Kids These Days Read online

  “Absolutely,” he said, and I watched them walk away, my wife and her older sister, same tallish height, same red hair, Alice’s cut a few inches longer. Same basic build, even, though Alice was a little slighter. Carolyn wasn’t heavy—just athletic, like she was maybe ready to do some pole vaulting. It was clear she went to the gym, picked things up. Alice asked her a question, and Carolyn laughed, the sound echoing back to us from the trees. Mid put his hand on my back. “Let’s go show you the castle,” he said. Carolyn and Alice rounded the corner, and I turned and followed him up the stairs.

  Inside, their twin daughters—the middle ones, twelve years old—were practicing what looked like karate in the living room, which was cavernous, astonishing, had cathedral ceilings and an obscene entertainment center taking up the bulk of one long wall. The girls were wearing white robes, white socks. Matching blond ponytails. They hollered out vowel sounds after every move. “Hi,” I said. One of them turned and waved, and the other pivoted, shouted, kicked her neatly in the side.

  “No fair,” the kicked one yelled. I always had trouble telling them apart at first.

  “Tae kwon do tests the mind as well as the body,” said the kicker. “It tests concentration.” The other one lunged at her, tried a roundhouse punch, took down a lamp.

  “Jane,” Mid said. “Sophie. Could you do that upstairs, please? Or outside?”

  “This is our dojo,” Sophie said. Or Jane.

  “This is not your dojo.”

  “We have to practice for the meet.”

  “Outside,” Mid said. “Or upstairs. The living room is not the place for—” He turned to me. “Help me out here, Walt.”

  “Is kicking allowed in tae kwon do?” I asked.

  “I guess it is,” he said.

  “Hello?” said Sophie-Jane. “It’s called a snap kick?”

  “No snap kicks in the living room,” said Mid.

  “Dad,” she said, complaining.

  “Not while company’s here. Say hello to Uncle Walter.”

  They said, “Hello, Uncle Walter,” at the same time.

  “Just Walter’s fine,” I said.

  Sophie-Jane said, “Can we watch TV, at least?”

  “If you do it quietly,” he said.

  “Can we watch the one in here?” the other one asked.

  Mid pulled a glass from the cabinet. “So long as you don’t snap-kick it.” He gave me a what-can-you-do? look, held the glass up. “What’s your poison?” he said.

  “Whatever you’re having is fine.”

  “Vodka and pineapple. Little soda water on top.”

  “Perfect,” I said, because he could have said almost anything, and it wouldn’t have mattered—there was a lot coming in at one time, a lot of family. One quick piece of what was headed our way. The girls sat down next to each other on the sofa. I wondered if Mid and Carolyn had a system for knowing which was which. I’d probably just have one of them dunk her thumb in ink every morning.

  “So,” Mid said. “What do you think?”

  “Of the house?”

  “The house, the development, the whole package. This was sort of your gig, right?”

  “I did mortgages,” I said, though that already felt like some other life, a cartoon badly drawn.

  “These’ll have mortgages. Come on. Tell me.”

  Luxury lots. In the jungle. I have some swampland, I was thinking. “We’ve only been here five minutes,” I said. “What I’ve seen so far looks good.”

  “It really could be,” he said. “It really, really could.”

  “So long as you don’t think you’re too far away, I guess.”

  “From what?”

  “From the beach, from civilization, whatever. You know this better than I do.”

  He broke into a wide grin. “Let me tell you this part, OK? You’re gonna love this. Next year, they’re building a high school right—” He walked me over to the back door, pointed out a stand of trees that looked exactly like all the other trees. “—over there. Kids’ll be able to walk through the woods to get to it. This place is a gold mine, Walter, I’m telling you. They will walk to school. It is a sparkling goddamn gold mine.”

  “Dad,” Sophie-Jane called, without looking away from the television.

  “We’re cursing less in the house,” he said. “Had a family meeting, came to an agreement. Now we have a curse jar.”

