The Humanity Project

by Jean Thompson

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Year We Left Home, a dazzling new novel already being hailed as an "instantly addictive…tale of yearning, paradox, and hope." (Booklist)

After surviving a shooting at her high school, Linnea is packed off to live with her estranged father, Art, who doesn't quite understand how he has suddenly become responsible for raising a sullen adolescent girl. Art's neighbor, Christie, is a nurse distracted by an eccentric patient, Mrs. Foster, who has given Christie the reins to her Humanity Project, a bizarre and well-endowed charity fund. Just as mysteriously, no one seems to know where Conner, the Fosters' handyman, goes after work, but he has become the one person Linnea can confide in, perhaps because his own home life is a war zone: his father has suffered an injury and become addicted to painkillers. As these characters and many more hurtle toward their fates, the Humanity Project is born: Can you indeed pay someone to be good? At what price?

Thompson proves herself at the height of her powers in The Humanity Project, crafting emotionally suspenseful and thoroughly entertaining characters, in which we inevitably see ourselves. Set against the backdrop of current events and cultural calamity, it is at once a multifaceted ensemble drama and a deftly observant story of our twenty-first-century society.

Release date: April 23, 2013

Publisher: Plume

Print pages: 352

Sample

ONE

"Dad?”

Gray morning. He’d fallen asleep in front of the computer again. The screen was gray too. “Yeah,” Sean said. His voice was more awake than he was. He swung around in his chair. His son was standing in the doorway, tall, shaggy-haired, peering in at him.

“Yeah,” Sean said again. “OK, buddy.”

“You’re supposed to call that guy.”

“OK.” Sleep was racing away and for another second he let himself follow it, his mind unraveling back into a dream that still held him under some impossible weight. Then he pushed the dream away, shut off the computer, planted his feet, and rose to meet the god-awful day. “Conner? Do I smell coffee?”

“I got some started.”

“Thanks, bud.” Coffee, then he’d call that guy in Santa Rosa to see if he could get a few days’ work lined up, and if he couldn’t, well, that was the next heap of crap to deal with.

“Conner?”

“Yeah?”

“Quit worrying.”

Sean got the first of the coffee into him, then dialed. He could hear Conner moving around upstairs, getting ready for school. The phone in his hand came to life. “Hello, Mr. Nocera? Sean McDonald here, I was wondering if you could use me today.”

He listened for a minute, then said, “Sure. Well thanks for your time. Have yourself a good day.”

Nocera had already hung up, but Sean heard Conner coming down the stairs, so he pretended he was still talking while Conner opened the refrigerator and the cupboards, found a carton of chocolate milk, peanut butter crackers, a banana, and a handful of Oreos, which was either a weird breakfast or a weird lunch. “Dad?”

Sean put his hand over the phone, shielding his imaginary conversation.

“I already fed Bojangles.”

“Thanks. Knock em dead out there.”

“You too.”

He waited until Conner was out the front door before he put the phone down.

Bojangles wanted in from the yard. He did his happy begging dance.

“Scram, you con man,” Sean said, and the dog went to his corner and lay down without complaint.

Another day of nothing stretched ahead of him.

He showered, fixed himself some eggs, then sat back down at the computer. The whole world was in the computer, if you knew how to figure things out, and you had to believe that somewhere out there were answers, solutions. Work and money, mostly.

He checked Craigslist for help wanted. It was the same old stuff— scams, mostly. Winter rain was going to start in soon and work would be even slower. He could fight the Guatemalans for landscaping jobs he didn’t want anyway. He could enroll at the community college to take computer courses and be qualified for a whole new category of jobs where no one was hiring. Last month he’d printed up five hundred flyers advertising himself as under windshield wipers in parking lots, came up with two jobs cleaning gutters and another hauling brush, and somebody who wanted a garage framed but didn’t want to pay white man’s wages.

He’d get by. He always had. Things would turn around and you wouldn’t feel like you were beating your head against the brick wall of the world. It wasn’t just him. Times were bad for everybody, everybody had it coming. He guessed he was just a little farther ahead in the line than most people.

