Read Online Northwest Corner by John Burnham Schwartz - Free Book Online Page A

home. An early riser, Tony will already have worked out in his home gym and be seated now in the family breakfast nook with the L.A. Times , a mug of coffee, and a bowl of Go Lean cereal with nonfat milk. (It’s a depressing verity that every man of a certain age knows with self-absorbed precision the dreary, hope-to-live-forever routines of other men in middle life—hard-won knowledge, I might add, that gets us precisely nowhere.) On the wall above Tony’s head are framed color photos (most professionally snapped) of the Lopez family at work and play, arranged in an artful mosaic. All in all, it’s as pleasant a morning stage set as one could hope for.
    One of the girls picks up and chirps “Hi” through a mouthful of something or other.
    “Hey there. That Ruby?”
    “It’s Jade.” Voice snippy: mixing up the twins is not the path to their hearts.
    “Oh, right. Sorry. Hey, Jade, it’s Dwight Arno.”
    “Dad! Dwight Arno!”
    “ Mister Arno, honey,” I hear Tony murmur as the phone transfer gets made. “The store?” This to me, and all business. “Morning, Tony.”
    “What’s wrong?”
    “Nothing. Everything’s fine with the store.”
    “You sure?” I can hear his fingers drumming the table and Jodi telling one of the girls to clear her plate. “You know I get tense when I’m not expecting the call.”
    “Sorry. Everything’s fine. Just calling ’cause I need the day off.”
    “You sick?”
    “My son’s here.”
    “Who?”
    “My son. Sam. From Connecticut?”
    “Yeah, yeah …” Tony’s recall process virtually audible this morning. “Hold on—isn’t he, like—?”
    “He showed up at my house last night.”
    “Just showed up? Whoa, man—big surprise, no? He okay and everything?”
    “He’s okay. Thing is, he might be staying awhile. And I just, you know, I need to get him settled.”
    “I get it. Family, right?”
    “Right. Family.”
    “You know me, I’m a family man, Dwight. So anyway, I was going in myself this morning. I’ll open up.”
    “Thanks.”
    I hear him sip his coffee, turn a page of the paper. “See that piece on Dateline last night? East Coast parents all got kids learning squash so they can get ’em into the Ivy League?”
    “Missed that.”
    “Something to think about—West Coast squash-clinic thing. Move some merchandise. Folks out here want Ivy League, too, right? Maybe build some courts. We’ll talk about it.”
    “Okay.”
    “Okay. Later.”
    As usual after a conversation with Tony in which I’ve had to ask for a favor of some kind, I hang up feeling that I’ve somehow neglected to make some key point on behalf of my own dignity. What the point might have been, I can’t figure. A gnatty cloud of frustration hovers over me. I sit with it for a time, then slip on my shades and exit the house. I lower the top of the Sebring and drive across town, my arm out and the sun on my face.
    And the joggers jog, God bless them, and the sprinklers don’t quit, and gulls fly over the marina and the beaches. And I go to the Vons at the shopping center like any red- or blue- or purple-blooded American. Get my four-wheeled cart and roll it down the bright six-foot-wide aisles, filling it with basics and sundries and the occasional frozen-dessert treat. Fill it right to the brim. Run my plastic quickand easy through the reader and clock my debt ($169.87) without so much as a flinch. Because this morning, with my son miraculously asleep in my house, my vision feels huge. Or I need it to be. I want to save my mind for the truly important questions. (Which are?) Refusing today to be brought down to the usual zero-sum state by the bad-news details of the everyday, the shocking price of milk or the one broken egg out of a brand-new dozen. These things happen; they don’t have to be personal. Run your card and get on with it, man. Pay the minimum at the end of the month. This is our beautiful way of life.
    And then a stop on the road home for gas. And—hell, why