The End Game

“Not that I choose to recall,” I said. We were in the Charger but not moving, traffic in midtown Miami having come to a complete stop. Now would be a good time to have an extraction team.

“Who did you eat lunch with?”

“I didn’t,” I said.

“You didn’t eat, or you didn’t eat with people?”

“I mostly did sit-ups.”

“And who do you blame for this, your mother or your father?”

“Combination of both,” I said. “What’s with all this traffic?”

“After school, you didn’t play with anyone?”

“No, I didn’t play with anyone. I built a lot of things. Small explosives. My own BBs. That sort of thing.”

“And where was Nate?”

“Causing problems somewhere,” I said. I turned on the radio and searched for a station with a traffic report, but all I found were stations playing hip-hop and Gloria Estefan. Doesn’t matter what station you listen to in Miami; they all play Gloria Estefan.

“Was I your first kiss, Michael?”

“Fi,” I said.

“It occurs to me that Sam is the only friend of yours I’ve ever met,” Fiona said.

“You met Larry,” I said.

“Who wasn’t really your friend,” she said.

“He was for a while,” I said.

“He was an assassin,” she said.

“Well, before that, he had good points.”

“Being an efficient killer doesn’t count.” I gave Fi a look. “Normally, anyway.”

“You met Ricky,” I said. “My friend Andre’s kid brother.”

“That’s right. And where is Andre now?”

“Doing twenty-five,” I said. “And now you have Davey. The five of you should go out and swap stories about me. Let me know what you find out.”

We were on our way to South Beach to meet my mother-Fiona kindly phoned her from Target and told her we’d decided gifts just wouldn’t do, and that I’d like to buy her dinner, as well-but the 195, the causeway we’d need to get on to get across the water, was frozen in front of us, too.

I made a left turn off Miami Avenue and wound around Roberto Clemente Park. Used to be this part of town was all working-class Puerto Rican families, but now it was this weird mix of big-box stores, high-rise condos, art galleries, coffeehouses, dollar stores, empty warehouses, boarded-up houses, chain-link fences, jungle gyms on broken pavement, cops parked window to window under trees and teenage gangsters trying to look hard, but mostly looking like they were bothered by the humidity and just wanted to be inside. I doubted any of them knew who Roberto Clemente was.

“You take me to the nicest places, Michael,” Fiona said. The pleasant thing about being with Fiona is that you drive through a bad neighborhood with her and she doesn’t lock the doors and scream for you to find the closest Quiznos. She just takes it all in. Cereal-box gangsters and graffiti scare her about as much as a guppy scares a shark. She was looking out the window and smiling at the corner boys, periodically waving at them as we passed.

“You want to know what I did when I was a kid?” I said. “I came down here and stole cars. Half of them were already stolen or had fake plates as it was. Sometimes, Nate and I would steal a car here, drive it to the Pork ’n’ Beans Projects, steal another car there, drive it back over here and then catch the bus back home before my dad even knew we were gone.”

“And that was fun?”

“That was the best time,” I said. “Better than being home, Fiona. Better than being home.”

We wound back through 34th Street, picked up the 195 and circled back to the MacArthur Causeway, which was a longer trip, but I didn’t mind too terribly much. I’d already seen my mother five times that week-once to unclog her sink, which it turns out was backed up with a compound of cigarette ash and animal fat, which had turned into a marcite-like substance in her disposal; once to take her to see her podiatrist in order to get her troublesome ingrown toenail cut out; once to assure her that her neighbors were not using their DirecTV unit to bug her conversations; once to show her how to operate her DVD player and once to dissuade her from making me go to family therapy with her again.

It was her new thing. She wanted us to get closer to each other, to get past my anger at her having been married to my father, of her letting him treat us like leaves, something to be raked up and burnt, and to, as the last article she clipped from Oprah’s magazine said, “mend our broken home.”

Twenty years of psychological training in warfare and battle. Armed conflicts in half the world. Set up shadow governments in countries that don’t even exist anymore. No one told me I’d still be responsible for repairing my past, too.

From the MacArthur Causeway I could see what was causing all the backup on the parallel causeway-a yacht the size of Bali had crashed into a piling beneath the Venetian Causeway, which runs between the MacArthur and the Tuttle. There wasn’t any real damage to the causeway, as it looked to be a glancing blow, but the yacht seemed wedged into place. The water was filled with other boats, mostly other ostentatious yachts, as well as a series of rescue ships and Port Authority boats making their way towards the accident.