“Hi, Jack. It’s Alfred.”
Jack’s face underwent an evolution of expression, as if he were deciphering a rune. “Holy fuck,” he said at last, pushing open the screen door and squinting out at them. “Hollander?”
“That’s me,” Alfred said, and reached out a hand, but Jack ignored it and clapped him in a bear hug. To enable this, Kristen took the life preserver. “Alfred Hollander?” Jack said, pulling away to look at him again. “What in Christ are you doing here?”
“This is Kristen,” Alfred said. “We’re visiting Miles, and we got curious about you.”
Jack took the life preserver back from Kristen and shook her hand. “Come on in,” he said. “Mi casa tu casa, if you don’t mind my ex coming by pretty soon to pick up my kids.”
They followed him into a dim carpeted living room. A boy and a girl sat on a couch in bathing suits, fiddling with a TV remote.
“No TV,” Jack said. “I told you.”
“But we swam,” the girl pleaded.
“You swam great. But no TV.”
“Twins?” Kristen asked.
“Yes, ma’am. Sally and Ricky. Kiddos, say hello to my old friends—well, old and new,” he said with a wink at Kristen.
“Pleased to meet you,” the children intoned, eyeing them warily.
“They’re sad because it’s almost time to go. Right, kiddos?”
“We’re sad because we want to watch TV,” the boy said.
“Story of my life,” Jack said with a laugh.
He brought Alfred and Kristen each an Old Style, and they sat on folding lawn chairs in the paved space between the back door and the garage. Alfred gave a blunt accounting of his father’s remarriage to Portia, a fellow art historian hardly older than Miles, and fatherhood to a toddler. Jack already knew of Miles’s ascendency in Chicago’s legal world. When it came to their mother, he nodded stiffly and said, “Good lady.”
“What about Ames?” Jack asked, for Alfred had forgotten to include him. “Still the army?” He chortled when Alfred cataloged the “retirement” from Special Ops and cryptic overseas activities. “Go, Ames,” Jack said.
For his own part, he told them, he couldn’t complain. He’d been laid off a year into the recession and was doing part-time work to cover the bills, collection agencies perpetually on his ass, but he liked the easier hours, had sharpened up his bowling game and played in a league three nights a week, but most of all he just loved his kids, although he had to fight for time with them—his ex was greedy, everything was about her; unfaithful, too, but that was another story, and look at those beautiful kids, they were part her, he supposed, though it was hard to see. He wished he could move with them back upstate; Christ, he missed the lakes, Lake Michigan was more like an ocean, there were shipwrecks at the bottom, but he couldn’t leave Chicago, no way—he’d camp out in his ex’s lobby just to be near his kids… and then the three-toned doorbell sounded and the children cried, “Mommy!” and there was a sound of stamping feet inside the house. Jack set his can of Old Style in the chair’s fitted cylinder, stood up heavily, and went inside.
Alfred and Kristen sat in silence as a murmur of voices drifted through the house from the front door to the back. He felt Kristen watching him. Finally, she said, “Alfred, this guy is a mess.”
The voices grew strident. Alfred caught Dan and I want to go away next month and felt a tightness approaching pain in his chest.
“Can you not see that?” Kristen asked.
“Of course I see it.”
“So? Why aren’t you screaming? Or demanding that he cut the bullshit and admit he’s a failure?”