Sunburn(3)

Magnus kept a safe and sympathetic silence, and after a moment Joey went on.

"His wife died a couple weeks ago."

"Your mother? Jesus, Joey—"

"Nah, not my mother."

"Stepmother then."

"Nah. Just his wife. It's a long story. But inna meantime, after forty-seven years, he's got nobody at home. He leaves here, he goes back north to an empty house."

"That's gotta be hard," said Magnus. He lived alone, Arty did; he knew the faintly thrumming silence one hears after the click of the key, the squeak of the knob on a front door with no one waiting behind it. "He work? Retired?"

"Anything but retired," Joey said. "But he's had some ... I guess you'd call 'em professional setbacks. My old man, he's used to having authority. Lot of authority. Now . . . it's just all going sour for 'im."

Arty Magnus took a sip of beer, blinked his hazel eyes, then splayed his long thin fingers on the bar. Several thoughts occurred to him, the first of which was how little he really knew about Joey Goldman, much less his family. Who was this guy, whose widowed father had apparently not been married to his mother, who'd arrived in town with nothing, got a dumb job hawking time shares on the street, and within a few short years, at the green age of thirty, had set himself up as something of a big shot in local real estate? They had friends in common, Arty and Joey did; they got together now and then for drinks. But they weren't close, and life before Key West wasn't something that casual Key West friends often talked about; they'd come to Key West to wash away the life before.

The second thing that occurred to Arty Magnus was what a maddening and undodgeable pain it was to see one's parents get old and slow and grouchy and alone, to see them insulted by sickness and abandoned by time, useless in the world's eyes and eventually their own. He made bold to put a hand on Joey's forearm. "It's tough," he said. "It's really tough. But there's only so much you can do."

"Yeah," said Joey, "I know, I know. That's why I was thinking, a book maybe ..."

"Joey, listen," the editor said. "I don't want to sound discouraging. Your father wants to think through his memories, write them down—hey, I think that's great. If he thinks of it as a book, what's the harm? But between us, Joey, a book is a different kind of thing. It isn't finger painting. It isn't just somebody remembering."

Joey put a couple of fingers around his glass, helped the streams of condensation run down to the bottom. "Yeah, I'm sure you're right," he said. "I mean, you've done it, right?"

It was an innocent question, it wasn't meant to needle, but it found Arty Magnus's sorest spot as sure as a blast of dentist's air finds the hole in a tooth. No, he hadn't written a book, though he'd meant to for as long as he could remember. He'd meant to write one in college, he'd meant to write one in grad school; he'd filled several dozen spiral notebooks with ideas, sketches, observations. He'd meant to write a book while living in New York, and six years ago, when he'd moved to Key West, part of his reason had been the hackneyed and half-ironic belief that that would be a good place to write a book. But he hadn't.

He'd done a lot of things instead, been impressively resourceful at finding things to do instead.

He'd helped elevate the Sentinel from a fifth-rate paper to a third-rate one. He'd learned to sail a boat. He'd become a fair fisherman and, to his own surprise, an impassioned gardener. But he was forty-one years old, a few silver wires were beginning to wind like tinsel through the brown corkscrews of his hair; it had lately dawned on him that all those ingenious insteads had so far used up half his life, give or take a few years.

Joey looked sideways at him and knew he'd said the wrong thing. "Hey." He back-pedaled. "Doesn't matter."

They drank. Behind the busy bar, Cliff the bartender was in his glory. He had a cocktail shaker in either hand, was taking an order from a fat guy in a lime-green tank top and carrying on a conversation with a plastered redhead. Arty Magnus looked straight ahead and waited for the sting of this book thing to subside. Then he figured it would subside faster if he distracted himself by playing journalist.

"But Joey, your old man: you really think he has a story?"

"Yeah," said Joey. "I really do."

Arty gave a noncommittal nod and tried to picture what Joey Goldman's father must be like. What would his name be? Abe Goldman? Sol Goldman?

A little old Jewish guy not unlike Arty's own father, a retired CPA, warm, decent, unfascinating, a man of lengthy anecdotes and jokes with forgotten punch lines, who at that moment was either playing rummy, striving for a bowel movement, or watching the market final up in Vero Beach.