The Next Right Thing (7 page)

EVEN IN MY WORST DAYS,
I’d always had one good thing in my life. I had something that Wade didn’t have, that Betsy and Jeep didn’t have. Something that Terry had wanted so badly that he’d tried to take it from Claire Monaco.

I had a child.

She lived in Anaheim Hills with her mother. She was the reason I never ate my gun. The reason I wasn’t in jail. Ultimately, she was probably the reason I wasn’t drinking. It was hard to talk that way in A.A.—the cranky old-timers would tell you that it wasn’t enough, that alcoholism was stronger than the bonds of family, that the vision of your adored tomboy daughter wasn’t enough to keep you on the wagon. They were right, of course. But they were also wrong.

I called her Crash, but almost no one else did. Her real name
was Alison, after that Elvis Costello song. My ex-wife, Jean Trask, when she used to like me, would call her Crash sometimes, too. When she was a little girl, Crash loved arranging Matchbox cars into vast, noisy conflicts: car chases, multicar pileups, that kind of thing. Her desire to stage vivid confrontations hung on in our shared love of fireworks. “Fireworks” is a nice way to put it: “explosives” would be more accurate. On our favorite annual road trip to Nevada, we bought a truckload and then set them off all at once in the desert.

I used to pray that she didn’t become a cop. I needed to remember to pray for that again.

She’d been holding up pretty well despite the fact that her parents had been fighting over her all over again for about a year. I’d woken up one morning near my seventh A.A. anniversary realizing that it wasn’t okay with me that I had no legal connection to my own daughter. I had been in the middle of a divorce when the DA was deciding whether or not to charge me with attempted murder
and
it was the bad end of my drinking. So it had made some kind of sense to give up custody. But I wasn’t that man anymore. The trouble was that I couldn’t convince my ex-wife. Now we were about a month away from the mother of all court hearings. My sister, Betsy, had helped me assemble a dossier testifying to my new standing as a solid citizen—statements from pretty much everyone I knew as well as magazine articles about my design work and every financial statement I’d ever filed. It was an impressive display that my sister was confident would do the trick if the judge was reasonable at all.

At the end of Jeffrey Road was a fire trail that ran through private land high enough so that on a good day, you could see the Channel Islands. Sometimes there was an old security guard
who tried to run you off, but that afternoon we were lucky. I hadn’t originally planned to take my lunchtime trip to Santa Ana, so I hadn’t envisioned this bike ride as an antidote to Santa Ana, but it was working well. By the time I’d pulled the bikes from the truck, it seemed like Crash was already beating my ass up the hill. The switchbacks that reached up for the ridge were as lush as anything in Orange County: scrub, cactus, and mustard so vivid that it seemed to dim the rest of the vegetation. The snow that stuck to Saddleback Mountain looked close enough to touch.

We didn’t talk for the first mile or so because we were both pretending it was easy for me to keep up with her. When we reached a plateau, Crash broke the silence. “You have something for me this weekend?”

“You don’t want to know,” I said.

“That big?”

“That loud. But if you tell any of your pyro friends, I’m going to jail.”

If the state of California had just started granting learner’s permits at thirteen, Crash would have smiled a little wider. I experienced a nagging thought that, God help me, I’d had every day since she was born. This time, I said it out loud. “Do you think I’m a bad father?”

Crash smiled. “No, I think you’re an out-of-shape, breathing-too-heavy father. Why do you ask such stupid questions?”

“I feel like a goof with this helmet,” I said. “Isn’t there some way I can get you to wear one without having to wear one myself?”

She stood on her pedals and cranked ahead of me a few yards.

“Why did your mother need the afternoon off?” I shouted after her.

“She has a date,” Crash said.

“With John Sewell?”

“Yeah.”

“Since when did your mom start taking off weekday afternoons?”

“Since John asked her to the groundbreaking of the new bazillion-dollar Civic Center. Mom always goes where the rich people go.”

“Are you being a smart-ass about your mother?”

“No. If I were an investment banker, I’d follow the rich people, too. Besides, she goes wherever John goes. He’s her guy.”

“He ever say anything to you about an electrician with a name like a dog?”

“Huh?”

“Never mind,” I said. “You think they’ll get married?” I wondered what effect her marriage would have on our custody battle.

“Why?” Crash said. “You jealous?”

“I barely know the guy,” I said. “I think it’s nice that you like him, though.”

“You think it’s nice that I like him? Why are you talking like a father from a TV show? Yeah, they’re going to get married. Yeah, I like him. But you don’t even like my coaches. You’re telling me that you’re going to be totally cool with a stepfather?”

“Unless you call him ‘Dad,’ ” I said. “And then I’ll have to kill you both.”

Crash rode close to the edge of the road. We were getting
higher and the drop-off was steep. “Tell me what’s wrong with you,” she said, “or I’m going to throw myself over the cliff.”

My stomach churned. There was a part of Crash, I knew, that believed she could do it. So much for escaping the insanity of her parents.

“I’ve been feeling sad about my friend Terry.”

Crash had insisted on coming to the memorial service because that’s the kind of girl she is, but we’d never really talked about his death.

“He was like my big brother,” I said. “And my father and friend all rolled into one.”

We slowed to a stop in the middle of the fire trail. It blew my mind that Saddleback Mountain was no longer wreathed in smog. I’d been looking up at that smog my whole life.

“I know what he was,” Crash said. She looked up at Saddleback before she looked back at me. “What’s it feel like?”