  “Sounds great.”

  “Fucking chaps my ass,” he said, too quietly for them to hear. He shook his head, headed back to the kitchen to finish up the drinks. I poured some of our water in a wine glass for Alice, and we went outside. “Check out the pool,” he said. He cracked an ice cube in his mouth. “Heated in winter. We special-ordered the tiles around the edge from Italy.”

  There was a waterfall on one end. The tiles he was pointing out were green glass. What they’d done was build themselves a hotel. “They’re terrific,” I said.

  “I mean, maybe it wasn’t exactly worth it, but what ever is?”

  Their oldest daughter, Olivia, was sitting off to the side in a low wooden beach chair, reading a magazine. I couldn’t remember if she’d turned sixteen yet. She was wearing jeans and a red long-sleeved shirt with what I assumed was a band name on it. The Cattle Prodded. It was way too hot for long sleeves. She had impossibly small earphones in her ears, lipstick on that was something close to brown. She was skinny in a way that made me want to feed her a burger. “Hey, Walter,” she said, when we walked past.

  “Hey, Olivia,” I said.

  “It’s Delton now.”

  “What?”

  “If he can go by Mid, then I’ve decided I can go by Delton.”

  Mid was short for Middleton, their last name. I worked it through. “But wouldn’t it have to be ‘Dleton’?”

  She made a face that looked like it took some effort—bored and interested at the same time. “Yeah, but then nobody would know what was going on, you know?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You like it?” Delton asked.

  “I do.”

  She looked at Mid. “He hates it.”

  “That’s his job,” I said.

  “She’s going through a charming phase,” said Mid.

  “I’m not going through any phase,” she said. “This is how I am. This is the picture in its entirety.”

  “In its what?” he said.

  “He’ll come around,” I told her. “He’ll get better.”

  “You’re going to make a great father,” Mid said. “Also, you’re fired.”

  “How can you fire me?” I said. “I haven’t started.”

  Right then their three-year-old, Maggie, ran shrieking across the yard—where she’d come from, I had no idea—and jumped into the pool. She was wearing an inflatable purple turtle around her waist. “You two are keeping an eye on her?” Carolyn called. She and Alice were by the driveway, back where it wrapped into a three-car garage.

  “Of course,” Mid said. Maggie bobbed in the deep end, smacked her hands against the water. Olivia—Delton—rolled her eyes, went back to her magazine. Inside, the twins were probably watching The Karate Kid and putting each other in headlocks. I took a long sip of my drink, and then another. Mid held out his glass. “To kids,” he said. “This is what you’ve got to look forward to. You’re going to love it.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “This is fine. Don’t worry about me.”

  “Worry?” he said. “Baby, this right here is as good as it gets, OK? This is the motherfucking dream.” He went over to a table and a matching set of chairs, and I joined him, sat in the shadow of his looming brand-new solitary house and just tried to hang on while he cranked himself up talking about the high school, how it was going to be some kind of performing-arts powerhouse, how they were going to build the county’s largest auditorium. Delton’s phone rang and she answered it, never took her earphones out. Maggie started calling for Mid, begging him to pay attention to something she’d decided was vitally important. “
Watch me,” she was yelling. “Daddy Daddy Daddy look!”

  Delton and the twins were planned, or planned enough. Maggie was an accident. Mid and Carolyn thought they were done, and then they’d had to start all over. I looked at Alice, who was pointing up at something with Carolyn, the roof, maybe, or the chimney nobody’d ever need down here, and I caught myself thinking holy, holy shit, tried to remember one more time what we could possibly think we might be doing.

  I stood down in the parking garage, waiting for Mid to pick me up. Alice had said she’d watch for our parachutist, and even that signaled a kind of truce—we’d gotten into it the night before on the way back from Mid and Carolyn’s about how I’d apparently been distant at dinner.

  “Just quiet,” I said at breakfast, once we’d resumed combat operations. “I was taking it all in.”

