Straight Man by Richard Russo Page B

show that I trust her, and she punches me again, though not so hard this time. “I want you to tell me what’s going on.”
    “I don’t know,” I confess. “Have you been talking to your sister?” I no sooner ask this than I can tell I’ve intuited the truth of the matter. Karen, an otherwise sensible girl, has always been certain that her mother and I were on the verge of divorce. When she was in high school, several of her best friends’ parents went through rancorous divorces, leaving her friends shattered and Karen herself shaken and alive to the possibility the same thing could happen to her parents. She was always looking for signs, and most everything she witnessed, from petty bickering to benign conversations she didn’t understand or had joined in progress, she construed as omens of the impending dissolutionof her parents’ union. And of course, being older than Julie, she was able to convince her younger sister to share her anxieties.
    “Mom’s always telling her things she won’t tell me,” Julie explains. “It really pisses me off.”
    “What did she tell Karen?” I ask, genuinely curious.
    “Karen won’t say. Which also pisses me off. It’s like they’re a club, and I can’t get in.”
    “You’re imagining things. So is your sister. There’s nothing wrong between your mother and me.”
    Julie shoots me a look. “How would you know? You never know when Mom’s unhappy.”
    “When is she unhappy?”
    “See?”
    A car has come up behind us and is waiting for us to do something.
    “I just … I don’t think I could take it if you guys divorced right now, okay?” Julie says.
    I don’t know. Is it wrong of me to regret this nearly complete lack of irony in my offspring? Either this is a changeling sitting next to me, or my genes are breaking down at some submolecular level. How is it that a daughter of William Henry Devereaux, Jr., can deliver a line like this straight? If Lily were here she’d say it’s sweet that our daughter would take her parents’ marriage so personally and want to save it, but I’m not certain.
    When the car behind us toots, Julie rolls down her window, sticks her pretty head out, and yells, “
Fuck off!
” To my amazement, the car does a three-point turn and heads back up the road the way it came.
    “Listen,” I suggest, “if you and Russell need money …”
    My daughter looks at me in disbelief. “Was someone talking about money?” she wants to know.
    “I don’t know
what
we’re talking about,” I confess. “Your mother’s got a job interview in Philadelphia. While she’s there she’s going to look in on your grandfather and see how he’s doing. She’ll be back next Monday, okay? That’s all there is to know. You’re up to speed.”
    She studies me hard. We’re still sitting at the intersection. Finally, she puts the car in gear. “I doubt that,” she says, surrendering to her old man a grudging half grin. “I’m just up to
your
speed.”

CHAPTER
4
    The phone is ringing when I return, so I pick it up. “Hello, peckerhead,” says a voice I immediately recognize as Billy Quigley’s. “I knew you were there.”
    “I just walked in.”
    “Bullshit.”
    “How drunk are you, Billy?”
    “Plenty,” he admits. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
    Billy Quigley calls me periodically, reads me the riot act, insults me, then begs my forgiveness, which I always grant, because I like Billy and don’t blame him for drinking himself into merciful oblivion. He’s fifty-seven and all worn out, and the eight years that remain before he can retire must look to him like an eternity. Irish and Catholic, he’s put ten kids through private parochial schools and expensive Catholic colleges by teaching summer sessions and taking course overloads during the regular semesters. He and his wife, a local girl he married young,live in the same shabby little house he bought some thirty years ago, before the neighborhood went bad. Their