“Benny!” he said, peering into the car. Then, turning to the driver’s seat, “Katherine!”
But she wouldn’t look at him. She just sat there, checking her watch as if frustrated that she’d never get these seconds of her life back, while Benny crawled into the backseat for his suitcase. It was technically Alexi’s suitcase, and he had a sudden image of everything else he’d once owned in Los Angeles, before the house was seized earlier that year and Katherine had dragged all of his belongings, his books and clothes and excellent record collection, out to the street on garbage day and moved with Benny to a tiny studio in Palms.
“Drop him at Ellen’s Sunday’s morning,” Katherine said, staring at the dashboard, and Alexi found, with a pang, that she still had a disorienting effect on him: her high cheekbones and light brown eyes and delicate hands gripping the wheel, so small they always made his own in comparison feel massive and clumsy. But he noticed, too, the lines that had begun to deepen across her forehead and how pale she was for summer, as if she’d barely had a chance to go outside.
And then, finally, she met his gaze. All at once everything he’d been planning to tell her, the carefully crafted apologies he’d been working on so much of the year — suddenly all of that was moot, seeing from her such a look of disdain it was clear she wanted him erased from her life. “She’s on 28th and Church,” she said flatly, scribbling down her sister’s address, all their road trips to visit Ellen in San Francisco apparently cast away and forgotten, some other couple’s history.
Benny climbed out of the car and ran to him. Alexi stroked his soft hair and breathed in everything at once, gum and sleep and cheese on his breath, wondering, if just through smell and touch, he could determine whether his nine-year-old was okay. “I missed you,” Alexi said, and right then something seemed to kick inside Katherine and she bolted out of the driver’s seat. She pulled their son toward her, pressing his face to her blouse, and whispered, “Call me at Aunt Ellen’s if you need anything.” And when Benny said, “Jeez, Mom, it’s just two days,” she reached through the open car window, pulled a five-dollar bill from her pocketbook and thrust it into his hand. “In case of emergency,” she said, as if Alexi weren’t standing right there, as if Benny weren’t going away with his own father but a derelict stranger, hurtling her boy into the wild.
She kissed Benny’s head, then got back in the car without even a wave goodbye to Alexi, and he led his son across the lot to the Plymouth he’d arranged to borrow for the weekend, rusty and dilapidated with candy wrappers and cola bottles cluttering the backseat. He slid in beside Benny and drove out of the gates and onto the bridge, where all at once the San Francisco skyline came into view. Flawless, if it weren’t for Katherine in the rearview mirror, as if signaling that the three of them would never be together in a car again, the windows down, her cheek on his shoulder, his hand on her calf.
He sank his foot onto the gas and the cluster of cars surrounding him, Katherine’s included, quickly disappeared. Then he glanced sideways at his son. As a baby, Benny had looked so much like him that even the sight of his child, sitting in his high chair or napping in his crib, used to startle Alexi so intensely he’d forget why he entered the room in the first place. He’d read somewhere that there was a biological reason for it, that it afforded fathers the kind of closeness and recognition mothers inherently felt after pregnancy. But over the past year Benny had begun to resemble him less, his curly black hair now wavy and light like Katherine’s, his once-olive skin so pale it was like the whole veiny map of his interior was open for public viewing. He’d shot up maybe four inches since they’d seen each other last but hadn’t put on any weight — though maybe, Alexi thought, his son could work the gangliness in his favor if he played the smart, serious card with girls. He knew from Katherine that once again Benny had gotten all A’s, about which Alexi was deeply proud and had been bragging to everyone inside.
“What’s your favorite subject?” he asked his son.
“Science, and probably history.”
Alexi nodded. These seemed like solid answers. “Who’s your best teacher?”
“It’s August,” the boy said, looking at him curiously. “I’m on summer vacation.”
“Ah,” Alexi said. He pulled off at 19th and drove along the park. He’d never liked San Francisco. Its beauty had always felt so showy, with its choppy blue water and steep, craggy hills and all those frilly houses painted candy-egg colors. Alexi was an actor and it had always felt to him, visiting the city, that he was on the set of San Francisco even when in the middle of it, even drinking coffee or eating a sandwich or waiting outside the ferry terminal. His closest friend from inside, Karl Mueller, had set him up with the car, along with a friend-of-a-friend’s apartment for the weekend. But the directions were complex and confusing, and as Alexi backed out of a one-way street, then headed down a dead end, he found himself pining for the wide, no-nonsense boulevards of Los Angeles.
“I have it all planned out,” Alexi said. “I’ve got us a great place for the weekend”—if he ever found it, he thought, silently cursing yet another one-way street to nowhere—“and we’ll do it up, a steak dinner tonight, pancakes for breakfast.”
“Is that what you want?” his son said.
“What do you mean?”
“Your first weekend out.”
How grown-up of Benny to consider his needs, Alexi thought. He’d always been that way. Alexi remembered picking him up from nursery school years ago, and the teacher telling him that when they were playing musical chairs and the girl left without a seat began to cry, Benny immediately stood up and offered his. He’d relished seeing his son through the teacher’s admiring eyes, though lately Alexi had been worrying about the line between generosity and patsiness growing murkier now that Benny had been alone with his mother. He’d sensed, in his calls to Katherine from Alameda Point, the weight that had been thrust on the boy. Usually she’d pass the phone off to Benny the moment she heard Alexi’s voice. But the few times she relented, her responses seemed as predictable as the clicking sounds they always heard five minutes in, saying things like “It’s been rough, but we’re getting through it,” or “We’re finding ways to brighten up the place in Palms,” as if it were perfectly acceptable that their nine-year-old was shouldering half of that “we.” And though he was out now, though he’d been offered his friend’s pool house in L.A. for a month while he, supposedly, figured out what was next in his life, Alexi knew that having a weekend dad wouldn’t save Benny from the year he’d been left without one.
The apartment Karl had set him up with was on a hill at the crest of Buena Vista Park, tidy and bright with a Murphy bed in the living room. On the kitchen table was a note from Karl’s friend’s friend, wishing them a great weekend and offering whatever was left in the icebox. Alexi was touched that someone he’d never met would be so kind.