“Better.”
Julia nodded. “Hello.”
“Nice to meet you,” Paul said, smiling. He reached forward, shook Julia’s hand.
“We just moved back here,” Paul said.
“No shit?”
Julia touched Gregory’s cheek, motioned toward the row of booths in front of them, and he nodded. She started walking, smiling a good-bye to Paul.
“I’ll catch up,” Gregory told her.
There was a moment of awkward silence.
“So you’re married, huh?”
“With three kids.”
“Girls? Boys?”
“Two girls, one boy. Sasha’s seventeen. Adam’s almost thirteen. Teodosia’s nine.”
Paul shook his head. “Man. Time flies, doesn’t it?” “Yeah,” Gregory said, “it sure does.” He looked at the man in front of him, saw within that man the boy he had once known.
It was nice to see an old friend, he admitted, but there was also something disconcerting about it. They were both grown men, middle-aged, so the years had obviously passed, but the fact that they were both here, in McGuane, gave him the unnerving feeling that they had both been spinning their wheels, that they’d accomplished nothing in all those years, that their lives were pointless and useless and they were just killing time until they eventually died.
It was completely illogical, an idiotic thing to think, but he thought it nonetheless, and he realized that he’d been feeling adrift ever since he’d won the lottery, ever since he’d quit his job. He’d never considered himself one of those people who were defined by their work, who needed the imposed structure of a job to bring meaning and order to their lives, but perhaps he wasn’t as free and independent as he’d always thought.
“Are you married?” he asked.
Paul nodded.
“Anyone I know?”
“Deanna.”
Gregory was shocked. “Deanna Exley?”
“She lost a lot of weight her last two years of high school,” Paul said defensively.
Gregory laughed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.” “That’s okay.” Paul grinned wryly. “What’s my life for if not to serve as the butt of jokes for my buddies?”
“Just like old times.” Gregory looked around. “So where is she?”
“Visiting her mom in Phoenix. Me and the old broad don’t exactly get along, so I drop Deanna off, she stays a week or so, then I go back and pick her up. Everyone’s happy.”
“I can’t believe it.” Gregory shook his head. “Deanna.”
“So what brings you back here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Getting back to your roots, huh?”
He smiled. “Yeah. I guess.”
“There aren’t a lot of jobs around,” Paul warned. “It’s gonna be tough finding work.”
“I’m okay.”
The other man’s eyebrows shot up. “Don’t tell me you’re independently wealthy?”
“I won the California lottery.”
“No shit?”
Gregory laughed. “It’s not quite as exciting as it sounds. There were three winners, and it’s paid off over twenty years, so I only get, like, eighty thousand a year.”
“Eighty thousand a year? I’ve never cleared that in my life.”
Gregory felt suddenly embarrassed. “Well, it’s not that much in California. The standard of living’s quite a bit higher there, and…” He trailed off, not sure what to say.
“Well, it’s quite a bit back here. You’re going to be one of our most important and respectable citizens.”
“I’d rather not broadcast it,” Gregory said.
“Wise decision.” Paul whistled. “The lottery. Eighty thousand a year.”
Gregory cleared his throat. “So, what are you doing these days?”
“I own Mocha Joe’s.” He pointed up the street to a small café sandwiched between a beauty parlor and a pharmacy in a block of connected buildings. “We serve bagels, cappuccino, that kind of thing.”
Gregory shook his head, smiling. “A coffeehouse? I thought I’d left all that back in California.” He looked quickly at his old friend. “No offense.”
Paul chuckled. “None taken.” He smiled ruefully. “There’s a lot of them out there, huh?”
“On every damn corner.”
“I’m the only one in McGuane, and I still can’t make a living.”
Gregory looked up the street, toward the restaurant. All of the sidewalk tables were filled, and there was a line of people standing outside the door. “Looks like you’re doing all right.”
“Yeah. This weekend. But I can’t live for a whole year off the profits of three days. The rest of the year this place is dead. McGuane is not exactly a mocha java town, if you know what I mean.”
Gregory laughed. “I do know what you mean.”
They talked for a few minutes more, then Gregory said he’d better catch up to his wife.
“I’m in the phone book,” Paul said. “Call me.”
“I will,” Gregory promised. “Nice to see you again.”
Adam and Teo came running up. Sasha following them slowly and coolly, and Gregory introduced them to his old friend.
Adam gave Paul a cursory nod hello before turning back toward Gregory. “It wasn’t even scary!” he said. “It sucked!”
“It was a little scary,” Teo amended, although Gregory could tell she’d thought it was much more than that.
“The stunt show’s going to start in twenty minutes,” Adam announced. “We have to go now if we’re going to get a good seat.”
“Let’s find Mom first.” Gregory waved good-bye to Paul and led the kids through the crowd. They found Julia at the Molokan booth, and here were even more faces that he recognized, but he did not feel like talking to anybody, and he used Adam’s Wild West Show as an excuse to drag Julia away from the Molokans and across the park to the grandstands.
2
Finished, Julia turned off the vacuum cleaner, started wrapping up the cord. They’d been here for more than two weeks, almost unpacked for the past three days, and by now they were pretty familiar with the house, with its boundaries and dimensions and idiosyncrasies, but it seemed… different now than it had been when she and Gregory had gone through it with the real estate agent. Less hospitable. It was always dark, and while no one else appeared to notice that fact, she almost certainly did. She knew the reason: the house lay at the bottom of a steep outcropping of hill, which protected it from the morning sun, and there were two few windows facing west, making it gloomy even in the afternoon. She even understood why the house had been built this way: it was old, constructed before the advent of air-conditioning, and its owners had attempted to shield it from the desert sun as much as possible. But the end result was that their new home seemed odd and uncomfortable to her.
Spooky.
Spooky. It was a child’s word, and she didn’t know why she’d thought of it, but it described perfectly the atmosphere of this house. She had not been alone much the past couple of weeks, but the few times she had, she’d found herself listening for noises, peeking carefully around corners, being startled by shadows. There was an air of unease about their new home that seemed almost tangible to her, although it was apparently imperceptible to everyone else.
She wheeled the vacuum cleaner back to the hall closet. Of course, it was probably nothing, probably just stress. It was a shock to her system, moving from metropolitan Southern California to rural Arizona, and she was having a difficult time adjusting and this was just the way it was coming out.
But she was already wondering if they’d made a big mistake coming here—and that was not a good way to start a new life.
Julia went to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of sun tea from the pitcher in the refrigerator. With the vacuum off, the house was silent, and she popped a Rippingtons tape into the cassette player on the counter just to hear some noise. Sasha was upstairs in her room, brooding as usual, feeling sorry for herself, and Gregory’s mother was in her room, taking a short nap. Gregory had taken Adam and Teo to check out the video store and see if they could find something to watch tonight. Their cable was still not hooked up, and antenna reception here was little more than wishful thinking. She’d always been one of those parents who decried the evils of television, but the fact was, now that they were deprived of TV, the kids weren’t spending their time any more wisely. If anything, they were engaged in even more frivolous pursuits: Teo dressing and undressing and redressing her Barbie dolls; Adam reading superhero comic books; Sasha lying on her bed listening to the same bad rap songs over and over again. None of their children, she realized, ever read the newspaper, and with no television, what little exposure to current events they had was cut off.