Kids These Days Page 3

  “Patience,” he said. “That’s what we’re taking you to see right now.” The light turned green, and Mid started back in on Olivia like that was all we’d been talking about, like I wasn’t white-knuckling the edges of what I wanted to do when I grew up. He told me about what it was like to ride with a kid who had a learner’s permit, how the first time she turned left, she’d just gone ahead and done it without checking, had pulled right through oncoming traffic. He still wasn’t sure how they didn’t get killed. He told me they were teaching her to parallel park between cereal boxes out on the street in front of the house. I listened and rode, tried to believe. After a few miles he whipped us into a strip center, stopped the car, sat up a little bit, and said, “Well, here we are.”

  There was a tax service, a church, two empty storefronts, and a vacuum repair place. There were no cars in the parking lot. I couldn’t tell what he was wanting me to look at. “What?” I said.

  “Right there.”

  “Where?”

  He opened the door, walked over to a white metal building about half the size of a truck trailer sitting in the middle of the parking lot. It was surrounded by red poles sunk into the ground, I assumed to keep people from driving into it. It said TWICE THE ICE! on the front in large red letters. There were two penguins painted on the side, looking pleased with themselves and sitting on a pile of ice. Mid held his hand out at the building. He could have been posing for a photograph.

  I put on my sunglasses and got out of the car. I could feel the heat from the asphalt seeping up through my shoes. “What is this?” I said.

  “It’s a Twice-the-Ice,” he said. “I ordered two. They come in this week.”

  “You ordered two for what?”

  “For this. I’ve already got the locations leased. All we need to do is get the water and electricity run. They come fully ready to go.”

  I said, “It sells ice?”

  “Sixteen pounds in bags, or twenty in bulk. Twice what you get at a gas station. That’s the angle. Twice the ice.”

  I looked at it again. It was a giant white brick with a slightly less giant white brick of an air conditioner on its roof. “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “There’s no ‘get.’ This is as simple as it comes. You drive up, put your money in, and it gives you ice.”

  There were two stainless steel chutes on the side of the building. Signs over each said BAG and BULK. There was a blue awning over the chutes so you wouldn’t have to stand in the sun while you got your ice. “This is what you want me to do for you?” I said.

  “Partly,” he said.

  I walked a full lap around the thing. There were penguins on the other side, too. “How much does one of these cost?” I asked.

  “About a hundred.”

  “Thousand dollars?”

  “They pay for themselves in three years, on average.”

  There wasn’t any window in the Twice-the-Ice. No attendant. “It’s self-serve,” I said.

  “The ice never touches human hands.”

  “Is that good?”

  “The website says it is,” he said.

  “But what would I be doing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The thing makes its own ice, right? What do you need me for?”

  “You check on them,” he said. “Once or twice a week, you come by, feed two bucks in, make sure it’s making ice.”

  “I check on them. On the Twice-the-Ices.”

  “Sure.”

  “Mid,” I said. “That’s not a job. Or if it is, you don’t need me to do it. Pay some college kid to do drive-bys.”

  “I don’t know any college kids,” he said. “I know you.”

  There was no job. The white paint of the Twice-the-Ice was like a flashbulb that wouldn’t stop going off. “You don’t have anything for me,” I said.

  “I do,” he said. “Relax. This is only one piece. Let me swing you by a couple of other places and show you the whole system. Tell you what I’ve got put together.”

  I looked back at Delton’s Camaro, chewed over my new career as the security detail for barrier-island ice-vending parking lot trailers. Alice and Carolyn would be headed for Jacksonville by now, for the appointment with the doctor. Other than going back to the condo and dragging one of Aunt Sandy’s aluminum folding chairs down to the beach, I literally had nowhere else to be. “Sure,” I told Mid. I was riding along. That was what I was doing, what was left I seemed to know how to do. “Let’s do it,” I said. “Show me the next thing.”

  “Guy won’t let me buy in,” Mid said, meaning the man behind the bar. “But I love it here anyway.” We were at Pomar’s, a shrimp-and-beer place he’d been telling me about since before we’d moved. It was squeezed up against the highway—there was the road, a tiny crushed-shell parking lot, and then there was Pomar’s. It had big plywood windows open to the air, big fans in the ceiling. You couldn’t see the ocean. It wasn’t quite hot. It wasn’t quite anything else, though.

  “You want to run this place?” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “What do you not do?”

  “Until those Twice-the-Ices come in and start turning a little cash, not much else.” Our shrimp came out: steamed, in a metal bucket, with a second bucket for shells. There was a bowl of lemons on the table. Also a salt shaker, red pepper, a roll of paper towels.

  “You’re stretched?” I asked.

  “The land thing over at the house has us a little thin.”

  “Then why the ice machines?”

  “Those suckers print money,” he said. “The guy who owns the one I just showed you? He’s got six more down in Daytona. He doesn’t have to do anything else.”

  “So, OK.” I was still trying to grasp what was going on. “You can’t have in mind paying me any kind of real paycheck just to drive between your two ice huts that aren’t even there yet.”

