He parked the BMW two blocks from Aunt Kathleen's house.
The Range Rover pulled up on Lake Shore Drive. He'd thought about it for exactly forty seconds that morning, standing by the kitchen window, eating toast; forty seconds had been enough for him to realize that arriving at the St. Patrick's Day party in his brand-new black Santorini Range Rover in Beverly was a decision that would require three hours of discussion, and he wasn't prepared for it. The BMW had an explanation. The BMW already had an explanation. The Range Rover was a sequel to the original movie, and no one had seen it yet.
He parked on a residential block, walked two blocks in the March chill, and heard the sounds of his aunt's house halfway down the street.
Kathleen O'Hara's St. Patrick's Day celebration was not a quiet affair. It never had been. It was a boisterous, lively gathering of seventeen people in a three-bedroom bungalow in Beverly, decorated with green streamers and smelling of corned beef. This family had lived there so long that the walls had withstood these gatherings for ten years, and the sound echoing off them made it seem like a building that knew its purpose.
Maxwell opened the front door and was met with all of this in quick succession: a hug from Aunt Kathleen, a pat on the back from someone he recognized as his cousin Patrick, and a glass of something very green in the right hand of someone he didn't know.
"Kathleen's neighbor, Gary," the stranger said cheerfully, pointing to himself with the bottle. "We do this every year."
"That's nice," Maxwell said.
He didn't drink the green liquid. He hid it and left the room.
His mother found him in four minutes, faster than usual, which meant she'd been keeping an eye on the door.
Linda Dragoski wore a green sweater, and her characteristic expression at family gatherings appeared friendly and sociable on the surface, but beneath the surface, she possessed the clinical acumen of an ER nurse, automatically scanning each room for any potential problems. She hugged him with absolute certainty, as if embracing were a matter of purpose rather than social obligation.
"Did you drive?" she asked, then stepped back to look at him.
"Did you drive?"
"A BMW."
"Yes."
She cupped his face in both hands for exactly two seconds, something she'd been doing since he was seven, a habit he stopped resisting around twenty-two. Her eyes scanned his face like those of a woman who's spent twenty-four years reading her son's expressions and trusts them more than his words. "You look better," she said. "You looked good before. Now you look even better."
"I've slept well this week."
"Where?"
"I've been sleeping well this week." There was something about the question. She looked at him. "To my apartment."
"Mmm." He let go of her. She picked up her glass. "Your Uncle Brian is in the kitchen. He has his own opinion about you."
"He always has his own opinion about me?"
"He always has an opinion about everyone." He smiled broadly, his eyes wide. "He's going to ask about girls."
"I know."
"He'll ask more than once."
"I know."
He patted her arm. "The stew is really good this year. Eat some before Brian gets here."
He was eating corned beef and cabbage at the dining room table next to his cousin Patrick, twenty-seven, from the Chicago Fire Department, Company 14 in Bridgeport. Patrick looked like someone born to pull things out of burning buildings, still wearing a green tie over a white shirt, and with the dwindling confidence of a man whose formal attire had lasted almost noon.
"Nate Cross," Patrick said, popping a potato into his mouth. "Does he work with you?"
Maxwell looked at him. "Nate's a firefighter. I'm in logistics."
"I know, I know. I mean, you know him? He grew up somewhere, I can't remember where."
"We grew up together. Wicker Park."
Patrick held up his fork. "That's right. He transferred to Company 98 last fall. He's a good guy. He worked the Ashland Fire in November, you might have heard of him…"
"No." "Yeah, he went back inside; it's a long story, really." Patrick piled more potatoes onto his fork. "Okay. Tell him Unit 14 said I was there."
"I'll tell him."
From the kitchen: "Maxwell."
Patrick's eyebrows arched an inch, a sign of sympathetic alarm. "Uncle Brian found you."
"I wasn't hiding."
"You should have been hiding."
Brian O'Hara was fifty-seven, Linda's older brother, a retired Chicago Transit Authority district supervisor, and the typical Irish-American uncle who used every family gathering as an opportunity to informally check on anyone under forty. He was a big man. Patrick's body seemed to belong to another planet with a red face, kind eyes, and no clue or interest in indirect questions.
He grabbed Maxwell by the shoulder before he could get through the kitchen door.
"There he is. Maxwell. How are you?" He didn't wait for an answer. Are you seeing anyone?
"No."
"What?"
"I've been busy."
"What do you do for a living?"
"Yeah."
"You work too much," Brian told Maxwell at every family gathering. Maxwell had just turned twenty-one. "You know what you need? You need to get out. Do you go out?"
"Sometimes."
"With whom?"
"With friends."
"With girls?"
