What did Harv know? Carol was supposed to know - and she said it would be okay so it would be okay. He and Carol would go to New York for the show and the kid would stay home with the dog. Thea was a good kid - she was a stylish, capable kid and she was seventeen years old. She had her own Honda Passport and she bought her prom dress on Carol’s Visa at Saks. When Harv was seventeen years old he was driving across the country in shitboxes and stealing batteries out from under the hoods of nice cars when the batteries in the shitboxes went dead. At the last moment Thea said she wasn’t even going to stay in the house all alone, it was too spooky - even with the dog there. She would take her Pooh bear in the Passport and stay at her friend Alexis’s house and, maybe, just maybe, Thea and Alexis would go back to the house if they had nothing to do that night and have a few girlfriends over for pizza and cokes. They would play with the dog and give him a bowl of dog food. At midnight they would go back to Alexis’s and sleep.
Just before they left the kid, the house, the dog and Cape Ann for Logan Airport and the Boston-LaGuardia shuttle, the wife got off the phone with Alexis’s mother. There were now plans for an old-fashioned weekend breakfast at Alexis’s house when the girls woke up. Harv thought of Alexis’s mother, the sparky realtor, and couldn’t quite see her flipping blueberry pancakes, but that was neither here nor there. So he pulled out the Quattro while Carol painted her nails - an event in itself - and off he went. He took the 3:30pm.shuttle and the wife would take the 4:30. The shuttle planes ran every half hour on the hour, like commuter buses, and at that blue-sky point in time the planes seemed even safer than buses. The worst thing that ever happened was the huge traffic jam at peak hours, the long chain of planes the pilots called the elephant walk.
All the same, Harv and Carol took their usual precaution. Since Thea was their one and only they had made a pact never to be on the same plane together unless Thea was on the plane with them. This would end very soon - when Thea reached age eighteen, the age of consent, whatever that meant. Like most of the rules in the house this flying thing was the wife’s rule. Harv’s big rule was to let Carol make all the rules. While Carol was running around making the rules Harv was usually dawdling in the master bathroom with a Q-tip in his ear. When his ear itched in a place where a Q-tip was unavailable, such as in the driver’s seat of the Quattro, Harv would use whatever was handy. Usually, that was his 18-karat gold Cross pen, which was a gift from Carol for the nice bonuses Harv brought in. That was Carol’s view of business - a Cross pen set. While the Q-tip or the pen was twirling in his ear Harv’s brain was twirling too. Among other things, it was spinning out infomercials and two-minute spots, the ones that run post-midnight when the media is cheap and people don’t mind seeing an 800 number come up six times in the same ad. But with Harv, among other things was not a small item.
While Carol was floating around on the 4:30 Delta, Harv stomped around the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia like a caged lion who hadn’t eaten for weeks. In order to save space for dinner in New York he had resisted the chicken fingers and dried berry snak-paks they had passed out on his flight. All the resisting did was make him doubly ravenous. For a while he stood in front of the hot pretzel cart, drooling. Then he haunted the smeared glass of the hot dog rotisserie at the bar. Finally he sat down on a barstool and drank a Bud, under the theory that it was only a drink and yet it was also a chunk of white bread in liquid form. At the bar a Merck detail man from Minnesota, the land of the blond eyebrows, got to talking about kids and families - and Harv couldn’t resist. He pulled his wallet out of his rear pants pocket and spread his stash of seventeen dog-eared, wallet-sized photos over the sticky surface of the bar.
Harv set down all seventeen Thea photos in perfect chronological order, right in front of the Merck guy. The guy was so impressed he bought Harv a new beer. Harv’s little square pictures stretched from the edge of a filthy ashtray to an abandoned, half-drunk glass of scotch and water the bartender hadn’t cleared yet. They ran left to right like frames of a storyboard depicting the life of a pretty teenage girl - a storyboard in which all the shots were closeups of the girl staring straight into the camera, either smiling or trying to smile. For sheer uninhibited glee nothing matched the very first frame - in which the girl, at the age of one, is clearly in love with an unseen Sears photographer who sat her down in front of a backdrop of sunflowers. The seventeenth and last shot had a different mood entirely. Thea was still smiling, but in a way that was so clouded and complex it made you think about what seventeen years on this earth can do to uninhibited glee.
