The Easy Way Out (37 page)

“More of Arthur's impeccable manners,” Rita said.

My father frowned away the compliment and the insult and turned his attention back to Loreen. “Look at these pearls. They're something, aren't they. Tony gave her these.”

“They're not real pearls,” Loreen corrected. It was the first thing she'd said since Arthur and I had come in. She articulated each word carefully, and her voice had none of its usual soft apology. I looked over at my mother for explanation, but she was absorbed in drumming her fingers across her knees.

“No one wears real pearls, honey,” my father said. “Everything's fake. I read in the paper the other day that some places, the thieves cut your head off with a chain saw to get your jewelry. Right on the street.”

“Let's try to talk about something pleasant for a change,” my mother said. This was clearly her theme for the evening.

Ryan appeared in the doorway from the kitchen with a tray of carefully arranged crackers and a bright-orange ball of cheese. “Poor Ryan,” my mother said, “slaving in the kitchen night and day.”

“Ryan's the cook and Tony's the handyman,” my father said. “Remember the time Tony paneled the basement, Rita?”

“It's branded into my memory, dear. Right up there with Pearl Harbor and the day we got married. Where are the drinks, Ryan? Loreen's been waiting for the past hour. Thank God there aren't any alcoholics around here, or we'd all have the d.t.'s.”

She looked at Loreen and laughed sweetly, as if she'd made a friendly compliment, but Loreen said nothing.

“I thought I'd wait for Patrick and Arthur to show up,” said Ryan. “What will you guys have?”

Arthur stood. He looked absurdly, almost impossibly large, hunched over in the tiny room. “We can get our own,” he said. “You don't have to wait on us, Ryan.”

“Ryan loves to do this,” my father said. “Make them one of those things Tony mixed for Loreen last Christmas. Wasn't that good, honey? What was that drink called?”

“The Pink Squirrels?” Ryan asked.

“I don't want a Pink Squirrel,” I said. “And neither does Arthur.” If I didn't make a stand now, he'd be offering us cream puffs next. “We'll have a couple of beers.”

“Coming right up.”

“Ryan looks a little different to me,” Arthur said. “Has he been losing weight?”

“It's that new girlfriend of his,” my father said. He'd turned his attention back to the TV and was flipping channels again.

“I didn't know he had a new girlfriend,” Loreen said, the blue lights flickering across her face.

My mother leaned across Loreen and glared at my father. “Do you think we could stick with one channel, Jimmy? The flashing lights are about to give me a seizure. And she isn't a girlfriend, sweetie, she's just a friend of his.”

“One he spends every night with,” my father said.

Arthur picked up a copy of
Modern Maturity
from a stack by the rocker and began to leaf through it.

“Does anyone else find it a little close in here?” I asked. “Maybe we could open one of the windows.”

The airless room had become stifling and seemed to be shrinking besides. If I leaned back in the recliner, my feet would have been resting on Loreen's lap and my head sticking out a window. I loosened my tie, but the suggestion of changing the air was turned down on the grounds that my father shouldn't be subjected to a draft.

“Let's discuss something happy for a change of pace,” Rita said.

Newly bold Loreen, however, wasn't so easily put off. She was as heavily made up as she had been at the travel agency, but some of the natural color of her cheeks was seeping through her foundation. She pushed at her big hairdo defiantly, adjusted the fake pearls, and said, “I'd think Ryan's new girlfriend would be a happy thing to discuss. Is she coming to dinner tonight?”

“Let's hope not,” my father said.

Loreen inched away from him and turned toward Arthur. “I haven't seen you in ages,” she said. “It must be more than a year now. How have you been?”

“He's buying a house,” my father said. “Didn't Tony tell you?”

“Tony?” she asked, as if he'd mentioned a stranger. “No, he didn't.”

“Well, he is. And Patrick's chipping in for it, too. Everyone's settling down. It's what parents live for, hon. Now Rita and I can . . .”

His voice trailed off into silence.

“We'll have to have you over for dinner,” Arthur said. “It's not a mansion, but I'm sure you'd like it. It's right next to a cemetery.”

