You Could Be Home by Now (2 page)

“I don't see any For Sale signs,” Alison said. “I guess you haven't been hard hit by this real estate mess?”

“HOA doesn't allow them. Messes with the neighbors' heads.” Lobel tapped his temple. “But we're doing all right. Had to postpone work on Phase Four, but what's already built . . . well, most folks bought to live here, right? And that's why you're here, see. We're going to add to that whole experience.” Lobel drew out the word. “Tough times hit and people like living in a real place. Like to be a
part
of that place. So we'll get our own paper. And you—” He turned to Alison. The cart drifted into the neighboring lane. “You, Miss, you've got to add some authenticity to our town. Some history when there's really none.”

“Not to talk myself out of a potential job, but shouldn't you be looking for someone in PR?” The cart had picked up speed. Ali had to shout.

“I want a real historian. You know those little brown signs by the side of the highway?”

“Historical markers, sure.”

“I bet you're the kind of folks who always pull over for them.”

“Sometimes,” said Seth.

“My students get extra credit for reading them,” Ali said. “Last week one of my sophomores discovered his grandfather's place was once a hub on the Underground Railroad.”

“That's what I'm talking about. History. You'd never guess if it weren't for the brown signs. And even if you don't read them, you see them and you think, good, this place is a part of things. Folks need a dose of that here. My latest brainwave. We've got to stop it from feeling too much like summer camp.”

“Summer camp's not so bad,” said Seth. Ali hadn't told him about the hub house.

“For vacation, yeah. That was my
first
brainwave. Took off like crazy, let me tell you. First and second phases sold out like that. But now—tougher times, people want to
belong
. I can give them that. Started up a festival last year, food booths and a sidewalk sale, art stuff, live music. Founder's Day. Big hit. Going to repeat it this summer. June the second. Mark your calendars.”

“Why the second?” Alison asked.

“My birthday. I know. The ego of it.” They jostled along. Lobel showed them where the cart paths burrowed beneath the highway toward the strip malls on the other side (“They set up special golf cart parking for us and everything. Though anything you get there you can get here, and
we've
got award-winning landscaping.”). He waved a hand at the employee parking lot, heat shimmering off acres of windshields (“Most neighborhoods in these parts got a free shuttle for Commons employees. We're the biggest show in thirty miles.”).

It had been hailing that morning in Vermont. The Camry had taken three tries to start. Arizona was all naked warmth and hallucinogenic colors, and Seth's lungs felt fuller here than they had in ages. He and Ali could rent a place with a patio and a view of distant mesas. They could jog down the streets of a town without strollers. The Commons, where the rules were painless and explicit. All residents must be at least fifty-five years of age. They had six months left on their lease back home, but so what, they'd break it. Two weeks' notice wouldn't be anywhere near the end of the school year, but the books were unanimous and frank: Do what you must to take care of yourselves. Seth wanted this job. He wanted Shipley to gripe about being left in the lurch. He wanted to grasp the man's shoulder, to clasp his hand, to look him straight on, and say, “I am so very sorry for your loss.”

T
HE LAYOUT OF THE CART
paths made it a huge pain in the rear to shop offsite, so most folks didn't bother. Ben Thales did though. Eggs were fifty cents a dozen cheaper at the Walmart across the way. Chicken breasts, too, almost a dollar less a pound. And it'd been a close eye on his money that had gotten him here in the first place. Golf twice a week, tennis twice a week, a guest suite for Stephen and Anjali with jets in the bathtub and a loft for the kids they'd presumably get around to having someday; not bad for a dumb kid out of Wheelsburg. Truth be told though, it wasn't about the nickels and dimes. It was the way the whole system reeked of coal scrip. It wasn't easy shaking a thought like that, not when your family's two generations out of the mines. He'd been the first Thales to leave the state for college; his father the first to go, period, thanks to Uncle Sam. And even then, Ben hadn't known anything about anything. When Veronica Corbin, his beautiful Phi Beta Ronnie, had said yes, she'd marry him but only after she finished business school, he'd thought she meant secretarial training.

She was the smartest woman, hell, the smartest person he had ever met. Oh, Ronnie, he'd said. I know you can do more than that.

