Say Nice Things About Detroit (14 page)

“Yes.”

“But what about Kevin?”

“He's coming with me.”

Tina slowly shook her head and looked out the window. It was three in the afternoon, the light outside fighting its way around a pine tree.

“Everything is falling apart,” her mother said.

“You'll have another grandchild,” Carolyn said.

“Sit,” her mother said.

Carolyn sat. Her mother reached out and took her hand.

“Whose child are you carrying?”

“I'd rather not say yet. I mean, until I tell him.”

“You are in trouble. That's why you're coming home.”

“Something like that, Mom.”

“What does Kevin say?”

“He doesn't know yet.”

“You must tell him.”

“Of course.”

“He might forgive you someday,” her mother said. “If you're lucky.”

• • •

T
HERE WAS NO
choice now but to act deliberately, with forethought. Most people considered options a good thing, the American way, but one tended to squander those choices, or to choose badly, and then to call a bad outcome fate, as if the choices made had nothing to do with it.

Carolyn had grown up with all the advantages and now she felt she needed to give them to Kevin, and to her new child. This seemed easier in Detroit, with its lesser stores of social pressure and conspicuous consumption; with its unsettled weather; with its lowered expectations of how well things might turn out. Oddly, she thought this didn't inhibit ambition but aided it: in California you might believe things came easily, while here you learned you had to work hard. She really couldn't think of a better place to raise kids.

And then there was David. She realized she was afraid to tell him about the child because she thought she might lose him. She cared for him; she was willing to admit this to herself. In fact, she loved him. It scared her how precarious the outcome seemed. Once she told him about the baby, he'd make a decision, and what if he decided differently than she hoped? It exhausted her just to think about it. But she had to tell him. And soon.

• • •

K
EVIN CRIED.
At first there were just tears, and then when he realized his mother's mind could not be changed, he wailed. She tried to comfort him, but he pulled away and then ran from the room. He locked himself in his bedroom. Carolyn insisted he open the door, pounded on it, put her shoulder to the wood, but he was on the other side, braced against it. He was twelve now, and stronger than she was.

“Open this door!” she shouted. “Or you're grounded.”

“I don't care!” he shouted back. “You've already grounded me for my life.”

She left him there and went outside. It was quarter to six in the evening, completely dark and freezing. She drew deep breaths of air, felt that odd coolness inside her, almost like water going down. She told herself she was doing the right thing. Then she said it again, aloud, so that it would be easier to believe.

XVII

T
HE POUNDING ON
the door made him freeze. He'd been in the house a little over four hours, since right after the closing. He felt his heart racing, his mind slowly conjuring up the word: fear. Who was pounding on the door? “It's okay,” he told himself. He said this aloud. The words, the sound of them, made him feel a little less alone. Besides, thieves didn't knock.

He'd been in the kitchen, looking in the cupboards—he'd bought not only the house but most of its contents—and now he walked to the door and opened it. There was Marlon in a puffy down jacket, his breath a cloud of smoke around his head. It was half past six, as dark as the middle of any night.

“Hey, can I come in, Mr. Halpert? Damn cold out.”

David took him to the living room, flipped on the light.

“Nothing's changed,” Marlon said. “Even the books and shit.”

“You a reader, Marlon?”

“Nah, not me. The paper, once in a while. Follow some basketball, but you can get everything you need from the TV, ESPN, you know?”

“Take your coat off, sit down,” David said. “You want something?”

“You mean like a Vernor's?”

“I don't know if I have any. I just moved in, but Shelly left everything. I bet I can find something.”

“Dirk, he liked gin. Bet there's a bottle. You like a martini?”

“Sure,” David said, amused at Marlon trying to play the host.

“Mind if I make a couple?” Marlon asked.

“Mind if I ask you a question first?” David said, thinking there was no way this kid came over to tend bar.

“What?”

“What are you doing here?”

“Let me make the martinis, and I'll get right down to it.”

David wasn't sure what he should say. Barging into someone's house and making drinks with his liquor was no one's idea of polite society, though Marlon obviously thought about it differently.

“What is it, Marlon?” David asked.

“Dirk said no one ever just says what he's got right off. Got to let it flow, right?”

“Perhaps,” David said. He wasn't sure what the kid was talking about, but Marlon went to the kitchen and found the gin and the cocktail shaker and two V-shaped glasses, ice in the freezer. He worked confidently, apparently familiar with the ritual.

“Cheers,” he said. The drink, the strength of it, made David's eyes open. He could feel a pulling in his cheeks.

“I like these glasses,” Marlon said, “how you tip 'em to your lips and the liquor slides right in.”

David nodded, waiting.

“It's good, right? Everyone says I make a good martini. I've done some bartending here and there. Private clubs, you know.”

“It's an honest living, bartending.”

“Yeah, that's why I wanted to talk to you.”

“Okay.”

“Remember before you said I could change my life.”

“I do.”

“Yeah. I've been thinking, maybe you're right. Maybe I can change. It's not like I grew up wanting to do this. Thought maybe I'd get me a real job, stop worryin' 'bout everything. Live like a civilian.”

“It sounds like a great idea. Dirk would be happy.”

“Dirk, man, it was never all that easy to make him happy, you know.”

“I didn't really know him,” David said.

“You just live in his house.”

“I
bought
the house.”

“Yeah, and I got this idea about that.”

“What idea?”

“Dirk told me I always had a place to go. Times got bad, I could come here.”

“But Dirk's dead.”

Marlon shrugged. He apparently thought that Dirk's promise extended beyond death, that the obligation—the covenant—stayed with the house, no matter the owner. “You want to live in my house?” David asked, to make sure he had it right.

“Just the guest room downstairs, like always. I'm quiet. I can help out. And it's good for you to have a brother living in the house, in this neighborhood.”

