Read Making Nice for Free Online Page B

sign, my immediate sympathy gives way to something that feels better than bad, like my idiot heart is smirking, and I imagine Gary but grown-up, coasting the thermals, patrolling the patchwork fields, the Long Island Sound and the Great South—giant, and red, and terrible.

 
    E VERYTHING I S A B IG D EAL
    We took a drive along Ocean Parkway and, like always, counted the rabbits on the side of the road. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine. I blew into the mouth hole of the coffee cap, stuck my tongue in it, tipped up the cup until the tip of my nose touched the x in DIXIE and took a big sip.
    “Thirty, thirty-one.”
    “Dead ones don’t count,” my father said.
    “Thirty then.”
    Thirties one and two were on the far side of the Jones Beach roundabout as we circled the water tower and slingshotted ourselves back in the direction we’d just come from, like some kind of gravity-assist maneuver, the tug and pull of my latest fuckup forcing our return east. I had to be there at nine. I was nervous. I kept wondering if I would be looked down on, judged, made to clean toilets. Back then I had a friend who worked as a busboy in a local restaurant who told me about someone shitting in a urinal and wiping their ass with Italian bread. I didn’t know what to expect.
    By the time we exited onto the Robert Moses Causeway we were at fifty-seven live rabbits. My father dropped me in front of the old Cutting House a good ten minutes before the hour, and as I was getting out of his car he patted me on the shoulder, and I climbed out and closed the door and peered in through the open window. He was looking at me, right in the eyeballs.
    “Call me if you got any problems.”
    “Thanks,” I said, then tapped the roof of the car and walked inside. When I was sure he had pulled away I walked back out and smoked a cigarette and finished off my coffee, which had gone cold because I’d forgotten to drink it. Then I went back inside and down the hall to Jim Chapin’s office, the Arboretum director, a short and thick cigar smoker with yellow-silver hair and a bum leg who—as I eventually figured from the betting slips on the floor of his pickup—spent most of everyday at the Bay Shore OTB. He didn’t look up from his newspaper when I knocked on the already open door.
    I cleared my throat. Nothing. “Hello,” I said. Nothing. Nothing. Something—Jim shuffled, quickly looked me up and down, then returned to his paper. Without looking up again he said, “You’re Albert?”
    “Yes sir.”
    “Community service, right?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Five hundred hours?”
    “Yep.”
    He folded his paper and slapped it down on the desk. Cigar ashes loop-de-looped out of the ashtray.
    “Wanna tell me what happened?”
    “Not really,” I said, but then I told him all about it anyway.
    *   *   *
    I got my first car two weeks this side of seventeen: a rusted-out 1978 Toyota Land Cruiser FJ40, a four-speed manual straight six that got nine miles to the gallon and had holes in the floorboard big enough to dump cups of cold coffee through—including the cups—and where I lost pennies and cigarettes and one time a carnival goldfish in a plastic bag. What didn’t rattle squeaked, it leaked antifreeze and oil, backfired on the downshift, and there was a crack in the windshield that I wanted to look like something—the east coast of Ireland or a vein in my father’s forearm, a spider web even—but it didn’t, it was just a big black crooked line from top to bottom that sometimes caught the light of the low morning sun on the way to school or the setting sun on the way home, or the headlights of an oncoming car. I wasn’t good at wearing my seat belt or parking, stalled in stop-and-go and up-hills, and when it rained I liked to see how long I could go without using my wipers. I cursed men and the sun, stoplights and left-turners, Yankees bumper stickers and orange traffic cones. I middle-fingered slow ladies, and screwed up