—

  Lina and Donnie found their names at a table, with Ken and his wife, Melinda, Susan’s parents, a guy named Cub, and another named Rory, who sat next to Lina.

  “Trying to talk your brother into going into business with me,” he said.

  Walter had seated him next to her, she suspected, because he was rich and single. She looked for her brother in the crowd while seeming to pay attention to what the guy was saying, about a real estate investment trust. Walter’s and Susan’s chairs remained empty. She scanned the crowd for Carrie, Susan’s roommate. She must be here. Rory, next to her, was going on about developing the Central Valley. Maybe he was looking for corners, too.

  Across the table, Susan’s mom broke into laughter. Lina remembered her—more than a decade ago—humiliating their mother the morning Walter went off to college. Lina had come prepared to hate her. But the sounds lingered…Peals of laughter, that was the phrase. The woman’s head inclined toward Donnie as if she were laughing along to something he’d said. Rory was still talking. If he’d asked her a question, she’d have had to pay attention to answer, but there seemed to be no danger of that.

  “The prison population is going up,” he was saying. “State’s going to be in the business of prison building.”

  “Why?” Lina asked. But as he began his long and technical explanation, she stopped following and watched the party. She spotted Walter behind her in a circle of men: a handsome Asian man with good gray in his hair, Susan’s compact dad, and the man who’d helped him buy his first building. Walter hadn’t invited their father. He’d given up on him decades ago. She heard Walter say something about the Falklands. Someone else brought up the breakup of Ma Bell. None of them believed that the price of telephone calls would go down. Lina looked up at the stars.

  * * *

  —

  A nerd in a suit and glasses who nonetheless looked as if parties with eight-piece bands were not unfamiliar to him asked Lina to dance. Susan’s younger brother.

  Maybe it was better that her mother wasn’t here. If she had been, Lina would have felt acutely aware of her every movement, wondering whether she’d eaten, if she was tired, should she lie down? And what would she be doing now, while they danced? Donnie was dancing with Susan’s mother to “Billie Jean.” Of course, when her mother was still herself, she would have loved it. Dr. Moss had told Walter that she’d gone to a dance. But Lina couldn’t picture her here. She tried and just couldn’t.

  Susan’s other brother tapped Lina’s shoulder. Then Rory. A dance floor had been set onto the field, luckily, considering Lina’s heels.

  She and Donnie made a game of seeing who could find Carrie first. When Donnie trekked to the line of porta-potties in the far field and came back with what looked like a drink in his hand, he said he’d heard girls talking about toasts they were going to make. “Did you know Carrie and Susan went to India?” he said. “They studied meditation.”

  Lina was freaked out about the drink. “What is that?”

  “Taste.”

  Sweet, like a cola.

  “A Roy Rogers,” Donnie said. They both found that hilarious.

  This is life passing, she thought, the leaves of the walnuts heavy on the branches, clouds pulled thin so moonlight shone through the uneven densities.

  * * *

  —

  Donnie could dance (she’d forgotten) without moving much; he made small angular jokes with his hands. He wasn’t showy, as most men who could dance were, or straight-backed like Walter. “You’re the only one of us who can dance!”

  “Nah. Look at Walter. He’s Cary Grant.”

  She asked about Susan’s mom. “Really good person,” he shouted over the music.

  Slices of cake were being passed out, and Susan announced into the microphone that it had been baked by two doctors. Melinda and Cub. “And Ken’s mom,” Melinda yelled. It was a dark chocolate cake that tasted like cocoa, with soft whipped cream. Donnie hadn’t known a wedding cake could be chocolate. He had seconds. Then thirds. Lina remembered the old bride and groom, each figure ending in a tiny stake to set into a cake, that Sacha had picked up at an antiques store. They’d probably once been sold by the bag, as gold bands were somewhere traded in bulk, and the tokens for days and months and years.

