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  “Mrs. Garcia,” he would say, as the employee avoided Dave’s bossman stare by eyeing the keyboard in pseudo-concentration, “I understand your predicament. I empathize. But I gotta predicament, too.” (A pause, as he prepared to deepen his voice, serrate his tone.) “Mine is that I’ve got an apparent case of fraud in front of me. You borrowed seven hundred dollars from Cashomatic PayDay, and the account history I’m looking at”—a lie, since Dave had no access to histories—“suggests you never intended to repay that money. That smells like fraud. That fits the definition. But—no, no, you need to listen, this is important—Cashomatic is willing to settle this without formal legal action. Without any kind of seizure. Without anyone showing up, unannounced, at your home or place of work. I’m authorized to waive the interest and penalties on this debt, and cut the principal by”—this fraction was always dictated by the debtor’s resistance level—“half. But you need to decide now, do you understand? Because there’s a deadline on this account, and it’s scheduled to move to our legal department tomorrow morning. And I can assure you things get ugly, not to mention extremely expensive, from there.”

  The end result: Marcella Garcia of Holbrook, Arizona (a cashier at Jack in the Box whose stated predicament involved rebuilding her life after a bout of methamphetamine addiction while caring for a brain-damaged three-year-old), pays $412.50 ($62.50 added to the settlement as a “processing fee”) on a $700 payday loan on which she defaulted twelve years earlier, a loan Cashomatic charged off ten years earlier (before going bankrupt in the wake of a books-cooking scandal) and which was expunged from her credit history five years earlier—a debt, therefore, that wasn’t presently affecting her, adversely or otherwise. The end result: $412.50 for a debt that ARC paid 6.6 cents to acquire, and which Dave spent seventeen minutes collecting, or as he put it, “recovering.” The end result: the American Dream, at least from Dave’s end of the phone line, by which the son of a Turnpike toll collector acquires and assetizes, acquires and assetizes, marries a hot widowed actress who knows the correct way to pronounce “Bulgari,” then sets her up in a 4,400-square-foot house with a three-car garage and a swimming pool and the builder’s top-of-the-line “Brazilian hardwood” option. “There,” he would tell the employee, clicking TERMINATE CALL with a fat prideful flourish. “Keep your mouth moving, not theirs. You play them right, and they’ll do anything. Get ’em to pee in a scotch bottle if you want. Anything.”

  In the kitchen he encountered Sara from the backside, his favorite view. He’d met her this way—on a standing-room-only New Jersey transit train out of Penn Station, him seated, her standing, that cotton-clad rump just inches from his twitchy rabbity nose; relinquishing her his seat had sparked small talk, then the exchange of cell numbers, then dinner in Sparta, then by and by this: her standing in the kitchen they’d designed together, loading the Thanksgiving dessert dishes into a custom-panel Viking Intelli-Wash dishwasher—and three years of full-frontal togetherness plus one surgical enhancement had done little to broaden the specificity of his attraction. He set down his beer glass and placed his hands on her hips, paying tribute to that attraction by giving her rear a few herky-jerky but affectionate crotch-thrusts. He calculated the odds of her unbuttoning her slacks right then and there as being about seven million to one, give or take a million, but then what were the odds of him having sculpted a triple-coil turd? Biology was his amigo today.

  Or maybe not. Startled and jostled, Sara muttered “Jesus, Dave” as three dessert spoons went fumbling from her hand down to the floor.

  “What?” He was still pumping a bit.

  “Seriously, Dave,” she said, bending to retrieve the spoons. From her forehead she wiped away a few strands of blonde hair disheveled by his dry-humped endearment. “Enough.”

  Dave shrugged, rebuffed, then investigated the refrigerator. “Any more of that pie left?” he asked.

  “Tell me you’re not still hungry.”

  “I didn’t say I was hungry,” he said. “I asked if we still had some of that pie. There’s a difference.”

  “I saved some for Alexis.”

  “She won’t eat it. No dairy, remember? Bad for the you-know-what.”

  “Well, let her decide that. Everything okay out there? I’m almost done . . .”

