Straight Man

just … I don’t think I could take it if you guys divorced right now, okay?” Julie says.
    I don’t know. Is it wrong of me to regret this nearly complete lack of irony in my offspring? Either this is a changeling sitting next to me, or my genes are breaking down at some submolecular level. How is it that a daughter of William Henry Devereaux, Jr., can deliver a line like this straight? If Lily were here she’d say it’s sweet that our daughter would take her parents’ marriage so personally and want to save it, but I’m not certain.
    When the car behind us toots, Julie rolls down her window, sticks her pretty head out, and yells, “
Fuck off!
” To my amazement, the car does a three-point turn and heads back up the road the way it came.
    “Listen,” I suggest, “if you and Russell need money …”
    My daughter looks at me in disbelief. “Was someone talking about money?” she wants to know.
    “I don’t know
what
we’re talking about,” I confess. “Your mother’s got a job interview in Philadelphia. While she’s there she’s going to look in on your grandfather and see how he’s doing. She’ll be back next Monday, okay? That’s all there is to know. You’re up to speed.”
    She studies me hard. We’re still sitting at the intersection. Finally, she puts the car in gear. “I doubt that,” she says, surrendering to her old man a grudging half grin. “I’m just up to
your
speed.”

CHAPTER
4
    The phone is ringing when I return, so I pick it up. “Hello, peckerhead,” says a voice I immediately recognize as Billy Quigley’s. “I knew you were there.”
    “I just walked in.”
    “Bullshit.”
    “How drunk are you, Billy?”
    “Plenty,” he admits. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
    Billy Quigley calls me periodically, reads me the riot act, insults me, then begs my forgiveness, which I always grant, because I like Billy and don’t blame him for drinking himself into merciful oblivion. He’s fifty-seven and all worn out, and the eight years that remain before he can retire must look to him like an eternity. Irish and Catholic, he’s put ten kids through private parochial schools and expensive Catholic colleges by teaching summer sessions and taking course overloads during the regular semesters. He and his wife, a local girl he married young,live in the same shabby little house he bought some thirty years ago, before the neighborhood went bad. Their mortgage payments are all of a hundred and fifty dollars a month, and the rest of his salary goes to paying off mountainous loans. Their youngest daughter, Colleen, a senior at Railton’s Mount Olive Catholic High School, has just been accepted at Notre Dame on a music scholarship that will pay part of her expenses. Billy will do the rest.
    “I hear Gracie cleaned your clock this afternoon,” Billy says, clearly hoping that this is true, that what he’s heard is not exaggeration.
    “She sure did, Billy,” I tell him. “Who told you?”
    “None of your business, you goddamn sellout, son of a bitch. You’d sell us all out for a nickel, you goddamn Judas peckerwood.”
    This, I realize, is what the phone call is about. The persistent rumors of an impending purge have spooked Billy. He’s called for my reassurance, which he wouldn’t believe even if I offered it, and anyway I decide against it. “Not for a nickel, Billy,” I tell him. “Ours is a two-bit department. I always get full price.” My strategy with Billy is to play along, wait for him to come around. Lily claims my turning Billy’s accusations into a running gag is further evidence that to me everything is a joke. But the fact is, jokes often work on Billy. They work on most people. The exception is Paul Rourke, who’s proud of never having cracked a smile at anything I’ve ever said or done, and who vows he never will. Like everyone else, Billy has only a finite amount of meanness in him, and most times he exhausts it quickly.
    “I bet you got my name right at the top of that list. Don’t tell me you didn’t make one, either, because I don’t believe it.”
    “The merit pay list? Of course I made it. I put you in for a bonus this year.”
    “Good. I’m going to need it. I tell you my kid got accepted at Notre Dame?”
    I tell him he sure did and congratulate him again, wondering if he’s already shifted gears.
    “Fucking Notre Dame,” he says proudly. “Your youngest never even went to college, did she? What the hell was her