“The Bistro?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s the occasion?”
“We’re going to celebrate.”
He heard the muffled thump of the car door slamming shut, then the revolving whine of the engine starting up. “Celebrate what?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just feel like celebrating. Life, I guess.”
There was silence on the other end.
“You there?”
The faint distant crunch of gravel, tires in motion, then her voice coming back to him: “Sounds fine to me.”
“Okay,” he said, “okay.” Everything was precious suddenly, his life, her life, the lives of the animals and of everybody else out there on the slick wet roads. He felt so overwhelmed he could barely get the words out. “You be careful out there, huh?”
The restaurant was in Fort Bragg, eight miles up the road from Mendocino. It occupied the second floor of a brick building the size of a department store that had once housed the operations of Union Lumber and it was floor-to-ceiling windows all around so that if you got a window table you could sit there and eat and feel as if you were floating over the whole town and the ocean too. Though it was the middle of August and the tourists were out in force, they got a window table without having to wait at the bar because the hostess was a former student at Fort Bragg High and recognized him, though he didn’t recognize her. “Who was that?” Carolee asked, once they were seated.
“Beats me,” he said, looking up at her, feeling good, if a bit shaky still. “At this point, they all look the same to me.”
There were menus, drinks, a basket of hot bread. He went through the bread without even realizing what he was doing, hungry suddenly, though he hadn’t got a lick of exercise all day.
“You are hungry,” she said. “Don’t tell me you didn’t eat any lunch?”
He ducked his head, grinned. “No, I had something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know — a sandwich. Or cereal, a bowl of cereal.” The fact was, he couldn’t really remember. He had a sudden vision of himself laid out flat in a nursing home, gasping for breath, all his vitals dwindled down to nothing. Old man. He was an old man. “But tell me, how was it down there,” he said, to cover himself, “—they get any new zebras in? Or what, giraffes? Or are they fresh out over there in Africa?”
“Same old,” she said. “But really, I don’t know why you have to make fun of them. If it wasn’t for the Burnsides and a handful of people like them, people who care, those zebras and antelope would be gone from the face of the earth.”
“Then why don’t they send them back? Because that’s where they belong, isn’t it? I mean, zebras in Mendocino County — give me a break. What does he think, he’s Noah or something?”
She was having a martini, three olives on the side. That was her trick: olives on the side so you get more gin, a matter of displacement — or lack of it, that is. She took a long slow sip, watching him. “That’s the idea,” she said. “Eventually. When things are, I don’t know, more stable over there.”
“Right,” he said, and he felt his spirits crank back up and it had nothing to do with the Xanax, or did it? “Because they’d just eat them now, right? Probably the minute they got off the boat.” The mountain zebra was almost gone in its native range, he knew that much, and the Grevy’s too. The kudu weren’t doing all that much better.
“Stable,” she repeated bitterly, sweeping her hair back. “It’s a joke over there. Places like Sudan or Somalia, even Kenya. Everything’s guns. Tribes. Guerrillas.” She paused to back up and give it an exaggerated Spanish pronunciation: “Gare-ee-yas, I mean. Not gorillas — gorillas we could use more of. A whole lot more. But that’s the mentality over there — shoot everything that moves.”
“Over here too,” he said.
She was silent a moment. Then she said, “What are you thinking of having?”
“Me? Fish. What about you?”
That was when he glanced out the window to the street below and saw Adam climbing out of an unfamiliar car that had just pulled up to the curb — a Japanese thing, pale blue, that suddenly became familiar, because here was that woman, what was her name, emerging from the driver’s side to join him on the sidewalk. From this angle — he was right above them — he saw only the crowns of their heads and the flat plateaus of their shoulders, Adam’s head shaved to the bone and glowing in the light trapped beneath the fog. The woman — her name came to him then, Sara — wore her hair parted down the middle, a crisp white line there as if her skull had been divided in two. They seemed to confer a moment and then started across the street to the pizza place and the bar there, Adam in the camo outfit he seemed to wear perennially now and Sara in jeans, boots and a low-cut top that displayed the deep crease between her breasts, bird’s-eye view.
“Isn’t that Adam?” Carolee said.
“Yeah, he just got out of the car there.”
“Who’s that with him?”
“Sara. The woman I told you about — from the other day?”
A silence. The restaurant buzzed around them. They watched the two of them cross the street, mount the curb and disappear into the pizza place — the pub that sold pizza, that is — Adam hunching in ahead of her, no thought of standing aside or holding the door, but that was only typical, that was only to be expected, that was Adam.
“She’s old for him, isn’t she? She’s got to be forty.”
“That’s his business.”
“I mean, what’s she even doing with him?” She was leaning to her left, at the very edge of the table, squinting to peer out the window, though there was nothing to see but the closed door and above it the neon sign doing battle with the fog. “She’s a piece of work herself, is what I hear.”
He just shrugged, took a sip of his martini. He’d given up worrying about Adam a long time ago — or at least he’d tried to. Adam had problems. He’d always had problems. There’d been shrinks, a whole succession of them, but once he turned eighteen they had no control over that, and even after the last time he’d been arrested and evaluated by a state-appointed psychiatrist they still couldn’t get access to the records. Privacy laws. He was an adult. Living in his own world. And while that world had its intersections with theirs and they did what they could — helped him with money, gave him a place to live where he could have some privacy and do his thing, whatever that might be, putting up walls, obsessing over the Chinese, calling himself Colter — he kept pushing them away till there was no point in it anymore.
“Cindy Burnside says she’s got some pretty strange theories; I mean, really out there — as in right wing? As in conspiracies? Anti-everything? You know she got arrested for refusing to show a cop her license and registration?”
“She’s fine,” he said. “He’s fine too.”
“Fine? Where’s he going to live when we close on my mother’s house? With her?”
He didn’t have a chance to answer because the waiter suddenly appeared with two fresh drinks, two more martinis, which would put them both over their self-imposed limit, if they were going to drink wine with dinner, that is — and they were. But there was the tray, there the perspiring glasses, there the waiter, smiling. “We didn’t order those,” Sten said.
The waiter — fiftyish, in white shirt and tie, his hair slicked tight to his skull — gestured to the couple sitting two tables over. They smiled, waved. Did he know them? “Compliments of the gentleman and lady,” the waiter said.
“I don’t want another martini,” Sten said. “I’m not even half-finished with this one—”