  “It’s all good,” Dave said, shifting glass containers around in the fridge, unpiling and repiling them. “Your sister’s scowling, Jeremy’s doing his knitting. Hey, where’s all the beer? Christ, I bought a whole case.”

  “Jeremy put it outside.”

  Dave straightened. “Outside?”

  “In the snow,” she said. “Smaller carbon footprint, or something like that.”

  Dave’s jaw dropped loose. “But more of my footprints, jeezum.” He shut the refrigerator with a sour grunt. “So, really . . . I gotta put my fucking boots on to get a beer?”

  “Sorry,” she said, raising her hands to denote helplessness. “You know how he is.”

  “Fruitycake, that’s what.”

  “Be nice,” she said.

  “I’m always nice.” There went that grin of his, the same one he’d flashed her that evening on the train when she’d agreed to give up her cell number. For mysterious reasons people called this a “shit-eating grin.”

  “Am I nice, or am I nice?” he went on. “I’m nice.”

  “You’re nice,” she agreed.

  “I’m so nice, see, I’m gonna go dig around in the snow for my own friggin beer.” This he said with the benevolent gusto of someone heading out to donate a kidney, just for the altruistic hell of it. Dave knew Sara shared enough of Liz and Jeremy’s liberal tendencies for him not to belabor the carbon footprint issue. Better to play along, he thought. He waited to be buttered with praise.

  “Want to be even nicer?” she said, in a decidedly unbuttered tone.

  “I think I’m red-lining already.”

  “Take the trash out for me?”

  Dave sighed through his flat nose. Snubbed, scolded, and then saddled with a chore. This was not lifting his buzz. Practiced in the art of “recovery,” however—in extracting from people what they don’t want to give—Dave made one final attempt at Sara’s affections, giving her right buttock a firm, piggy, I’m-not-done-with-you cupping. “That’s nice, too,” he said quietly, in what he thought was seductive understatement.

  But Sara said nothing—just hit the switch for the sink disposal, which gurgled and slurped and filled the room with a harsh machine racket that seemed intended to drive him out. Not even a coquettish wink, or the promise of “later” that she used to whisper in his ear. He stood there, looking victimized. Frankly he thought he deserved a little something-something for having put up with Liz and Jeremy all day, for biting his cranberry-sauced tongue when Jeremy had launched into a rant about “factory farming” at the dinner table, thereby insulting the turkey Sara had so expertly, Food Network–edly roasted. But no: nada. He feared his holiday might have peaked on the potty.

  Bundling himself like a polar explorer, he cursed the forced switch from Weejuns to snowboots and all the political deviance it represented. Outside, he was distracted from the search for his organically chilling beer by the spectacle of his kingdom, all 2.11 acres of it covered in a moon-colored blanket of snow so plump and waveless that it resembled marshmallow cream. After dumping thirty inches on northern New Jersey, the snowstorm had finally ebbed, and the landscape—quiet to begin with—seemed gripped by a weird, muffled stillness: a snow coma. Dave dragged the trash bags down the path that Raymond had shoveled for him (“good for the old ticker,” he’d said, pink-faced and jolly). He heaved them into the roller bin beside the garage, then paused to take stock of the bestilled landscape from this slightly different angle.

  Pedro, the only Mexican plowman Dave had ever encountered, was out on Russell Lane, scritch-scratching the pavement as he cleared the driveways to three houses, almost identical to Dave and Sara’s, and twelve empty lots. For a moment Dave felt sorry for Pedro, pulling a
holiday shift, then wondered if Mexicans even celebrated Thanksgiving. He didn’t recall any beaner pilgrims. He also didn’t know why the developer forced Pedro to clear the driveways to the empty lots—who was going to scope out homesites during a blizzard?—but then Dave’s low opinion of the developer precluded any reasonable theories. The sufficient answer was: Because he’s a prick, that’s why. Dave would have gleefully organized a lynching party among the neighbors if there had been any neighbors to organize.

