* * *
THEY PULL INTO THE PARKING LOT after you’ve gone to bed. Seen from the outside, they’d almost seem comic: first they have to find your car, and then they circle the parking lot arguing about whether parking next to it is a good idea or a bad one. Then, when they’ve agreed that it’s probably a bad idea, they argue about where a better place to park might be—on the street, or a block away, or across the parking lot next to some other cars whose owners don’t figure into the story at hand.
Most of the argument consists of a running monologue from Gene, but as Jesse begins to apprehend the reality of his situation amid the unusual sticking power of Gene’s pipe dream from the previous night, he raises objections or notes possible complications. “Anywhere you park, somebody might see,” he volunteers, interrupting, and then, a minute later: “They built most of this in the last couple years, it’s all going to have streetlights.” Jesse has a fear of consequences whose constant presence at the periphery of his consciousness is a sort of tribute to his father.
This irritates Gene, who likes Jesse for his passivity, his use value as a sponge: he soaks up the runoff from Gene and never seems to saturate. “If you wanna puss out, say the word, little brother,” he says, pulling up abruptly near the enclosed swimming pool, whose lights shimmer dreamily through the window. “I’m only doing this for you, anyway.”
“Gene, I’m just saying, a lot of people live here, probably somebody’s going to see.” Gene, staring through the windshield toward the swimming pool, is plotting points on a line whose arc is really only a rough guess. “You know? Just, probably somebody.”
Gene has made up his mind. “So?”
Jesse laughs, despite himself. “So nothing she’s got in there is worth anything to us in jail.”
Gene punches Jesse on the shoulder—not hard, but hard enough—and smiles. “What do you know about jail?”
“What do you?” says Jesse, punching him back, but tentatively: there is an order here, one whose terms Jesse understands instinctively. These constraints are comforting, known parameters. It’s good to have someone to mark out the boundaries, to keep them consistent. Some people wait their whole lives for such a person.
“About as much as I’m gonna know,” Gene says, suddenly parking the car in an available space and killing the engine. They remain there for quite some time, smoking cigarettes with the windows down and watching your building like amateur detectives on stakeout, waiting until the last light in the last window has gone dark.
5.
THE KNICKKNACKS, the found art taped to the wall, the modest assortment of paperback books; the cutlery. You had so little to protect, so few things you chose to call your own and keep as tokens of your passage through this world. Mothers protecting their children are expected to act with ferocity: society demands this of them; it’s one of many requirements women are encouraged to absorb and internalize, selves they’re supposed to envision themselves growing into. You? You were a high school teacher in a one-bedroom apartment a block from the bay. Few could have looked on your life with envy, fewer still with scorn: your days were like leaves. Why, then, did you defend your domain, such small holdings, with lethal force? It was this line of questioning, unfair and unfeeling, that would eventually put you on death row, but when the moment was alive and present, none of them were there. Only you know. Only you remember. Only you, alone among your inquisitors, know how it feels to have a place of refuge defiled, to see the barrier breached, and to know for certain that only ruin will remain unless you act.
Today, you arise unaware of the little drama that played out in your parking lot while you slept—the boy behind the wheel tightly coiled and ready to strike, the one in the passenger seat gently planting seeds of doubt, clearing a little space for light and nourishing the tender sprouts until his companion, Gene, turned to him angrily in the near-dawn, and said: “Fuck it. Tomorrow.”
But tomorrow’s here now; school’s out for the day, and you’re at Jordano’s again. In the lounge this morning, skimming the newspaper, you ran across a recipe for fried oysters in sauce, and it sounded so decadent—what a thing to do, just on impulse, to whip up some oysters and eat them, by yourself, on a Thursday evening in May, in sight of the very waters from which the oysters had been harvested. Maybe pile them high on a French roll, head down to the shore alone for dinner. Spread a tablecloth on the sand and watch the sun set. And with a glass of wine from just up the coast? Why not? It’s the small favors we do for ourselves that we’ll remember when we’re older. A little pampering, insurance against the unknowable tides of the future, maybe. It seems that way from here, today, anyhow. You can’t be sure that it’s true, but it feels true.