  Rory made a toast; he was qualified, he said, because he’d taken a creative writing class. At Berkeley, he said, nodding down to Walter and Susan. The third or fourth week, after the teacher had had a chance to read his story, he’d asked her what she thought his chances were. Chances for what? she’d asked. He said, Well, say, of winning the Nobel Prize. People laughed, a soft, murmuring. The teacher told him to lower his sights. How much lower, he’d asked, and she’d said, Let’s be sure you can write a great toast for your best friend’s wedding. Then he told a story about a food cart, which made two tables of people laugh. Susan stood up to thank her sorority sisters and asked everyone to think of her maid of honor, Carrie, who was in a Jerusalem hospital with her mom, who’d suffered a stroke on vacation. Susan’s father lifted a glass and said, choking up, that he considered Walter his third son.

  There was a change in the music. “Blackbird,” the violin racing up a staircase, the small musician hunched over her instrument.

  Susan’s father danced with Susan. It settled on Lina as she watched, like a moth landing on her wrist. Happiness.

  For no reason, she remembered herself before Sacha. Unbidden, she felt again the way she had loading the ceramics room’s kiln with Troy, late, then walking home under a dark sky.

  Soon, the grown-ups began to stand, purses tucked under arms, bending to kiss goodbyes. A row of black cars waited on the dirt road. It occurred to Lina that this field with its necessary porta-potties might not have been the bride’s family’s ideal wedding for their daughter. But they seemed to have loved it all. “We’re family now,” Susan’s father called as he stepped into the back of a car.

  Caterers were packing glasses in segmented boxes. Lina returned to the table for her purse.

  “Oh, don’t go,” Walter said. “We’re gonna change and sit around the fire.”

  Ken and his father stood flinging logs onto the flames.

  Lina and Donnie made the long trek to the ranch house, changed, and rode back on the motorcycle. “Dirt roads like this are what bikes are for,” Donnie said. There were millions of stars.

  “You should give it away after you get home. No more highways. You’re too old for those risks.”

  “You know, you’re right. I have a dependent. Sylvie can’t ride.”

  The band left and Ken hooked up a turntable and speakers with a long orange extension cord, playing Joni Mitchell. California, she shrieked in halting melody.

  “Walter made it to the finish,” Donnie said. “He’s married.”

  But not in love, Lina thought. He’d wanted that, too, of course. Everyone wants that.

  When they returned to the ranch house, it was nearly dawn and there was just enough time to pack. Lina’s taxi pulled up with its headlights on.

  Donnie held one of the champagne glasses up to the light over the kitchen sink. So pretty. Only twenty dollars for the four. A gift that almost hurt to give. But Donnie didn’t drink and she had to get on a plane, so they left them with a note on the counter. Thank you for your generosity to strangers.

  The New York horizon made a dirty line outside the airplane window. Still, Lina’s shoulders dropped in relief.

  74.

  Donnie got stuck on the steps. He made inventories, but when he tried to offer amends he found no takers. Nobody wanted his apology. His family refused to forgive him; they blamed themselves instead. Julie asked him to absolve her for moving to Michigan—“biggest mistake of my life”—and he axiomatically did, twenty times, but that didn’t sit well with her either. She said she felt guilty about Diane.

  “We all do. And she’s our mother. You did way more than any other friend.”

  “There’s friends and there’s friends,” Julie said. “Your mother was one of the big people of my life.”

  “You were for her, too, for a long time.” Donnie wasn’t sure this was true—but friendships were never exactly level. “Not sure any of us is that now.”

  Friendship was a voluntary activity, his sister said. People who got married promised to stay together no matter how sick the other became, even if the other stopped being herself, which was, Donnie supposed, what had happened to his mother.

  “Being married is no guarantee either,” Julie said. “From what I’ve observed. I’ve known married people who don’t honor their vows. But I could’ve been better. I still call every night. A lot of times she doesn’t want to talk to me.”

