“Nita goes by the name Jonnie Forke now.”
“Does she?” Polite, uninterested. Not getting it.
Lu stands to go. “I feel silly to have bothered you. Davey-do you still sing?”
“I sing with my congregation. But, no, I don’t perform. It appealed too much to my vanity. We have to be careful of our weaknesses, Lu. I was so proud of my body, the things it could do. We know how that turned out.”
“Do we?” Lu asks.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Andi is almost pathetically grateful when Lu asks her if she wants to catch a late bite, although surprised by the suggested location.
“The casino?” she says. “Why would you want to go there?”
“I just have this yen to play a few hands of blackjack, have a few drinks. All work and no play-”
Andi does not bother to assure Lu she isn’t dull. She’s too concerned with nailing down which one of them will be the designated driver.
“We have to be careful. Wouldn’t look good if one of us were flagged at a sobriety checkpoint.”
“I’m happy to pick you up at your place. And if you get lucky-”
“I’m not that kind of girl,” Andi says, feigning mock outrage. “I’m a lady.”
“The kind of lady who takes his number and calls him the next day.”
“As I said, a lady.” Lu laughs. Outside of work, Andi can be good company.
And, for an evening that began as a ruse, it is surprisingly fun. Lu sets her limit for losing at $200 and blows through it even faster than she hoped. Andi is having an unusually good night-winning hands and winning the attention of a perfectly nice looking man in a suit. She barely seems to notice when Lu says she’s going to grab a bite in the noodle bar.
Jonnie Forke does a double take when she sees Lu, tries to disguise it.
“I’m not your waitress,” she says. “I’ll tell someone you’re waiting.”
“Jonnie Forke of Luk Fu,” Lu says. “Unlucky Jonnie Forke of Luk Fu.”
“What?”
“It’s this thing I do. It helps me remember names, faces. I’m sorry to hear about your grandchild-what was her name? Joni Rose. I didn’t realize-the other day when we were talking-that she was sick. That sucks.”
She shrugs. “Yeah, well, what are you going to do?”
“It’s good, at a time like this, to have the comfort of religion. I’m not a believer, and it makes it harder to get through certain things.”
“I don’t go to church. Your waitress will be with you in a moment. But I’ll put your drink order in if you’re anxious.”
“Just club soda with lime. But I can wait.”
Andi and her new friend join Lu then, flush with possibility if not actual cash. “I’d say winner buys,” Andi says, “but then we’d have to kite the check and how would that look if two prosecutors walked out on a bill? This guy was up five hundred dollars, then totally blew his wad.”
“You two good-looking ladies could not possibly be prosecutors, unless you play them on Law & Order,” says Andi’s admirer, who close up is about ten years north of fifty, where Lu had originally pegged him. Still, he has all his hair.
“Dinner’s on me,” Lu says, putting down two $100 bills. “Andi-you use Uber or call a car service when it’s time to go home. Promise me. We have a meeting tomorrow morning, you can’t be late.”
“She’ll be fine,” Andi’s new friend says, sounding like the perfect gentleman. Lu sizes him up, then says: “Text me when you get in, Andi. I won’t sleep a wink until you do.”
Of course, she’s not going to sleep anyway. She had been skeptical, when talking to Davey-he spoke of Nita, not Jonnie Forke. But if she didn’t go to church, then she had no pastor to share the story about her sick grandchild on a listserv. Davey was lying about that, Lu is sure.
In her car, Lu instructs the Bluetooth paneclass="underline" “Call my brother, please.” She cannot break the habit of saying “please,” even to the nonperson who lives inside her car’s dashboard. She is her father’s daughter.
AJ’s voice, on another machine, replied: “Hi, you have reached AJ Brant. I will be traveling until May twenty-fourth and may be slow returning calls. But leave a message or e-mail me in care of the foundation and I’ll-”
She disconnects. A sister shouldn’t have to queue on a brother’s answering machine, another supplicant yearning for his time, money, attention. How can he be away for a month? Oh, it’s almost Earth Day, a big date in AJ’s world. No problem. May twenty-fourth is the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. They’ll have a barbecue. She’ll buy vegan hot dogs for Lauranne if that’s what it takes to get a little time alone with her brother in order to broach the unbroachable subject, that Friday night after Thanksgiving 1979. Did he lie to protect his friend? Would he continue to lie to protect his friend?
The bigger question for Lu is whether she will be speaking as a sister, or the county state’s attorney.
MAY 25
“I guess this day is for you, dear Father.”
AJ raises a beer-a local one that he brought to the barbecue, presumably brewed from ethical hops. Whatever those are. But their father shakes his head. “Memorial Day is for those who died. I merely served. You can toast me in November.”
“Of course,” AJ says. “Of course. My bad. It’s not like I wish you were dead.”
He seems a little loopy to Lu, but it’s probably jet-lag. AJ was at the Sydney Writers Festival and he arrived at BWI only yesterday afternoon. Although his memoir about his wanderjahr is several years old, it was a bit of a sleeper hit in Australia and a big publisher there has just brought out a new edition, with an introduction by some hot-shit novelist that Lu has never heard of and a new afterword by AJ and Lauranne, all about how individuals matter, small changes, blah, blah, blah.
Lu scrapes the leftover baked beans and corn from her plate into the trash and endures two withering glances from Lauranne-one for the paper plate, the other for the lack of composting. She glares back, unhappy they are dining on the screen porch. The day is shockingly hot, a misery, especially coming as it does after two perfectly pleasant spring days. But AJ and Lauranne said they preferred to be outside in “real air,” and they were the “guests,” so the family has congregated here. At least her father had the good sense to install ceiling fans on the porch. And the twins keep leaving the porch doors open, so the house’s downstairs AC unit-one of three required to cool the house-whirrs and groans, sending puffs of cool air toward them. Lu is simultaneously grateful for every artificial breeze and despairing of the utility bill. She keeps thinking the heat will back off when the sun goes down, that the planet has simply not absorbed enough of the sun’s warmth to torture them into the evening. But, so far, there is no respite.
There is, however, that deeply layered fecund smell of the suburbs. The light grassy scent of lawns, the darker fragrances from the trees. Lu may want to believe she’s a city person, but she is, at heart, a child of the suburbs, a child of this suburb, and she can’t live without yards and trees and flowers. Their first two years as a married couple, she and Gabe had lived in the treeless yuppie playground that was Federal Hill in the 1990s and she was secretly miserable, then ashamed of herself for being miserable. But she missed these smells.
“You want to take a walk with me?” she asks AJ, as the sun-finally-begins to set. “Around the lake?”
“I’m sooooooo tired, Lu. I’m still on Australian time. My body’s living in tomorrow.”
“That’s the price of being a visionary,” she jokes. Then, in a lower tone of voice: “Please. I want to hear about the status of your, um, project. The one we discussed all those months ago.”