  “Meaning the kids, right? Meaning Maggie?” Maggie’d stayed up past her bedtime, melted down in a serious performance that left everybody a little bleary.

  “Meaning everything,” I said. “I get to think about things.”

  “It was like you were on a whole other planet. Carolyn asked me if you were OK.”

  “What’d you tell her?”

  “I said you were having your thing.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “You absolutely were.” She took her still-full cereal bowl to the sink, poured it out, and walked off down the hall, or what hall there was. Being at Mid and Carolyn’s had made the condo seem tiny, even though it wasn’t.

  “What’s the matter?” I said.

  “You could act excited,” she said. “That’s all. Every now and then, you could act excited.”

  I said, “I am excited.”

  “You’re terrified. You have been the whole time.”

  “Why is that bad? Why can’t I be both?”

  “You know what? You’re completely welcome to be both. I would love it if you were both.”

  I said, “Why are you standing in the hall?”

  She went in the bathroom, closed the door. I got up and stood outside it, looking for some kind of traction. “You’re having a thing, too, you know,” I said. “What was all that about how there’s something wrong with their house that way? About how you didn’t understand what they were trying to do?”

  “That’s me being worried about my sister, Walter. It’s hardly the same.” I heard her turn on the water, turn it back off again. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “There isn’t any toilet paper in here.”

  I got a roll from the closet, opened the door just wide enough, handed it through. It was what I could offer. “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” I told her, and that was most of what we’d said to each other all morning.

  Alice and Carolyn were headed to the doctor later on, to Carolyn’s ob-gyn up in Jacksonville. Carolyn raved about him. She said he was great, said on top of that, he was put together like a marble statue. I’d offered to go, too, but Alice said there wasn’t any need, that she just wanted to meet him, make sure she felt comfortable. If she liked him, we’d go back together for the regular appointment. So I was riding with Mid for the day, my first true day on the job, whatever the job might be. All we’d gotten to at dinner was that he’d pick me up in the morning.

  The parking garage was open on the ground level, the walls only about waist high, which gave a pretty good view of the tennis courts. There were two kids out there, college age, hitting it back and forth with an easy, practiced rhythm. The ball had that good sound coming off the racquets. I was trying to remember when I’d last been in the kind of physical shape where playing tennis in the full summer sun would have seemed like a good idea when Mid came around the corner, driving a yellow Camaro that had definitely not been in his driveway the night before. It had to be fifteen years old, early or mid-nineties, but it looked brand new. Like a brand-new banana. He pulled up next to me, the engine rumbling away. He had the windows down. He smiled. Big. “Is this yours?” I said.

  “Belongs to a friend of mine. He’s letting me test it. Thought maybe I’d get it for Olivia.”

  I looked down the length of the car. “It’s really yellow,” I said.

  “Yeah, but it’s only got 45,000 miles on it. And it’s huge. Unless she rolled it, she probably couldn’t kill herself.” He smiled again. “And it’s way too wide to roll.”

  “What does it get, like eight miles to the gallon?”

  “There is that. Get in.”

  Inside, the car seemed made for some other species: You felt like you were riding right down on the road, the seats were so low, and the windshield was flat enough that we were all but looking out the roof. Mid was clearly enjoying it. I was having a hard time imaging Olivia behind the wheel. “When does she turn sixteen?” I asked him.

  “End of the summer. You think she’d like this?”

  “Does she like yellow?”

  “Who doesn’t like yellow? It’s a color.”

  I held my hands out in front of me like I was driving, pushed at the floor with my feet. “Could she reach the pedals?”

  “Oh, hell, I don’t know. Probably.” He gunned us around a golf cart half-hanging out of the bike lane. “We’ll just get her in here and see, let her take a look. That’s all. I’m only trying it out.”

  “I didn’t mean anything by it,” I said.

  “You’re OK,” he said. “No worries.”

  “I think it could be a great car,” I said.

