Part 11 (1/2)

”Rick. Hey, hi.”

”Hi, Jason. Hi, Barb. Jason, I thought you were Kent for a second there. Did all you guys come down together? I can't believe how cheap everything here is during the off-season.”

I didn't know how to reply, but Barb said, ”I like blackjack, but the guys are more into c.r.a.ps.”

Rick said, ”I'm a blackjack guy, too. c.r.a.ps is for the real hotshots. I like to stretch my losses out over a few days so I can savor the experience. When did you guys get here?”

”Just today.”

”You're staying at Caesars?”

I said we were.

”I'm at this motel off the Strip. Twenty-nine bucks a night, with free coffee and croissants in the morning. Talk about a deal. You guys want to come play with me?”

I was going to motion to the elevators, but Barb said, ”Sure.” My eyes must have sprung out of my sockets. ”Jason, go upstairs with the others. I'll meet you in a few minutes. I think my luck is changing.”

Rick said, ”Now, this woman has the Vegas spirit. Come on, Barb. I'll show you my lucky table.”

Barb said, ”I'll be up shortly. Go, Jason.”

This was one very screwed-up situation, but the thought of a quiet room was seductive, and I went upstairs. I showered for twenty minutes, and tried to figure out everything that had happened during the day, particularly how we might explain to people how it was that Rick Kozarek saw us in Caesars Palace the night Kent died.

I got out, s.h.i.+vered in the all-powerful air-conditioning and got into bed, awaiting Barb and wondering how Mom was going to take Kent's death. Would she just give up on life altogether?

An hour pa.s.sed. I put cable news on as wallpaper and dozed off. When Barb came in the door and woke me up, her face was neutral.

”It's about time. It's two-thirty, Barb.”

”I'm having a shower.”

”You went to play blackjack? Are you out of your mind?”

She said nothing, but emerged from the shower and got into bed with me, and the truth is that from the tension and grief and stress and you-name-it, the s.e.x was a repeat of my marriage to Cheryl. Around six o'clock Barb phoned the concierge for tickets on an 8:10 nonstop to Vancouver. We were silent most of the way home.

It was only in the truck, nearing the house, that I asked, ”Barb, by the way, you never did say what made you decide to go play blackjack with Rick Kozarek. That was really random.”

”Blackjack? I didn't play blackjack. I killed him.”

I nearly put the truck in the ditch as I stopped. ”You what?”

”There was no other option. He saw the two of us together. He'd have blabbed. So I went back to his motel room with him and cracked him on the back of his head with a forty-ouncer of discount vodka. Done.”

”You murdered him?”

”Don't be sanctimonious with me, rebel boy. You wanted to get married in Las Vegas, and you got it. And part of the deal of getting married in Las Vegas is that you might very well b.u.mp into the Rick Kozareks of this world. Now, are you going to drive me the final block home, or am I going to walk?”

I didn't know what to say, because I was thinking, Oh, G.o.d, this is how my father felt back in 1988.

So Barb got out of the truck and walked home. The heel of her left shoe was about to come off, and a mist of dandelion fluff had attached itself to her panty hose. I got out and walked alongside her. ”Barb, what if you're caught?”

She stopped. ”Caught? Jason, get real. One of the bonuses of staying in a twenty-nine-dollar-a- night motel room is the convenient lack of surveillance or security. And if I'm caught, I'm caught, but I won't be.”

We rounded the corner and there were all Kent's friends' cars, as well as my mother's. Barb and I looked like wrecks -we were wrecks - and my distress couldn't have been more visible.

As Barb predicted, she was never caught, and everyone fully bought her story about going crazy - which is, in its way, true. Kent's funeral was four days later, and that was that.

A month later, my mother phoned to say that Barb was pregnant with twins. And maybe another month later I b.u.mped into Stacy Kozarek, Rick's sister, in the Lonsdale Public Market, where she was buying clams. She told me that Rick had been found murdered in his motel room, and the Las Vegas police thought it was somehow gang-related.

And there you go.

I'm looking out the pickup truck's window at Ambleside Beach and the ocean and the freighters - at the mothers tending to their children covered in sand and sugar and spit, at the blue sky and the mallard ducks and the Canada geese. And Joyce is smiling at me. Dogs indeed smile, and Joyce has every reason to smile. It's a beautiful world and she's part of it - and yet . . .

. . . and yet we humans are not a part of it.

Look at us. We're all born lost, aren't we? We're all born separated from G.o.d - over and over life makes sure to inform us of this - and yet we're all real: we have names, we have lives. We mean something. We must. My heart is so cold. And I feel so lost. I shed my block of hate but what if nothing emerges to fill in the hole it left? The universe is so large, and the world is so glorious, but here I am on a sunny August morning with chilled black ink pumping through my veins, and I feel like the unholiest thing on earth.

This letter is now going into the safety deposit box. Happy birthday, my sons. You're men now, and this is the way the world works.

Part Three

2002: Heather

Sat.u.r.day afternoon 4:00

I met Jason in a line-up at Toys R Us. He was in front of me buying a pile of toys, looking slightly sad, slightly damaged and slightly naughty. I had some toy plastic groceries for my sister's kid, who never really cares what I give her, and I just wanted to escape the store. But instead there's this sad guy in front of me - no wedding ring, straight looking, and no apparent tattoos - and so maybe I didn't want to leave too quickly after all. The cas.h.i.+er was changing the paper tape - why does that always happen in my line? Standing on the counter was a plastic giraffe model someone had abandoned. Some wiseacre had strapped it into a little sheepskin coat with a fleece lining; it probably came from the box of one of Barbie's gay boyfriends.

I said, ”I think our giraffe here is a bit s.e.xually conflicted.”

Jason said, ”It's that fleece-lined bomber jacket - always a dead giveaway.”

”Manly, and yet more like a prop than a garment.”

”I bet you anything our giraffe friend here is always buying Shetland sweaters for the younger giraffes, but he doesn't even understand why he does it.”

”The sweater-buying impulse baffles him more than it frightens him.”