There was another shot that Harv carried with him, but he couldn’t show it to the Merck guy, because he carried the shot in his mind instead of his wallet. He hadn’t had a camera on him at the time. The three of them were on a flight to San Fran, a junket on frequent flyer miles. When the stewardess cleared his food away Harv placed the newborn Thea on the tray table extended above his lap. There she slept as they crossed the Rockies. The tray table was her private Pullman berth. Thea slept away, totally trusting everyone, until the voice came over the speakers requesting that tray tables be returned to their full, upright and locked position. Even then she kept on sleeping. These days Thea took Tylenol PM to fall asleep. If that didn’t work she took an extra Zoloft.
It was a hot day in the East and the Merck guy loved beer, and Harv was powerless to refuse.
“I hope you don’t think I’m a doctor,” Harv said. “I have a different specialty. I’m the ad doctor.”
“Well, you never know who you know,” said the Merck guy. “If you’re from Boston you’re a doctor to me. And you’re a doctor to my expense report.”
Harv and the Merck guy were in sync, mentally and physically. At the exact same moment the two of them sucked the second beers dry and picked up the two new ones slapped down by the bartender. They both wrapped their paws around the brown longnecks. It was a really hot day, too hot for the terminal climate control system. The chilled brown glass took some of the heat out of Harv’s hand, which always felt two sizes bigger on a scorcher like today. Big hands were one reason - but not the only one - why Harv had always been a ham-and-egger as an art director. Some asshole of a client once said he would have done better as a house painter.
Visually, Harv was an accomplished multi-tasker. His profession required it. Whenever he sat at the Marine Air Terminal bar he kept one eye on the person he was with and the other on the crowds trudging to and from the Boston gate. Harv’s eye was trained to disregard every human being who was not attached to a large black portfolio case. The Marine Air Terminal played a key role in the life of anyone who worked in advertising in and around Boston. It was like the Khyber Pass. It was the place the agency people had to get through to enter New York, where all the production facilities were located, the shooters and cutters of commercials. If you were looking to hit someone up for a job or a project, you could always call them on the phone, but it was better to lie in wait at the Marine Air Terminal and strike when you saw them troop by.
As the clock ticked towards Carol’s 4:30 ETA, the straggle of Boston-bound passengers turned into a swarm of suits and black jeans converging on the gate. Before they could file on board, the incoming plane would have to disgorge its New York-bound passengers and, for several sullen moments, the New York-bound and the Boston-bound would jam thighs and rub elbows, each crowd blocking the other’s way. Looking past the Merck guy’s shoulder, Harv zeroed in on a couple of chieftain-level portfolio cases. They were carried by a towering blonde woman and a jockey-sized man. In the tribal Boston ad hierarchy Harv could never work for or with either one of them, not until Untouchables were allowed to work for or with Brahmins. The Amazon blonde and the dapper shrimp were celebrated in awards books all over the Western World - fawned over like gods for the commercials they made, the kind that cost a million dollars a day and are really only understood by people who work for MTV London. With six repeats of the 800-number in most of his ads, Harv was likely to go through life without ever copping a single bowl or statue, not even one from his local Rotary Club.
Harv watched the cool couple rush by, then slow down as they hit the logjam at the gate. The blonde and the shrimp reminded him of streams of mercury, silver and sleek and flowing, until the mercury runs smack into the bulb at the end of the thermometer and stops. Out of nowhere the blonde did an unusual thing. From Harv’s barstool it looked like a modern dance move. She pivoted on one high heel and stormed away, but in a swift measured prance, like the jilted, enraged lover. Her high dancer’s legs cut though the crowd like scissors. Until they stopped six inches from Harv, and she was so close to his eyes, nose and mouth the air he was breathing seemed to change.
But the blonde was looking past him at the pyramid of liquor bottles behind the bartender. She started to order a drink. Then she looked down and her eyes met Harv’s.
“Nicolene,” Harv said. No response.
He said it again. New sweat seeped out on his face. He said his name and said it again. “You probably don’t remember me.”
And she didn’t - but she said she did. In actual fact, they had been introduced at a sound studio three years ago. They just happened to be working in adjoining suites. Harv wasn’t surprised. Top-tier creatives like Nicolene never remembered peasants like Harv.