  “You do?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not?” The car smelled not exactly new, but like somebody had tried to make it smell new. It had black leather seats. In Florida. I watched Florida go by out the window, tried to keep count of the blue Hurricane Evacuation Route signs. The signs made it seem like evacuating would be more complicated than just driving away from the water, which worried me in a way it was hard to put a solid shape to. I said, “How long’s she been going by Delton?”

  “That won’t last.” He pressed the trip meter button on the odometer a couple of times. “Every few weeks it’s something new. At the end of the school year she was wearing these knit caps every time she left the house. Ninety degrees outside, and she’s walking around like Swiss Chalet Barbie.”

  “I don’t think I remember being sixteen,” I said.

  “I’m blocking it out, man, everything I can. We keep getting these goddamn boys ringing our doorbell. And that’s if we’re lucky. Half the time they just sit in the driveway, hit the horn, wait for her to come outside.”

  “She seems like a good kid, though, right?”

  “It could be a hell of a lot worse. She’s got a friend who’s already been to rehab twice. Pills. Spent last fall living in a halfway house.”

  “Damn.”

  “You know what, though? You never know what’s coming. And even when you do know, you still don’t know.” He shifted gears, let that idea sit between us.

  The thing about Mid was that he basically meant well. I had him as a pretty good father, a pretty good husband. He probably knew how to listen when he needed to, how to broker peace deals in the house when that was what was required. It felt possible that his politics might not quite match up with mine, or his understanding about how the cosmos spun around, but he’d always seemed like a good guy, somebody who’d happily enough go to his kids’ tae kwon do meets, somebody who’d be alright to drive around with in a borrowed Camaro on a given summer morning. Even so, something still wasn’t sitting exactly right about the job, and in the wash of another poor effort on my part at being what Alice needed me to be, I figured I ought to check. Be sure. We stopped at a light. Mid drummed his fingers on the wheel. “So I wanted to ask you a question,” I said.

  “Do it.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way.” Alice and I hadn’t fully chased this through—we’d been afraid, I think, to completely sketch it out. “I wanted to make sure you really did need somebody,” I said. “Because I could find something to do. I
t wouldn’t have to be much, on account of the condo and everything.”

  “I need somebody,” he said.

  “You’re sure.”

  “I am. I cleared it through the boss.”

  “You are the boss.”

  “That did simplify things,” he said.

  “I guess I’m just trying to say—” I shuffled a few possibilities: I could work aisles at the Home Depot, send people to where the hammers hung in their little rows. I could mow lawns. I could work some breakfast buffet place and make sure the bacon never ran low. What I knew: I could not go back to selling loans. That was done and gone forever. I’d spent those last few months at the bank trying hard to believe the bootstraps-austerity-we-shall-overcome singsong that kept floating through my e-mail, but when the Feds finally knocked on our door on a Friday afternoon, I wasn’t surprised. Nobody was. We’d been headed that way for the better part of a year.

  And they were good at it, the Feds. Efficient as hell. They locked us down, interviewed us one by one, took their notes, took our keys, and then opened us back up Monday morning as a branch of Piedmont National. New signage, new plants, new everything—except for loan brokerage. No new signs on loan brokerage. They shuttered us entirely. I went home, worked my stack of business cards, made my calls. I did what you were supposed to do. Nothing. Turned out, all at once, that nobody was doing much of any of that anymore. They certainly weren’t doing more of it. And I was supposed to somehow have a family.

  “Listen,” Mid said. “I don’t want you thinking this is some kind of a charity case. It’s easy math, alright? I could use the help, and you’re a smart guy. Plus you got a raw deal, if you ask me. You got fucked where it counts. I feel great about this. You don’t need to be thanking me.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “OK?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Glad we got that out of the way.”

  We passed a place that sold Dutch Barns. We passed a place that sold bicycles. If the earth fell further out from underneath me, I could sell Dutch Barns sized especially for bicycle storage. “But what is it?” I said.

  “What is what?”

  “What is it you’re planning for me to actually—”