“And
you
do? Saint Frank?”
“Boys,” Mac said. “Now come on.” He put his hand on Carson’s elbow, hoping, it seemed to Frank, to lead him back toward the car, back toward sanity, reason. But there was no need. Frank was ready this time. He’d take Carson on. Bring it. He opened the door to his truck, put his wallet and keys on the seat, and turned back to Carson. He expected his brother to come at him again, to punctuate his rage with a physical attack, like when they were kids. But Carson simply stood, regarding him, his face contorted in a mask of frustration, anger, and something that might have been fear. And then he turned, wordlessly, left Mac standing there with Frank and got into his Acura. He was nearly to the intersection at Seminary Street and Monroe Road before Frank unclenched his own fists.
Mac cleared his throat.
“I’ll walk back to my office,” he said quietly.
Frank nodded, got into the truck.
Mac walked to the passenger side of the truck and leaned through the truck’s open window.
“I’m sorry, Frank,” Mac said. “I’m sorry about everything.”
You and me both, Frank thought as he drove away from the bank.
When he pulled up at home he found the banker from next door had stacked a small mountain of palm fronds on Frank’s side of the property line. The fronds were thick and dry, having blown down from Frank’s trees in the last squall and littered the banker’s carefully manicured lawn for nearly a week now. The idiot had evidently decided to make good on his promise to Frank that he’d deposit the fronds back on Frank’s land if he didn’t get the trees trimmed.
“Whatever floats your boat,” Frank had said at the time. “But I’m not trimming my trees. They were here first, in case you didn’t know.”
“The fronds are a nuisance,” the banker said.
“And you’re becoming one,” Frank said.
He’d resolved to ignore the stacks of fronds, and the imbecile who’d put them there. But now he knew, given the impending storm and the way the fronds were stacked ten high in a pile instead of left flat and benign as they had been on the ground, that they’d become missiles in the high winds, threatening not just the dumb-ass banker’s house, which he wouldn’t have minded, but his own plate-glass windows as well.
“Shit,” he said. “This guy is really starting to get on my nerves.”
He parked the truck, went to the shed for a jug of lighter fluid. Across the yard, Biaggio’s trailer sat at a rakish angle, and his van was gone, meaning he and Sofia had probably gone out somewhere. The trailer door was closed and the curtains drawn.
So what about this, he wondered now. With no money in the foreseeable future and no restaurant to generate any, Frank could envision his sister and her new husband living in their rusted trailer on Frank’s property until the end of all their days. Biaggio’s moving business wasn’t going to finance a new house for the happy couple anytime soon. And what, exactly, was Frank himself going to do for a living? Why had he never considered these questions before today?
Because he’d been banking on Arla to take care of them all. He stood with the can of lighter fluid, regarding the palms. It was true. He was no different than Carson. He’d made no plans for any kind of job, any kind of livelihood beyond the sale of the properties, because he knew, in the back of his mind, that Arla would take care of them all with her new millions—would make it easy for all her children to get what they wanted. And he knew what he wanted. A mountain cabin. A cool rushing creek.
Elizabeth
. He’d been banking on it, albeit subconsciously. And now?
Frank drenched the palm fronds with fluid, then lit them carefully from the side and stood back as the pile ignited and the fronds began to kindle. He’d always enjoyed the smell of burning palm. It was an ancient smell. He let the pile burn for a little while, then started for the house. The rains were coming soon. They’d douse the fire.
His head was spinning, thinking of the morning’s events. He had that feeling again of walking backward in fog, and he had no idea how to get himself turned around. He didn’t even know what he was supposed to do today. What day was it? Wednesday? Thursday? Sunday? What did it matter? No fish to fry, no booze to pour. He had no idea what to do next.
He’d gotten to the porch when the sound of a car in his drive made him turn around. Elizabeth parked and walked toward him. They hadn’t been alone since the night of the acrobats, the night of his office, and he watched her approach.
“Hello, beautiful,” he said, and she smiled. “Where’s Bell?”
“With Sofia and Biaggio,” she said. “They’re buying a dress for your mom. For the cremation.” Oh, God. These details. They were horrible. He remembered when Will was cremated, having to root through Will’s bureau drawer, trying to find a clean pair of underwear for the undertaker to dress the body in under the new brown suit they’d bought at JCPenney. “What does he need underwear for?” he’d asked Arla, exasperated, but she’d looked at him with such haunted, hollow eyes that he said nothing else. He found a pair of his own underwear, clean, put them in a plastic bag for the undertaker. He’d thought about that many times since, his own Fruit of the Looms incinerated along with Will’s body, scattered across the surface of the Intracoastal, sinking below and beyond.
Now he looked away from Elizabeth, watched the palms burn.
She stepped up to the porch. “I’ve got to meet them at the condo in a little bit. They’re dropping Bell off,” she said. “How are you doing?”
“Been better,” he said. They sat down in the porch rockers. He told her about the bank, the money, Dean. She drew in her breath sharply.
“Do you think he’s really gone?” she said, after a moment.
“Yes, I do. Gone. Poof. Again.”
“I’m sorry, Frank.”
“Well, I’m sorry for you, too, Elizabeth. You’d have stood to gain, too. My mother would have taken care of all of us.”
She shrugged. “I don’t need much money,” she said simply. The oaks in the yard made a rushing sound in the wind.
They sat quietly for a while. Frank took a deep breath, then looked out into the yard, where the palms were smoking heavily in the damp air, tendrils of ash and steam rising, fading, dissipating.
He looked back at Elizabeth.
“I love you,” he said.
She stared straight ahead.
“But we can’t do this.”