Nicolene stood there, her high heels planted like tent spikes. She flipped open her cell, palmed it and did a swift thumb-dial. Harv watched in beer-clouded awe. It looked as though the thumb didn’t need to push the buttons, just wave over them like a wand. The wand effect was so powerful it vaporized the Merck guy. He made a lame excuse about a flight, backed off his stool and was gone. While Nicolene snapped orders into the phone she looked down at Harv, at his empty beer bottles and the seventeen pictures of Thea. She ended her call sharply. The long thumb reached up and slapped the phone shut. Harv felt the impulse to do something servile - wipe off the red vinyl of the empty stool - just as Nicolene and her legs sat down beside him.
Nicolene was still trying to order a Martini with gin and Campari. She called it a blood something.
Finally she got the bartender’s attention. “Campari at the airport?” he said, making the thumbs-down sign. Nicolene told him if he didn’t have Campari to just pour the gin so it was cold.
Harv yearned to swig from the longneck, but he stopped himself in mid-suck. He grabbed a plastic glass, spilled in some beer and took a small, painfully delicate sip.
“I gather you forgot something,” he said.
“Me forget? Don’t get me started.”
But she started anyway, ranting about the diminutive genius Cal and his megalomania. “He reserves the right to make changes even after the client approves. So who do you think has to go back and do them?”
Her incredible leg - tanned, smooth, long and strong - was inches from him, swaying like the bough of a tropical tree. He tried to force his mind to not make cruel, anti-family comparisons, but it was impossible. Nicolene’s leg made Carol’s seem like a pallid, freckly arm. Harv wanted to gulp the whole glass of beer, but he forced himself to take another small sip.
“If they’re his changes,” he said, “why doesn’t he go back?”
“The boss never goes back, Harv, don’t you know that? He’s the creative director, I’m the producer. If he wants a point-size change in the mousetype I’m the one who has to go sit with the fucking button-pusher. This will be my tenth straight night in New York. On a weekend. Double overtime for the engineer, but who cares.”
“Where do you guys stay?”
“This time the Peninsula. For the pre-pro we were at the Mercer.”
Poor you. That’s what Harv thought of saying. But instead he said, “You guys have those Peninsula budgets. It’s not my world.” He and Carol would be splurging on the big Marriott in the theater district. Usually they went to the Hilton, where wingtippers like the Merck guy stayed.
Harv was suddenly embarrassed by the Thea pictures. He saw his personal life spread out all over the bar. He reached to sweep the pictures up, but Nicolene stopped him. She cupped her long, manicured hand over his thick mitt and pinned it to the bar. And Harv felt the voltage shoot up his thighs. He thought of his pert, stern, flat-hipped, freckly wife circling overhead - nose in an Irish novel and sneakers on her feet - and he wished he could stop time. For just an intermission - ten or fifteen minutes all to himself.
“Is she yours?” Nicolene asked. “She’s beautiful. You’d better watch out.”
Nicolene picked up the seventeenth photo, the shot of the seventeen-year-old Thea. She held it up in the light and studied it the way a photographer studies a Polaroid of a model, thinking of the different possible angles for the real shot, the one with the Hasselblad. Harv had a rush of pride. Thea had her red hair from Carol, but thanks to him she was big-boned, even statuesque.
“You’d better watch out,” Nicolene said again. “Does she have a boyfriend?”
Harv said he didn’t know. He told her about the pizza and coke night with her girlfriend Alexis.
“You don’t believe that one, do you?” Nicolene said. “I used to be her age.”
“I like the age you are now,” Harv said. The comment brought an immediate response. Nicolene’s leg brushed against his leg. Harv’s bodily functions shot into a confused state. Too much was going on. The flood of beer he had drunk was pushing on his bladder. The little signals from Nicolene were causing sexual frenzy in the same zone. Harv wanted to excuse himself at the same time he felt pulled by a magnet.
Nicolene kept peppering him with questions about Thea. More questions about his daughter, he felt, than anyone had ever asked him. The longer the questioning went on the more he felt the real subject was the unspoken one, the erotic come-on he saw in every roll of Nicolene’s eyes, every touch of her tongue on the gin glass.
Why him? He looked down at his dumb shoes - size twelve Rockports. He didn’t understand.
Harv was half listening as Nicolene started speaking about her newest venture, a small design shop. It would have nothing to do with film production, the thing she was known for.
“You - a designer?” he said. “I never knew.”
“Nobody knows, but they will. I shoot my own pictures too. I want you to think of me if you have a project.”