  “It’s the disease,” they both said. They had been saying this for a long time. Years now.

  “Will you go back to Michigan?” The professor had hired Donnie to babysit her kids, and he was staying above the garage for the summer.

  “Not for good. Maybe a week in spring and fall. When I got there, I realized that I’d lived my whole adult life in California for a reason. And you’re all here.”

  * * *

  —

  Six weeks after the newlyweds returned from their long honeymoon, Donnie drove up to LA to offer an amend, but he couldn’t get Walter alone. He and Susan did everything together. They called each other “my love” with no irony. Walter kept putting his hand on Susan’s flat belly and asking Donnie if he thought she looked pregnant. Donnie volunteered to walk Susan’s problematic pug, to get out of the house. Sixteen months sober, the din of happy silly married banter slightly sickened him. He wasn’t sure why. He walked a long time. Sylvie pulled him to the right, and he saw a low building he’d never noticed before across from the abandoned fire station. Sylvie pointed in a straight diagonal to two crude doors. Stables, it looked like. There hadn’t been horses in the Palisades downtown as long as Donnie could remember, but through the windows he saw an old stone trough on a concrete floor. Sylvie sniffed as if she sensed an ancient animal presence nowhere visible in the stark, empty building. The doors were bolted with a thick metal chain. Just then, Donnie noticed a small for sale sign. I want this, he registered with a ridiculous urgency, considering he was a student working at a state hospital for minimum wage. Was this a craving? He’d tell Trish. But what would you even do with old stables? He didn’t want to live in LA, not now, and if he ever did, he could camp out with Walter and Susan, who ran a sober house of a different kind. They were naturally sober. Sober to the point of wood.

  Lina said their mother gazed at Walter with reverence. Donnie wouldn’t put it that way. When she peered up at Walter, Donnie saw fear, her attempt to stand her straightest, talk well, and impress. Sometimes Donnie felt that way with Walter, too. He and his mother slumped together in 301 after they cleaned their hands from the garden. They liked watching TV, waiting to see the boarder again. Donnie respected his brother, but he wouldn’t have traded lives. He needed slack.

  Before he left, he summoned the nerve to mention the stables to Walter, who rubbed his eyebrows. “I always wanted to do something with that fire station. I couldn’t afford it then. Tell you what. Let’s do it together.” Walter took out a pencil and started sketching. The stables and the old fire station could be two corners of a square. They’d have to buy the parcels between, he said. Donnie saw his whim gain volume on the paper. “You babysit that professor’s kids, right?” Walter asked. “What do you think families want?”

  “Caroline likes a place to read, have coffee,” Donnie said, “where she can see her kids a ways away. By themselves but safe.”

  “Coffee’s high profit. And what do you think enchants kids?”

  “Other kids. Being away from parents.”

  “And what about things for a family to do together? If it’s not nature.”

  Donnie remembered the youth unit’s roof. “An outdoor movie theater?”

  Walter squinted, trying to picture the perimeters, and then he started sketching a drive-in until Donnie reminded him that what he’d drawn as an empty lot was the police station. Susan handed him an eraser. “Thank you, my love,” he said.

  Donnie had to leave. He thought he’d try to make an amend to Walter-and-Susan, together, though he hadn’t done a thing to her.

  * * *

  —

  Donnie’s sister was no easier. “We’re fine,” she interrupted, when he told her he needed to apologize. She wouldn’t let him finish.

  “It doesn’t really matter,” she’d said last winter when he wasn’t sure he’d go back to college, and he’d known nothing mattered to her more. She and Walter said that to each other about him, he guessed, meaning, in the end, in terms of death, this was true, but in the small races they lived inside, it mattered crucially. And it wasn’t only college. It was profession. Status. Books they read touted the nobility of their kind of lives, because the writers of those books had themselves punched in their ten thousand hours and had to believe that that lost time was meaningful, even sacred. All the while other people were making meals and sitting down to eat together. What Lina and Walter finally came to, he assumed, was, Oh well, he’s learned how to live some other way. His sister’s days sounded as if they were built on adrenaline; she was standing on tiptoes, hoping to be picked by some disapproving deity. Their mother’s life had been like that once. Though, come to think of it, on the phone Lina sounded quieter now. Donnie was glad she didn’t marry that art dealer. Since last October, Donnie had lived with people who ate dinner together every night.

