B009XDDVN8 EBOK (53 page)

“Someplace new, someplace warm,” I said, nodding at the cleanliness of it all. “A house for you and the kids, an apartment for me.”

“Sounds right, for now,” said Caitlin. Was there a clue there? A hope?

“Where?” I said.

“California?”

“We’re not that hip,” said Shelby.

“And there’s that whole earthquake thing,” said Eric. “What about Florida?”

“I had enough Florida to last me,” I said. “Arizona?”

“Real estate there is cheap enough these days,” said Caitlin.

“Can we get a swimming pool?”

“It’s up to your mom.”

“Sure, why not?” said Caitlin. “Phoenix?”

“I hear it’s all one big suburb,” said Shelby.

“Perfect,” I said.

Which was why we were on our way to Arizona. We had mapped the roundabout way together. On our journey we had already seen Chicago, and Mount Rushmore, and Yellowstone.
From Vegas we were heading to the Hoover Dam, then to the Grand Canyon, before dropping down to our new home. It was the best kind of adventure, on the fly and with people you love.

After our visit to the cemetery in Las Vegas, we headed back to Augie’s neighborhood to take Selma home. For old times’ sake we stopped off at the Applebee’s for lunch. There were six of us, Ben and Selma, Caitlin and the kids and me. We sat around with our iced teas and hamburgers and riblets and talked about the old days.

“I still remember that first afternoon you showed up at the Bernstein house,” said Ben, “with your little dog and your little tie.”

“You had a tie?” said Shelby.

“You had a dog?” said Eric.

“I never told you about the old neighborhood, did I?” I said to my kids. “Pitchford, PA. But to understand the way I felt about Pitchford, you have to know about my dad. Did I ever tell you about my dad?”

“I didn’t even know you had a dad,” said Eric.

“Don’t be a moron,” said Shelby.

“I thought he was hatched.”

“You told us something about your mom dying in Florida,” said Shelby, “but nothing about your dad.”

“There’s a reason for that,” I said. “My father left when I was nine. To say he fled would be more honest, but who wants honesty when dealing with family, right?”

Caitlin leaned forward and smiled.

“Certainly not my mother,” I said.

And that’s how I began telling my kids about what we had been, the three of us, Augie, Ben, and I, and what we had done, and how it had impacted all our lives. They deserved to know, because they were impacted, too, maybe most of all, and they listened, rapt for once at something I was saying. But I wasn’t telling it only for them.

Caitlin stared at me with a bemused smile, like she was wondering who this person was who sat at the head of the table and talked so freely about his past. I had seen that same expression many times in the past few weeks. Our marriage was dead, thank God, it deserved to die for all it hadn’t been, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t build something new, something better, built on a trust that we had never truly shared before. That didn’t mean I couldn’t try to seduce her all over again, this time with honesty.

What a novel concept. Seduction through honesty. Maybe I could write a book, maybe I could turn it into a self-help lecture, maybe I could sell it on late-night infomercials. I could be the Tony Robbins of honesty. Though not total honesty. I wasn’t ever going to tell Caitlin what I did with Harry in the darkness after we sailed out of Fort Lauderdale. Just like Caitlin wasn’t ever going to tell me what she did with Thad. But that was okay with me.

Hell, we all need our secrets.

I
PICKED THE
small Las Vegas development in which I set the opening of this novel from satellite images on the Internet. Through the screen, I could examine the precise houses that would be used, note the conditions of the lawns, pick the routes in which the hair-raising chase would occur. Such images are an amazing resource for writers, but you can get only so much from a photograph. I don’t write about anyplace I haven’t been, and so in the middle of the writing of this book I paid that very development a visit.

On the East Coast we were certainly hit hard by the Great Recession, but if you drove through our neighborhoods and squinted just a bit, things looked pretty much normal. This was definitely not true in that Las Vegas development. In the book I tried to express the emotions I felt as I walked through its deserted streets. Of all the things I saw during that visit, the street sign caked with dust remains the most memorable, as if a tragic storm had ripped through the landscape, blowing away not just budgets and dreams but also the very name of things.

When I returned to the manuscript, I started again on page one and let what I had seen and felt in that devastated neighborhood bleed into the book. And suddenly, Jon Willing was no longer a successful lawyer with money in the bank, he was an unemployed mortgage broker facing economic, as well as
corporeal, calamity. This is how a novel is written, not just word by word, but emotion by emotion, memory by memory, and by a thousand pieces of advice.

I want to thank my son Michael and my great friend Pete Hendley for accompanying me to Vegas before we all headed down the Grand Canyon. I also want to thank Rex Morgan for showing me what would become Patriots Landing. I received amazing advice on this book from so many people, including from my agent, Wendy Sherman, the book’s first reader and greatest advocate; from Mark Tavani, who gave trenchant advice; and from the fearless David Downing, who pointed out the manuscript’s flaws with vision, gentleness, and just the right amount of snark. I especially want to thank Andy Bartlett and Daphne Durham at Thomas & Mercer for their advice, encouragement, and support in getting this manuscript to print. Working with Andy and Daphne and the entire Thomas & Mercer team has reenergized the whole enterprise of my writing.

My children, Nora, Jack, and Michael, gave me the courage to write about kids and what it means to love and be loved by them. And I remain forever grateful to my wife, Pam, because everything I do is part of our love and partnership. Finally, I grew up in Pitchford (not its real name), flipping baseball cards, riding a red bike bought at Sears, hanging in the woods at the end of the road. My siblings, Bret, Jane, and Suzy, are the only ones with whom I can reminisce about those days and our small split-level house, but I can tell you I loved being a kid in the suburbs and am grateful that my late parents settled there. It is too bad that Jon never understood how great a place Pitchford was in which to be a kid.

Photo by Sigrid Estrada, 2003

W
ILLIAM
L
ASHNER IS
the
New York Times
–bestselling creator of Victor Carl, who has been praised by
Booklist
as one of mystery’s “most compelling, most morally ambiguous characters.” His crime novels include
Blood and Bone
,
Killer’s Kiss
,
Marked Man
,
Fatal Flaw
, and
Hostile Witness
. His novel
Kockroach
, published under the name Tyler Knox, was a
New York Times Book Review
Editors’ Choice for fiction. Lashner is a former prosecutor with the Department of Justice and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; his work has sold worldwide and been translated into more than a dozen languages.