One Last Thing Before I Go

This is an evolved species. They love sex. They love it and they want it, and they feel it’s their inalienable right to have it. These girls are feminists, God bless ’em.”
    “Will you quit speechifying?” Oliver says. “I’m trying to relax over here.”
    “Come on, Oliver, you know you’d take any one of these girls. A bottle of wine, a couple of Viagra, you’re good to go.”
    Oliver pulls the cap off his face and squints at Jack. “But would any one of them take me?”
    “What are you talking about? You’re a handsome man.”
    “I am old and fat, and I survive by knowing my role in the jungle.”
    “And what’s that?”
    “The rich old toad who pays to occasionally have his cock munched,” Oliver says, pulling his cap back over his face. And right at that moment, Silver thinks, there is something vaguely toad-like about him.
    The girls stretch and roll on their chairs, expertly opening the clasps on their bikini tops to avoid tan lines. They swing their legs, they rub lotion into their cleavages, lick their lips, play with their long hair. Jack lifts his Ray-Bans to squint at them, then laughs at the wonder of it all. “God in heaven,” he says.
    Oliver farts, long and high, like air escaping from a pinched balloon.
    “Christ, Oliver, take a pill,” Jack said.
    This is what passes for his friends these days.
    * * *
    They are still sitting there, two hours later, when Casey shows up. The sun is high above them, the smell of tanning oil sizzling on the skin of the college girls wafting across the pool to tease their senses. Heard from a certain vantage point, the tractor-trailers thundering down the interstate can sound like the pounding surf. Silver is, as he so often seems to be these days, adrift in a hazy fog of memory, fantasy, and regret.
    “Silver.”
    And maybe, on his better days, the faintest glimmer of hope.
    “Silver!”
    Casey is walking purposefully toward him, in shorts and a breezy halter top, her almond-colored hair pouring down her back and billowing slightly in the faint summer breeze. As she gets closer, he can see that her face is lightly dusted with a horseshoe-shaped constellation of freckles. Jack grunts, making a big show of not checking out his friend’s daughter.
    “Hey there,” Casey says with that jaded nonchalance she reserves exclusively for him. As always, in the first instant he sees her, he can feel his heart suddenly shut down, the way you do in those first moments after impact, or, he supposes, when you’re drowning. Love or panic. The two have always been fairly indistinguishable to him.
    “Hey, Casey.” He sits up in his lounge chair, suddenly self-conscious of his rolling gut, his unshaved face, the haircut he’s been meaning to get. “What are you doing here?”
    She smiles as if his question has triggered a private joke. “What indeed?”
    It will surprise no one to learn that he has not been anyone’s idea of a model father. In the seven years since his divorce he has missed, by design or neglect, more than his share of birthdays, recitals, varsity games, and more dinner dates than he dares to recall. His relationship with Casey gradually evolved from playful to strained to distant, and once puberty had had its way with her, her once habitual forgiveness became somewhat more elusive. He knows this is all his fault, knows he deserves far more contempt from her than she is capable of, but still, there’s something about hearing your little girl look down her nose at you and say “What indeed?” that makes you feel fractured beyond repair.
    Casey looks them over, and he can see them through her eyes; Jack, the aging lothario, coasting on a witless charm that started to fade sometime in the late ’90s; Oliver, doughy and dour and old enough to be her grandfather; and himself, sweating through an extra-large T-shirt commemorating a band that stopped being cool before she was born. Her eyes briefly flit over to the college girls, then back to them with a cynical gleam and they are busted for being the sad, drooping ball sacks that they are.
    It’s hard to get up smoothly while simultaneously straddling a lounge chair and sucking in your gut. He achieves verticality, but only after some graceless jostling with inertia, and somehow this simple effort leaves him flushed and breathless. The Versailles has a decent gym, and with all the time on his hands, you’d think he’d have wandered in there by now.
    He kisses her cheek. She doesn’t