Finally he’s done. The late afternoon sun ducks under the freeway, slants in the open window. Door open, shoo out all the dust motes with a cross breeze. The place actually looks neat! Jim carries the accumulated trash out to the dumpster, comes back. He carries out the busted-up bedroom video system, throws it away too. “Enough of the image.” He comes back in and finds himself surprised. It’s not a bad ap, at least at this time of the day, of the year.

He makes himself a dinner of scrambled eggs. Then he calls Hana. No answer, no answering machine. Damn. He calls his parents. Their answering machine is on, which surprises him. It’s not a Friday evening; where are they? They usually only turn on the machine when they leave town.

There’s nothing to do at home, so after a while he drives over to check it out.

*   *   *

No one home, that’s right. A note from Lucy is on the kitchen screen.

“Jim—Dad’s been laid off at work—we’ve gone up to Eureka to visit our place—please water plants in family room etc.—we’ll be back in two weeks.”

Laid off! But there’s no lack of work at LSR!

Confused, Jim wanders his childhood home aimlessly. What could have happened?

It’s odd, seeing the place this empty. As if all of them have gone for good.

Why did they fire him? “Bastards! I should have let them melt you down! I should have helped them do it!”

But if he had, then his father just as certainly would have been fired, wouldn’t he? Jim can’t see how the destruction of the plant in Laguna Hills would have made it any likelier that LSR would have kept his father on; in fact, the reverse seems more likely. He doesn’t really know.

*   *   *

Jim stands in the hallway, where he can see every room of the little duplex, the rooms where so much of his life has been acted out. Now just empty little rooms, mocking him with their silence and stillness. “What happened?” He recalls Dennis’s face as he looked over the opened motor compartment of the car, Dennis holding to his beliefs with a dogged tenacity.…

Jim leaves, feeling aimless and empty. I’m back, he thinks, I’m ready to start up in a new way. Begin a new life. But how? It’s just the same old materials at hand.… How do you start a new life when everything else is the same?

Chapter 81

81

He tracks down to Sandy’s, refusing even to look at South Coast Plaza.

Sandy’s door opens and it’s quiet inside. Angela’s there. “Oh hi, Jim.”

“Hi Angela. Is Sandy—is Sandy okay?”

“Oh yeah.” Angela leads him into the kitchen, which seems odd, so quiet and empty. “He’s fine. He’s gone down to Miami to visit his father.”