This was a switch. Harv wanted to say he had a project in mind right now. Then it occurred to him he had gotten the intermission he had wished for. Ten or fifteen minutes must have passed - Carol would be deplaning any moment. When it occurred to him to check the time, he looked at Nicolene’s watch instead of his own. It was an excuse, the cheapest of excuses, to get his face closer to her skin, its scent and color roused by the summer heat and the alcohol.
“Is your watch fast?” he said. The time he was looking at was bizarre - 6:05. Harv, the multi-tasker, stared at the empty Boston gate in disbelief. His eyes whipped around the terminal. The new arrivals were just straggling in for the 6:30. The crowd waiting to board the 5:30 to Boston was nowhere to be seen, vanished. Where was Carol? Where had she gone?
“That rat Cal is halfway to Logan,” said Nicolene. She toyed with her drink, licking the rim of the gin glass, while he soaked up the sweat on his chin with a cocktail napkin.”Waiting for someone? The Spouse?”
Harv couldn’t believe the Boston plane had come in. But it had. Obviously it had. It had come in, emptied out its passengers, loaded up new people and taken off again. Harv had missed it, missed everything. Two hundred people parading by him, exiting the terminal. Had Carol been in the crowd? Had she seen him with Nicolene and run out to the cabs and buses in a rage? Carol didn’t carry a cell phone. She could be in a cab right now, heading for the Marriott. Or she could be on the ground in Boston because she never left.
Harv couldn’t help himself. He took a massive swallow, pouring a river of beer down his throat. He wiped his lips with the fat palm of his hand while Nicolene sat and watched him, cool and bemused. “Am I blind?” he asked, forcing his voice to soften, to sound concerned rather than desperate. “Where is everybody?”
“They all went by,” she said. “Like they always do. Buy you a beer?”
He wanted to say no but he said yes. He took her offer as a proposition, an invitation to something far more intoxicating than a new bottle of beer. He was on shaky ground - unhinged about Carol - and it kept getting shakier. And hornier. He wanted to get up and do something about his wife. But he was mesmerized by Nicolene - and he stayed put. Harv forced himself to shake his head. To chuckle. He hit his head with the palm of his hand, play-acting the oafish clown. But there was panic surging in his throat. His mind had made two hundred people invisible, and his wife could well have been among them. But he didn’t know, not for sure - and Harv didn’t really believe Carol had simply raced by and walked out. It wasn’t like her, it didn’t add up. In his heart of hearts he felt she was still in the sky, stuck in a holding pattern. Circling and circling.
Harv hadn’t directly answered Nicolene’s question, “The Spouse?” In fact, he hadn’t even acknowledged it. He hoped she wouldn’t ask it again - he didn’t want to hear it. There was no gold wedding band on his finger. He never wore one. If she didn’t bring it up again, why did he have to? But as it turned out, Nicolene didn’t bring it up again. She asked more and more questions about Thea, who seemed to fascinate her. She studied the last of the seventeen photos again, pincering it with her long dark nails, delighted with herself when she found a racy clue to ask a question about.
“This girl cares about her eyebrows. She’s a little fashionista, no?”
“Is she. She can drop a fifty at CVS and not buy a single pill. The Visa people love her.”
“Does she have her own card?” In fact, Carol allowed Thea to use her charge cards, and forge Carol’s signature too. But Harv nodded yes to the question, fibbing to keep his wife out of this.
“Does she have the ad thing - the bug? Is she like us?” When Nicolene said the word “us” Harv got a lust rush that wobbled him on his stool. She said it with her eyes and legs as well as her lips, and Harv felt a circle drop down around the two of them, a magnetic play zone which excluded everyone else in the entire airport. He knew now all this Thea talk was at least half a ruse, a decoy language Nicolene was using to slyly tease and torture him. To mess with his mind. In his little life Harv had never gone near a geisha - he had never even been with a common hooker, not one - and yet the thought of Nicolene as a kind of geisha kept running through his mind, driving him wilder. At the same time the Carol situation got scarier by the minute, and this drove him wild through a whole different set of wires. The overload of sex and anxiety almost made his limbs shake.
But he was determined to keep one eye on the gate no matter how discombobulated he was, to not to let the 6:30 arrival pass him by. The New York passengers bound for Boston were on the move, gathering down at the gate in droves and milling impatiently. As he watched them circle on the ground Harv became more certain Carol was circling in the sky - she had undoubtedly missed the 4:30 and caught the next one - but he didn’t see this as a happy thing. In the best of possible worlds she would be up there, safe, but somehow unable to land. Zapped and stopped - for as long as he required it - high above his private magnetic play zone with Nicolene.
