Wade got Nick to change a dollar bill, and he headed through the nearly empty restaurant to the game room in back. Nick himself was serving at the counter this morning; he had a high school girl waiting tables, a plump girl with a uniform two sizes too small for her and a face made up to look like a Las Vegas showgirl’s. Back in the game room, where the pay phone was located, a pair of teenaged boys were playing donkey ball and smoking cigarettes. Wade dropped a coin in, got Concord information and the number of J. Battle Hand, attorney at law, and dialed it.
It occurred to Wade that J. Battle Hand might not be in his office on a Saturday morning, he might be over in Catamount skiing, or lounging in front of a fire in his huge living room, so he was pleased and a little surprised to have a secretary ask him who was calling and then to say, “Just one moment, please, Mr. Whitehouse,” and then to find himself instantly and easily speaking with the man he wanted to represent him in what Wade regarded as the most complicated, ambitious, possibly reckless but nonetheless righteous thing he had ever undertaken: the attempt to gain regular and easy access to his own child. This might not be all that hard, after all, he thought, and he noticed that his hands had stopped shaking and his toothache had gone back to a dry rattle in his mouth. It had not bothered him much this morning anyhow, but it had been there nonetheless, like unpleasant background noise, a next-door neighbor playing his radio a little too loud.
Hand’s voice was low, calm, authoritative, just as Wade had hoped he would sound. He said, “I see,” many times, while Wade quickly explained what he wished Hand to do for him. When the lawyer suggested that, before they do anything, Wade come in to his office and talk, Wade explained that he worked up in Lawford and had trouble getting off on weekdays; he would like to come in today, sometime this afternoon, if possible. Hand said fine, how was two o’clock, and that was that.
No, sir, this was not going to be as hard or as confusing as he had expected. They had not talked about how much it would cost, of course, but Wade could tell from the sound of the man’s voice that Attorney Hand was a reasonable man. Whatever it cost Wade, it would be worth it to have Jill back in his life, and he could pay it out over years, if necessary. He could take out a bank loan, maybe, a second mortgage on the trailer, if he had to — and no doubt he would have to, for he had no savings whatsoever.
Then Wade called Margie. As soon as he heard her voice, he wanted a cigarette. He patted his shirt pocket and found that he was out. “Shit,” he said.
“What?”
“Wait a minute, I got to get a pack of cigarettes. Can you hold on?”
“Hurry up. I’m baking.”
“Be right back,” he said. He was suddenly frantic for a cigarette; the need was as physical and immediate as the need to urinate. He placed the receiver on top of the phone box and hurried out to the cash register and bought a pack of Camel Lights from Nick. By the time he got back to Margie, he was already smoking, his lungs and face feeling soothed and familiar again.
“I got to quit these things,” he said to her, but he could not imagine being able to endure for more than a minute the agitated unfamiliarity that smoking eliminated. It was a singular and specific kind of psychic pain, which had been caused by the cigarettes in the first place, and they were the singular specific remedy for it. If there were available to him a similar remedy for the general pain, a wide-body potion that eliminated the overall agitation and unfamiliarity that he believed he suffered every waking moment of his life, and if that potion were programmed to kill him in an even shorter and more exact time than the cigarettes were, Wade surely would have taken that remedy too. The final result may be death, but addiction is about eliminating pain with what causes the pain in the first place, and death was coming along anyway, so what the hell. But there was no such general remedy that he knew of, and though he did not always think so, he was probably lucky there was none. It was perhaps sufficient that at present it was only the cigarettes that were killing him.
While he spoke to Margie, he kept thinking of Mel Gordon’s wife, the dead Evan Twombley’s living daughter, standing between him and Mel Gordon like an angelic shield, protecting him from Gordon’s dark fury, and when Margie said that she could not spend the afternoon with him in Concord, she had to finish baking pies for Nick Wickham, Wade was almost glad. For the moment, his image of Margie Fogg could not compete with his image of Mel Gordon’s wife.
“It’s probably just as well,” he said. “I got to see my lawyer at two anyhow.”
“So. You’re really going to do that. The custody thing.”
“Yep.”
“Oh, God. I think you’ll be sorry. I think you’ll wish you had never opened this whole thing up again, Wade.”
“Maybe. But I’d be a hell of a lot sorrier if I just let it go. Kids grow up fast,” he said. “And then it’s over. You get old, and the kids are grown into strangers. Look at my old man and me.”
“Your father,” she said. “Your father was not like you. That’s why you and he are strangers.”
“That’s the whole point. My father … well, I don’t want to get into that.”
“And Lillian, she’s not like your mother, either. Lillian’s going to fight this like a she-bear. Believe me.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know. But that’s the whole point too. If Lillian was like my mother, I wouldn’t be doing any of this in the first place, you know.” He lit a second cigarette off the first and inhaled deeply. “Besides, me and my old man, we aren’t really strangers.”
“No.”
“In fact,” he said, “I was kind of thinking of going up there tomorrow. I haven’t been by to see them in months. You feel like coming?”
“Sure,” she said in a flat voice. She was giving up on Wade: his inconsistency was patterned and self-serving, and there was no way in for her. She might as well just let him be who he is and enjoy him for that as much as possible. More and more often these days, she found herself regarding Wade from a distance. She knew what it meant: sooner or later she would not want to sleep with him anymore. Right now, however, she was lonely, she was, and she felt imprisoned by her body, she did, and she wanted out, badly, and sleeping with Wade, even if only on occasion, provided her with brief reprieves, like conjugal visits, and she was not about to give that up. She was not.
“Wade,” she said, and she said his name in a low voice that was instantly meaningful to him, like the start of a catechism, and they began their old ritual sequence:
“Yes.”
“Can you come by my place tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Will you?”
“Yes, I will.”
“Do you want to?”
“Yes, I do.”
“What will you do with me, Wade?”
He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece and cast a glance at the teenagers playing donkey ball in the corner of the room. In a low voice, he said, “I’ll do everything you want me to do.”
“Everything?”
“Everything. And a few things you don’t want me to do.”
“Ah-h-h,” she said. “You’re not at home now, are you?”
“No.”
“So we can’t do it over the phone,” she said.
“No. We can’t. I’d look… I’d look pretty silly if we did. I’m in Nick’s back room.”