Finished with the job listings, he let his fingers do the walking over to the personals. Women seeking Men. Like the help wanted, he’d seen most of them before . Princess looking for her prince. Where did all the great guys go? Friends first. Looking for something real. None of them attached pictures, which was smart, he guessed, but made you waste a lot of time. Here was a new one: Pretty Lady, 38.

Maybe not pretty. Maybe not thirty-eight. Who knew? Sean clicked, and read:

So how was your day? Mine too. I miss having somebody I can talk to.
If you ever want to get out of the house some night for a while, you can pretend I’m your best friend and tell me all about it. Me: normal in most respects. You: tired of reading these ads.

Well at least she had a sense of humor. Sean thought for a minute, typed in the address.

Hi Pretty Lady,
I hear you loud and clear. I’m a single dad. My son is seventeen.
He already puts up with enough of my griping. Not that you have to put up with it either. But yeah, it would be nice if

Here he paused for a long time. Nice if you could just lie down with a woman, have some naked good times, not worry about anything more. But you couldn’t write that.

I could get together with you some time and compare notes. I’m 45, work as a carpenter, self employed, meaning I’m broke most of the time, but I can always spring for a couple of drinks. I’m 5’10” and as for looks, well, dogs don’t bark at me. I’m free most nights, hope that doesn’t make me sound like a social reject, ha ha.

He signed it Sean, then sent it off before he changed his mind. She wanted to talk. He was hornier than an eight-peckered toad, but he guessed talking had to come before anything else.

He took his second cup of coffee outside and sat on the deck. The day was going to work its way into hazy heat. The hillside beyond his back fence was a tangle of manzanita and scotch broom and blond grass. So dry the least spark would send it up in flames and then he guessed it would be good- bye, house—that is, if Bank of America didn’t get to it first, but there he was getting down again, letting the negative thoughts in, and so he put his feet up on the railing and smoked a little pot just to take the edge off things. It wasn’t the life he’d planned for himself but it was the life he’d grown used to, it had its comforts, and it would be a sad and low-down thing if he got kicked out of it.

His phone rang. Sean dug it out of his pocket, stared at the screen. Floyd. “Talk to me.”

“What are you doing, pencil dick?”

“Your girlfriend.”

“Want to help me with some drywall?”

“When, today?”

“Whenever you can get over here.”

“Half an hour,” Sean said. Sat for a moment longer to clear his head, then stood and stretched, and even if his body was sending out its usual SOS’s (back, shoulders, elbow), he just had to get moving, work a few kinks out, tell himself he was thirty-five, not forty-five—well almost forty-six. Floyd would buy him lunch and throw a little folding money his way, a bad day turning into a not-bad one, and you had to have faith that things would work out eventually.

He called to Bojangles and the dog leapt up, excited without knowing why, followed him out to the driveway, and ran in circles. Sean opened the truck’s passenger door for him and the dog jumped in, happy all over again for no reason. Dumb dog. Sean checked the toolbox, grabbed a couple of Red Bulls from the fridge, and headed out.

Now that he had the day back on track, he was able to look out on the world with something close to pleasure. His house, his street, his neighborhood might be a little shabby, the whole town mostly a place where old hippies came to plant backyard pot and gradually fall apart, but he’d been here fifteen years now, almost all of Conner’s growing-up time, and it was home. He liked the who-gives-a-shit attitude of people who let their gut- ters drip rust, and strung Tibetan prayer flags across the front porch and kept too many cats. The younger ones he wasn’t so sure of, thought they were probably cooking meth or some other nasty business and Conner had better not ever get mixed up in anything like that, he’d beat his ass.

But live and let live and anyway, there wasn’t a sweeter place on the planet than Northern California, with its soft winters and golden grass and yeah he guessed he was still a little stoned.

Floyd was trying to get his house in shape so he could put it on the market. He was one of those optimistic people who thought you could still get money out of a house. Floyd’s house sat well back from the street in its own cruddy yard of foxtails and thistles. A pile of PVC pipe lay to one side of the driveway, along with two sawhorses and a sheet of plywood set up as a workbench. To the left of the house was scaffolding, and a blue tarp spread over the flat roof, and ten-gallon buckets of sealant. Also odds and ends like an orange heavy-duty extension cord snaking out of the openfront door, a nail gun, a roll of fiberglass insulation, knuckle-shaped pieces of gutter. If you didn’t know any better, you might think the house was being dismantled, not built up.

