Page 10 of The Lie Maker

Six

Jack

I grabbed an Uber from home to meet someone from my insurance company the next morning at a garage where the charred remains of my car had been taken.

His name was Arnold, and he was a thin, short man who wasn’t much bigger than your average twelve-year-old. He made little clicking noises with his tongue as he walked around the car, taking photos with his phone, making notes.

“Looks like it caught on fire,” he said.

Sharpest knife in the drawer, this one. “Yeah,” I said.

“They have any idea why?”

If the police and firefighters who responded to the call knew, they hadn’t passed the information on to me. Electrical fault, arson, it was anybody’s guess at the moment. “I don’t know,” I said. “The car’d been parked, the engine was off.”

“I’ll be getting a copy of the report,” Arnold said.

“So what’ll I get for it?” I asked. I wasn’t expecting much. That year’s model, with nearly a hundred thousand miles on it, could be found online for less than four grand. Whatever the insurance company decided it was worth, I wanted it sooner than later. My monthly rent of nineteen hundred dollars was due in ten days. I had about nine hundred bucks on my Visa.

“I’ll be in touch,” he said.

I got out my phone to get an Uber back to my place, but it rang before I could call up the app. The caller ID said earl. I’d remembered, the night before, that I was supposed to see him today, but the business with the car had pushed it to the back of my mind again.

I took the call.

“Hey, Earl.”

“Where are you?” he asked in his raspy voice. “I went inside, they said you don’t even work there?”

Shit. When we’d arranged this, I’d told him to drop by my new place of employment. “Yeah, that didn’t work out.” I told him the location of the garage.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll come to you.”

It was a strange relationship I had with the man. I was twenty when my mother died, and out of the house, for the most part, at college. I’d always had the feeling that rather than causing him to wallow in grief, my mother’s death and my departure had given my father a sense of liberation, a freedom from responsibility, although responsibility was never his strong suit to begin with. But after Mom died, Earl didn’t have to worry about her, and her stern judgments of him, and he didn’t have to worry about me. I was off to college at that point and had indicated, even before Mom passed, that it wasn’t my intention to return.

Earl sold the house shortly after her death, and he hadn’t bothered to ask me what I thought of the idea. This wasn’t the house I’d grown up in as a kid, but the one I’d lived in since I was twelve. It wasn’t so much that Earl wanted to start over or live somewhere that wasn’t haunted with memories of my mom. He just needed the money.

Earl wasn’t particularly talented when it came to finances. Maybe that’s not fair. He was very good at spending it, at throwing it away. He was less skilled at hanging on to it, investing it, making it work for him. He wasn’t a gambler in the strictest sense of the word. He didn’t frequent casinos or play cards or bet on the horses. But he was big on get-rich-quick schemes, things that would bring huge rewards in a short time with a minimum of effort.

“This is the one,” he would tell my mother, and you could almost see her deflate as she imagined more of their savings—actually, more of her savings—evaporating. Among the things he’d sunk money into while I was still at home were a housing project that was built on a sinkhole, a window that opened and closed through voice activation (ahead of its time, not totally unheard of now with some wired houses), and a drive-through fast food operation with a totally vegan menu. Well intentioned, maybe, but situated as it was between a McDonald’s and a Burger King, it never stood a chance against the airborne aromas of Big Macs and Whoppers.

And yet, somehow he skated through these financial misadventures, always confident that one of them would pay off. Borrowing from friends—soon to be ex-friends—to pay off previous debts, selling off anything he could, including, at one point, Mom’s 1995 Eldorado while she was visiting her mother, and doing the occasional wise real estate flip. That was one thing he’d had some success with. Finding some run-down property, getting it fixed up just enough that it looked presentable, then selling it quickly at a profit. If it weren’t for one of those deals every eight to ten months, he’d have been on the street begging for change.

I don’t think he could have pulled off any of it if he weren’t so charming. He was, at his core, a likable enough guy, and he gave it his best shot where I was concerned. He tried to impart what little wisdom he possessed, and when I was in my teens and getting into shit I shouldn’t he’d either find a way to bail me out—not literally; I never found myself arrested for any of my shenanigans, and they were plentiful—or at least cover it up so my mother didn’t find out.

It’s only right that I point out here that I was as much a source of stress for my mother as Earl. Starting around age ten. Stealing shit from corner stores, staying out to all hours, worrying my mom to death. Ran away from home repeatedly. Once, when I was eleven, I was gone three days. Had saved up some money—well, had stolen a little from my mom’s purse every few days over a couple of months so she wouldn’t notice—and bought an Amtrak ticket to Chicago. Had to lie to the ticket taker. Told her I was going to see my uncle. Police finally found me sitting on those steps in Union Station where they filmed the famous baby carriage scene in The Untouchables. Mom had to catch a plane to come fetch me and bring me home.

The next year, I took a bus to Providence one day without telling my mother, and another time I hitchhiked to Cape Cod, telling the couple who picked me up that I was on my way to see my aunt in East Sandwich. Both times, Mom had to come and get me. She caught me once while I was on the phone trying to book an airline ticket to Phoenix. Didn’t make that flight.

“Why?” she asked me repeatedly. “Why are you doing this to me?”

Like she didn’t know.

I became less of an asshole as I progressed into my later teens, and after I finished college, where my interest in writing had been rekindled by an English lit professor, I made my first attempt to get a newspaper job, but it didn’t pan out.

Did a bit of this and that for a few years.

Finally ended up getting that journalism job in Worcester. All this time, I kept in touch only sporadically with Earl, who had a small apartment in Quincy. I’d hear from him around my birthday—not every year, but at least every other year, and usually about a week late—and he’d take me out for dinner. I rarely saw him at Christmas. He liked to head down to Florida or Arizona for a month or two, escape Boston’s often unbearably cold winters, and, I surmised, find some attractive widow to bunk in with at minimal expense.

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