Before Luke, though, there was the matter of a wife. He hadn’t found one yet, although he admitted he hadn’t looked too hard. There had been one girl, the sister of a friend, who he’d visited a few times. But after three conversations he’d run out of things to talk about, and had not returned.

  He thought again about leaving. Maybe there was nothing for him on Cannery Row anymore. Maybe, like the girl, he’d run out of things to say to it. And then he thought that maybe that was what was making Tom and so many of the other men so itchy. Maybe they couldn’t be married to the canneries and their wives too. That’s why they were restless, because they were in love with Cannery Row like they would be with a girl, loving her even though she made them miserable.

  Pleased with himself at having arrived at such a profound conclusion, Charlie lay down on the bed. He told himself that the next time he wrote to Pete he would tell them that he was married, married to an ugly, snarling girl with breath like the hold of a boat. He imagined Pete scratching his head and reading Charlie’s letter to his wife, and he laughed.

  Hudson, having finished the chicken, set the carton down. He scrawled a note on the margin of the manuscript, reminding himself to look into something he recalled reading in a Steinbeck biography but couldn’t quite place. Then he gathered up the remnants of his dinner and carried them to the kitchen.

  I should cook, he told himself. After all, he had the time, and the kitchen was well stocked. But it seemed like a lot of effort to cook for just himself. At least at home he had Marty. Alone, he found it hard to muster the enthusiasm to settle on a recipe, shop for the ingredients, and then actually put it all together. It was so much easier to just look at a menu and wait.

  The cleaning up accomplished in under a minute, he thought about his next step. Tomorrow he would make a visit to the Steinbeck Center in nearby Salinas. He had no idea what he would find there, or whether it would bring his journey to a screeching halt, but he was excited. Whatever happened, he was getting closer to an answer.

  As he was throwing away the bag his food had come in, he noticed that he’d failed to open his fortune cookie. After snapping it in half, he removed the slip of paper and looked at it. “ ‘What you look for is not always what you find,’ ” he read aloud. “Great. Just what I needed to hear. Nothing like a cookie to make you neurotic.”

  He crumpled it up and tossed the fortune into the trash along with the uneaten pieces.

  CHAPTER 15

  Hearing the hiss of water turning to steam, Ben turned from where he was slicing a tomato at the sink just in time to see the pot on the stove boil over. Dropping the knife in his hand, he went to the stove, cursing his lapse in concentration, and turned the flame down. The foaming water in the pot quieted, and he repositioned the pot on the burner.

  He returned to the tomato, half of which was already cut and stacked in a neat, if uneven, pile. He finished the remaining half, then started on an avocado. Glancing at the clock, he wondered when Caddie was coming home. Already past six, he’d expected her some time ago.

  He checked the table. Two places were set, the plates flanked by napkins and silverware. He’d even picked up some flowers on the way home, thinking that the big pink and orange gerbera daisies would liven up the dining room. Now, looking at them standing in an empty coffee can—the only thing he could find in the house that resembled a vase—he worried that they were silly.

  A timer went off, and he returned to the kitchen. Beside the big pot of water, a smaller pot held spaghetti sauce. It had come from a jar, but he didn’t think Caddie would mind. At least he hoped not. He thought, a little unkindly, that Carol had never been a particularly good cook when they were together. He hoped she hadn’t improved much over the years. He wanted Caddie to see that, if not chef-worthy, his food was at least as good as her mother’s.

  He opened the door and checked the garlic bread. He’d found the recipe online and followed it exactly. He was pleased to see that it appeared to have worked successfully. He turned the oven down to warm and shut the door. Pausing, he went over the list of dinner items: pasta with sauce, garlic bread, salad. Everything was done except the pasta. Opening the box of spaghetti, he dumped it into the boiling water. All that was missing was Caddie.

  It’s going to be fine, he reassured himself as he waited, not certain if he meant the pasta or dinner with his daughter. He was surprisingly nervous. Dinner out would have been easier. But he was pleased that he had elected to cook. Stressful as it was he’d managed it, he thought, quite well.

