Free Independence Day by Richard Ford

midnight. Among her other worries, Phyllis is convinced he might just forget the whole damn thing—the move, Sonja’s schooling, Leverage Books, even their marriage—and sink back into an aimless nonconformist’s life he lived before they got together and charted a new path to the waterfall. It was possible, she said, that Joe couldn’t stand the consequences of real intimacy, which to her meant sharing your troubles as well as your achievements with the person you loved, and it seemed also possible that the act of trying to buy a house had opened the door on some dark corridors in herself that she was fearful of going down, though she thankfully seemed unready to discuss which these might be.
    In so many sad words, the Markhams are faced with a potentially calamitous careen down a slippery socio-emotio-economic slope, something they could never have imagined six months ago. Plus, I know they have begun to brood about all the other big missteps they’ve taken in the past, the high cost of these, and how they don’t want to make any more like that. As regret goes, theirs, of course, is not unusual in kind. Though finally the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of suffering new regret just as you get a glimmer that nothing’s worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life.
    A tangy metallic fruitiness filters through the Jersey ozone—the scent of overheated motors and truck brakes on Route 1—reaching clear back to the roily back road where I am now passing by an opulent new pharmaceutical world headquarters abutting a healthy wheat field managed by the soil-research people up at Rutgers. Just beyond this is Mallards Landing (two ducks coasting-in on a colonial-looking sign made to resemble wood), its houses-to-be as yet only studded in on skimpy slabs, their bald, red-dirt yards awaiting sod. Orange and green pennants fly along the roadside: “Models Open.” “Pleasure You Can Afford!” “New Jersey’s Best-Kept Secret.” But there are still long ragged heaps of bulldozered timber and stumps piled up and smoldering two hundred yards to one side, more or less where the community center will be. And a quarter mile back and beyond the far wall of third-growth hardwoods where no animal is native, a big oil-storage depot lumps up and into what’s becoming thickened and stormy air, the beacons on its two great canisters blinking a red and silver steer clear, steer clear to the circling gulls and the jumbo jets on Newark approach.
    When I make the final right into the Sleepy Hollow, two cars are nosed into the potholed lot, though only one has the tiresome green Vermont plate—a rusted-out, lighter-green Nova, borrowed from the Markhams’ Slave Lake friends, and with a muddy bumper sticker that says ANESTHETISTS ARE NOMADS. A cagier realtor would’ve already phoned up with some manufactured “good news” about an unexpected price reduction in a previously outof-reach house, and left this message at the desk last night as a form of torture and enticement. But the truth is I’ve become a little sick of the Markhams—given our long campaign—and have fallen into a not especially hospitable mood, so that I simply stop midway in the lot, hoping some emanations of my arrival will penetrate the flimsy motel walls and expel them both out the door in grateful, apologetic humors, fully ready to slam down their earnest money the instant they set eyes on this house in Penns Neck that, of course, I have yet to tell them about.
    A thin curtain does indeed part in the little square window of room #7. Joe Markham’s round, rueful face—which looks changed (though I can’t say how)—floats in a small sea of blackness. The face turns, its lips move. I make a little wave, then the curtain closes, followed in five seconds by the banged-up pink door opening, and Phyllis Markham, in the uncomfortable gait of a woman not accustomed to getting fat, strides out into the midmorning