Ryan came in with the drinks and served them around the room. “We went to that cemetery the other day. Beautiful place. I don't much go for walking around on top of dead people, though.”

“It's better than having dead people walk around on top of you,” Loreen said.

Considering that Ryan lived in the basement, I found the comment a little sharp. Arthur looked over at me and raised his eyebrows. If anyone else had made the connection, they let it pass. Ryan took a seat on the floor by the TV and proposed a toast to my father's health, a proposal that was ignored. An advertisement for a diet milkshake came on the TV, my father cranked up the volume, and we all watched intently.

“Now, Reenie, honey,” my father said, “what do you think of those things? From a professional standpoint, I mean. Any good?”

All eyes turned expectantly to Loreen. She shrugged and took a sip of her drink. “I don't know much about it. I think I mentioned
to Patrick that I'm getting a little tired of the diet business. I'm planning to apply for a nursing program, possibly physician's assistant.”

Arthur had been revived, either by the beer or by the mention of education, and he told Loreen he knew someone who was currently enrolled in a nursing program at Boston University. The two of them began chatting about the merits of various Boston-area schools, while my parents and Ryan and I looked on helplessly, with nothing to contribute. After a time, my father reminded Loreen that she should be looking into programs in Chicago, and my mother hastily suggested we get to the presents.

“Good idea,” Ryan said. “I'm dying to see what you think of mine, James.”

“Which one's yours, honey?” My father patted Loreen's knee. “I'll save the best for last.”

“It's the shirt wrapped in the green foil.” She laughed, a little drunkenly, and said, “Aw, shucks, there goes the surprise.”

“That's all right, dear; he'll have forgotten by the time he gets to it. Why don't you open that one that looks like a rifle, Jimmy?”

“That's mine,” Ryan told Arthur.

My father tore off the wrapping paper and pulled out an ebony walking stick with a brass handle in the shape of a duck's head.

“What a good idea,” my mother said. “He needs a cane.”

“I wouldn't call it a cane,” Ryan said.

“I might not be in the best of health,” my father said, “but I'm not so far gone I need a walker, Ryan.”

Rita reached under the sofa and pulled out a paper bag. “Here, Jimmy. I meant to wrap it, but between one thing and the other, I didn't get the chance.”

He opened the bag and took out a small plastic tub with a lid. “What is it?” he asked.

“It's for your pills!” Rita said. “You can keep them all organized in this. I got it at that health food store downtown. How that place stays open is beyond me. And talk about filthy! Everything in big dirty bins. I scrubbed my hands as soon as I got back to the store. You can arrange it any way you want. You can put a different pill in each section or all the pills for one day in each section.”

“Patrick, yours must be the one wrapped in newspaper,” my father said.

I tried to answer, but I was having trouble breathing. I could have sworn the walls were beginning to close in.

“Aren't those adorable,” Rita said as my father unwrapped the pajamas. “Those are like the ones you wore when you had the gallstones out, Jimmy. You must have picked them, Arthur.”

“Patrick got them on his own.”

My father had the presents stacked up on the floor by his feet. “Where's the IV drip and the headstone?” he asked.

“I thought we were going to have a nice time tonight,” my mother said. “Let's not ruin it.”

Loreen's present was wrapped in shiny green paper with a gold felt ribbon tied around it. My father held up the package for inspection. “Isn't this beautiful? Look at this wrapping job. I hope Tony paid for half of it,” my father said.

“No, he didn't,” Loreen said.

My father was unwrapping the present as if he'd been trained by a bomb squad. When he finally opened the box, he held it out at arms' length, awestruck. “Oh, my God, will you look at that. That is really beautiful. Look at that, will you? Of course, it'll probably look like hell on me. Everything does. A shirt like this shirt needs someone with broad shoulders to fill it out, someone like Tony.”

“Does he have broad shoulders?” Loreen asked. “It's been so long since I've seen him, I can't really remember.”

“How long has it been?” Ryan asked innocently.

“Ryan,” my mother said, “let's try to focus on the positive.”

“That again,” my father said. “You should have given out sedatives at the door.”