Ben started up the golf cart and backed down the drive. One of The Commons' thousand groundskeepers stood jumpsuited across the way, pruning. Ben waved. Call it the mark of a decent man: to look straight at the people your money meant you could look away from.

The other man kept working. What he must think of the lot of them. Everything you could desire, for sale and self-contained. Ben's son, Stephen, once had an assignment like that, a frog he'd had to keep alive for grade school. Think of its needs and how to keep them in balance. Seal its terrarium and see what happens.

It wouldn't have been grade school though. Nor middle. If it had been he'd have remembered Tara with a frog, too.

Down the street a car approached, breaking through the heat shimmers. An actual car. You didn't see that much; once they got over feeling like fools on a parade float, people here liked zipping around in their carts. Ben slowed to let the car pass. It stopped, its window opening with a brief puff of chilled air.

“Benjamin! Off to practice on the sly?” Sadie Birnam was his standing Thursday golf date. She had a capable, elegant swing, and though she could best him, easily, from the advanced tees, she always set up at the ladies'. When he'd joked—tentatively, because they'd never talked politics—about women's lib, she'd shut him down. She'd been teeing up at the ladies' forever. If she changed her standard at this late date, she would have no proper measure of her lifetime progress.

Ben raised his hands in a show of innocence. “Wouldn't take a swing without you. Just headed across the way. Need anything?” Sadie didn't seem the helpless widow sort, but with Gary gone—last Founder's Day, his heart, no warning, there but for the grace of fruits and veggies—Ben did his best to be solicitous. He'd always been an early riser and had fallen into the habit of walking a mile or so each morning with the Birnams. The morning after Gary's funeral he'd shown up as usual because he reckoned Sadie could use the company.

Sadie shook her head. “I stocked up last week. My granddaughter's out for a visit. We've just come from the airport. Lily, this is Ben Thales. Best neighbor money can buy.” There was weight and glint to that smile, an invitation. Or maybe not. He
had
been handy with jumper cables a month back. He was useless at reading these things. Decades since he'd had to.

“Hi.” The girl in the passenger seat raised a hand. Dozens of thin bracelets clattered. Sadie in her prime, perhaps: eyes blue and enormous when she raised her sunglasses, skin clear and smooth, long dark hair, long fine neck, cleavage he should not be looking at. She smiled, and—proof he really, really should not be looking—her teeth were heavy with orthodontia.

“Good to meet you, Lily.” Tara should've been Lily's kind of sixteen. The thought hurt.

“Ben used to be a veterinarian,” Sadie said. “Lily wants to be one, too.” Again, that tone he couldn't quite get a read on. Marvin Baum, one of his Tuesday golf buddies, liked to remind Ben: Men die younger; it's a question of odds. But beat those odds and the odds are in your favor, and you know I'm not talking actuarially. Marvin was right. There were six houses on Daylily Crescent: three couples, two widows, and his solitary self.

“I
used
to want to be a vet,” Lily said. “I'm going to do something in fashion now.” She gave her grandmother a quick, conciliatory smile. “I still want lots of pets though.” There were boys out there, and plenty of them, who were going to wind up with ill-advised lily tattoos thanks to this girl. Her sunglasses slotted back into place, turning the girl inscrutable.

Sadie let the car idle as Ben drove off, and he wondered if she was watching him. He wondered if Veronica had started seeing people, if she'd tell him if she had. He passed the sixth hole and then the fifth, its water hazard glinting like a disco-ball in the sun. He trundled past Main Street, its far end dominated by the achingly pristine Hacienda Central. He crossed a series of artificial creeks, skirted the lap pool and the gym, then turned through a gate and onto the brown and shriveled expanse of nothing that up until the housing freefall had been slated to be The Commons' Phase Four. Then he floored it. Call him a big dumb lug, but you were never too old for a lead-foot love affair with the accelerator. He passed hundreds of surveyors' stakes marking out lots that were no longer for sale. He passed the remains of an adolescent bonfire and a midden of broken bottles and burger wrappers. The path turned sharply and dipped down, tunneling toward the shopping center, and Ben held his breath like a child until he came out on the other side.

