The Return: A Novel Read Online Free

air-conditioning throughout, a desalinization and sewage treatment facility in operating order, and a diesel generator in its own little building. The house was square, with a flat roof and a squat tower at each corner. It looked like a Spanish colonial fortress, which suited Marder very well. The asking price was a reasonable $1.2 million.
    “This is available immediately?” he asked.
    “They’ll kiss your hands. The family, I mean. They’ve been paying maintenance through the nose ever since Manny disappeared. They’re terrified it’ll be looted and stripped. There are some people living in the servants’ wing, watching the place, but you don’t need to feel responsible for them. The taxes are practically nothing. If you let me talk to them, I’m sure they’ll come down a little.”
    “No, I’ll take it,” said Marder. “I’ll have my accountant send you a check for the asking price.”
    He heard a sigh over the line. “It must be nice to have money,” said Nina Ibanez.
    After that they discussed the details of the sale in a businesslike way and then Marder’s phone buzzed with an incoming call. He said a quick goodbye and pressed the call-accept button.
    “Hello, babe,” he said to his daughter. “I’m not interrupting anything important, I hope.”
    “No, I was just in the fabrication lab, running some trials. Is anything wrong?”
    She always asked that when he called, and he wondered why. Perhaps he should have called her more often. He knew other parents had more contact with their kids, but he’d always felt that after they were grown, excessive contact was an intrusion. Or maybe it was because his own father, in his madness, had called Marder oppressively often, full of paranoid complaint and mad schemes to reform the world. Chole had always been the caller, the main contact with the children.
    And even though something was wrong now, and even though he’d always tried not to lie to his kids, he replied in a cheerful tone, “Not at all. I just called to find out how you were doing and to tell you that I’ll be traveling for a while.”
    They’d had enough misery dealing with their mother’s sickness and death, and he told himself he was actually doing them a favor.
    “Where are you going?”
    “Not determined yet. I thought I’d buy an open ticket and take some time off. There’s a lot of the world I haven’t seen, and I’m not getting any younger.”
    “But you hate to travel. You’re always bitching about airports and the food.”
    “I changed my mind. Anyway, I’ll be leaving in a day or so and I didn’t want you to worry.”
    “You’ll keep in touch, though, right?”
    “I always do. How’s work?”
    “We’re having tempering problems. Three-D printing in metal’s easy if you’re only doing art stuff or prototypes, but if you’re trying to manufacture actual machine parts, it’s a different story.”
    “I’m sure you’ll solve the problem, dear,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll be in at the end of mass production as we know it,” and she laughed. Marder was constantly amazed at how both of his children, the spawn of two literary types, had become engineers, and brilliant ones by all accounts. Carmel was in grad school at MIT; Peter taught at Caltech, as far as possible from New York and his father.
    “Still keeping up with the swimming?” he asked.
    “Every day. Still with the shooting?”
    “Every week. How are your times?”
    “Static. I’m devoted but not that devoted. Don’t expect me at the Olympics. I hope that doesn’t break your heart.”
    “As long as it doesn’t break yours. Meanwhile—anything new on the social front?”
    “The usual. Don’t rent a hall.”
    “So you’re saying no grandchildren anytime soon.”
    “When they have cloning maybe. I’d kind of like an instant ten-year-old with freckles and a gap-tooth grin.”
    He couldn’t think of any response, couldn’t think of any final paternal words of love or advice.