"With people. 'Friends.'" Brian's expression betrayed that he didn't think that was a good enough answer. He let go of Maxwell's shoulder and turned to the counter to refill his glass. In the three seconds it took him to turn around, Maxwell's perception of his surroundings did what it was supposed to: a complete peripheral scan, a classification of the ambient audio, a cataloging of entrances and exits. From that position, twelve people were visible. Two conversations about the Bulls. One about the price of gas. Gary, the neighbor, was explaining something to a woman Maxwell didn't recognize, with the impassioned energy of a man who'd been telling the same story for twenty minutes without realizing he had no one listening.
Brian turned. "You know what I'm going to say."
"You're going to say my mother works too much, and she'll be happier if I settle down."
Brian pointed at him. "Your mother works too much, and she'll be happier if I settle down." "She'll be happy..."
"I know, Brian."
"I'm just saying."
"I know you're just saying."
Brian looked at her for a moment, not with the vague affection of before, but with something that mirrored his sister's gaze, a genuine understanding beneath the noise. "Are you okay?" she asked, a little slowly.
"Yes," Maxwell said. "Actually, yes."
Brian nodded. He patted her hand, the way men of his generation did, but without repeating the words. "Good," he said, turning back to the corned beef. The wellness check was over.
As expected, Fiona was waiting for him in the kitchen at 3:42.
She was 29, worked at Northwestern Memorial, Linda's specialty: ER, night shift, with the constant, serene lucidity of someone managing controlled chaos 40 hours a week. That included her mother. She had the same skin tone and the same candor as her father, and held a glass of Guinness with the same ease as someone completely at ease at home.
She stood by the refrigerator in a way that, technically, didn't block the exit but rather acted as a barrier. "So," she said.
"So," Maxwell said.
"Patrick says you knew Nat Cross."
"When we were 11."
"Patrick says Nat Cross did something brave in November."
"Seems like he did."
Patrick doesn't call people brave unless it's true. He took a sip. "How's work?"
"Okay."
"Okay, like you're fine, or like you're checking something off."
Maxwell looked at her. Fiona O'Hara asked better questions than most of the adults she'd known since she was nineteen, and he'd never been able to figure out if it was instinct, maternal instinct, or simply the peculiar consequence of being the eldest child in a noisy family, where the only way to be heard was to ask something unexpected.
"Probably both," she said.
"Check something good, or check something that's going to be a problem."
"Something that requires patience."
At this, she nodded slowly, as if filing an answer in the right folder. "You seem very calm," he said.
"I'm fine, Fiona."
"I know you're fine. I told you you're calm. That's different from not being fine."
The system beeped. Maxwell kept a close eye on Fiona because looking away for no reason during an important sentence was information he didn't want to reveal.
As he sipped his Guinness, he glanced at the panel out of the corner of his eye.
[Hidden Reward Unlocked]
[Condition: 2920 Consecutive Days: Daily and Uninterrupted Contact with the Family]
[For 8 Years. Every Day.] Not a single one.]
[Reward: 2,500 shares: Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ)]
[Price, March 17, 2012: $64.83/share]
[Total Value: $162,075]
[Taxes: Handled.] Host's Liability: $0.00
[Deposit: Fidelity Account -4471]
"Do you know what I told my mother last year," Fiona said, "when she asked me why I hadn't gotten married yet? I told her it was because I hadn't met anyone who was doing anything interesting. And she said that was the loneliest thing she'd ever heard me say." She finished her Guinness. "I'm 29, and I've been a nurse for six years, and I'm doing okay, but I see things differently than you do." She looked at him intently. "You know things you don't say."
"Everyone knows," Maxwell said.
"Not like you." He shoved the refrigerator. "Not at all." As he passed, he shook his hand, the same gesture Brian had made, a familiar way of saying, "I mean it, and I won't repeat it." "Call Mom more often," he said over his shoulder. "She doesn't ask you to, so you know she wants to."
Maxwell stood in the kitchen for a while. The gathering around him continued: noisy, warm, oblivious to the atmosphere inside, as only a family gathering could be, and that was one of the things he valued.
He had $162,075 worth of new Johnson & Johnson stock.
He had a plate of corned beef he'd brought from the dining room and forgotten to eat.
He ate standing by the kitchen counter and thought about how it had been worth spending eight years meeting with family at a cost of $162,000 every day, and about Fiona saying she didn't like him at all, and about whether the peace he felt was the right kind or if it was finally too much for him to bear alone.
He left the house at 6:44. The BMW was exactly the same. When he returned, the lake was dark, and the Range Rover was right where he had left it.
He stood for a while between them in the parking lot. A BMW and a Range Rover. Two cars. Fourteen days ago, he had had a baby, and it had come so suddenly. He couldn't explain how fast life was passing him by.
He went up to his room. He made dinner. He called his mother at eight.
She answered on the first ring, which meant she was expecting him.