The Next Right Thing (18 page)

“It might just be for a little while,” MP said.

“You didn’t want to take your own car?” I pointed at her VW Cabrio in the garage.

“That’s
your
car. I don’t want to think about that stuff.”

Refraining from begging her to stay felt like I was swallowing a tape measure. “What
do
you want to think about?”

“Whether I’m helping you by being your girlfriend. Actually, I want to pray about that.”

“Jesus, Mary Pat. How can you even ask that question?”

MP stared down into the steering wheel. “If you keep this up, you’re going to be back where you started eight years ago.”

“If it wasn’t for Terry, I wouldn’t be where I am right now.”

MP turned toward me; the compassion vanished from her face. She slammed her hand against the Volvo dashboard. “Don’t fucking lie to me, Randy! This isn’t about Terry—this is about you wanting to punish someone!”

My fist clenched, and I would have punched the side panel of the Volvo if I hadn’t seen the fear spark in MP’s eyes. My hand slowly returned to the window. Her mouth closed and softened before she spoke again.

“If my mother had left my father the first time he hit her,” MP said, “one way or another, he never would have hit her again. It’s as simple as that.”

“You think I could hit you?”

“You need to know that I won’t put up with this. In your bones, you need to know.”

Doing the kind of calculations that a drunk will sometimes do when he sees the writing on the wall, I figured the likelihood of getting through the next twenty-four hours without another assault. Not likely. Then I added up my love for Mary Pat Donnelly. It was significant, but balanced against the slim possibility that I could find out who or what had killed my sponsor, Terry Elias, it didn’t add up. I pinned an asterisk to both these estimates to represent the chance that I might also lose my bid for custody of my daughter. Still, God help me, I stood there.

MP looked at me, waiting for me to plead my case.

“Will you please tell me where you’re staying?” I said.

WADE HADN’T RETURNED MY CALLS
. I wanted to go back and do over my interrogation of Mutt Kelly, but Sean had been pretty explicit on that subject, and I took him at his word. I thought about tracking down Busansky’s erstwhile girlfriend, Emma, but decided against it because I knew that eventually, she would come to me. All I had left was Catalina Acuña. I decided that I would visit her in the morning and hope that Wade remembered my phone number between now and then.

When I woke up at two forty-five
A.M.
, wishing that I were alone with anyone but myself, I searched the house for distractions and found nothing but more evidence that MP had prepared to never return. Pictures that had been taken with her camera were gone, while pictures taken with our camera remained.
The juicer was gone, and so was her garlic press, but a Pottery Barn storm candle that we’d picked up for evenings on the deck remained. The eyesore beanbag chair that she’d found at the swap meet was gone—the only improvement I could detect. When I found myself checking the CD collection, I knew I had to leave.

MP may have taken her juicer and beanbag chair, but I had an espresso machine and a mini-fridge at my cabinet shop in the canyon. I opened the bay doors at about three-fifteen
A.M.
and made my own damn double espresso with a little crema on the top. Then I started to sort lumber for a project that I’d been designing in my head all evening.

It was one of the first things I learned in A.A.: just do the next indicated thing.

Sometimes people will say, “Just do the next right thing,” but that was too advanced for me. Who knew what the next right thing was? Indicated, I could handle.

I left Wade a voice mail telling him where I’d be when he was ready to talk. Sipping strong coffee and denying for the moment that anything in my life was wrong, I began to build a crib for Terry’s son.

I’d been taking courses at Art Center in Pasadena, one of the best all-around design schools in this galaxy. It was a long drive from Laguna Beach, though. So one morning I just quit. My fear of failing and the length of the drive had a talk, and they decided.

Terry and I were walking away from the seven
A.M.
meeting at the Catholic grammar school above Pacific Coast Highway.
The flower stand across the parking lot was a gang fight of color. I told Terry of my decision as we reached his car, which in those days was the Caddy.

“I’ve been thinking about this,” I said, “and it makes sense that I stop going to that school.”

Terry turned around to face me. The traffic was rushing beside us. Over his shoulder I could see Vic, the one-armed florist, fluffing up a bucket full of crocuses. Terry took a deep breath, and I stood exactly where I was. Maybe even leaned in to him.

“You’ve been a loser all your life,” Terry began through thin lips. “And now, for the first time, you’ve got a chance to win. There’s no way you’re going to quit that school. You’ll get in that car this afternoon and you’ll get your ass up there.”

A huge silence grew between us. Vic looked over. Very quietly, I said, “Why?”