Sean parked and let Bojangles out to run around. Floyd was inside, in the bedroom at the end of the hallway. He’d taken it down to the studs and he was standing there like he was confused about where his walls had gone. He was a big guy who was going to fat, with a baseball cap jammed down on his ears and a beard that grew up practically to his eyeballs, so there wasn’t much actual face visible.

“I just love what you’ve done to this room.”

“Funny.”

Sean popped one of his Red Bulls. “So, what’s the plan?”

“I can’t believe you drink that shit. It’s nothing but chemicals.”

“You get the sheets already, or are we going to Home Depot?”

“I got everything. We need to do the cutouts.” Floyd took his cap off, scratched and pulled at his ears, replaced the cap. “This house is gonna kick ass by the time I get it finished.”

“It’s going to be sweet, Floyd.” He would never get it finished and even if he did, it would still be a junky little undersized house.

They’d moved the first sheet into the room and leaned it up against the studs when Floyd asked, “You ever think about taking vitamins, you know, taking some of those formula kinds?”

 

“What kinds, the manly ones?”“I’m just saying, it’d be nice not to have to get up and piss four times a night.”

 

“You really should get that checked out,” Sean told him.

“You mean that test where they shove a fist up your ass?”

“That’s the one.”

“Would you let somebody do that to you?”

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t tell you about it. Let’s hit it.”

There was a rhythm to any kind of work and it always took a while to find it. You had to be patient with yourself until then, try not to bust up your hands or trip over your feet or break equipment. Just dig in, think it through, gradually let your muscles take over from your brain. He’d done plenty of jobs with Floyd. It made it easier to get to that smooth place where you used the least amount of energy to get a task accomplished. They sanded, did the cutouts for the electrical boxes, sanded again, then drove the screws, and even the first piece went up without too much of a fight.

Sean peeled off his sweatshirt and filled a plastic bowl with water for the dog, who lapped up half of it and then went back to sleep on the cement floor of the back porch. Floyd said who told him he could use his fine china for the damned dog and Sean said he’d had to look around a long time before he found anything the dog would consent to drink from.

It wasn’t a big room but it took them most of the day to get the drywall up, and that with only a couple of breaks for smokes and a quick lunch from the Taco Shack. Floyd brought out two Coronas and they sat in the patchy shade of the yard to drink them. Floyd dug out his wallet and handed Sean two twenties. “Here you go. Buy yourself something nice.” “You want me to come back and help you mud?”

“No, I think I got it under control,” Floyd said, and by that Sean knew Floyd couldn’t afford to pay him for another day’s work, probably couldn’t even afford the little speck of cash he’d come up with. Everybody he knew was broke. It was beyond depressing.

 Sean said, “You know what we are? Modern-day peasants. The guys who used to live in mud huts and sleep in straw and live on potatoes.”

 

“Yeah?” Floyd considered this. “Potatoes?”

“Nothing but potatoes, come on, you know what I mean. There’s all this money in the world and it never seems to get to the people who do the actual work.”

“What are you, some kind of communist?”

“Sure, why not.” Communist. It had an old-fashioned sound. They hardly even had communists in Russia now. From where they sat, they could hear the noise of the freeway, a constant low-grade roaring, because the world never ran out of people going places, like nobody was ever happy enough where they were.

Floyd said, “What’s the news with the Bank of Asshats?”

“They get the house back.”

“Aw shit, man.”

“Yeah. Simple math. Only a matter of time.”

“Sucks,” Floyd said. “I mean, seriously, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“Can you get some kind of, I don’t know, negotiation? They give you more time to pay?”

“That’s what all us broke morons want.” It felt worse to say it. It made it more real. There were too many other things crowding in behind that he didn’t want to have to ask or answer, like where they’d go and how he could afford even such a thing as rent. He felt like he was losing out, like they’d changed the rules when he wasn’t looking and drained all the good luck out of the world.

“Another beer?”

“No, I got to get back to the muchacho.”

“One for the road.” Floyd repositioned himself in his chair, heaved himself upright, and headed for the refrigerator.