Harv’s beer-filled bladder burned like it had a cattle prod stuck in it. He had reached the point where hitting the men’s room was no longer optional. But suddenly there was action at the gate. The gate door swung open and an airport worker in a blue uniform walked out. It had arrived, the 6:30 from Boston. The plane was in and unloading. Out came the first passenger, then three or four more.
Harv locked his legs on the rails of the bar stool, grimly fighting his own plumbing system. He knew he was trying to do too many things at once - like a juggler working simultaneously with rubber balls and flaming sticks, a half dozen of each. He watched the gate like a hawk. At the same time, trying to appear nonchalant and unattached and so very available, he delved into Nicolene’s question about whether Thea had “the ad thing - the bug.” Whether she had it in her blood like Harv had it in his and Nicolene had it in hers. As he talked he realized how much the wife didn’t have it in hers. The wife with her inspirational car tapes and her pillow-stitching group. In Harv’s world of work Carol was the audience, the consumer/foreigner who buys magazines for the actual articles, not for the neat blow-in cards and double page product spreads, the things that mattered to Harv.
“You won’t believe this,” he said about Thea, “but she’s had this thing, I call it the knack, for as long as I’ve known her. I mean even when she was three. Last year she plastered Absolut ads all over her wall.”
The trickle of deplaning passengers turned into stream, then a torrent. But there was no Carol and no sign of her. And then the arrivers had all marched by the bar and out to ground transportation, every last one of them. All Harv could see back down at the gate was the swarm of travelers pushing against each other to get on board and shoot up to Boston.
“I have to meet this girl,” said Nicolene, still carrying on about Thea. But now there was no air, no space at all between Nicolene’s leg and Harv’s. She pressed against him and he pressed back. The heat from her skin went through the fabric of his slacks like a furnace blast.
Where could he take her, where could he go? There were no more telephone booths to sneak into - they were things of the past, vanished relics from his student days. Everything was in the open. And he couldn’t leave the Marine Air Terminal. He was stuck waiting for Carol, stuck on a barstool. Harv’s dick felt as big as his foot.
Then, without warning, Nicolene did a three sixty on him. She might just as well have thrown the glass of gin in his face.
“I’ve got people waiting, Babes,” she said. “I’m out of here.”
“Hey.” It was all he could say.
Nicolene peeled her long legs off the stool, stood up and snapped her phone open. “It’s clear you’re on some mission,” she said. “You should stay here. But I can’t.”
Harv watched haplessly as Nicolene spun on those javelin heels of hers and loped away, like a white tigress receding into the jungle. He was suddenly alone - abandoned -and famished - as though meat had been torn from his jaws. He staggered into the men’s room and pissed like a horse. Then he came back to the greasy hot dog rotisserie and devoured three in a row. So much for dinner with Carol. The hot dogs were fat and salty. He quenched them with two more beers. The last thing he wanted to wait for was dinner with Carol.
But he sat through two more arrivals, the 7:30 and the 8:30. He ate and drank like an animal, and he called the Peninsula four times, but Nicolene hadn’t checked in yet. He telephoned home too and got Carol’s pert “we’re not home now …” But there were no messages. Harv didn’t want to leave his own message asking about Carol - he was afraid that would terrify Thea. He listened to Carol’s voice and hung up when the beep came on. Every scrawny syllable made him want to be with Nicolene, whose big satin voice matched her legs.
After the 8:30 came and went he dismounted his barstool and headed for the gate. He gave them Carol’s full name, even the middle initial. They had no record of her being on any shuttle, but they said their records could be wrong. They directed Harv to the ticket counter and to some central airline phone number. At that moment he faced his big decision - he could take the next flight back to Boston or he could go to the Marriott as planned. But for Harv there was no decision. He turned, marched out to the taxi area and cabbed to Manhattan and the Marriott. As he sat in the back of the cab he wrestled with his panic over Carol - with the deepening sense of true tragedy unfolding. At the same time he exulted in every second he felt the panic vacate his body, pushed out by his exploding hunger for Nicolene.
