Falling in Place by Ann Beattie Page B

supports you? It’s not that unusual to have a father who goes to work, Mary.”
    “Angela sleeps with people,” John Joel said.
    “What did you say?” Louise said.
    John Joel lowered his eyes, but he said it again.
    “I don’t even believe this,” Mary said. “Like, she’s my best friend, and I’m supposed to sit here and listen to this from the ten-year-old? I don’t even believe that he lies the way he does.”
    “Why did you say that?” John said.
    “Because we were talking,” John Joel said.
    “You and Angela were talking?”
    “No. The four of us. She said something about Angela’s father, didn’t she? So I just said something.”
    “You are so out of it,” Mary said.
    “Oh yeah? Parker’s cousin works at the garage and he’s got a car behind his shed he’s restoring, and the door was unlocked, and Angela and Toddie was in there.”
    “Were
in there,” John said.
    “I don’t know if she does or she doesn’t,” Louise said, “but this isn’t what I want to discuss at dinner on Saturday night. Please.”
    “Everybody has to talk about just what you want to talk about,” John Joel said.
    “You should be nice to us and not speak that way,” John said to John Joel. “Your braces are going to set us back two thousand bucks.”
    “I don’t even want them.”
    “So what,” Mary said. “You have to have them.” She smirked at John Joel.
    Louise turned to John. “Don’t speak to him
kiddingly
about showing respect for his parents. He
should
speak to us nicely, damn it, braces or no braces.”
    “Everything’s fucked,” he said. “What does it matter the way things
should
be?”
    Louise put her napkin on the table. She refolded it in its original triangle shape. He did not know that Louise knew how to make a napkin cone-shaped. She fitted the napkin into her full water glass, got her purse from the floor and walked out of the restaurant.
    “Jesus,” Mary muttered.
    “You started it,” John Joel said.
    There were little dishes on the table: mustard, duck sauce,
dim
sum
dishes with bits of rice cake, an empty dish where the spareribs had been. And leftover food: a little pork ball in a dark brown sauce, chopped shrimp on lettuce, and the stuffed duck’s foot, which he had ordered out of curiosity. It had indeed been a duck’s foot, with a small ball of something in the claw. The industrious, frugal Chinese. No Chinese would ever be having such a dinner. And this had been an attempt to do something right, instead of taking them on a picnic.
    “What do you want to talk about now, brilliant?” Mary said to John Joel.
    “Pissball,” John Joel said.
    “Maybe if this is the way things are going I
should
get a polyester leisure suit and be an asshole,” John said. “I feel, when I am with my loving family, that everybody is conspiring to beat me down.”
    Mary sighed. John Joel reached for the last pork ball.
    “No one is going to see where Louise went,” John said. He was not asking a question, just stating a fact.
    “So what could I do?” Mary said.
    “No one cares,” John said.
    “So?” Mary said. “What about you?”
    “I care,” he said, “but I have to pay the bill. I don’t work all week—that unusual pastime of mine—for nothing. I am here to pay the bill. One book I remember very well from college has a character in it who behaves well. A novel by Ernest Hemingway, which I’m sure you’ll never read.
The Sun Also Rises
. A woman runs away with some other man, but the hero pays the bills. That’s what I do: I work, and I pay the bill. I also care about where my wife is. Not as much as I would have cared years ago, but enough so that I will summon the waiter and go out and try futilely to find her. Don’t let me interrupt your meal. If I do find her, I can stand outside with her while she screams until you’re done.”
    The Muzak was playing a medley of songs from
Oklahoma
. It was all high-pitched and too fast.
    “In French, it’s
Le Soleil se