“Because if you don’t,” Terry said, “I’m going to kick your ass.”

My smile had no love. “You
can’t
kick my ass, Terry. I’m the ex-cop with the impulse control problem, remember?”

Terry didn’t back down. His smile had no love, either. “Then one of us will be in the hospital tonight.”

He walked away. I laughed to pretend I wasn’t scared. He turned back, practically charging at me.

“You think I’m here on this planet to be a fucking lawyer?” Terry shouted. “You think you’re here to build houses? You think you avoided jail after that circus in Santa Ana because you’re lucky? We’re in Alcoholics Anonymous, you fucking prick. We have the power to bring dead people back to life.
That’s
why we’re here.”

“So why am I driving to Pasadena?” I yelled back. “Why
don’t I stay here and go to a meeting? Talk to a newcomer? Clean some fucking ashtrays?”

“Because you think too goddamn much.” Terry tapped the side of my head, hard. “You need something to do, something that scares you to death. Can you understand that?”

“No.”

“Can you do it anyway?”

That afternoon I drove to Pasadena.

Once upon a time, I wanted to design furniture, too. So far, I hadn’t been as successful with that as I had been with home design. I’d spent about six thousand hours and twenty thousand dollars trying to design the first prototype of the first chair in my first line of furniture, and I was as close to the beginning as I was to the end. I enjoyed my shop, though, where I liked to pretend that I was an honest workingman with thick hands and a simple brain.

The crib: I pulled out my laptop, went to Google, and looked through a hundred images for cribs. I finally found a Shaker design that was as simple and unadorned as anything I’d ever seen. It was nothing more than a box with slats for the baby to see through. I made it out of quartersawn oak, I made it well, and I tried mightily to avoid putting anything of myself into it. For a few hours, I felt some peace as I assembled that simple, boxy design. The only time I fucked up was when I stripped a bolt near the drop side (I’d fabricated the fixtures myself) and scraped my knuckles on the wood. Other than that, the time I spent making that crib felt better to me than sleep. But then I did sleep.

Having conked out with my head on the workbench, I woke up looking straight at my masterpiece. I felt a click down deep in my heart when I recognized how well the crib had come together. It reminded me that my first impulse toward making things had been when Crash was a baby. Silly fabrications were always flowing from my hands. Crash was always asking me for things:
Daddy, make me a flower. Daddy, make me a robot. Daddy, make me a sky that’s full of flowers and robots
.

I did what I was told. Maybe that was all I was doing now. It seemed to me then—as it had seemed to me this morning—that I might die if I didn’t find a form for my feelings. I made robots and flowers and sky out of my love for Crash. I made a crib out of my love for Terry and his son, whom I hadn’t yet met.

Wade showed up at about nine. I turned off the planer and threw my safety visor across the room. I checked my knuckles and they had stopped bleeding. As Wade walked toward me, my project caught his attention. “Why are you building a crib?”

The clamps had pushed some wood glue out of a dowel. I wiped it away with a damp rag. “Commission.”

“Someone commissioned you? When did they hope you’d deliver? Just in time for medical school?”

“Make yourself useful,” I said. “Drill up some espresso.”

After he had made the espresso and steamed some milk, Wade opened a bag of pastries he had brought from Jean Claude’s.

“MP moved out,” I said.

Wade took out two chocolate croissants and started to chew on one. “She’ll come back.”

“It’s lucky for me that you know so much about women.”

Wade’s espresso tasted like you’d stuck your head in a bucket of scorpions, and I hadn’t known how much I needed a chocolate croissant until I was eating one. For a single second, I was in my happy place.

Wade went and stood by the crib. One of his problems in life was that he couldn’t hide his feelings from me for long. He was impressed. He kept looking at it. For another second, that made me as happy as the chocolate croissant.

“What are you charging for this?” Wade asked.

“I’m being an artist this time.”
Being an artist
was how Terry described my tendency to underbid.

“It’s really beautiful, man. But there’s no way this is a commission. Come on, who’s it for?”

“Terry’s son.”

Wade looked genuinely startled, and I guess I knew right then that this was his first time hearing. I finished swallowing the croissant before I told him about the hospital trip and Catalina Acuña.

“Fuck,” Wade said.
“Fuck.”

Thinking about that fatherless baby, I was angry again. “You connected Terry to the pot farms. That’s how he met Simon Busansky. That’s how he found this lovely new business taking money from drug dealers. He got involved with those people because of you. And that’s why you’ve been avoiding me again.”