Javier took it. The photo shows Brian with his arm around Avis’s shoulders, and Stanley, inches away, holding up a fish, tail lifted, he’d just caught in the Sebastian Inlet. It was a year after Felice had run away for good, the summer before Stanley left for college. A good trip. Still, the three of them look gaunt, their smiles vaporous — all photos post-Felice looked like this. “Yeah,” Brian says. “That’s them.” Them?
“They’re charming. How old is your son?”
Brian clears his throat. “Well, he’s twenty-three now. I guess he was almost eighteen in that shot.”
“And this is your wife? She’s lovely.”
Brian lowers his eyes: Avis is lovely. Her face now not so different from when they first met: the ice tones beneath her brow, the soft corners of her lips, her skin lit like a Baroque portrait. Fernanda replaces the photo but her hand lingers a moment, hovering over his desk. He notices a dot of silver glinting at her clavicle. “I love that you have them here.” She doesn’t look at him but at the photograph.
When the phone rings, he glances at the phone, line two, Agathe. He presses Off.
Fernanda lifts her chin, puts her hands on the chair arms. “I should let you get back to it.”
“No, please don’t.” He lifts his hand. “It’ll stop.” He waves at the phone. “I mean — it’s probably just one of the clerks. Research reports. I can get those later.”
“Oh, is that all?” She smiles archly. “Isn’t that, like, your job?”
He rubs the back of his neck, squeezes it, smiling and disoriented. The city is full of such young women: they exist in a world separate and apart from his. They speak to him in a deferential way, as if he were a kindly old uncle. He recalls then the first instant of seeing Avis — seated in a college seminar — the back of her hand curled under her chin. He inhales, startled by a hit of the agitation and confusion of twenty-five years ago, as if time could dilate and collapse into a crystallized…
His BlackBerry starts to buzz, vibrating an obscene spin on his desk.
“Let me let you…” She’s pushing out of her chair. “Somebody really wants you.”
He stands also as he grabs the phone. “Give me two seconds. It’s just — Agathe knows I’m not answering.” He keeps one hand in midair, as if holding Fernanda in place, presses the speaker phone on with his other. “This is Muir.” In his peripheral vision, he sees Fernanda give a wave and back out of the office. Brian opens his hand—Stay! He lets go a sigh then, rakes one hand through his hair, settling back in the chair, watching through the glass as a city worker installs a new billboard: Can you say Beer-veza? Se habla CHILL? Image of a bottle of beer and an edge of lime.
“Dad?” Laughter. “That your Donald Rumsfeld impersonation?”
Brian sits up. “You got me,” he says, withered. “Want to hear Karl Rove?”
“Got your calls — what’s up? I’ve got a hundred cases of plantains I’ve got to cope with here.” Stanley has managed, once again, to flip their positions, so he is the harried overseer and Brian’s the needy old dad.
“No, no, nothing — it’s just—” Now he feels uncertain — is it even worth mentioning that strange girl? “Have you heard this singer on the radio? I think her name is Nelly? I noticed this. Is it that there are two Nellys and one is a rapper and one is a regular singer?”
“Dad—” Stanley breaks off; there’s some scuffling and a thin stream of voices in the background.
“Are they singing? Is that considered singing?” Suddenly he wants to know. Stanley is the authority on all such matters by virtue of being young: musicians give steel drum demonstrations in his parking lot; he has a sale bin at the front of the store, Music of Indigenous Uprising.
“I don’t know, Dad.” Another pause in which Stanley might be muttering instructions to someone. “Sure, yeah, it’s singing, why not?”
“Oh.” Brian falls silent. Even though Brian’s son is often remote and very busy, he’s also dutifuclass="underline" the child they could count on. Brian presses, angling to keep his son on a little longer: “It just sounds like a mess.”
“It’s protest — like reggae,” Stanley says peevishly. “They’re angry. It’s a sign of sanity.”
“Yeah. Probably.” Brian sighs.
“Dad, is — are you okay?” More voices blur in the background, a small shuffling crash and distant laughter. Always this mesh of noise at the market.
“No, no, yeah. I’m fine,” Brian waves one hand in his empty office. “Um. Your mother was — she was going to meet with Felice today.”
“Oh.”
Brian rubs at the underside of his jaw for a moment: mistake.
Stan asks, “Why does she bother?”
“I’m sorry?” Brian massages his knuckles into an aching spot between his ribs. At four, Stanley was smitten, practically in tears at the sight of his newborn sister. Even in those first hours, before Felice’s beauty was apparent — her iridescent eyes, the numina of her skin — Stanley was devoted. He held his sister in his lap, her tiny hands fused into fists, her face purplish with crying. He kissed her head and murmured into her damp hair.
“No, nothing.”
“Yeah. Well, hey son, I got this call…” Staring out the window, he sees a rope of lightning flash over the skyline.
“You got what?”
“This girl—” Brian chuckles, embarrassed. “She called my cell and said she’s your girlfriend?” He chuckles again, wishing he could stop. “She told me not to worry.”
“Shit.”
“Stan?” Brian presses the phone to his right ear. “What’s the deal?”
“Gimme a minute here. Fuck.” He hears his son’s voice muffled, away from the phone, shouting something like Nevis! Then, “Fuck.”
“Stanley, what the hell is going on?”
“It’s just — she’s my goddamn girlfriend.”
Brian lifts an eyebrow — the last girl Stanley was seeing was not someone that a person would apply the word “goddamn” to in a million years. “What happened to—”
“Nieves!” Stanley is shouting, away from the phone again. He returns. “I’m sorry about that, Dad. I can’t control her.”
“So you know her?”
A long hot sigh. “Yeah. She must’ve gotten your number from my cell phone. She does stuff like that.”
“Stan. This is someone — you’re seeing? You’re involved with?”
Pause. “Dad, listen. Can you just sort of — can you pretend like you never got that call?”
“Stan — really. What’s up?”
“Nothing. Just. We’ve had some money issues.”
“Money issues.”
“Nothing really. Goddamn Citizen’s finally denied our claim for the refrigerated cases.”
“Oh, jeez.” Last summer, Hurricane Charley took out the electricity — both mainframe and backup generator — at Freshly Grown, and three of their industrial freezers were ruined, along with extensive wind damage to the exterior of the building. The case investigator, a crimson-faced woman, kept dropping in at the store, writing reports and gazing at Stan. Brian knew his son had encouraged her — inviting her to wine and cheese tastings and baking sessions at the store; he’d given her an “appreciation basket” filled with organic pears and apples and chocolates from Vermont. Stanley can be a bit obtuse that way, Brian thinks — so focused on business that he never realizes there are other motives at work. She’d strung the investigation out for months, continually remembering some new piece of “evidence” she needed to collect or some bit of damage that needed to be photographed. She’d been encouraging about their chances, but then Stan demurred from her invitation to a home-cooked dinner.