Loreen wiped at the front of her dress as if she'd spilled her drink on it and began to laugh. “You could have put them in the pill container,” she said. She threw her head back and let out a high-pitched shriek of laughter. My mother joined in in the false way of someone laughing at a joke she doesn't understand.

Arthur had his hands clamped on the arms of his chair, trying to get the rocker to rock. My mother's accompaniment to Loreen's hysterics gradually faded, and she looked over at my father. He shrugged and turned on the TV volume once again. Ryan lifted himself up from the floor and announced dinner in ten minutes, and I hastily followed him into the kitchen.

“Should we offer her a drink of water?” I asked.

He held a finger to his lips to silence me and listened. “I think she's calming down,” he said quietly. “What brought that on?”

“She knows something's up.”

“The poor kid. Hey, Pat, are you all right?”

I was hanging on the edge of the counter, trying to establish normal breathing after nearly passing out in the tomb. “I'll be fine in a minute. What happened to the oxygen out there?”

Ryan handed me a can of beer. He went to the oven and lifted out a roasting pan with three chickens in it. “Look at this,” he said proudly. “Perfectly done. I should open up a restaurant. I should get out of that store and open up a nice little restaurant down the Cape someplace. I think I could be happy doing something like that.” He stopped and looked at me. “Did you hear that? Did you hear what I just said? I'm beginning to talk like Sharon, aren't I?”

“Speaking of Sharon . . .”

“Let's speak of Sharon, Pat. She's my favorite topic of conversation these days. You know, introducing the two of us was one of the best things you ever did for me. Did I thank you for that?”

“It has nothing to do with me. I think you've been a good influence on her. She's mending her ways at the office.”

He looked up from the chickens, beaming. “You think so? She says she's going to stop cheating and risking her neck for those clients. She says I convinced her, but the funny thing is, I didn't really say anything to her.”

He took the dripping chickens out of the pan and placed them on a blue-and-white platter and started to arrange orange slices and watercress around them in a floral pattern. “Have you talked with her today?” he asked.

“No. I expected her to be here.”

He was grinning. Very quietly, he closed the door to the tomb. I had an insane, fleeting notion he was going to tell me he and Sharon were getting married.

He told me that at Sharon's suggestion, he'd contacted his old boss at New Balance and, after getting his fancy haircut, had gone in to talk with him about the possibility of being rehired. He was so pleased with himself as he reported this, he practically dumped the chickens on the floor. Nothing was settled yet, but he was feeling hopeful. “And that's only the beginning, Pat.” He was done with the orange slices and was arranging a ring of roasted potatoes around the edge of the blue platter, looking very much as if he were going to burst from excitement. “I called Elaine last night,” he finally said.

“Elaine?”

“I had a calm conversation with her for the first time in years. We're going to get together next week and talk.”

“What do you mean, talk? Don't you talk every time you pick up Stacy?”

“Sure. ‘Hi, how are you?' That kind of thing. But next week the two of us are going out to a nice restaurant to have a rational conversation. I've got a lot to get off my chest. It's what you suggested back in March.” He tilted the finished platter toward me and swept his hand over his work. “Almost looks good enough to eat, doesn't it?”

“But what about Sharon?” I asked.

“I'm telling you, Patrick, if it hadn't been for her, I wouldn't have even dared suggest it. She was delighted. And you know what? I think Elaine sounded happy about it, too. Well, almost happy. We'll wait and see.”

Ryan was grinning, pleased with himself, pleased with his chicken, his potatoes, Sharon, and even me. I tried to work up some anger toward him, but there was a look of such innocent happiness on his face, I couldn't. It wasn't in his nature to hurt anyone. He probably believed Sharon was delighted with the news. I congratulated him and helped him carry the plates of perfectly presented food into the dining room.

*   *   *

Loreen was immeasurably calmer after her fit of hilarity. The half-bottle of wine she finished off might have helped. She and Arthur continued their discussion of graduate schools, and it was clear from the way Arthur was looking at me across the table that Loreen was impressively informed and displaying a good deal more intelligence than he'd given her credit for.