“Yeah, I know.”
“Do you?” he said. His voice was stern, but his eyes weren’t.
“Of course I do.”
“You got your gifts and I got mine. I can detect a good dude when I see one. In these parts, they’re about three per thousand.”
Sofia gazed ahead, past the road, at a huddle of weary myrtles.
“That’s a good dude wants to treat you nice. Your best policy with that kind of customer is stay open for business. Sometimes you young people think too much. You can think yourself into the loser’s bracket.”
Sofia felt inert. She didn’t expect to speak, but then she did, like she wanted to confess something. She told Uncle Tunsil what she had been telling herself all along, that she was scared of what came after the chase, scared that James would get tired of her once he knew he had her. It sounded flimsy in her ears.
Uncle Tunsil looked unimpressed too. “History repeating itself, huh?” he said. There was a gnat or something in his drink, and he fished it out with his finger and flicked it away. “I’m not the lecturing type. I’ll just say it isn’t always an advantage thinking you’re a step ahead. Because here’s the thing: you never are.”
A lone gull flew overhead, seeming lost, piping its peppy, shrill call. It zigzagged over the house and out of sight. Of course Sofia’s uncle was right about this. She should tell James all of it. She should open the whole book to him. The interviews. Driving past the prison as a child. Shannon Janicek. She should spend every minute with him, give him everything he wanted. She’d felt all along it was foolish not to.
Uncle Tunsil finished his last spill of whiskey and didn’t seem to know what to do with the glass. A few minutes remained before it was night.
“The kid’s lucky in a way, despite the treatment you lay on him. To love something the way he does you. It’s not everybody who finds that. Not the real thing, like he has.”
Sofia and Uncle Tunsil were quiet then. They weren’t happy or unhappy. The hunting birds were swooping now, nighthawks and the like. Something seemed different in the known little world of the front yard, and they realized a breeze was sweeping over them. It rustled the leaves of the good half of the nut tree and lisped against the roof of the house. It wasn’t going to keep blowing for long. It was going to die out any moment and leave Lower Grove to deal with the real summer.
NAPLES. NOT ITALY
On TV is a painting show. It’s like the show that guy Ross used to do. This new guy is more Ross-like than Ross, dreamier. His clothes are astounding. What he’s painting looks like a flowerpot until it looks like an oaken bucket. He starts filling the bucket with something, his brushstrokes precise yet whimsical. Wheat. Soon the bucket is on a table, outside. We wait to see what he’ll do with the sky, what kind of weather is on the way.
For us, it rains the whole weekend and on into the week, sometimes barely drizzling and sometimes resembling a monsoon. Our friend is down for a visit, a woman our age who’s newly single and rankled. After a few hours, she softens. She needs my wife and me in order to be herself, or a version of herself she can live with. In the old days, in the desert and in a lot of other places, we showed her that she didn’t have to volunteer for anything, that she didn’t have to smile at strangers or defend her opinions. We forced her to learn how to prepare lots of dinners. And now she has returned to us, to this shabby old condo we’re renting.
***
The TV in the sunroom stays on, muted, day after day. None of us have what it takes to turn it off or to sit and listen to a program. The TV is as big as a booth, an old-fashioned big-screen from before they started flattening TVs out and pinning them to walls. You could collect tolls from inside this TV, or dispense pills. The TV is our connection to the fresh disasters of the world. We watch earthquakes soundlessly topple buildings in Asia. We see Alabama leveled by tornadoes, hollow-eyed couples gazing at rubble. Naples is due for a hurricane, the weather experts say, but it won’t much matter; the retirees here are rich and have deluxe insurance policies and houses on concrete stilts. And if someone dies, well, they were getting ready to die anyway.
The TV shows us which priests and congressmen and starlets can’t stop doing the wrong things. We make a point not to root against them, to remember that everyone needs to make a living. The ways these people make theirs come with extraordinary demands.
The TV shows us the world of the young, too, and they’re the sorriest young people yet — empty of righteous hatred, casual in their loves, seeking a thousand shallow alliances. The young are easy to make fun of, but this fact does not comfort us in the least. They still have youth, regardless of what they do with it, and so we envy them.
Lara, our visitor, owns a near-empty condo in another part of the state. She doesn’t want to return to it. Two dozen acres around Lara’s condo are clear-cut, a vast tract of dingy sand. Her building was the only one completed before the whole development project was halted. It looks lost, her building, like it arrived at a ball field on the wrong day. When you drive up Lara’s street, you see just how flat Florida is, and how exhausted. At night, at Lara’s condo, it’s like living on the moon.
In the mornings, before we’re awake, she runs in the rain until her feet hurt. A desperate practice, but one that earns a person a certain seriousness. She makes lunch soups full of beans and organic herbs. She spends hours mending torn clothes or writing letters to her aunts — the types of womanly tasks my wife no longer finds the energy for.
We play a game, out under the roof of the front porch, called 20-Point Turn. All you do is sit with your drink, hidden among fronds, and watch the old folks try to park. The rules of 20-Point Turn can be changed on the spot. Every time a wife gets out and directs her husband — that’s two points. If she does it decently, without squawking, she gets points too.
When I go to the mailboxes, the old men think I’m mocking them. I’ve done something to my back, something involving a disc. There’s never anything out there except coupon booklets, but I carry those inside so we can check if there’s anything funny about them, anything ridiculous about this week’s discounts.
We talk about nicknames. That’s the type of thing we try to talk about, so Lara won’t cry. You can always talk about nicknames. Other types of inside jokes spoil, but not nicknames. If any of us ever have children, the first thing we’ll do is nickname them.
My wife wants Lara’s nickname to be Dwayne for a while. My wife says she wants to leave notes for Lara and address them to Dwayne.
What kind of pill is best for a backache is a topic. Whether to keep doing our own taxes is a topic. The yoga Lara does every day after lunch is a topic. Computer brands. Libertarians. The various ways movies can be made. I tell the gals about how Florida used to be, since I’m the one who’s from here — how there used to be orange groves everywhere you looked and now there’s Home Depots and chain bakeries. I tell them it used to be pleasant to drive on 41—people did it for fun — and now it’s a traffic jam of senile Long Islanders. You used to be able to camp on the beach, with a fire and everything; it was safe to be out there overnight and the authorities wouldn’t hassle you. There was a family-owned pecan grove right down the street from my childhood home, and my brother and I would walk over there every Saturday and get free pecan logs from the old lady. Now, I tell them, that plot of land is a used-car dealership. The trees are long gone, not a matchbook of shade on the whole lot.