid and Carolyn were already out the door. No sneaking up on them in a place like this. One selling point. But Alice was right: The house did feel odd, standing alone like it was, like a scaled-up dollhouse—the even grass, the flowers blooming pink and yellow, the shutters squared so nicely to the sides of the windows. It was as if they'd helicoptered in a finished house and lawn from somewhere else, somewhere like Missouri. There were concrete statues of pelicans at the bottom of the driveway. We got out of the car and already Carolyn and Alice were hugging, and Mid was shaking my hand, grinning the grin of a tall tan man with a good shave and a good jaw, standing in an immaculate front yard, not wearing any shoes. He had a drink going in a wide tumbler. “Come on ahead,” he said. “We'll give you the grand tour.”

Alice said, “You guys really are the only ones in here.”

“I told you we were,” he said.

“I know, but I don't think I totally had it pictured,” she said.

“Wait until we tell you the rest,” said Carolyn, who was in all green, shirt and skirt, like a bridesmaid.

“What rest?” Alice said.

Carolyn turned to Mid. “You tell them.”

I looked around, at the flat land stretching back to the highway, at all the places where houses were supposed to be, and I had it. I knew it. “You bought in,” I said.

“One-third,” said Mid. “And we got our lot for free.”

“He wanted to wait until you saw it to tell you,” Carolyn said.

Alice said, “Do you mean—”

“When all this sells,” Mid told us, “when they build all this in, we'll be sitting pretty. You're looking at luxury lots here, folks.”

“Luxury?” I asked.

“Has something to do with what kind of house you intend to build on it,” he said.

“You mean like this kind?” said Alice.

“We know it's big,” Carolyn said. “But the architect kept coming back with new ideas, and we just decided, you know, let's go for it.”

Alice ran her hands over her dress, a thin-strapped thing with flowers on it I'd never seen before, something she must have bought down here. There was a line of sweat on her lip. She said, “You went for it, alright.”

“Well, the girls each get their own room now, and we got the master we wanted—”

“I didn't mean it like that,” Alice said. “I'm sorry. That came out all wrong.”

“It's alright,” said Carolyn. “It looks strange right now. We know that.”

“Sure,” Mid said. “But wait until we've got a few other houses in here. Wait until it looks like a real street. Picture some kids riding bikes up and down, folks in their lawns in the evenings, out walking their dogs—”

“Are they selling?” I asked him. “The lots?”

“They will be. We had somebody through today to look at 34 for a second time.”

“Which one's that?” Alice asked.

“Over there, I think,” said Carolyn, pointing at one of the sewer stubs, and everybody turned around.

Alice said, “Is that a good one?”

“They're all good,” Mid said. “Every last one of them.”

“They look good,” I said, trying to imagine a neighborhood where there wasn't any.

Carolyn took a long breath, said, “Why don't I take Leecy and show her the pool? You guys can meet us out back.” Leecy was Carolyn's nickname for Alice growing up. I'd never heard Alice use one for Carolyn.

“Great,” said Mid. “Will do.”

She handed him her glass. “Freshen me up?”

“Absolutely,” he said, and I watched them walk away, my wife and her older sister, same tallish height, same red hair, Alice's cut a few inches longer. Same basic build, even, though Alice was a little slighter. Carolyn wasn't heavy—just athletic, like she was maybe ready to do some pole vaulting. It was clear she went to the gym, picked things up. Alice asked her a question, and Carolyn laughed, the sound echoing back to us from the trees. Mid put his hand on my back. “Let's go show you the castle,” he said. Carolyn and Alice rounded the corner, and I turned and followed him up the stairs.

Inside, their twin daughters—the middle ones, twelve years old—were practicing what looked like karate in the living room, which was cavernous, astonishing, had cathedral ceilings and an obscene entertainment center taking up the bulk of one long wall. The girls were wearing white robes, white socks. Matching blond ponytails. They hollered out vowel sounds after every move. “Hi,” I said. One of them turned and waved, and the other pivoted, shouted, kicked her neatly in the side.

“No fair,” the kicked one yelled. I always had trouble telling them apart at first.

“Tae kwon do tests the mind as well as the body,” said the kicker. “It tests concentration.” The other one lunged at her, tried a roundhouse punch, took down a lamp.

“Jane,” Mid said. “Sophie. Could you do that upstairs, please? Or outside?”

“This is our dojo,” Sophie said. Or Jane.

“This is not your dojo.”

“We have to practice for the meet.”

“Outside,” Mid said. “Or upstairs. The living room is not the place for—” He turned to me. “Help me out here, Walt.”

“Is kicking allowed in tae kwon do?” I asked.

“I guess it is,” he said.

“Hello?” said Sophie-Jane. “It's called a snap kick?”

“No snap kicks in the living room,” said Mid.

“Dad,” she said, complaining.

“Not while company's here. Say hello to Uncle Walter.”

They said, “Hello, Uncle Walter,” at the same time.

“Just Walter's fine,” I said.

Sophie-Jane said, “Can we watch TV, at least?”

“If you do it quietly,” he said.

“Can we watch the one in here?” the other one asked.