  “Here’s how I see it.” He was dressed like a gym teacher—khaki shorts and a polo shirt a half-size too small. He looked a little like an upside-down pear. “You want to work. And I want to work less. I don’t have to pay you a ton, because, like you said, you don’t have any housing costs. I come out the big winner: I get a guy like you on a steep discount.” He squeezed half a lemon over the shrimp bucket, plowed ahead: “All you have to pay for is insurance for the kid, plus three squares a day times however many people are living under your roof. In my case, that’s thirty-seven. In yours, it’s two, going on two-and-a-half. I don’t need you to do much. Hell, you don’t need you to do much. So what I’ve been thinking is maybe you can sort of be me a few days a week. Fill in. Go stick your nose in places, make sure everything’s working the way it’s supposed to. Free me up to do other things.”

  I said, “Like I’m your second, or something?”

  He pointed a shrimp at me. “Perfect,” he said. “We’ll call it that. I love it.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “How would I even know if—I don’t know, if the locksmith thing is going right?”

  “Those guys are easy. You stop in, say hello, ask them if they’ve been opening a lot of doors and windows. See if anybody thinks the van could use a paint job.”

  “I don’t know shit about locksmiths,” I said. I knew derivatives. Depreciations. Not this.

  “You know as much as I do,” he said, “and it doesn’t matter. This is a benevolent dictatorship we’re running here, you and me. It’s their locksmith service. All I need you to do is turn up from time to time and remind people we still exist. Helps them keep a tighter ship.”

  My beer was warming in its plastic cup. A TV mounted on the wall played a grainy replay of an old college football game. I felt a little desperate, a little hurried. “You don’t know me well enough to bring me on like this,” I said.

  “Come on. I know you fine.”

  “Carolyn’s making you do it. For Alice.”

  He shook his head. “Not the kind of thing she’d do. I mean, I won’t lie—she’s pretty jacked about
having you guys down here. Talks about you all the time. But I’m happy, too. I’ve always felt like you and I might get along pretty well if we ever had the chance.”

  “We do get along.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying. Here. Listen to me.” He waved down the guy at the bar, who pulled us two new beers. “This last year or two, I’ve been looking for somebody to take over the business. I’m wanting to step back. Maybe pick up a hobby. Maybe painting.”

  “What are you, forty-four?”

  “Forty-three,” he said. “But I’m tired.”

  “Painting?”

  “Or triathalons. Or Revolutionary War reenactments. Doesn’t matter. I’m just ready for something else. I’m ready to sleep a little later. Once Maggie’s old enough for kindergarten, Carolyn and I will have more time to spend around the house. Olivia goes to college in two years. This is the old ‘I want to spend more time with the kids’ thing, except it’s not even that.”

  “I don’t think I’m totally following,” I said.

  “I do want to spend more time with the kids. Of course I do. But I’d also like some more time, period. If the Pelican Pines thing works out—shit, if we sell even half those lots, or two-thirds, then I’ll be at a place where I can slow down some. Maybe that’s not for a year. Maybe the economy shits the bed again. Maybe we gotta grow the city out that way. But it’ll happen eventually. And when it does, I’ll need somebody looking after things.”

  “And you want that person to be me.”

  “I want that person to be somebody good,” he said. “Somebody I can trust. You seem like a pretty even guy. You seem like you wouldn’t be walking in the front door and yelling at people.” He was sweating a little bit. He pulled a paper towel off the roll, wiped his hands, his face, his forehead. “I like you, Walter, goddamnit. Stop fucking around. Take the job.”

  I thought I had already. “I’m supposed to be your partner?” I asked him.

  “My second. I liked the way you said it before.”

  “And you’re wanting to give me a paycheck.”

  “Well, about that.” He went in his pocket, came back out with a slip of paper. “Here,” he said.

  It was a cashier’s check. For thirty thousand dollars. I waited for the circus music. “Mid,” I said. “What the fuck?”

  “Paying you a salary’s just another pain in my ass. Plus, then I have to report you as an employee. This way you’re a contract worker. Easier for everybody.”

  “You really don’t have to—”

  “Let’s call that five or six months,” he said. “Or three, if we do well. We can work out the fine print later. This way you can get your feet wet down here, see if all this feels like home. You can see if you can stand working for me. With me. And now you’ve got money in the bank. Take Alice to dinner, while you still can.”

  “I can’t keep this. It’s too much.”

  He held his hands up. “Don’t cash it if you don’t want to. Stuff it in some drawer if that makes you feel better. It’s already off my books, so it makes no difference to me.”

  “Mid. Listen. Wait.”

  He pushed his half-full cup to the center of the table. “Too much talk about money. We’ve got more stops to make. Time to get a move on.” He stood up. I stayed where I was. “You coming?” he said.

  “Do you want me to get this?” I said, meaning the bill.

  “Walter, don’t go all big spender on me now, OK? This was business. Business is on the company.” He put twenty-five dollars under the sugar caddy and walked outside, left me at the table. I wasn’t certain what to do. I felt sure when I explained it to Alice, I’d get it wrong. Half of it, anyway. Mid fired up the big engine. I added five dollars out of my pocket even though he’d already tipped plenty, chased him out there, climbed in my side, buckled up, and tried very hard to act like I knew what was going on.

