The Candy House(13)

Miles’s Quiet Supremacy had hardened over the years into an exoskeleton, growing stiffer with each honor until he looked barely capable of motion, much less spontaneity. His every gesture seemed to Alfred an act of pretense, even concealment—why else did Miles’s only genuine smiles seem to come when Trudy was taking pictures with her iPhone? Trudy was an avid Facebook poster, a touter of family vacations and toddler artworks, a coiner of sappy hashtags like #motherdaughterlove and #thankgoodnessforgrandparents that Alfred logged on to Facebook specifically to be enraged by. His antidote to such artifice was usually the memory of recent screaming, but today that led him to the Avis bus and his public defeat. It was impossible to imagine screaming again. The project was dead without warning, leaving—what? What could Alfred do or say or even think that would make it possible to sit on Miles’s deck for one more fucking minute?

And then it came to him. He could ask a question.

“Hey, Miles,” he said. “Are you in touch at all with Jack Stevens?”

Miles paused infinitesimally in the act of eating, like a jump in a video. “No,” he said with deliberation. “I am not.”

A heavy silence followed, which Kristen tried to alleviate by asking brightly, “Who’s Jack Stevens?”

Miles’s mouth made a grim line. Trudy looked at the deck. Alfred felt Kristen’s panic at having said the wrong thing.

“Oh, honestly, Miles,” their mother said. “Can we please be done with this drama?”

Susan (as Miles and Alfred had started calling their mother) looked younger than fifty-seven, lithe and ashy-haired in her blue wraparound dress and soft white sweater—younger, somehow, than she’d looked when they were children. Then she’d been Harried Mom, the kind who runs onto the baseball field between innings to rub sunscreen on your nose. Those moms were always a little comic in their bright clothes and oversize fanny packs, hacking up watermelons for the team. After the divorce she grew quiet, watchful, as if she no longer knew what role to assume. But with time she’d acquired a more knowing air and begun doing what she pleased. There was nothing funny about her.

“Jack Stevens was Miles’s childhood friend,” she explained to Kristen. “They were inseparable all the way through college and even after.”

“I see,” Kristen said gravely. “Did something… happen to him?”

“You could say that,” Miles said with a mirthless laugh.

Their mother set her glass hard on the picnic table. “I’m sorry, that is a ridiculous thing to say.”

“Oh. You’re sorry?” Miles asked with mock surprise.

“You’d think we’d murdered someone, Jack and I!”

“I misunderstood. You’re not sorry.”

“Don’t talk to Mom that way,” Ames said very quietly. He was holding the newborn; cradled in his burly, veiny arms, it looked like a mouse engulfed by a python.

“Oh. Now I’m the bad guy,” Miles said.

Alfred felt a sudden absence of pain, like the cessation of a toothache. “Does he still live in Chicago? Jack?”

Miles looked at his watch. “How long have you been here? Forty minutes? Forty-five?”

“Thirty-seven,” Trudy said.

“You timed our arrival?” Alfred asked.

Miles and Trudy exchanged a glance. “We wondered how long it would be before you did something provocative,” Miles said.

“Thirty-seven minutes is an improvement,” Ames said, and everyone laughed except Miles.

“I don’t think he’s funny,” Miles said.

“I was funny,” Ames said.

“Portia is almost thirty years younger than your father,” their mother said, addressing Miles. “Your half sister, Beatrice, is the same age as your daughter. But none of that is a problem. Gee, I wonder what the difference could be?”

“We didn’t know Portia before Dad married her,” Miles said.

“You’re lucky I didn’t marry Jack.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t marry Jack. Or you wouldn’t know your grandchildren.”

Ames was on his feet with martial swiftness. “Don’t. Talk. To Mom. That way,” he said in a barely audible murmur. Trudy plucked the infant from his arms.

“Careful,” Miles checked Ames. “His next topic might be what you do for a living.”

“Now who’s being provocative?” their mother said.

“I’m retired,” Ames said with a smile. “More than happy to talk about it.”

Miles tossed his sandwich over the rail of the deck. “Thirty-seven minutes,” he said. He looked exhausted, dark swatches under his eyes, as if the idiocy of other people were sapping his life force.

“You haven’t answered my question,” Alfred said. “About Jack.”

“Yes. As far as I know, he still lives in Chicago,” Miles said acidly. “Why, are you planning to visit him?”

“I think I will,” Alfred said, and stood up. “I think I’ll visit him right now.”

There it was: frank surprise in the faces around him, unguarded and pure—like kicking open a door and finding golden light behind it.

Alfred retrieved his satchel and glanced at Kristen, half expecting her to stay behind. But she joined him at the door.