  He read the back of the spaghetti box for at least the fifth time since purchasing it. Six minutes, it said. He looked at his watch. How long had it been? He hadn’t noted the time the pasta had gone into its bath. He grew anxious, afraid that he might now overcook it, and poked at the strands in the pot with a wood spoon. Several of them seemed to be stuck to the bottom, which further upset him. I should have bought a backup box, he thought darkly.

  He thought he heard a door shut, and looked up. But nobody came into the kitchen, and when he called out “Caddie?” in a hopeful voice, there was no response. Across the street the neighbor children were singing some nonsensical song as they jumped rope. He heard the slapping of the rope against the sidewalk.

  He waited two minutes, then turned the flame off and carried the pasta pot to the sink. He had no strainer, so he drained the water by holding the lid on with his thumbs and leaving only the narrowest opening between it and the far side of the pot. As he tipped the pot forward, steam erupted and the pasta slid forward, hitting the lid. Startled, Ben let his grip falter, and the lid fell with a crash into the sink. The pasta tumbled after it, landing with a wet plop and slithering, along with the water, toward the drain.

  He managed to stop it, creating a dam with the lid and preventing the majority of the pasta from escaping. What was left he scooped up using the salad tongs and returned to the pot. Then, rattled by the near disaster, he stood and sipped at a glass of merlot, eyeing the pasta suspiciously lest it make another attempt at escape.

  It was now a quarter to seven, and Caddie was officially late. He tried to recall if he’d given her an exact time, and suspected he hadn’t. Still, she should have been there by now. He wondered if he should have waited for her to get there before cooking the pasta, but it couldn’t be helped now.

  He began putting things in bowls, the salads in individual ones and the pasta and sauce into larger communal serving dishes. He withdrew from the refrigerator the bottle of Italian dressing and the Parmesan cheese he’d picked up along with the other groceries and removed the protective plastic wrappers from each. He considered putting the dressing on, then decided that it would be better to let Caddie do it herself.

  After carrying each dish to the table, he had nothing to do but wait. He drank a full glass of wine and poured himself another. As he emptied that one, he found himself growing hypersensitive to noises. He jumped when a car door opened, and any sound that resembled footsteps on the stairs caused him to go to the front door. But each time the steps belonged to someone else, and the cars stopped in front of other houses.

  At seven-thirty, he sat down at the table and poked listlessly at the pasta. It had formed an unappetizing ball, now grown cold, and the strands left gummy paste on the fork. The garlic bread, too, had not been made more appealing by the loss of heat. Only the salad retained some of its freshness. He picked at it listlessly, putting a piece of avocado in his mouth. It was mushy, and he was forced to wash it down with more wine.

  At eight o’clock he accepted that he had been stood up. Leaving the food on the table, he took the bottle of wine and retreated to his study. He was a little surprised to find that his feelings were hurt, that he was actually thinking thoughts along the lines of, Doesn’t she know how much work I put into that dinner? When he thought these things, it was his mother’s voice he heard saying them. Had she ever really done so, he wondered, or was it only natural to think of her because he associated cooking with motherhood?

  Then he recalled a night when he was perhaps ten. Caught up in a game of kickball, he’d forgotten to be home at his usual time. Arriving almost an hour late, he’d found his mother scraping his untouched plate into the garbage. Despite his apologies, she’d refused to let go of her anger, telling Ben that such ungratefulness wasn’t to be tolerated. He’d appealed to his father, who in a rare instance of deference to his wife, had agreed that Ben should be sent to his room without his supper. It had seemed grossly unfair to Ben, and he’d spent the night planning in great detail how, as soon as his parents were asleep, he would run away and take up residence in the fort he and some friends had built from cardboard boxes in the nearby woods. Ultimately his anger had fallen prey to his weariness, and he’d fallen asleep. In the morning there had been breakfast as usual, and no one mentioned his crime of the previous evening.

