kind of honeyed shrimp, and his eyes were roving the restaurant as though he was looking for someone he was expecting to meet. “No,” I said, “I moved here when I was eleven.”
“See?” he said, and smiled at me. “Everybody’s moved here. Nobody is from North Shore because everybody wants to move here, I mean, except her mother.” He gestured at Bunny with his thumb. She sipped from her Shirley Temple, sucking hard on the straw, then grew frustrated, pulled up the straw, showed us the cherry stuck on the end of it, and laughed like a kid.
Her father continued, “They were from here, very serious people, her dad was a machinist for Boeing. Used to have this huge shop in his garage, the guy could fabricate anything.”
It took me a moment to track that we were discussing Bunny’s mother’s father, Bunny’s grandfather. “Is he still around?” I asked.
“He passed,” Ray said. “But he lived a good life. Yeah, he passed when Bunny was, what were you?”
“Nine,” Bunny said.
“Helluva thing, being able to make things with your hands. That’s a real loss in the digital world, I think. Making things. Don’t you think so?”
The dinner continued on in this vein, Bunny occasionally queuing up her dad to tell an interesting story, almost as though he were a jukebox and she were playing me her favorite songs. Occasionally she would try to steer him away from dangerous topics: “I’m not against immigrants, but I’m just saying they should come here legally—” and she would pipe up, “Tell him about the pool, tell him about the pool you’re going to put in,” and he would seamlessly switch tracks and begin telling me about the Olympic-size swimming pool he had convinced the city council was vital to the town’s growth. “I mean, think about it, how are we going to have kids that grow up to be Olympic swimmers if we don’t even have a damn pool for them to swim in?”
Both Bunny and her father were putting away shocking volumes of food and drink, and I thought perhaps this was normal for them, the way that André the Giant could drink forty beers with dinner. She had given him a pleading look when he ordered the fourth Tom Collins, but he had ignored her, as though he could not feel her eyes boring holes in the side of his face as he told me about a guy he had known in construction who had a pet chimp, and wasn’t that incredible? It used to wear little overalls.
Aside from that single warning look Bunny had given Ray, she appeared to be at ease with the situation, and Ray’s conversational alacrity had never ceased, so I was disoriented when he was visibly weaving as we made our way out to the parking lot for the car after dinner.
I looked at Bunny, who would not meet my eyes. Oughtn’t we not allow him to drive? Shouldn’t we suggest that we taxi home? But she was already casually getting into the car, as though everything were fine. I could not fathom a polite way to decline, and so I got in and buckled my seat belt nervously. Perhaps he would be somehow more able to drive a car in a straight line than he was able to walk in one.
“A funny story about Bunny’s grandpa,” he said, looking over his shoulder as he backed out of our space, when suddenly the car lurched forward and we slammed into a pole. The force of the impact was surprising, considering that we had been at a stop. He must have had his foot slammed on the gas, and the car in drive instead of reverse. I was breathing hard and the backs of my hands were prickling with adrenaline.
Ray Lampert popped the car back into park, yanking on the gearshift. “Fucking bloody shit hell fuck motherfucker,” he said, and got out of the car to look at the front bumper. Bunny and I stayed in the backseat, and she turned to me and said, quite casually, “This is not the first time he’s done this,” and then laughed.
Outside the car, he was yelling and kicking the tire of the car repeatedly, but the noise was hushed by the expensive car, almost as though we were sealed in some kind of space pod. I could see the spittle fly out of his mouth, lit up by the streetlight. Mostly, I was confused. My entire childhood had been