“Marlon, you can't be serious.” What, David wondered, actually went through this kid's mind?

“Serious? I'm serious. I need a place. Can't go back where I was.”

“Why not?”

“Just believe me, I can't,” Marlon said.

“You could live with your mother.”

“You want to live with your mother?”

“You've got money,” David said. “Get an apartment.”

“You said you'd help me. That's why I'm asking for a little help. Show me some civilian stuff, like you did at the bank. I thank you for that, by the way.”

“Civilian stuff.”

“Yeah. No one's ever done that. I've learned a lot from you.”

“I don't know, Marlon.” David remembered his own father taking him to the bank to open an account. He'd been about twelve.

“I'll stay out of your way,” Marlon said. “Besides, what are you gonna do with all this space? It would be good for you, you know, to have somebody in the house. Not good to live alone.”

David took down his cell phone number. Marlon had a pay-as-you-go plan; the number was always changing. David walked him to the door, feeling dizzy from the drink, from Marlon's request.

“I'll think on it,” he told Marlon. David couldn't decide if he was more taken aback by this bizarre request or by the fact that Marlon didn't seem to think it was anything special. It occurred to David that no one had needed anything from him in a long time.

“Even pay you rent,” the kid said. David waited while Marlon slowly made his way out. Marlon took two steps from the door and then turned and waved. In that big jacket he looked like a little kid. David couldn't help but like him.

XVIII

T
HROUGH A FRIEND
Carolyn had gotten an interview with an ad agency, and so earlier that day she had put on her business clothes—the skirt was too tight, but the jacket covered that up—and driven downtown. When she was a little girl her father had taken her down Woodward to the old Hudson's. Back then Woodward had been crowded with pedestrians, the street lit up with signs from stores and the streetlights themselves. People dressed up to shop at Hudson's. Now Hudson's was gone, and she was vying for the chance to pick at the dwindling marketing dollars left on the carcass of the Detroit auto business. The job paid roughly sixty percent of what she was making in L.A.

The interview was in the Penobscot Building, a structure grand enough to lift her mood. She stood in the lobby and looked at the art deco design of the floor and decided that the city didn't have to decline forever, that nothing was set in stone. Then she walked over to security and announced herself.

• • •

“
T
ELL ME AGAIN,”
the interviewer said, “why you want to work in Detroit.”

He was young, early thirties, she guessed, trying hard to look older. “Look, kid,” she wanted to say, “you're young—don't fight that. Enjoy every goddamned fleeting minute.”

She actually said, “It's my home.”

“But twenty years in Los Angeles?”

“Training. Getting ready for this job.”

He looked out the window, and she followed his gaze. They were looking north in winter, and it seemed that somewhere over gray Michigan there was a strip of blue sky, a tease. It was two days before Christmas, three after the shortest day of the year. Light was at a premium.

“I wouldn't want to work here,” he said.

“But you do,” she pointed out.

“Long lines of guys like me in New York and Chicago, but none here.”

“So you've got your reasons, and I've got mine.”

“The last two people we hired left inside a year. They both took jobs where it doesn't snow.”

She began to understand that she could have the job if she would just say that she wanted it and she would stay. Of course, she'd need at least a year to really start. She didn't think it would matter. Everyone else wanted out.

“I like the snow,” she said.

“Really? Why?”

“I miss it.”

“Then why did you live in L.A. for twenty years?” he said.

“Lack of imagination,” she said.

XIX

C
HRISTMAS DAY AND
Marlon was playing Call of Duty 4 with E-Call, shooting up Germans like nobody's business. It was fun, to a point, but it creeped Marlon out how E-Call got off on wasting the enemy, as if there were no life behind it. Which there wasn't. Still, when Marlon pretended, he pretended fully, till for him it was real.

Hiding from Elvis but hanging with E-Call was fraying his nerves, making him wake up thinking there was a gun pointing in his face. That was always a possibility. Elvis meant to kill him. He trusted E-Call—they were brothers, they went way, way back—but E-Call had worries of his own, lying to Elvis every damn day. If Elvis found them together, he'd kill the both of them. If Marlon took off, it would take some heat off E-Call. Marlon figured he owed his brother that much.

He got up to take a leak, stood over E-Call's ancient toilet, and thought of the guys he used to know who were gone, BB and Crick and Lionel, all dead, and Shocker, who took a bullet in the spine and was now stuck in a chair, shitting into a plastic bag, maybe even worse off than the other three. It was how things went and he'd known it all along, though lately he'd felt it more.

“How many gangsters make it to thirty, Marlon? Answer me that.” Dirk had said this on the last night of his life. But that was in July, when thirty seemed far away and very old. Now, for some reason, it didn't.

“Gotta go,” Marlon told E-Call when he got back from the can.

“Man, you sure took a long time in there. Where you going now?”

“Ypsi. My mom's.”

“Why?”

“Christmas, man.”

“See you on the flip side.”

Marlon wanted to take E-Call to his mother's so E-Call didn't have to be alone. It was Christmas, and Marlon thought everyone should have a place to go.
I ain't coming back,
Marlon wanted to tell him, but he didn't. Easier for E-Call that way. No farewell. No knowledge that he'd have to keep secret. That was the best way—you just didn't show up. No goodbye but most definitely gone.

• • •

H
E DROVE OUT
I-94 to Ypsi. The road was damn near empty, except for some sorry-ass truckers who didn't have a better place to be than on the road. There was something sad about it. He thought again about how he should have brought E-Call, but he needed to let E-Call be and he wanted to keep his mother separate from the rest of his life. It was her best chance. Today she prepared one of her spectacular meals. After prayers and a couple gifts—he'd bought her an i-Pod and loaded it up with that old music she liked—they ate, almost in silence.