  Caddie isn’t a little boy, he reminded himself. She’s sixteen. She should be able to get home for dinner. Part of him wanted to invent excuses for her, mostly because he didn’t want to think that her absence had anything to do with how she felt about him. He preferred to think that she’d become engrossed in some local attraction, even that she’d forgotten the address, than that she was deliberately snubbing his attempt to thaw the divide between them.

  Maybe she left, he considered. Thinking of his own aborted escape attempt, he got up and went to her room to see if she’d packed up and gone elsewhere, to whatever fort of her own she preferred to living with him. But her clothes were still in the closet, her books and CDs stacked on the bedside table. She was still there.

  He sat down on her bed. Who is this girl? he asked himself. Where had she come from? He tried to remember her birth, thought for the first time in many years of the room where Carol, panting and chewing on bits of ice he fed to her from a paper cup, efficiently and without incident brought Caddie into the world. Then she had been in his arms, looking up at him with indignation and surprise as he counted her fingers and toes.

  Sixteen years had changed her into something he didn’t recognize. Gone was the infant who had trusted him implicitly, also the five-year-old girl who had asked him whether Santa Claus was real and had believed him when he said that he was as real as air. Somewhere she had been replaced by this changeling, this shadow daughter who assumed that every word of his was a lie, every affection for her artificial.

  When he’d announced his separation from Carol, his mother had begged him to reconsider for Caddie’s sake, brushing aside his argument that a child’s happiness didn’t necessarily outweigh that of her parents. She’d disagreed with such desperate fervor that he came to suspect that she spoke out of experience, and for the first time he questioned whether his parents’ marriage had been a happy one, although he couldn’t bring himself to ask either of them. Now he wondered if perhaps she hadn’t been right. Maybe, if he’d stayed, Caddie wouldn’t be unhappy now.

  That theory, he told himself from some part of his brain still operating with scientific detachment, was flawed. There was no way of knowing what might have happened. The uncontrollable variables were too many, the number of possible outcomes immeasurable. Any conclusion reached through such an equation was unreliable and would have to be discarded.

  He had never been a religious person. Even as a child he had found the notion of an omnipotent creator who punished his creations inconsistently for minor infractions of a vaguely defined moral code to be unthinkable to anyone with an ounce of sense. Later he had added such concepts as karma and the inevitability of fate to the list of beliefs unsupported by rational thought.

  Now, however, he saw how a person might believe such things. Surely his actions had had an effect on Caddie. She had told him as much herself. And believing that maybe her current behavior could be explained away merely by pointing to something he’d done nine years earlier was easier than trying to unravel the complicated workings of a teenage girl’s mind.

  But at some point didn’t his responsibility for her personal happiness end? Was it really his due that he should now suffer for something he’d done not out of selfishness but to preserve his own sanity? He heard his ten-year-old self assert angrily that it was not.

  It occurred to him that Caddie’s failure to come home could be the result of some accident, and for a moment he was actually relieved to think this might be true. Then fatherly concern overrode this temporary reprieve, and for a time he truly did consider the various possible emergencies that might be keeping her from returning. His thoughts flashed upon scenes of auto accident, sickness, even murder, all of them with Caddie playing the central figure. He tried to remember, was she diabetic or allergic to bees?

  Again, it was some fatherly instinct, long dormant but not dead, that told him that none of these things were anything more than random thoughts. Caddie simply hadn’t come home because she didn’t want to. Wherever she was, she was there because she preferred it to being with him. The real question was whether this was simple thoughtlessness or deliberate cruelty.

  He thought suddenly of the T-shirt that Caddie had been wearing at breakfast that morning. She’d said that she’d bought it, but he was almost certain she was lying. Remembering the size of it, Ben realized that he’d overlooked the obvious. And she had sat there, teasing him, maybe even hoping he would realize that she’d been with some boy.