“I guess I feel lost,” I said. Like a dinghy in an ocean that just got emptied by a meteor. “No one has ever died on you, have they?”

“Your dad? Mom’s dad?”

“You don’t remember them, do you?”

“Not really,” she said, “but I know what you mean. I felt that way when you got divorced.”

“You remember that?”

She glanced at me like I was an idiot, a glance I recognized from her mother.

“Remember when Terry and I used to take you to the movies?” I said, eager to change the subject. “What was that movie we saw so many times?”

“Terry never talked that much around me. I liked him, but I was never sure if he liked me.”

“I didn’t notice. Was that weird?”

“Not weird,” Crash said. “Maybe confusing.”

We started riding again, turning away from Saddleback toward Santiago Canyon Road. Thinking about Terry, I remembered a definition of “cool” that I’d once heard: loneliness seen from the outside in. Terry had always been pretty cool.

“He was jealous,” I shouted, my calves burning to keep up. “He wanted kids more than anything, but he didn’t know how to make that happen.”

“Why didn’t he ask somebody to marry him?” Crash said as I caught up with her.

“You think it’s that easy?”

“Absolutely,” Crash said. “Don’t you?”

I wanted to say I didn’t think it was that easy. But then I realized we weren’t talking about Terry anymore. My thirteen-year-old daughter smiled and started pedaling hard again.

STORIES ABOUT TERRY MAKE HIM
seem like some sort of tough but loving drill instructor. He was that, but he was also a deeply strange man whose life baffled him as much as anyone.

One time he took me to an A.A. convention in Palm Springs. He was speaking at the banquet, and I think he told me about it ten minutes before we drove away in his Cadillac. He knew I didn’t have anything better to do. After we’d been in the hotel for about a half a day, moving from room to room listening to charismatic A.A. speakers, sitting before good-natured A.A. panels, I’d had enough. I couldn’t handle the volume of the place. Everyone was vibrating at a frequency that made me want jump from my skin. I went back to our room, took a long shower, and then lay on the bed in my shorts planning to hitchhike home.

Terry returned in crisply pressed linen pants and a blue
Hawaiian shirt that didn’t have any wrinkles, either. He leaned against the wall beside the bathroom. “You want to get away from here at any cost,” he said. “Failing that, you want to kill yourself. You’re thinking about stealing my car right now.”

I just stared at him.
Yes, yes, yes
, I thought.
So fucking what?

“If I were you”—he stood up straight—“that’s exactly what I’d do. Go ahead and steal my car. Get the fuck out while you can.”

He smiled. And then he left the room.

When I took Crash home, there was a full-tilt autobahn-eating Mercedes in my ex-wife’s driveway, the G-series, the expensive kind. Jean’s date wasn’t over yet. I’d get the chance to talk with John Sewell sooner than I’d thought. When I took off my seat belt, Crash gave me a wide-eyed look: it was rare that I wanted to see my ex-wife.

I walked in with Crash, armed only with the vague cover story of speaking with my ex-wife about starting a college fund, an idea that had suggested itself after this morning’s abrasion with the very uncollegiate Troy Padilla. I sometimes dreamed up these arbitrary conversations with Jean, hoping that if I distracted her from our custody battle, maybe it would go away.

Jean and “her guy,” John Sewell, were on the patio, drinking the same expensive ginger ales that I stocked myself. Crash wisely ducked into her bedroom.

As he stretched out his hand, I remembered how much I had wanted to like John Sewell that time when we invited him fishing with us off Dana Point; I was guardedly encouraged when Crash brought his name home one weekend. He was about my
size and shape, maybe five years older, going gray, and he had a jaw that belonged in a shaving commercial. He wore a navy suit without a tie, but I knew the tie was around here somewhere. He was the kind of man who held your hand for exactly the right amount of time as he looked squarely into your eyes.

I gave Jean an awkward kiss on the cheek, which is what people like us do to pretend we’re not people like us. It had been years since we’d screamed at each other, but that didn’t mean we were friends. Jean was wearing a tailored jeans jacket over a salmon-colored shirt and a butt-framing pair of slacks. She was a compact but lovely woman, and she should have married the kind of country-club geek she went to USC with, the kind her father always pushed her toward. The kind of guy who grew up to look exactly like John Sewell.

“We shouldn’t be talking,” Jean Trask said. “You’re suing me.”

“I’d be happy
not
to sue you,” I said, “if you’d agree to share custody of our daughter.”

“It’s a good thing, then,” she said, “that it’s not my job to make you happy.”

Her response was so sharp that I almost laughed. “This is ridiculous, Jean. If I lost your trust eight years ago, I’ve more than—”

“You gave away your rights in this situation,” she said. “It would be easier on everyone if you would just accept that.”

I looked at Sewell, wondering how far ahead of me he was. The conversation had gone to shit almost immediately, and yet his expression seemed remote, maybe even bemused.

“This is not unreasonable, Jean. I’ve consented to drug tests.
I’ve consented to home visits. For the past eight years, I’ve lived an exemplary life. What do you want me to do that I haven’t done?”

“I want you to drop the lawsuit. You have everything you need. I don’t deny you access to Alison; she even has a room at your house. What we’re arguing over is a technicality.”

“You think it’s a technicality,” I said, “that I have no legal status in her life? You could move her to another state without even telling me.”

“You should have thought of that, Randy, when you destroyed our reputation on the front page of every paper in Southern California.”