The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [69]
Chapter Twenty-one
Summer 1980
Tim stands outside his house, watching the participants gather for the Fourth of July parade. He tries not to take it personally, that his one-block street, Sekots Lane, is used as a staging area for the annual parade, but he can’t help feeling slighted. Sekots has always felt like an annex to the real neighborhood, some orphan street that got tacked on by mistake. Sekots dead-ends into a hill where children sledded once, but the Dickeyville Garden Club planted it aggressively, hoping to block out the view of the Wakefield Apartments above them. Seemed ridiculous at the time, all those little saplings, but trees grow, and the club’s objective has been achieved. Tim remembers when those trees were smaller than his boys.
It’s been years since his family was home for this parade. Even through last year, with his work life on and off, they were able to take their usual week in Ocean City. They always go to an old-fashioned rooming house that Tim’s family stayed in when he was a boy. It’s not fancy. In fact, it’s downright crummy, but what’s the point of spending dough on a place where you only come to shake sand out of your suit and hang wet towels over the railings. The location is prime, two blocks from the beach, within walking distance of the attractions along the boardwalk, where they spent almost every evening. Last summer, it broke Go-Go’s heart when he just missed the height cutoff for the bumper cars. Tim pleaded, even tried to slip the attendant a fiver. Go-Go threw a tantrum, not entirely out of character for him, although it struck Tim as particularly violent and out of control. Last summer—no, Tim tells himself. It hadn’t happened yet. It was only the one time. Go-Go said it was the only time he was ever in that old bastard’s cabin.
No shore this summer, even though Tim is back to work. He has a gig at Tuerkes, which sells luggage and leather goods. Not doing the books, but working the floor as a sales associate. He likes it, sort of. He actually has to dress better than he did when he was working in accounting, and he enjoys the store’s deep leathery smell, the company of the other guys. They’re young, blow-dried. They go to discos and come in after the weekends, talking about the pussy they get, claiming a girl’s drink preference tells you everything about her, whether it’s a Wallbanger or a Sex on the Beach. They swear that the best girls, the classy girls, drink white wine spritzers or Bristol Cream. The women they talk about—they seem like an entirely new species to Tim. They could be imported from the moon.
The Tuerkes job felt like a demotion at first, but now Tim thinks it might be a turning point. Learn the ropes at Tuerkes, rise up, maybe start his own business. The economy is god-awful, but it won’t always be. People will have money to spend again one day. The trick is figuring out what they’ll want, or how to make them think they want what you’re selling. He’s seen customers in Tuerkes who have no more need of a $200 briefcase than a pig needs a sports car, but the briefcase represents something to them, a dream, an ambition. What will people want when the money flows again? High-end appliances? Jewelry? With men wearing it now, the market has doubled. Gadgets? Look at Hechinger, beginning to spread all over the goddamn place. Who knew that a fucking hardware store could get so big? A hammer is a hammer is a hammer.
In the meantime, Tim has no seniority and no paid vacation. Which is a better excuse for not going to the shore than ’fessing up to his kids that they pretty much have no money. Interest rates hovering at 17 percent this year, and he had to pay a penalty to cash in a CD. That hurt. He told the older boys that they had to get part-time jobs this summer, making it seem like a character-building exercise. But he can’t force Go-Go to get a job and the kid’s a nonstop fount of needs. Lately, he’s obsessed with this video game