He watched her, watched the way her eyes focused on the fire in the yard, the way her knuckles tensed on the arms of the rocking chair, and the name rose up between them, palpable and thick:
Carson
.
“Am I right?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “You’re right.” In the yard, the burning palms popped, cracked, raged.
T
WENTY-ONE
The air was fat with the promise of rain, and a thunderhead eight miles high hung in the sky. Carson watched it from a booth inside the Cue & Brew. The rushing noise in his head had not subsided since he’d left the bank this morning, though he’d been sitting in this booth since the Cue & Brew had opened at eleven and was now on his third Heineken, trying, oh God in heaven,
trying
to calm down. But the world was conspiring against him.
Ponzi. Ponzi. Ponzi
. Oh, Jesus,
stop
.
The disaster at the bank had taken a few hours to process, but now Carson had moved beyond pure incompetent rage and into a black determination to
fix
this,
solve
this, make it
right
. It wasn’t right, what Dean had done. But it wasn’t over, either. It couldn’t be. There was too much at stake. Carson had called Mac on his cell phone a half hour earlier, and Mac had answered on the fifth ring, his voice groggy.
“Where are you?” Carson said. From the Cue & Brew, he could see out the window across the back parking lot into the adjoining lot of Bait/Karaoke, and Mac’s car was not there.
“I’m at home,” Mac said.
“What are you doing home?” Carson said. “It’s the middle of the afternoon. Don’t you have a business to run?”
“I’m on a lunch break,” Mac said. “What are you, my mother?” In the background, Carson heard a woman’s voice, sleepy, and the voice sounded familiar, but Carson shook his head, kicked the distraction out of his mind. He didn’t have time for Mac’s love life.
“We need your help,” he’d said.
“I thought you wanted a
real
lawyer.”
Carson exhaled, trying not to let his impatience get the best of him.
“You’re a real lawyer,” he conceded. “And you know the players better than anyone. You know how my father thinks as well as we do.”
“Scary,” Mac said.
“No shit,” Carson said. “Can you meet me at Frank’s in an hour?”
“Only if you promise to be sweet to me,” Mac said.
“Fuck you,” Carson said. “We’ll cuddle, okay? Just meet me out there.”
Carson had hung up and spent another hour stewing at the bar, putting two more beers to bed and taking notes on a long legal pad, trying to weigh all the options. Legal intervention? A private investigator? The cops? There had to be a way to put a warrant out for Dean, something. Get the fucking money back.
Because it couldn’t end like this. Forty-two years invested in that house, forty-two years with this family, this frigging pack of oddballs and failures for whom he’d been wrestling with shame and ambivalence his entire life. So many embarrassments. So many disasters. He’d done his time with this family. He’d paid his dues. And if Dean thought he was going to make off with all the proceeds now, after all these years, he had another think coming. They all needed the money. God knew,
he
needed the money.
He paid his tab at the Cue & Brew and drove out toward Frank’s house, the rushing in his head still present but feeling more muffled, somehow, more manageable. He could handle this. He could. The light had grown dim in the shade of thunderclouds as Carson pulled down Frank’s dusty driveway. A pile of palms burned on the corner. He could handle anything.
And now this—now this—
Elizabeth’s car in the driveway. The two of them together on the porch.
Carson parked, got out of the car, walked up to the house. Elizabeth and Frank did not move. The dog lay on the porch between them, thumping his tail at Carson’s approach. Wasn’t it all so cute—man, woman, rocking chairs, porch, dog. Norman Rockwell. What the
fuck
.
Then Mac pulled up behind Carson, got out of his car, and stood waiting for a moment. Frank and Elizabeth stared at Carson, and he approached the porch, looked from one to the other.
“Am I interrupting?” he said, finally. His voice was thin, detached. The rushing in his ears was so distracting. He cleared his throat. “Am I interrupting?” he said again.
“Sit down, Carson,” Elizabeth said.
“Where’s my daughter?” he said.
She hesitated, looking at him strangely. “She’s with Sofia,” she said.
She was so beautiful, Elizabeth. He’d always thought so, even when she was pissing him off, as she was doing right now. In the humidity her hair had taken on a thick waviness. A bead of sweat rolled down her neck. When he’d first noticed her, first really paid attention to her, he’d been only sixteen, and she was fourteen, a freshman. She’d been sitting on the tailgate of George Weeden’s truck, which was parked in the back lot of Utina High. It was winter, unusually cool, and she’d been sitting with Frank, his left arm around her shoulder, his right hand parked under her blue-jeaned thighs in an adolescent expression of intimacy. She wore a yellow sweatshirt. Carson had remembered her vaguely; they’d been kids together, after all, and he had a vague recollection of her sad, lonesome presence, her mismatched clothes, that awful day on the bus when she’d vomited into the aisle. But those memories dissipated the day he’d seen her with Frank, and he’d stopped short and taken a long look at her pale skin, her freckles, her straw-colored hair, and he’d thought to himself,
I want her
, and then, in almost the same instant,
I don’t want him to have her
.
“What are you doing?” Carson said to Elizabeth, to his wife, now. She stopped rocking in the chair. Frank put his hands on his knees and waited, and the first fat drop of cold rain fell onto Carson’s forearm.
“We’re just talking,” she said. “Frank told me about Dean.”
“Oh, did he? That’s good. That’s good, that Frank filled you in. Good old Frank.” He turned to look at his brother. Frank had not moved from the chair, and he looked up at Carson with such a flat, innocent expression that Carson wanted to break his teeth.
Mac approached from behind. Carson sensed him at his shoulder, but he’d forgotten, momentarily, why Mac was even here, had forgotten about Dean, the money, the fund, all of it. His focus was narrowed on his brother, his wife. His
brother
. His
wife
.