her face bright and shiny as a kid on Christmas morning, asks, “A.J.?”
It is me and Tyler she wants to unwrap. To tear through the crinkly paper and pull us out and exclaim, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”
But even if there is nothing inside the package—or maybe especially because there is nothing inside—it is my package, to unwrap when I want.
So, dry as toast, I answer, “Yes, Olivia, A.J. In the future, I’d like to be called A.J.”
FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010
There’s the exit,” Dori says, pointing to a giant sign welcoming us to the future home of Heritage Acres. Miles of subdivided lots stretch into the distance, prime lunch-wagon territory, since the construction workers would have to drive so far just to get out of the place. We follow the trail of newly framed houses and the sound of air hammers firing nails.
The one other time I ever drove out here was a month ago, the middle of July, when, for the third time in a row, Aubrey had stood me up for a date to go shopping for the stuff she needed to take to college, and I was determined that, by God, we would buy a dust ruffle together. So, righteously pissed off, I’d made my way to the lunch wagon, then taken a place in line hidden behind a couple of construction workers. Weather-beaten men with hands rough as tree bark, they’d joked with Aubrey as she took their orders. They made her laugh. I tried to recall the last time she’d laughed in my presence. Filling the orders, pushing food wrapped in white paper out the window, she was engaged, expressive. She was a person I didn’t recognize.
She’s happy. This is where she’s happy.
That thought was immediately eradicated by the memory of an old black-and-white photo I’d seen once of Chinese coolies racked out on planks as they took their leisure at an opium den. They had looked happy too.
When the guys in front of me had stepped aside, and the smell of frying onions, bad coffee, and fermenting ketchup wafted out of the order window on a blast of oven-hot air. Aubrey pivoted, saw me, and her happiness curdled. She leaned down and hissed, “What are you doing here?”
Tyler, his back to us at the grill, had yelled, “A to the J, was that hold the jalapeños? Or extra jalapeños on the Mexi-burger?”
The steam and heat had twisted his dark hair into heavy curls that flopped across his forehead. Without the ball cap, wearing a white apron streaked with orange chili grease, he was harder to hate. Aubrey whispered in his ear. He jerked his head up, smiled, and pivoted, sticking his large, scarred hand out the order window. His class ring caught the sunlight. The only people I ever knew who wore high school rings were proud that they’d graduated from high school; they never went on to collect college rings. That made me remember that Tyler Moldenhauer was the opium trapping my daughter in this hellish den.
Before I could shake his hand, Aubrey leaned in and told me that she couldn’t leave and I could buy whatever I wanted without her; she, they, had customers. And they did. Half a dozen hungry men jostled behind me. That day, for Aubrey’s sake, I didn’t make a scene. Today I am going to make a scene.
“There it is.” Dori spots the catering truck before I do, a dingy rolling metal box with PETE’S EATS written above the order windows and a line of workers waiting outside. “Pete’s Eats? Who’s Pete?”
“I’m not sure that there is a Pete. It’s sort of a franchise. Tyler rents the truck. Something like that. Aubrey hasn’t exactly shared all the details with me.”
“Probably because ‘Pete’ is exploiting them.”
“That is a distinct possibility.” I park behind a flatbed truck loaded with planks of engineered wood flooring. The planks are the same blond-colored woodlike product that’s in my house. I know how light and airy and elegant the floors will be after the installers have finished and tiptoed out in their stocking feet. I know how scratched up and cheap and shoddy those floors will look after a few weeks. Even when you go crazy and insist that everyone who enters the house put on slippers like the Japanese do. I know how the floors will delaminate around the doors and windows and anyplace where even a drop of water hits them. I know that, unlike real wood