  Greg Russell—that was the developer, the greasy grand poobah of Russell Estates, LLC—had promised an “ultra-exclusive” neighborhood of fifteen luxury homes. Two years later, however, Russell Estates consisted of the house Dave and Sara had built, a smaller one built by a Pakistani orthodontist, and the model home; the rest of the development was bare graded dirt poked with weak little FOR SALE signs. From what Dave had gathered, Russell had never had the proper funding to begin with; just the land, a bulldozer, and a boneheaded mixture of hope and greed. The rumor was that he’d scammed the 112 acres—gorgeous rolling hills, about 60 acres of them covered in second-growth hardwoods, plus a wide ribbon of wetlands bisecting its middle—from an old spinster he’d befriended. This was way back when, when she and her brother had operated a chicken farm on the property, but the brother died, the old lady morphed into a chickenless shut-in, and then came Russell to the screen door, offering to mow her lawn if she’d let him deer-hunt on the back sixty. No one knew how, but Russell had somehow weaseled her into deeding him the land, which he’d promptly started logging three days after her death. Cleared the whole damn parcel, laid a horseshoe-shaped road on it, then constructed a rococo, foam-concrete entranceway—RUSSELL ESTATES: A LUXURY COMMUNITY—with columns, caps, pediments, three thousand dollars’ worth of pansies, and a foam-concrete sculpture of a bucking stallion onto which a local yahoo had painted red tears (probably, Dave and Russell agreed, one of the eco-ninnies who’d opposed the subdivision permit). Dave should’ve figured Russell for a fraud—he prided himself on his radar that way—but Sara had gotten all misty-headed about the views (they were pretty magnificent, if you were into that sort of thing) and about the “community stables” and equestrian trails Russell had promised for the long term. She’d swooned. Whispered hot breathy things in Dave’s ear, things that’d gelatinized his good sense.

  There were no stables, of course. Hardly any houses, for that matter. Just Pedro, the Snow Spic, clearing this oxbow to nowhere, while King Dave of Masoli stood watching from on high. He’d sell the goddamn house if the real estate market hadn’t tanked; right now they’d be gobsmack lucky to break even. And, Christ, all the issues; Russell’s houses were built to last a season, tops. An offset crack in the foundation. Drippy white stains between the pool’s deck and bond beam. Popped nails and buckling in all the windows. The veneer already peeling from the kitchen cabinets, which weren’t supposed to be veneered to begin with. Insufficient flashing around the chimney, resulting in a water-logged attic. “What’d you expect?” his golfing buddy Pete had said to him. “The houses they build these days, they ain’t designed to outlast the warranty period. Back in the old days, they built ’em to pass down to their kids, y’know? Who the hell you know now who’s living in the old family homeplace?” Into Dave’s mind had entered a vision of himself occupying his parents’ shabby little bungalow in Rahway, causing him to shudder so violently that he shanked the ball with his seven iron.

  Surveying the not-neighborhood now, he decided it didn’t look quite so abortive and barren beneath all the snow—though maybe only in the way a corpse doesn’t look so bad after someone drapes a sheet over it. Regardless, it was better than the view inside—Jeremy no doubt explaining why the Cowboys cheerleaders’ uniforms were sexist and exploitative, rather than magically delicious—so Dave fetched a cigar from his shirt pocket. He lit the cigar, a high-end Nicaraguan torpedo. As always, life improved. Unlike the proverbial cat to which he’d been recently likened, Dave had never eaten a canary, but he guessed they might taste something like this.

  Except soon the cigar began to stink. He pulled it from his mouth and stared at it. Number eight on Cigar Aficionado’s top twenty-five cigars of the year, with a Sumatra seed wrapper around Costa Rican leaf, ten bucks a pop, supposedly heavy on pepper and leather flavors with an espresso-bean finish. And it smelled like a friggin skunk fart. But then, no, scratch that: Bringing the cigar to his nose, Dave sniffed its smoke plume, twice, then a third time, finally acquitting it from blame. So what the hell was that smell? He flipped the lid on the trash bin beside him and took an investigative whiff. All he got there was a mixture of gravy odor and whatever the chemical was that they impregnated the trash bags with to make them smell like a mountain meadow or feminine deodorizing products. Just about then, however, with his nose probing the trash bin like a wine expert’s assessing an old Bordeaux, Dave recognized the smell—unmistakable, once he’d pegged it. He grinned, and not only because he was instantly transported back to 1984 when Bon Jovi opened for the Scorpions at Madison Square Garden and Matt Rocca showed up with some tripweed his hippie brother had brought back from Kathmandu. Sauntering farther down the path, his cigar jutting from his smile, he turned the corner to the dark little alcove where the central air conditioning unit sat hidden inside a semicircle of dwarf boxwoods.