  He wasn’t angry, not about the boy. He wasn’t naive enough to think that a sixteen-year-old, especially an attractive one hell-bent on expressing her independence, was still a virgin. That it was his daughter who was the girl in question made it slightly more unsettling than if it had been someone else’s daughter, and he fully intended to ask Carol if she’d had a talk with Caddie about the subject. But it wasn’t the possibility of sex that bothered him; it was the knowledge that Caddie had wanted him to be upset, that she might have slept with someone just to spite him.

  Maybe that’s where she was, out with the same boy, hoping that her father would come looking for her or, more likely, wait up for her to return so that he could tell her that under no circumstances was she to behave like some backstreet whore while living under his roof. Was that what she wanted—a scene? Something to justify her loathing for him?

  Well, she wasn’t going to get it. Ben stood up, took a final glance around the room, and returned to his office. He’d moved from hurt to fear to guilt, and now had arrived at indignation. If Caddie wanted to play games with him, she would have to do better than this. Not only wouldn’t he wait up for her, he wouldn’t even gratify her by being angry. It would be a hollow victory for her, and he hoped she would be wise enough to, if not end her war against him, at least call a stalemate.

  The bottle on his desk was empty, and the glass beside it less than a third full. Had he really drunk so much? His head felt light, but he wasn’t at all sick, merely pleasantly unfocused. The idea of working on his paper came to him, but he dismissed it as too much effort. He wanted to do something he didn’t have to think about.

  The copy of Cannery Row that he’d purchased earlier in the day was sitting near the typewriter. He picked it up. On the cover a man with the wide, soft-eyed face of a manual laborer sat on a step before a wooden door, smiling for the camera as a cigarette burned in his hand. He wore a sailor’s peacoat and a cap that rested far back on his head. Ben imagined that somebody had chosen the photograph because he or she felt it perfectly captured the spirit of the old cannery workers. And maybe it did, but he found the look of unenlightened bliss on the man’s face faintly disturbing, as if he had no idea that one day the photograph for which he’d been paid perhaps fifty cents, or maybe just a bottle of beer, to pose for would one day be looked upon with sentimental affection by readers who thought they knew who he was because they had just read a story about men who resembled him. Sort of like people who insist they know who God is because they’ve heard a couple of stories, Ben thought acidly.

  Opening the book, he began to read. He’d forgotten how deceptively simple Steinbeck’s prose was, how reading him felt like listening to someone talk. He’d forgotten, too, how easy it was to get caught up in the various interconnected stories that made up the novel. He found himself turning page after page, often chuckling at a particularly wry turn of phrase, occasionally nodding in agreement with something the author said.

  He read for perhaps an hour. Then, closing the book, he leaned back in his chair and thought about Steinbeck’s world. It would be nice, he thought, to live in a time and a place where his biggest problem was how he was going to afford a jug of wine. This was a simplification of that world, he knew that, but it was pleasant to think about.

  That caused him to remember the young man. What had his name been? He found the scrap of paper he’d put on his desk earlier in the day and looked at it. Hudson. That was it. Hudson Jones. It sounded like a clothing store, or a law firm. At any rate, it had been enjoyable talking to him. He hadn’t had a conversation about anything other than work in some time.

  He remembered then, too, his promise to see about getting Hudson a look inside Ed Ricketts’s lab. He would give Al Blackmore a call in the morning, see what he could do. He’d given Al some abalone last year, so he owed him a favor. If anyone could get them behind that plywood fence, it was Al. He knew everyone in Monterey.

  Glancing at his calendar, Ben saw that he had a dive scheduled for the next morning. Suddenly he regretted the empty wine bottle. While the more potentially troublesome aspects of having alcohol in his system would more than have worn off by the time he got into the water, he was going to have a whale of a headache. He tried not to think about it as he got up and went to the bathroom in search of aspirin. If he got to bed now, he hoped, it wouldn’t be so bad.