He parked on the lot's outer margin, because it never hurt to build a bit more exercise into your day (dogs helped on that front, but Ronnie had kept Musetta). Ben walked each morning and always caddied for himself. He was sixty-eight and trim, firmer in his chest and shoulders than his own son, whose first deskbound years of legal practice were taking their toll. Before the divorce, he hadn't bought pants in decades—new pairs appeared in his closet at whatever intervals Ronnie deemed appropriate—but he'd been pleased to discover the tags were right and that a thirty-inch waistband fit him fine. Ben did the crossword every day and hadn't written a shopping list because he didn't need one; his mind wasn't going anywhere, thanks. Let's see. He wanted eggs and butter spray to cook them with. Bread. Oranges. Orange juice, too, now that he was thinking of it, the fortified kind. Chicken and that Cajun rub if they had any.

It was nice and cool in the store. Say what you like about these big-box places, but this one had a real neighborhood feel. Always someone he knew. See? Mona Rosko—Daylily Crescent's
other
widow—waited in line for customer service, overdressed and holding a red file folder to her chest. Lee and Joanie Stamp waved from an endcap display of bottled salsa. Ben's phone rang, the onscreen letters announcing
V. Corbin
. Though Stephen and Anjali had talked him through it step by step last Thanksgiving, he still hadn't assigned his ex her own ringtone.

“Hello? Veronica?”

“Benji in Elderland!” Ben's father was dead. Ben's mother was dead. Ben's sisters phoned on his birthday and Christmas. Veronica was the only one left who called him Benji. “How's Camp Commons?”

“Not a cloud in the sky. Raining in Portland?”

“Buckets. That's what I get for not running off to live in an amusement park.”

“I've been meaning to call you. You know there used to be a ranch here? I read the other day that back in the forties they packed off a hundred crates of dirt to Hollywood. You'll never guess why.”

“Probably not.”

“They used it for
Gone with the Wind
. On the plantation sets. Actual Georgia clay didn't look right in Technicolor.” Ronnie loved that movie. Every time she watched it she made the same guilty joke about getting herself kicked out of the feminist clubhouse.

“The red earth of Tara,” she said. They'd been back and forth on Stephen's name until he was three days old but Tara Ruth Thales had always been Tara.

“The red earth of Tara.” Ben had seen the movie maybe three times to Veronica's three dozen but he got it, oh man, did he ever get it: Tara the big symbolic heart of it all, Tara for which no sacrifice is too great. “You could come down and see for yourself. I've got room.”

“A thousand miles for a bit of dirt?”

He could've quoted something then, something from one of the sweeping romantic scenes. God knew he'd learned the whole film through osmosis. Ronnie would laugh. It would be sweet to make Ronnie laugh, but the silence after—these things were hard enough to read in person. “Not just that. There's tennis and golf and a lake and a brand-new spa.”

“Sounds nice.”

“You'd like it.” He'd met Ronnie their sophomore year at Bucknell. If someone had told that rangy kid this moment was in his future, divorce from Veronica would've been harder to fathom than the existence of the cell phones they were speaking on. “I think you'd like it a lot.”

“You sound funny.”

“I'm out shopping. It's too damn cold in here.” Ben didn't say he was at Walmart. Veronica had read an expose and had opinions, capital O. Not that it mattered now, but still. Over forty years together. A bit like Pavlov saying, Oh never mind about that bell.

“I won't keep you.”

“It's fine. Say, do you think I should get the five-alarm spice rub or stick with the three?”

“What happened to four?”

“Doesn't seem to be one.”

“Go with the three. You can always add pepper.” Every time they introduced him to someone new, his golf buddies insisted he tell the joke. What brings you to The Commons? Well, I'm newly divorced. And without my ex, I need the HOA to tell me what to do.

“Good call.” Silence from Veronica. They had phones now that could send photographs and articles from the
New York Times
. You'd think they'd invent one that could interpret those damn silences. “Look, I'll bring you some of that dirt when I'm up next.” Ben flew back to Portland every six months or so to touch base with his old life. He slept in the guest room, on the now-sagging queen bed that had been their first furniture purchase, and timed his trips with the Chinook run so that time-with-Ronnie didn't become too-much-time-with-Ronnie. They hadn't had the best marriage—they'd made an absolute mess of things by the end—but that was no reason not to shoot for the best possible divorce.