Within ten seconds of arriving at his room he was on the phone to the Peninsula, but the situation was no different than before. He ripped a beer from the minibar and threw himself on the bed. He started to reach for the clicker to click on a porn movie, but he hardly needed to. The biggest porn movie of all was already playing in his head. All the hours he had spent at home slumming in the lust pits of the internet - while Carol had been fashioning her festive Autumn wreaths or preparing her spreadsheets for the PTO auction - came back as a raging orgy starring Harv and a dozen Nicolenes. He was priapic and beyond relief. He had never, ever been with anyone other than Carol - not once in twenty years. Yet he had fantasized about it every day, sometimes many times a day. Carol was his life and his jail. Now the lock was off and the gate was open. Harv thought about all the cliches of flirtation. Phrases such as one-night stand and low-rent rendezvous and casual sex. It made no sense to him. Nothing about what he felt was casual at all. It was eating him alive.
Above all, one thought dogged him to near delirium. Carol’s size - her birdlike arms and legs, thin as stems of glass, her tissue paper skin. Compared to Nicolene she was a gift shop figurine. More than anything, what mattered about Nicolene was that when Harv stood facing her, when he looked into her eyes, he actually looked up.
Shortly before 1a.m. the Peninsula reported Nicolene had finally checked in, but when they put him through to her room phone all he got was the voice message. Harv called again and described Nicolene to a desk clerk. The desk clerk knew her exactly, and he was certain she had checked in, but just as certain she had quickly gone out again. Harv tore open a glass jar of cashews and poured them into his mouth. He chewed minimally and swallowed the half-chewed cashews in big gulps, as though he were drinking them. He finished the pair of beers left in the minibar and moved on to the nips of scotch, mixing them with water from the bathroom sink. His clothing felt heavy, tight and hot, but he kept everything on, even his tied shoes. It helped him keep hoping that the night was not over, that Nicolene would come back to the Peninsula and take his call. As the minutes ticked by he made desperate deals with himself. One night with Nicolene and he would go back to a lifetime with Carol. He would not waver or stray. He would turn the country upside down to find her.
In the end, Harv spent the pre-dawn hours with neither Nicolene or Carol, only his drastic images of the two of them, both swirling in the great lake of alcohol that pitched and boiled from one side of his stomach to the other. The last thing he remembered seeing was the sky outside his room turning from satin black to sorrowful gray. Then the lake rose up in a giant wave, a crashing curtain of gray that slammed his eyes shut and tore the phone from his fist.
Harv woke up to the sharp bleating of the uncradled phone. He slammed the handpiece back in place, unglued his eyes and found a sky that was like a fat blotch of pus, sickly and yellow-white. He recalled the marks on Thea’s swollen tonsils when she was eleven years old and miserable with strep throat - they were almost the same sickly color - and he began to weep. The night of Nicolene, whatever it had been or meant, was now over. It was time to enter the day of Carol.
Time to find his wife.
Harv dressed, paid his bill, climbed into a taxi and headed for the Marine Air Terminal. All through the ride through the tunnel and over the littered expressway he was uncomfortably aware of the wallet stuffed in his back pocket, pressing against him like a growth. No matter how he positioned his legs he couldn’t get away from its cumbersome thickness, its mound of money and cards, its stack of seventeen pictures, none of which were of Carol - not a single shot.
When he landed at Logan and got home, he turned the key in the door and stepped into the aftermath of Thea’s outrageous party. In every corner of the house he bumped into wreckage. The broken glass, the puke and the blood. After an hour of hard labor, he felt he would never stop pulling beer bottles out of vases and ceramic umbrella stands, never stop digging up the charred marijuana snipes wedged into the kitchen tile cracks and the mossy squares of patio bluestone.
There was a message on the voice mail - not from Carol but from the local police. At the station he found Thea wasted and weeping, in a state of terror about whether there would be consequences in court. The police, speaking in that cold, official way, let him know drug paraphernalia had been found within a quarter mile of the house. They were pokerfaced and secretive about all issues except one, Harv’s culpability, his legal and moral failure as a parent. While Thea watched and sobbed, the sergeant ranted about selfish parents who jet off on weekends and leave teenagers with empty houses and open liquor cabinets.
When Harv announced that Carol was missing the sergeant seemed uninterested, as though it were a far lesser calamity. Or worse, a crude attempt at an alibi. He filled out a form and asked Harv for a picture of his wife. Harv wanted the picture to be in his wallet, he wanted to just reach in and pull out a snapshot. But the object in his pocket no longer felt like a wallet. It was too heavy, the way a stone is heavy. He told the sergeant he had pictures of his wife, there were pictures all over the house - he just had to go back and look for one.