Free House of Sand and Fog by André Dubus III Page A

again?”
    I take a breath. “Not too soon. Perhaps once we get a buyer we will tell them to wait until fall. Would you prefer that?”
    She looks by me to the window, at the sun on our long grass, the road, the woodland beyond, her eyes becoming moist. “I will do as you wish, Massoud.”
    I stand and hold my wife, and for a brief moment she allows this. I feel the softness of her chest against me. I smell her clean hair, the familiar scent of lavender and tea. But she steps away and walks quickly down the corridor to her work.
    Nadi has always had more pride than a queen, and I am certain what just happened between us was an apology. But as I sit at my desk, I feel that caged heaviness in my belly that comes with a failure of courage, for it is I who should apologize; it is I who have helped to fly us so far off course.

 
    I WAS ON CORONA BEACH, STILL WEARING THE SHORTS I’D WORKED IN, leaning back on an El Rancho Motel towel. The sky was clear and blue, no sign of the fog that can float in whenever it feels like it. The tide was low, and green waves curled in long and lazy, spreading out on the wet sand where four kids squatted building a hill for a red plastic truck.
    My Monday job was a two-story duplex on the Colma River. The owner was a quiet CPA who had custody of his twelve-year-old daughter on the weekends. He had a beard and thick glasses and once he left me a typed note asking me out and I wrote in pencil on the bottom that I couldn’t, I was married, which was true, though Nick had already been gone for months. The CPA wrote an apology in a second note, and I’d felt like a liar and a chickenshit, and he never wrote any more notes, just left the check under a rainbow magnet on the fridge. After cleaning his small house, I drove straight to the motel and called Connie Walsh. It took her almost ten minutes to get to the phone and when she did she told me she was running late for court, she still hadn’t heard from the county, then she asked me to drop off my copy of the notarized tax statement. I told her I couldn’t find it. She said that wasn’t good news but keep your chin up; it’ll probably be in the records they’re sending. “And Kathy, I recommend you try and stay with friends. County bureaucrats are notorious for dragging their briefcases. This could take a few weeks to iron out.”
    “A few weeks?”
    “Yes, that’s right.”
    I was about to tell my lawyer that’s too long, I can’t afford it, but she hung up, and soon after the front desk lady buzzed my room and asked if I was checking out or staying another day. I didn’t know where else to go, but told her I was checking out. I packed my suitcase, then carried my TV across the street and locked it back in the storage shed. A trucker was backing his rig into the yard to turn around and as I crossed the street again he honked once, then stuck his head out the window, smiled hard, and said something to me I couldn’t hear over his engine. I should’ve given him the finger, but instead I went back into my room and packed two of the motel’s towels to take with me, revenge, I guess, for the broken TV, though I never told them it was broken.
    Behind me an engine with no muffler started up and I turned to see an old Malibu pull out of the beach lot, a First Things First bumper sticker above its rusted tailpipe. Nick hated those twelve-step, Higher Power slogans, especially when they were on cars he’d see on his way to work or just running errands. “Big Brother ruling you from somebody’s fucking tailpipe,” he’d say.
    “They’re not rules, they’re reminders.”
    “They’re fucking reminders to obey the rules, Kath.”
    But I didn’t feel that way. Every time I saw one—usually on a back bumper—I felt like when you’re in a crowded city street and you see a face you knew once and even if you don’t talk to that person you feel suddenly more tied to your past and present. When I was using I never liked seeing them. But