  “I want to be more divorced,” the professor was yelling into the phone when Donnie carried in a bag of groceries. “What’s the next step after divorce?” The telephone slammed; she probably didn’t want him to hear that. He hoped she didn’t mind him in her house. She put on a record. Two Canadian women country singers.

  “Soup for dinner,” he said, holding up a bunch of celery.

  “I might be late. I’ve got a department meeting. Was hoping you could stay with the kids.”

  * * *

  —

  Donnie and the professor drove to the campus chapel together for their meeting. They stored the box of books in the trunk of her car and set them on the table for new people. Since he’d been given The Little Red Book in the youth unit, Donnie kept it in his pocket. It had been written for alcoholics, but this meeting was for any and all addicts. Over Labor Day weekend, the housekeeper at Susan’s parents’ found empty cocaine vials while cleaning her little brother’s car. Walter asked him to help and, on the same call, told Donnie that they were pregnant. That was how he said it. They.

  The pudgy girl addicted to love invited Donnie to the beach.

  “I can be your friend,” he told her, “but not more.”

  “Are you afraid of intensity?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But I don’t think so.”

  She noticed the professor load the books into the box and said, “She’s way too old for you.”

  “I don’t care about that.”

  “Well, she’s gonna care,” she said.

  The pudgy girl was right. The professor did care. But Donnie hoped to wear her down with usefulness. Her kids liked the food he cooked. They already loved Sylvie.

  Anyway, there was no hurry. He was still stalled on Step Nine.

  * * *

  —

  The professor asked if he missed drugs. He didn’t think so. “I miss places they brought me. I don’t have as many revelations.”

  “I wish I’d had even one. I guess you don’t get revelations from shopping.” She was keeping a journal to discern patterns. “It’s like anorexia. You can’t completely stop eating or using money. And what is it they say? One hundred percent is easier than ninety-five.”

  Donnie thought of the pudgy girl whose problem was love. He supposed you couldn’t quit that either. Donnie could tell he wouldn’t be good at moderation.

  The professor talked about irresistible urges. The difference between an expense and the addiction, she said, was just a tingle.

  A tingle. That was what Donnie felt about those stables.

  She was an assistant professor, an intellectual, with an insufficient divorce, two kids, and an addiction. He found her beautiful. He was in fall when he met her and had no idea in what to major. But he appreciated the tough hot water, voluptuous on his back, in the garage shower after running. In the youth unit, he’d learned to restore order. He’d spent hours going back and forth polishing that floor. He knew that there was such a thing as beautifully clean. Sylvie was always by him. He loved lying in bed with Sylvie.

  He didn’t want the summer to end.

  * * *

  —

  There was still his mother. Now that fall classes had started again, he drove to the hospital only Tuesdays and Sundays, when he washed her hair. He told her about his courses. A lot flew over his head. Sometimes he brought the books along and did homework, reading little bits aloud. Then he’d read something and say “I have no idea what that means,” and they laughed. They could spend an afternoon together not saying much, but when he left he felt nourished as if he’d eaten a light but healthy meal.

  Donnie drove up to LA with Sylvie to try apologizing to the newlyweds together. But Walter-and-Susan weren’t having his amend. They sat in awkward silence. “You have absolutely nothing to apologize for,” Susan finally said. “You’re doing a good job with your life.” She was grateful, he knew, that he talked to her brother. Donnie suspected his own trouble had tipped Walter over into marrying. Possibly Susan understood that, too.