Mid pulled a glass from the cabinet. “So long as you don't snap-kick it.” He gave me a
what-can-you-do?
look, held the glass up. “What's your poison?” he said.

“Whatever you're having is fine.”

“Vodka and pineapple. Little soda water on top.”

“Perfect,” I said, because he could have said almost anything, and it wouldn't have mattered—there was a lot coming in at one time, a lot of family. One quick piece of what was headed our way. The girls sat down next to each other on the sofa. I wondered if Mid and Carolyn had a system for knowing which was which. I'd probably just have one of them dunk her thumb in ink every morning.

“So,” Mid said. “What do you think?”

“Of the house?”

“The house, the development, the whole package. This was sort of your gig, right?”

“I did mortgages,” I said, though that already felt like some other life, a cartoon badly drawn.

“These'll have mortgages. Come on. Tell me.”

Luxury lots. In the jungle. I have some swampland, I was thinking. “We've only been here five minutes,” I said. “What I've seen so far looks good.”

“It really could be,” he said. “It really, really could.”

“So long as you don't think you're too far away, I guess.”

“From what?”

“From the beach, from civilization, whatever. You know this better than I do.”

He broke into a wide grin. “Let me tell you this part, OK? You're gonna love this. Next year, they're building a high school right—” He walked me over to the back door, pointed out a stand of trees that looked exactly like all the other trees. “—over there. Kids'll be able to walk through the woods to get to it. This place is a gold mine, Walter, I'm telling you. They will
walk to school
. It is a sparkling goddamn gold mine.”

“Dad,” Sophie-Jane called, without looking away from the television.

“We're cursing less in the house,” he said. “Had a family meeting, came to an agreement. Now we have a curse jar.”

“Sounds great.”

“Fucking chaps my ass,” he said, too quietly for them to hear. He shook his head, headed back to the kitchen to finish up the drinks. I poured some of our water in a wine glass for Alice, and we went outside. “Check out the pool,” he said. He cracked an ice cube in his mouth. “Heated in winter. We special-ordered the tiles around the edge from Italy.”

There was a waterfall on one end. The tiles he was pointing out were green glass. What they'd done was build themselves a hotel. “They're terrific,” I said.

“I mean, maybe it wasn't exactly worth it, but what ever is?”

Their oldest daughter, Olivia, was sitting off to the side in a low wooden beach chair, reading a magazine. I couldn't remember if she'd turned sixteen yet. She was wearing jeans and a red long-sleeved shirt with what I assumed was a band name on it. The Cattle Prodded. It was way too hot for long sleeves. She had impossibly small earphones in her ears, lipstick on that was something close to brown. She was skinny in a way that made me want to feed her a burger. “Hey, Walter,” she said, when we walked past.

“Hey, Olivia,” I said.

“It's Delton now.”

“What?”

“If he can go by Mid, then I've decided I can go by Delton.”

Mid was short for Middleton, their last name. I worked it through. “But wouldn't it have to be ‘Dleton'?”

She made a face that looked like it took some effort—bored and interested at the same time. “Yeah, but then nobody would know what was going on, you know?”

“Sure,” I said.

“You like it?” Delton asked.

“I do.”

She looked at Mid. “He hates it.”

“That's his job,” I said.

“She's going through a charming phase,” said Mid.

“I'm not going through any phase,” she said. “This is how I am. This is the picture in its entirety.”

“In its what?” he said.

“He'll come around,” I told her. “He'll get better.”

“You're going to make a great father,” Mid said. “Also, you're fired.”

“How can you fire me?” I said. “I haven't started.”

Right then their three-year-old, Maggie, ran shrieking across the yard—where she'd come from, I had no idea—and jumped into the pool. She was wearing an inflatable purple turtle around her waist. “You two are keeping an eye on her?” Carolyn called. She and Alice were by the driveway, back where it wrapped into a three-car garage.

“Of course,” Mid said. Maggie bobbed in the deep end, smacked her hands against the water. Olivia—Delton—rolled her eyes, went back to her magazine. Inside, the twins were probably watching
The
Karate Kid
and putting each other in headlocks. I took a long sip of my drink, and then another. Mid held out his glass. “To kids,” he said. “This is what you've got to look forward to. You're going to love it.”

“I'm fine,” I said. “This is fine. Don't worry about me.”

“Worry?” he said. “Baby, this right here is as good as it gets, OK? This is the motherfucking dream.” He went over to a table and a matching set of chairs, and I joined him, sat in the shadow of his looming brand-new solitary house and just tried to hang on while he cranked himself up talking about the high school, how it was going to be some kind of performing-arts powerhouse, how they were going to build the county's largest auditorium. Delton's phone rang and she answered it, never took her earphones out. Maggie started calling for Mid, begging him to pay attention to something she'd decided was vitally important. “Watch me,” she was yelling. “Daddy Daddy Daddy look!”

Delton and the twins were planned, or planned enough. Maggie was an accident. Mid and Carolyn thought they were done, and then they'd had to start all over. I looked at Alice, who was pointing up at something with Carolyn, the roof, maybe, or the chimney nobody'd ever need down here, and I caught myself thinking holy, holy shit, tried to remember one more time what we could possibly think we might be doing.