The Next Right Thing by Dan Barden

you’d heard? What did you hear?”
    “There’s a guy,” Troy said. “A guy I don’t like. He used to hang out at the house.”
    “Does this guy have a name?”
    “Busansky,” Troy said. “Simon Busansky.”
    Never heard of him. “And why do I care about this guy you don’t like?”
    “Because he’s a pornographer. And a scumbag.”
    “He’s in A.A.?”
    “No.”
    “Then why was he hanging out at a recovery house?” I asked.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Why do they call these places recovery houses,” I asked, “when there’s so little recovery?”
    “It’s not all like that,” Troy said. “But yeah, it’s sort of like that. I think that when a lot of people are getting better, maybe sometimes it attracts a lot of people who aren’t getting better.”
    “Did Terry know him?”
    “I heard that they were friends. I didn’t want to believe it, though. Simon’s already messed with one person I like.”
    “Who did he mess with?”
    “Emma.”
    “The sniper?”
    “You know how you asked me if she was my girlfriend? Actually, she was
his
girlfriend. But this guy … he’d make her do things. I’ve got a bad feeling that this porn they’re talking about has something to do with my friend Emma.”
    It was my first moment of truly liking Troy. It had to happensooner or later. He said “my friend” like he was drawing a line around her and you’d better not cross it. I checked Wade to see if he’d caught Troy’s brave inflection, but he was turned away from me, looking out the window.
    I slapped his arm to bring him back to us. “You know this guy? The scumbag Busansky?”
    “No,” Wade said. “I don’t think so. Terry was definitely becoming friendly with Colin, though. He maybe wrote some contracts for him. He was around the houses sometimes, hanging out with the newcomers, like always. That’s how he met Troy.”
    Which told me nothing that I didn’t already know. Which made me wonder why Wade had bothered to say it.
    When we got back to the Coastal Club, Wade closed the door behind him and walked back to his own car. I assumed that he wouldn’t be joining us for the “meeting after the meeting.”
    As we pulled out of the parking lot, I asked Troy if he’d eaten anything recently.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean how long has it been since you put food into your body?”
    Troy looked at his hands as though the answer might be hidden there. “I can’t remember.”
    Newcomers were always going psychotic with low blood sugar. “Sometimes you think you want to commit suicide,” Terry used to say, “when what you really want is a bacon cheeseburger.”
    I took Troy to Wahoo’s Fish Taco, where I ate a basket of mahimahi tacos and Troy ate two baskets. Afterward, we strolled the boardwalk. I smoked a cigar. Being around Troy was surprisinglylow-maintenance. He talked about himself exclusively, and mostly he answered his own questions. Up to a point.
    “How do you save for retirement?” he asked. This was as we passed the art deco lifeguard station that appears in most Laguna Beach postcards.
    “How do
I
save for retirement?” I said. “Are you asking me specifically or in general?”
    “Both,” Troy said.
    “I make a lot of money,” I said. “But I spend most of it. I guess I figure I’ll keep moving into nicer houses, and that’ll be my retirement.”
    Troy stopped walking. He tapped the filter on his Camel Light with his thumb. I took a hit off my cigar and wished I still smoked cigarettes.
    “Why are you looking at me like that?” I said.
    “Because that’s not going to work,” Troy said. “You can’t save for retirement like that. Did you miss the part where home values dropped something like thirty percent?”
    “If you know the answer,” I said, “why did you ask the fucking question?”
    “I
don’t
know the answer,” Troy said. “But I guess I know what’s not the answer.”
    That was enough foreplay for me, so I asked him again what had