Sean took the extra Corona, which Floyd probably wouldn’t have of- fered if he hadn’t felt sorry for him about losing the house, well, what good was total economic ruination if it didn’t get you a free drink here and there. He checked his phone; no messages. He stood up. He’d done something unholy to his back. “Later, man.”

“Yeah, thanks for coming over. This place is really starting to shape up.”

He tried to call Conner on the drive home, got his voice mail. “Hey, let me know if you want dinner or you’re doing something else. I can stop and get us something.” The kid was probably chained to a video game some- where. Him and his friends lived their lives in front of computers. He stopped at the Safeway, wrote a check for dog food, milk, laundry detergent, orange juice, cereal, frozen pizza, frozen vegetables, lunch meat, bread, and a roast chicken, and wasn’t he a smart shopper because now he had two hundred and ten dollars in the bank and Floyd’s two twenties in his pocket and maybe another thirty of his own and that was the end of the line.

Conner wasn’t home. Sean filled Bojangles’s food bowl and watched the dog eat it up in nothing flat. Whatever happened, the dog was staying with them. He wasn’t going to be one of those people who left an animal tied to a tree, or took it to a shelter.

But maybe he was going to be one of those people who slid down bit by bit until you did things you never imagined doing.

Conner called and said he was at Tyler’s house and he was going to eat dinner there and hang out for a while. “What about homework?” Sean asked. Conner always got good grades no matter what he did. Sean only nagged him about homework once in a while because he figured that was part of his job. Conner said not to worry, him and Tyler were going to study for the Spanish test and the only other thing was speech com. He had it knocked.

So he fixed his own supper and ate it watching SportsCenter and then he did the dishes and got the kitchen wiped down and took two ibuprofen for his back. There were times he liked the feel of the house with nobody else in it but this wasn’t one of those times. He walked the circuit of the rooms just to keep his back from locking up, wearing a path in the sad sad carpeting that needed shampooing, but why bother when it wasn’t really his anymore. Ditto the window that didn’t open and the plugged-up shower drain and the leaking water heater, all things he could fix or at- tend to but what did it matter.

He tried to start each day with something close to a good attitude and by sunset he was always back down in the black pit.

He turned on the computer to check his mail. Pretty Lady, 38, had sent him a message three minutes ago.

Hi Sean, well here goes nothing. I’m heading out to Ted’s in a little while, you know the place? I’ll be sitting at the bar, the hair is short and blond, the name is Laurie.

Hi Laurie, sounds good to me. As soon as I can get it together. See you. Sean

Here goes nothing indeed. She might have sent the same message to the fifteen other guys who answered her ad. He knew Ted’s. It was a hike down the freeway in Novato and maybe a little more prissy and upscale than he liked. That might mean she just wanted to be a lady about picking up strange men she met online.

Sean showered, running hot water over the funky part of his back and pounding on it to loosen it up. He dressed in a clean pair of jeans, a plain black T-shirt, and a windbreaker. He’d said carpenter, she shouldn’t be expecting anybody in a suit. He texted Conner that he was stepping out for a while, and got the dog a rawhide so he’d have something to do while he held down his spot on the couch.

Driving, he tried to dial his expectations down to zero. If she was really ugly, he didn’t even have to say hello. Walk in, walk out again. Part of him almost hoped that was how it would turn out because then you were spared the stupidity of getting excited about something working out for once like it never did, and you just had to pour more attention and time and energy not to mention money into the situation before it crashed and burned.

He guessed it was fair to say his luck had gone bad all around, and that included women.

Ted’s had a bar in front and a restaurant in back, so there were a lot of couples in the entrance, dressed up and waiting for tables. Sean stood behind them, trying to check things out. The bar was a big half-horseshoe and not very crowded. From the doorway he couldn’t see all the way to the far end. No short-haired blondes in view.

Maybe she wasn’t here yet. Nothing for it but to quit acting like a giant chickenshit, go in and sit down, and he’d just pulled out a stool when she came out of nowhere, that’s what it seemed like, sticking her face in front of his and saying, “Hi, are you Sean?”

