“Really?” the kid says anxiously.
“Oh, she’s an animal sometimes. It’s scary.”
Emma peers curiously over the top of the newspaper. “Who’s an animal?”
“See you Monday,” I say to Evan, and hang up smiling.
We’re back in bed when the telephone rings. Emma’s head is resting on my chest and I’m not moving, period.
The answer machine picks up. The call is from Carla Candilla, her voice hushed and urgent.
“Derek really did it! ‘Ode to a Brown-Eyed Goddess’—Jack, it was so fucking lame.”
She’s calling on her cellular from Anne’s wedding, which I’d come tantalizingly close to forgetting.
“It took him half an hour to read,” Carla says, “meantime I had to pee like a racehorse. I wrote down a couple lines ’cause I knew you could use a laugh.”
Emma stirs against me. “Jack, who’s that on the phone?”
“The daughter of an old friend. She’s the one who loaned me the gun.” The gun now resting somewhere in Lake Okeechobee, where I tossed it.
“Dig this,” Carla is saying on the machine. ” ‘My heart melts anew each time your brown eyes light on me. Passion sings in my breast like the soaring sparrow’s harmony.’ ”
“Ouch,” says Emma.
“And that’s a best-selling writer,” I feel duty-bound to report. But at least he wrote her a poem, which is more than I ever did.
“Can you believe it—birds in his breast!” When Carla’s giggle fades, her tone turns more serious. “Anyhow, Mom looks awesome and the champagne is killer, so I guess I’ll survive. The real reason I called, I want to make sure you got home okay from your big adventure last night, whatever it was. And I hope your friend’s okay, too. Someday I’ll get you drunk and make you tell me about it. Oh, one more thing: Happy Birthday, Blackjack.”
Oh Jesus, that’s right.
Emma raises her head. “Today’s your birthday? Why didn’t you say something?”
“Slipped my mind.” Incredible but true.
Emma snaps her fingers. “How old again?”
“Forty-seven.”
So long, Mr. Presley. Hello, Mr. Kerouac. I suppose this will never end, until I do.
Emma springs out of bed. “Get up, you old fart. We’re going shopping.”
That was the most time I’d spent in a mall in ten years. Emma was buoyant and sassy; she likes birthdays. She bought me the new Neil Young CD, two pairs of stonewashed jeans and a bottle of cologne that she says is “the bomb.” Then she wanted to treat me to a movie, and she wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was an action remake of the TV series Petticoat Junction, starring Drew Barrymore, Charlize Theron and Catherine Zeta-Jones, three beautiful sisters who live at a rural railroad depot. In the old television show, the girls had weekly comic encounters with cranky relatives and colorful characters who came and went on the train. In the movie version, however, all three sisters are working undercover for the Mossad. For me, the plot never quite came together.
A small FedEx box is sitting by the door when Emma and I return to the apartment. My mother’s birthday present: a first edition of Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage. Where she found it I can’t imagine, but what a beauty! I’ve got a shelf devoted to books my mother has given me on birthdays. Tucked into the pages of the Zane Grey novel is a card, and also a long brown envelope. For some reason I open the envelope first.
Inside is a photocopy of my father’s obituary.
Ever since my mother revealed that she’d seen it, I’ve been imagining what the article said. Not everybody’s death gets written up by a newspaper, so it was intriguing to think that, after ditching Mom and me, Jack Tagger Sr. had done something in life to merit notice of his passing. Perhaps he’d become a beloved saxophone teacher, a crusading social worker or a feisty small-town politician. Maybe he’d invented something new and amazing, some nifty gizmo now taken for granted by the entire human race, including his estranged namesake—the electric nose-hair trimmer, for example, or Styrofoam peanuts.
I’ve also pondered the unappealing prospect that my father earned an obituary not because of anything good he’d done, but because of some newsworthy fuckup, scandal or felony. Bruno Hauptmann got quite a boisterous send-off in the media, though I doubt his family made a scrapbook of the clippings. I myself have written obits of local scoundrels that elicited sighs of relief if not cheers from our readers. Communities usually are pleased to be rid of bad eggs, and I’ve been bracing for the possibility that my father was one.