Ferris shrugs. “I’ve got a few creaks.”
“No,” Vince says, as if reading his thoughts. “You look young. Your face. And this,” he pokes at Ferris’s gut, “pretty good.”
“Well, it isn’t like I’ve had to work at it,” Ferris answers. “Good genetics, I guess.”
Vince’s face hardens momentarily. “Oh, yeah, sure. But you haven’t led a hard life. All you do is travel to glamorous places and sit on your ass. Hop in.” He gestures toward the passenger side of the Jetta.
Ferris leans through the open window and looks inside. The car is immaculate. “Nice car,” he says. “What happened to your junk heap?”
At one time Vince had four mid-fifties GMC pickup trucks in his backyard to rob for parts to keep the panel he drove running. It wasn’t that he liked working on cars, or that he was saving money. It was a gesture to his father, a master mechanic who could make or repair anything.
Vince doesn’t answer for a moment, as if he can’t quite remember. “Oh, shit,” he says, finally, “that was a long time ago. Someone hauled them all to the dump when we sold the house.”
Ferris opens the car door, tosses the bouquet into the back seat, and climbs in. When he closes the car door, it comes to with a satisfyingly soft thump. Vince clambers in, reads Ferris’s mind once again.
“The old man’s dead, you know.”
Ferris doesn’t know, but he isn’t surprised. Vince’s father had been in poor health for years, and he didn’t much like doctors or hospitals.
Ferris had been fond of Vince’s father and had got along better with him than Vince did. Ferris would have loved the old man, but that wasn’t permitted. After Ferris’s parents died, the old man had taken Ferris under his wing and offered him everything that familial love confers. He was about the only male role model Ferris ever accepted. He’d given Ferris his nickname – Cuckoo – joking that Ferris was trying to push Vince out of the nest.
“When’d he go?” Ferris asks, breaking his reverie. “How long?”
“A couple of years ago,” Vince answers after a pause. “His heart blew up on him while he was pulling the transmission on a truck. Never knew what hit him.”
“I liked your old man a lot,” Ferris says, then revises. “I loved him. I’m sorry he’s gone.”
“Yeah, me too,” Vince answers, as if it were the least important thing on his mind. “I miss him sometimes. And,” he pauses again, “sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I’m glad he’s gone. He could be a miserable old bastard when he wanted to.”
“We should have grown up to be men like him,” Ferris says.
“We didn’t.” Vince stares through the windshield for a moment, as if considering what kind of men he and Ferris had become. “That’s for sure.”
He starts the car, and they drive off the ferry slip past the line of cars waiting to load.
“How’s Ava doing?” Ferris asks.
“You know how it goes,” Vince answers, noncommittally. “Up and down. You’ll see.”
Ferris wants to ask him if Ava is still beautiful, but it occurs to him that Vince might not understand what he’s asking. There had always been a strange lack of interiority in the way Vince viewed Ava. He seemed to know that she was an attractive woman, and he admired her sexual athletics and her unpredictability – but Ferris didn’t think he ever thought of her in terms of beauty. Not the way he did. And does.
They reach the turnoff to the northerly part of the island. Vince yanks hard on the steering wheel – too hard – and the Jetta sloughs around the corner. Ferris can’t think of anything to say, so he looks out the window. The island has, to use the misleading euphemism of real estate agents, developed. New homes sear the roadside, replacing the dense thickets of alder and fir that had been there since the glaciation.
The changes are so many that Ferris doesn’t recognize Vince and Ava’s old house when they pass it. Vince has to point it out. An addition has been built on, the yard backfilled, fresh paint. It looks like most of the other houses around it – an upmarket bungalow. When Vince and Ava lived there, it looked like what it was: a prefab starter home in a swampy yard filled with wrecked pickup trucks.
“When did you sell it?” Ferris asks.
“Four years ago, when Bobby moved out. I built the addition, and then we didn’t need it…” Vince trails off into silence.
That sounds about right to Ferris. Vince was always good at starting projects, not so great at figuring out the correct scale, and lousy at finishing them. Twelve years ago, Ferris helped him put in a fancy new septic system, an experimental one that didn’t work as advertised. Whenever it rained, the already swampy backyard turned into a private sewage lagoon, replete with floating turds and streamers of toilet paper. At least part of the cause was that Vince decided to route the eavestroughs into it, for reasons Vince couldn’t quite explain and which Ferris never got his mind around.
They talk briefly about what they’ve been doing in the last few years – or rather, Ferris questions Vince about what he’s been doing – teaching retarded teenagers – now challenged pre-adults – for some government program. Vince asks no questions and seems to have no curiosity about Ferris’s doings. Several miles pass. The density of development drops off and the island begins again to resemble the island Ferris knew.
“What’s the new place like?” he asks.
“Very different. You’ll see in a minute. Here’s the turnoff.”
Vince makes a right turn off the main road and bumps down a steep gravel hill toward the water. They’ve moved closer to the ocean, at least, Ferris thinks. For a moment it looks as if they’re right on the beach, but at the last minute Vince turns left into a deep draw sheltered by huge fir trees. It’s like a park, protected from both the main road above and the ocean winds. Vince pulls into a tiny driveway that backs onto a shed-like structure, cuts the ignition.
“Here we are,” he announces.
Ferris can’t see any house, and Ava isn’t to be seen either. Ferris retrieves the flowers from the rear seat and follows Vince along a treed path around the shed. Down a short but steep incline he can see a tiny cottage. It’s covered in varnished shiplap, with deep eaves, and a roof of shingled cedar. Smoke drifts up from the chimneys at each end. Beyond it is another building, unfinished, but about the same size.
“This is a change,” Ferris says, still wondering why Ava hasn’t appeared. In the old days, she always came out to greet him, a habit he attributed to her Yugoslav ethnic background – it was not then necessary to know if that meant Serbian, Slovenian, Croatian, or Muslim. It was, as far as he could see, her only ethnic tic. Otherwise she was as disenculturated as any WASP.
Vince waves his arm forward in reply, and Ferris skids down the mossy slope after him, and in his wake, tramps his way to the cottagey wooden back door. There is a small bell over it, on a string, and Vince tugs the string before entering. Ferris isn’t sure whether to expect Ava, or Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Vince pushes the door open.
Over his shoulder Ferris can see a sign that says “NO SHOES”. Vince bends over to remove his, and there is Ava. Her dark hair is peppered with grey, but God, she’s still beautiful. Ferris drinks her in, transfixed by a sense of relief. Without being conscious of it, he’s been imagining all kinds of horrible transformations – weight gain, accident scars, the coarsening of the features that women sometimes get under extended stress. For ten years he’s seen and heard nothing of or from her except a single telephone call he made five years ago. It wasn’t a long call. Ava cut him off in the middle of the opening pleasantries, saying that she and Vince were having problems; no, there was nothing Ferris could do, please stay clear.
“Ferris,” she says. “You’re here. It’s been a long time.”
Before Ferris can hand her the bouquet, Vince straightens up, completely blocking his view with his bulk. “Take off your shoes, Cuckoo,” he orders, curtly. “Things have changed.”