Tony’s own reliability, of course, was unquestioned. When their parents died Tony had staked his share of the estate on a junior partnership in an auto dealership out on Commercial Road. The investment was more than financiaclass="underline" Tony had put in a lot of time, sweat, and deferred gratification. And the investment had paid off, handsomely enough that Tom sometimes wondered whether his own use of the same inheritance—for his engineering degree, and now the house—was ultimately frivolous. What had it bought him? A divorce and a job as a car salesman.
But he was not even a salesman, really. “For now,” Tony said, carrying the steaks in to the dining room table—Topic A surfacing at last—“you are strictly a gofer, a lot boy, a floor whore. You don’t write up sales until the manager says you’re ready. Loreen! We’re gettin’ hungry here! Where the hell is the salad?”
Loreen emerged dutifully from the kitchen with a cut-glass bowl filled with iceberg and romaine lettuce, sliced tomatoes, mushrooms, a wooden spoon and fork. She set down the bowl and went about tucking Tricia into a high chair while Barry tugged at her dress. Tony sat down and poured himself iced tea from a sweating jug. “The steaks look wonderful,” Loreen said.
Tom spent the salad course wondering what a “floor whore” was. Loreen fed Tricia from a jar of strained peas, then excused herself long enough to install the baby in a playpen. Barry didn’t want the steak even after she cut it for him; Loreen fixed him a peanut butter sandwich and sent him out into the back yard. When she sat down again her own steak was surely stone cold—Tony had just about finished his.
A floor whore, Tony explained, was a novice salesman, viewed mainly as a nuisance by the older hands at the lot. Tony shook his head. “The thing is,” he said, “I’m already getting some flak over this. Bob Walker—the co-owner—was very much opposed to me putting you in this job. He says it’s nepotism and he says it frankly sucks. And he has a point, because it creates a problem for the sales manager. He knows you’re my brother, so the question becomes, do I handle this guy with kid gloves or do I treat him like any other employee?”
“I don’t want any special treatment,” Tom said.
“I know! Of course! You know that, I know that. But I had to go to the manager—Billy Klein, you’ll meet him tomorrow —I had to go to him and say, Hey, Billy, just do your job. If this guy fucks up then tell him so. If he doesn’t work out, you tell me. This is not a featherbed. I want the maximum from this man.”
“Sure enough,” Tom said, inspecting the greasy remains of the steak on his plate.
“There are basically two things I want to make clear,” Tony said. “One is that if you screw up, I look bad. So as a favor to me, please don’t screw up. The second is that Billy has a free hand as far as I’m concerned. You answer to him from now on. I don’t do his job and I don’t look out for you. And he is not always an easy man to please. Frankly, he wouldn’t piss down your throat if your guts were on fire. If it works out, then fine, but if not—what the hell are you smiling at?”
“ ‘Piss down your throat if your guts were on fire’?”
“It’s a colloquialism. Jesus, Tom, it’s not supposed to be funny!”
“Barbara would have loved it.”
Barbara would have repeated it for weeks. Once, during a phone call, Tony had described the weather as “cold as the tits on a brass monkey.” Barbara laughed so hard she had to pass Tom the receiver. Tom explained patiently that she’d swallowed her gum.
But Tony wasn’t amused. He wiped his mouth and slapped the napkin down on the table. “If you want this job you’d better think a little more about your future and a little less about your hippy-dippy ex-wife, all right?”
Tom flushed. “She wasn’t—”
“No! Spare me the impassioned defense. She’s the one who ran off with her twenty-year-old boyfriend. She doesn’t deserve your loyalty and you sure as shit don’t owe it to her.”
“Tony,” Loreen said. Her tone was pleading. Please, not here.
Barry, the five-year-old, had wandered in from the back yard; he stood with one peanut butter-encrusted hand on the armoire and gazed at the adults with rapt, solemn interest.
Tom desperately wanted to be able to deliver an answer— something fierce and final-—and was shocked to discover he couldn’t produce one.
“It’s a new world,” Tony said. “Get used to it.”
“I’ll serve the dessert,” Loreen said.
After dinner Tony went off to tuck in Barry and read him a story. Tricia was already asleep in her crib, and Tom sat with Loreen in the cooling kitchen. He offered to help with the dishes but his sister-in-law shooed him away: “I’m just rinsing them for later.” So he sat at the big butcher-block table and peered through the window toward the dark water of the bay, where pleasure-boat lights bobbed in the swell.
Loreen dried her hands on a dish towel and sat opposite him. “It’s not such a bad fife,” she said.
Tom gave her a long look. It was the kind of bald statement Loreen was prone to, couched in the slow Ohio Valley cadences of her youth. Her life here, she meant; her life with Tony: not so bad.
“I never said it was,” Tom told her.
“No. But I can tell. I know what you and Barbara thought of us.” She smiled at him. “Don’t be embarrassed. I mean, we might as well talk. It’s all right to talk.”
“You have a good life here.”
“Yes. We do. And Tony is a good man.”
“I know that, Loreen.”
“But we’re nothing special. Tony would never admit it, of course. But that’s the fact. Down deep, he knows. And maybe it makes him a little mean sometimes. And maybe I know it, and I get a little sad—for a little while. But then I get over it.”
“You’re not ordinary. You’re both very lucky.”
“Lucky, but ordinary. The thing is, Tom, what’s hard is that you and Barbara were special. It always tickled me to see you two. Because you were special and you knew it. The way you smiled at each other and the way you talked. The things you talked about. You talked about the world—you know, politics, the environment, whatever—you talked like it mattered. Like it was up to you personally to do something about it. I always felt just a little bigger than life with you two around.”
“I appreciate that,” Tom said. In fact he was unexpectedly grateful to her for saying it—for recognizing what Barbara had meant to him.
“But that’s changed.” Loreen was suddenly serious. Her smile faded. “Now Barbara’s gone, and I think you have to learn how to be ordinary. And I don’t think that’s going to be real easy for you. I think it’s going to be pretty tough.”
Tony didn’t apologize, but he came out of Barry’s room somewhat abashed and eager to please. He said he’d like to see the new house and Tom seized on the offer as an excuse to leave early. He let Tony follow him down the coast in the electric-blue Aerostar. Moving inland, up the Post Road and away from the traffic, Tony became a glare in Tom’s rearview mirror, lost when the car angled around stands of pine. They parked at the house; Tony climbed out of his van and the two of them stood a moment in the starry, frog-creaking night.
“Mistake to buy so far out,” Tony said.
“I like the place,” Tom offered. “The price was right.”