After a while I rolled over, picked up the phone, and dialled a number. The phone rang six times, and then an answering machine kicked in. A voice I knew better than my own said that Mr and Mrs Hopkins were sorry they couldn't answer the phone, but that I should leave a message. They'd get back to me.
2
At ten o'clock the next morning I stood, pale and penitent, at the end of my parents' driveway. I was wearing a clean shirt. I had eaten some breakfast. I had apologized to everyone I could find in the hotel, right down to the guy who cleaned the pool. I was amazed that I hadn't spent the night in a cell. I felt like shit.
The house sat near the end of a narrow and hilly road on the mountainside of Dyersburg's main residential area. I'd been a little surprised by it when they moved. The lot was decent-sized, about half an acre, with a couple of old trees shading the side of the house. Properties of similar size bordered it, home to nice late Victorians, that no one looked too obsessed about painting. A neat hedge marked the edge of both sides of the property. Mary lived in the next house up, and she wasn't anything like wealthy. A college professor and his post-grad wife had recently moved in on the other side. I think my dad actually sold them the house. Again, decent people — but unlikely to bathe in champagne. The house itself was a two-storey, with a graceful wraparound porch, a workshop in the cellar and a garage round the back. It was, without question, a nice-looking and well-appointed house in a good neighbourhood. Someone wanted to set you up there, you wouldn't complain. But neither would Homes of the Rich and Famous be doing a showcase special anytime soon.
I waved across the fence in case Mary happened to be looking out the window, and walked slowly up the path. It felt as if I was approaching an impostor. My parents' real house, the one I'd grown up in, lay a long time in the past and a thousand miles west. I'd never been back to Hunter's Rock since they moved, but I could remember that house like the back of my hand. The arrangement of its rooms would probably always define my understanding of domestic space. The one in front of me was like a second wife, taken too late in life to have a relationship with the children that extended beyond distant cordiality.
A galvanized trashcan stood to one side of the door, the lid raised by the full bag inside. There were no newspapers on the porch. I assumed Davids had seen to that. The right thing to do, but it made the house look as if it already had a dust sheet over it. I pulled the unfamiliar keys from my pocket and unlocked the door.
It was so quiet inside that the house seemed to throb. I picked up the few pieces of mail, junk for the most part, and put them on the side table. Then I wandered for a while, walking from room to room, looking at things. The rooms felt like preview galleries for some strange yard sale, each object coming from a different home and priced well below its value. Even the things that went together — the books in my father's study, my mother's collection of 1930s English pottery, neatly arrayed on the antique pine dresser in the sitting room — seemed hermetically sealed from my touch and from time. I had no idea what to do with these things. Put them in boxes and store them somewhere to gather dust? Sell them, keep the money, or give it to some worthy cause? Live within this tableau, knowing that in the objects' minds I would never have anything more than a second-hand regard for them?
The only thing that seemed to make any kind of sense was leaving everything as it was, walking out of the house and never coming back. This wasn't my life. It wasn't anybody's, not any more. Apart from the single wedding picture in the hall, there weren't even any photographs. There never had been in our family.
In the end I wound up back in the sitting room. This faced down the garden toward the road, and had big, wide windows that transformed the cold light outside into warmth. There was a couch and armchair, in matching genteel prints. A compact little widescreen television, on a stand fronted with smoked glass. Also my father's chair, a battered warhorse in green fabric and dark wood, the only piece of furniture in the room that they'd brought from the previous house. A new biography of Frank Lloyd Wright was on the coffee table, my father's place marked with a receipt from Denford's Market. Eight days previously one of them had bought a variety of cold cuts, a carrot cake (fancy), five large bottles of mineral water, some low-fat milk and a bottle of vitamins. Most of these must have been amongst the fridge contents that Mary had thrown away. The mineral water was maybe still around, along with the vitamins. Perhaps I'd have some later.
In the meantime I sat in my father's chair. I ran my hands along the worn grain of the armrests, then laid them in my lap and looked down the garden.
And for a long time, in savage bursts, I cried.
Much later, I remembered an evening from long ago. I would have been seventeen, back when we lived in California. It was Friday night, and I was due to meet the guys at a bar out on a back road just outside town. Lazy Ed's was one of those shoebox-with-a-parking-lot beer dens that look like they've been designed by Mormons to make drinking seem not just un-Godly but drab and sad and dead-end hopeless. Ed realized that he wasn't in a position to be picky, and as we were never any trouble and kept feeding quarters into the pool table and juke box — Blondie, Bowie and good old Bruce Stringbean, back in the glory days of Molly Ringwald and Mondrian colours — our juvie custom was fine by him.
My mother was out, gone to a crony of hers to do whatever it is women do when there aren't any men around to clutter up the place and look bored and not listen with sufficient gravity to stories about people they've never met, and who anyway sound kind of dull, if their troubles are anything to judge by. At six o'clock Dad and I were sitting at the big table in the kitchen, eating some lasagne she'd left in the fridge, and avoiding the salad. My mind was on other things. I have no idea what. I can no more get back inside the head of my seventeen-year-old self than I could that of a tribesman in Borneo.
It was a while before I'd realized Dad had finished, and was watching me. I looked back at him. 'What?' I said, affably enough.
He pushed his plate back. 'Going out tonight?'
I nodded slowly, full of teenage bafflement, and got back to shovelling food into my head.
I should have understood right away what he was asking. But I didn't get it, in the same way I didn't get why there remained a small pile of salad on his otherwise spotless plate. I didn't want that green shit, so I didn't take any. He didn't want it either, but he took some — even though Mom wasn't there to see. I can understand now that the pile in the bowl had to get smaller, or when she got back she'd go on about how we weren't eating right. Simply dumping some of it straight in the trash would have seemed dishonest, whereas if it spent some time on a plate — went, in effect, via his meal — then it was okay. But back then, it seemed inexplicably stupid.
I finished up, and found that Dad was still sitting there. This was unlike him. Usually, once a food event was over, he was all business. Get the plates in the washer. Take the garbage out. Get the coffee on. Get on to the next thing. Chop fucking chop.
'So what are you going to do? Watch the tube?' I asked, making an effort. It felt very grown up.
He stood and took his plate over to the side. There was a pause, and then he said: 'I was wondering.'
This didn't sound very interesting. 'Wondering what?'
'Whether you'd play a couple of frames with an old guy.'
I stared at his back. The tone of his inquiry was greatly at odds with his usual confidence, especially the mawkish attempt at self-deprecation. I found it hard to believe he thought I'd take the deception seriously. He wasn't old. He jogged. He whipped younger men at tennis and golf. He was, furthermore, the last person in the world I could imagine playing pool. He just didn't fit the type. If you drew a Venn diagram with circles for 'People who looked like they played pool', 'People who looked like they might' and 'People who looked like they wouldn't, but maybe did,' then he would have been on a different sheet of paper altogether. He was dressed that night, as he so often was, in a neatly pressed pair of sandy chinos and a fresh white linen shirt, neither of them from anywhere as mass-market as The Gap. He was tall and tan with silvering dark hair and had the kind of bone structure that makes people want to vote for you. He looked like he should be leaning on the rail of a good-length boat off Palm Beach or Jupiter Island, talking about art. Most likely about some art he was trying to sell you. I, on the other hand, was fair and skinny and wearing regulation black Levi's and a black T-shirt. Both looked like they'd been used to make fine adjustments to the insides of car engines. They probably smelled that way, too. Dad would have smelled the way he always did, which I wasn't aware of then but can summon up now as clearly as if he was standing behind me: a dry, clean, correct smell, like neatly stacked firewood.