  “Let me see it,” Alice said. I handed it to her, and she unfolded it. “Shit,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Shit,” she said again. We were sitting down by the dunes, on wooden benches built into the walkway to the beach. The sun was setting. There was a little wind off the water. Alice had a box of crackers and a glossy booklet called Loving Your Second Trimester. She said, “What are we going to do?”

  “Put it in the bank, I guess. I can’t be walking around with it.”

  “He really didn’t say anything else?”

  “Just that it was easier this way. Or that it would be.”

  “I still don’t think I understand what he wants you to be doing for him.”

  “He took me around,” I said. “We went by Island Pizza. We went out to the sunglasses shop. We looked at things.”

  “You looked at things?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Are you working tomorrow?”

  “He said he’d pick me up at ten.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking at more things, I guess.”

  “Thirty thousand dollars,” she said.

  “I tried to bring it up a couple more times, but he’d just talk about something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Olivia, the house, the high school. He loves to talk about the high school.”

  She said, “Carolyn told me they might not build it.”

  “What? When?”

  “Today in the car. She says it’s tied up with the school board or the county commission or something. They haven’t voted yes yet. She says Mid keeps acting like they have, or like they will, but she thinks there’s a chance it won’t go through.”

  “What else does Carolyn say?”

  A bunch of people walked by us on their way down to the beach, all of them wearing matching faded jeans and untucked white button-up shirts. Picture time, a couple of sunburned families’ worth. “She says there’s something not right with him lately. She says there’s something going on where he’s not the same.”

  “Not the same how?”

  “That’s what I asked. She couldn’t explain it. Maybe it’s the house. I’m not sure.” She ate a cracker. “Carolyn said she thought he was under stress. How does he seem to you?”

  I said, “He seemed fine. Like himself.”

  “Except for the part where he gave you an enormous check.”

  “Except for that.”

  “But you felt like he was alright?”

  “How would I know better than Carolyn?”

  “You wouldn’t,” she said. She was staring up behind me at the building. I turned around. There were towels hanging off the balcony railings, umbrellas in the corners, hurricane shutters down on the units nobody was in. She said, “This is all starting to feel a little bizarre, right?”

  “Starting to?” I said.

  “Don’t do that,” she said.

  The group down on the beach had lined themselves up, the kids standing behind the adults, who were kneeling. A flash went off a few times. Then they broke formation, went into some deal where everybody held one kid sideways, smiled for the camera again. I said, “Did the doctor say anything about Kitchenette?”

  “Or Kitchen,” she said, right away. We’d been fooling with pairs of baby names, joking around—Kitchen and Kitchenette, Azalea and Azaleo.

  “Or Kitchen,” I said.

  “I made an appointment for a week from Monday. He said we’ll be due for an ultrasound. If the baby’s pointed the right way, we might be able to find out the sex. If we want to.”

  “Do we want to?” I said.

  “Do you?”

  I couldn’t see how knowing would make anything easier or harder. I said, “Could we wait until we get a little closer to it, see how we feel?”

  “We’re pretty close to it,” she said.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I still don’t know, either.” She opened up her booklet, flipped through the pages. “They gave this to me today,” she said. “It says I’m supposed to get all horny during the second trimes
ter. Here: ‘You may find your sex drive increases. Take advantage of this time with your partner.’ ” She smiled.

  I said, “Are you wanting to have sex now?”

  “No, you idiot. Not now.”

  “I’m just asking. I was making conversation.”

  “That isn’t making conversation.”

  “You’re still mad,” I said. “From this morning.”

  “I’m not. I’m just weird.” She waved the book at me. “This says I’m allowed to get a little weird. It says we’re not supposed to worry.”

  “What does Carolyn say?”

  “She said she wanted sex all the time.”

  “I meant about the worrying.”

  “I didn’t ask her. She wanted to know how you were doing today, how you were with everything, and I said fine.”

  “But you think I’m not fine.”

  More formations down on the beach. More pictures. Most of the kids laughing, one of the little ones in tears. She said, “Walter, half the time you’re fine, like now, and half the time it’s like you’re at the bottom of a well.”

  “I’m not at the bottom of a well.”

  “Sometimes you are, though,” she said, and wiped her eyes.

  I moved over to her bench. “Are you crying?”

  “The book says I can cry.” She sniffed. “It says I’ll have mood swings. It says it’s perfectly normal.”

  “Then you’re doing it right. You should cry.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do.” She got up and put the crackers on the railing. “I’m going up,” she said. “I’m going to go take a shower. Why don’t you stay down here a while, and then later you can come up, and we can maybe see what happens.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe the book’s right. Maybe I would like to have a little sex.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No,” she said, laughing now, wiping her face with her sleeve. “Not really.”

  “That sounds great,” I said. “Anything you like.”

  “Oh, God,” she said. “Watch out for the crazy lady. Crazy lady coming through.”

  “You’re not crazy.”

  “If you think that, you’re worse off than I am. Maybe we’re both losing it.”