had a good sense of humor. Before Next. Forget Martin’s sense of humor; he said there might be a problem at the bank.”
“Call him! Call him! Call him!”
I try. Several times, but don’t get through.
Dori gasps in wonderment. “You just heard from the love of your life for the first time in sixteen years.”
“Dori, calm down, okay? This is not an episode of Gossip Girl, and who said he was the love of my life?”
“You. On more than one occasion.”
“Had there been drinking beforehand?”
“There is always drinking beforehand with us. Um gee!” she bursts out, her abbreviation for the abbreviation “OMG.” “Do you remember that article I e-mailed you?”
“Dori, you e-mail me roughly half a dozen articles a day. I don’t always have time to catch up on Cosmo’s ‘Seventy-five Crazy-Hot Sex Moves.’ ”
“No, the one about rekindled romances.”
“Dori, please.”
“Seriously, this researcher wrote about why Classmates-dotcom and Facebook and all these sites where you reconnect with old sweethearts are causing this epidemic of divorces. A person’s first big love gets stored in the brain in the exact same place as crack cocaine does and just even seeing the old flame’s picture on Facebook can, like, reactivate the addiction. So are you all rekindled?”
“Dori, no kindling. No crack. Okay? I have got to focus.”
“No, really. This is all true. The researcher did a whole study on it and found out that the most amazing thing is that these couples who get back together, you know, leave their wives and husbands of thirty years for their first big love, have incredibly successful relationships with the first love. I mean, it’s a delusion, but a delusion that totally works in the real world. So are you blown away? You seem blown away.”
“Dori, you’re not following the plot here: There is a very real possibility that something has happened to my daughter’s college fund.”
“You don’t know that. Maybe he was just checking to make sure you got the money.”
“He said there was a problem.”
“Where was he calling from?”
“He didn’t say. Sounded like he was driving. I heard traffic.”
I hit Aubrey’s number. For roughly the thousandth time, her voice mail picks up and I scream at the phone, “Answer, damn you!”
Dori states the obvious: “Call Tyler the Defiler.”
I hesitate. Not just because Tyler is the last person on earth I want to talk to, but because when, under great duress, I did manage to extract his number, Aubrey made me swear that I would use it only under very precise circumstances. Like if I were bound and gagged in the trunk of a kidnapper’s car. For the past six months, Aubrey has done everything in her power to keep Tyler and me as far apart as possible.
I dial his number and, of course, it’s straight to voice mail. I put his message on speakerphone for Dori to hear, and slump back as I wait for whatever cocky, football-hero attempt at lame humor will follow. I predict white-boy ghetto wannabe, “wigger,” as Aubrey so charmingly calls such poseurs. Instead, we hear a polite young man tell us, “Hello, you have reached the number of Ty-Aub Enterprises.”
Dori pops her eyes, mouths, Ty-Aub Enterprises?
“Please leave a number and one of us will return your call as soon as possible.”
I press the phone to my mouth. “Tyler, this is Aubrey’s mother. I need her to call me right now! Immediately. There might be a problem at the bank. So, seriously, when you get this have her call me. Stat.”
I hang up. “ ‘Ty-Aub Enterprises’? That delusional asshole has upgraded his goddamn roach coach to ‘enterprises.’ God, I hate that cocky little bastard.” I calm down, turn to Dori. “So, you up for coming with me to drag Aubrey to the bank?”
“Absolutely.”
“Thanks for being on my side.”
“Is there any other?”
We drive in silence as I beeline along the fastest route to the roach coach. A horn honks when I cut a pickup off. I wiggle through a yellow light, then floor it, blasting down the road, swerving from lane to lane, passing nothing but an endless loop of Best Buy–Ross–Home Depot–Joe’s Crab Shack–TJMaxx–Best Buys.
A person looks at his or her surroundings in completely different ways depending upon whether they are temporary or permanent. Parkhaven, for the eighteen years we’ve lived here, has been softened for me by the gauzy scrim of impermanence. It was just the place Aubrey and I had to be to get her an education good enough that she’d never have to live in a place with