The Leisure Seeker: A Novel by Michael Zadoorian Read Free Book Online

old, everything gets farther away. But here in the Leisure Seeker, everything’s right there where you need it.)
    I fire up the electric frying pan, pull bacon and eggs out of the icebox, and lay six strips in the pan. After I hound him into washing his hands, John is on toast detail. He stands at the counter, a stack of Wonder bread in front of him.
    “Don’t put it in the toaster yet,” I say.
    I watch as he closes up the bag with a twist tie and starts rummaging in our junk drawer till he finds the scissors. He then snips the excess plastic bag just above the twist tie. John has done this for the last couple years. It’s the sickness. At home, he was always stacking, straightening, fiddling with something. He’d trim the bag, leave the room, then come back in and do it again. Sometimes before we even use any of the bread, the bag is trimmed down to a nub. Despite this, he’s more lucid than usual and all this feels pretty normal.
    “Hey, how about a cocktail?” I say.
    “Sounds good.”
    I know you’re probably thinking, she’s grateful for a precious few moments of clearheadedness with her husband and what does she do? Make him dull with booze. You would have a point, but I really don’t care. I reach up into a cupboard and pull out bottles of Canadian Club and sweet vermouth.
    “We haven’t had a cocktail hour in a long time,” I say as I turn the bacon on low. “Get some ice out of the cooler.”
    John surprises me by turning on the tape player to some music. The van is suddenly filled with the sounds of lush strings and a mellow baritone sax. Years ago, he taped a lot of our favorite albums for us to listen to on vacations. All kinds of good stuff—Arthur Lyman, Tony Mottola, Herb Alpert, Jackie Gleason.
    “Is that ‘Midnight Sun’?” I ask.
    “I guess,” he says, coming back with a tray of ice cubes.
    “I think it is.” I mix us manhattans, extra sweet. After the kids left home, John and I started having a little drink before dinner. We would sit downstairs at our rumpus room bar where we used to entertain, light a candle, put on some music, and just chat. John was just finishing up as an engineer at GM then and he would tell me about what was going on over at the Tech Center, who was stabbing who in the back, who was getting laid off, and so on. He didn’t care anymore since he was retiring. (Thank God for “Thirty and Out.” It was the mid-’80s, just as the Detroit auto industry was going to hell in a handbasket.) I would tell him who I had talked to that day, what was going on in the kids’ lives, sales at the grocery store—nothing earthshaking. But we got things out there, shared information.

    Now we sit around our table staring at our drinks without a word. I’m thankful for Andy Williams singing “Moon River.” At least someone’s saying something. I give my drink a swirl, watch the cherry drop to the bottom. I lift my glass. “Well, here’s mud in your eye.”
    John raises his glass and smiles, like he always has. Is there such a thing as cocktail muscle memory? I take a sip. It’s cold, sweet, and strong, and I remember that there is nothing like that first sip of a cocktail. Ah! The pleasure of forgetting, then finding again. This gives me renewed hope for the idea of this trip. John sips his drink and squeezes his eyes shut. I worry for a moment, then he sighs contentedly. “God damn, that’s good.”
    “We’re making progress, don’t you think?”
    John nods. “Sure are.”
    “I think we did maybe about three hundred miles today.”
    John takes a second sip and frowns. “Doesn’t seem like very much.”
    “We’re doing fine. It’s just slower taking the old road. Don’t you worry.”
    “Maybe tomorrow,” he says.
    “Maybe tomorrow,” I repeat, raising my glass. And never have two words seemed so true.
     
    After our dinner, I decide that we need something else to do. I give John a Pepsi and make myself another drink. “Time for the evening’s