  “Busted,” he announced.

  Alexis shrieked in terror, her arms gyrating so wildly that she ejected the contents of both hands—her cellphone shooting one way, the joint she’d been smoking the other. But she wasn’t alone. Some kid was standing beside her, a slim shadow raising his hands slowly to show they were empty.

  Pricked by the indignity of her surprise, once she’d identified her stepfather behind the orange nub of his cigar, she pouted at him and snarled, “What are you doing, perv?”

  “I know what I’m doing,” he replied, his mad hatter’s grin fading as he sized up the terrified-looking kid frozen beside her. “What’re you doing?”

  “It’s medical, okay?” she said, bending to retrieve the joint and cellphone from atop the snow. With her coat sleeve she wiped the snow from the phone’s screen. “It helps with my condition.”

  “It helps you shit?”

  “Whatever,” she said.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Who’s what?”

  “Who’s what? Him.”

  “That’s Miguel.” To Miguel she said, sighing, “My stepdad.”

  The kid nodded, dropping his hands, while Dave leaned in for a closer look. The kid was Latino, he noted, and—no way around it—a handsome little devil, with a narrow smoldery face and soccer-star frame. Skittish-looking, but Dave guessed that was to be expected in the present weed-perfumed circumstances. Dave snorted. “Who’s Miguel?” he said to them both.

  “He goes to Sussex,” answered Alexis, Miguel affirming this with another nod. “Let’s not make an issue out of this, okay? With you-know-who?”

  Dave pursed his lips. Goes to Sussex: This was a cryptic answer, even for the reliably cryptic Alexis. And what precisely was the issue she didn’t want Sara digesting, he wondered. The pot—or the presence of Enrique Iglesias here, hiding in the shrubs?

  She and Dave had what might be called an “understanding,” despite his geopolitical alliance with Sara. Or if not an understanding, then a kind of caustic accommodation—a mutual tolerance manifesting itself in the kind of thorny banter that cocktail waitresses engage in with their dumpy regulars: lewd jokes, hard-edged teasing, recurrent bouts of eye-rolling. He called her Lexi, which Sara abhorred (“that’s a stripper name,” she protested), and, privately, she called him “perv,” owing to her exploration one night—accidental, but exceedingly thorough—of his unsavory internet browser history. That discovery—in which she’d reveled, acidly, for the power it gave her—had shifted the relationship, infusing it with something oozy and potentially toxic but also, to Dave’s thinking, kind of . . . stirring. It was as if they’d lowered their human masks—the do-righ
t businessman, the Honor Roll teen—to reveal something meaner and more reptilian behind them: the lecher, the blackmailer. The benign teasing she’d formerly directed Dave’s way—dubbing him her “step-guido,” taunting him for the undone top buttons of his shirts, his Rocawear sweaters, the tinted windows on his Escalade, the way his dancefloor moves were limited to punching the air in slipshod time with a song—had turned darker, aimed deeper. She’d redrawn her cartoon of him, depicting him as a goatish old sadsack, as discontented with his life with Sara—albeit far differently—as she herself was. “Having a little me time?” she’d say, as she passed by his home office. “I’ll just close the door for you,” punctuating it with a cold wink. Or in the aftermath of a spat between him and Sara: “Guess you’ll be working late tonight, huh?” This had chafed Dave, at first, until he’d formulated a defense, which was more like a plea of nolo contendere: Copping to the perv charge, he’d taken to constantly quizzing her about her own sexual hijinks, real or imagined, with just enough quasi-parental disapproval in his tone to maintain a staged sense of decorum. As in, “I hope you kept it to just a blowjob tonight,” when she’d roll in late on a Friday night. Or, in the present instance, as he watched her peck away at her cellphone while poor Enrique/Miguel stood there wetting himself: “What’re you—getting a little action out here in the bushes?”