“Yeah, ah, Laurie? Hi.” They shook hands. She was kind of pretty. He ducked his head so he wouldn’t seem to be staring, and so he wouldn’t see her checking him out. But then, she must have already done so, must have thought he looked all right or else she’d be hiding in the john or something. He said, “I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

“No, just a couple of minutes.” She took the seat next to him. She already had her first drink, some kind of margarita it looked like, and that was another point in her favor since he wouldn’t have to buy it. She was wearing jeans and a short jacket that was made out of some shiny silver fabric, which was different and not in a good way, some fashion trend he guessed he’d been oblivious to. A little on the skinny side, but nothing he couldn’t live with. He wondered if that was really her name, Laurie, then decided it didn’t matter.

They smiled at each other. “So,” Sean began. The perfume she had on fogged his head. It didn’t matter what kind of foo-foo name they put on the bottle, it all smelled the same to him: perfume. “Did you get a lot of answers to your ad?”

The next second he wondered if that was an indelicate thing to ask, sort of like saying, ‘How’s business?’ But she seemed OK with it. Rolled her eyes and made a wry face. “I sure did. You’d think if you say, ‘Let’stalk,’ that wouldn’t be taken to mean, ‘Let’s screw.’ ”

“Ha, no, you wouldn’t.” He was mildly shocked at her saying ‘screw,’ then interested, then disappointed that she seemed to be ruling it out. “I mean, that’s not cool.”

Laurie—he had to remember the name—got some more of her drink into her, then put the glass down. She had a cute face—blue eyes, pert little nose, smiley smile. She could have been a cheerleader back in high school, the kind of girl who everybody says ought to be a model or an ac- tress or something, and maybe she tries that but it doesn’t happen for her. Her eyes and mouth had a stretched-out look at the corners, and it was likely that she clocked in somewhere north of thirty-eight. She’d put some kind of goofy silver-colored makeup under her eyebrows to match the jacket, which he still thought was a mistake. The jacket made you think of spacemen in old movies. “So, where you from?” he began gamely. “You a local girl?”

“I am now.” She laughed, like this was something funny. “I’m new in town, that’s one reason for the ad. Meet a few people, feel a little more grounded.”

The next thing was to ask her where she’d moved from, but just then the bartender came to take his order and Laurie said she was good for now and what he really would have liked to ask was what she meant by ‘grounded,’ since that was a different concept for the online community, a little bit of a stretch when it came to most people’s purposes. He got his wallet out to pay and decided there was going to be a definite limit on expenditures tonight.

“A carpenter,” she announced, before he had a chance to speak. “What made you decide to do that? Be that? I hope you don’t mind me asking.”

“No, that’s OK.” He was just as glad to have her steering the conversation. He was always afraid that something dumb was going to walk out of his mouth, and the woman would decide he was uncouth or just plain unfuckable. “I guess I kind of fell into it, you know, always liked the idea of building things, doing things with my hands. I took some community college courses in business, yeah, wheel and deal, be a big moneybags. So that didn’t happen—” He was trying to remember exactly why. He thought he’d just stopped going to class. “—and one job leads to another—” Sean stopped himself, checked to see if she was still listening. He thought she was. “I’m just your basic working stiff.”

“Well the important thing is to do what you love,” Laurie said. It sounded like she was consoling him for something, like he hadn’t quite made the cut in the cheerleader tryouts. “And you have children?”

She must have forgotten what he’d said in his message, or more than likely, forgotten which one he was. She finished the last of her drink and Sean looked around for the bartender. Two drinks. He was good for two, he decided, unless by then she was sitting in his lap or something.

“Yes, I have a boy, he’s seventeen and he lives with me.”

“There has to be a story there.”

“We’ll save it for another time,” Sean said, not eager to start in on tales of marital failure. “How about you, any kids?”

“Ah,” Laurie nodded. Her head bobbed in a way that made Sean wonder if the drink she’d finished was really her first. “That’s complicated.”

 “It isn’t usually.”

 

Either she had not heard him or she was pretending not to. “Seventeen. I hope he doesn’t raise too much hell.”

 “Naw, he’s a good kid. Smart. Focused. He wants to work with computers. I’m all for that. I don’t want him to get stuck in the same rut I’m in. Work your fingers to the bone, what do you get? Bony fingers.” The bartender came then and Sean said to get them two more. He twisted incautiously on the bar stool and his back flared. “Case in point.” He repositioned himself, trying to get the pieces of his spine into better alignment.

 

“Messed up my back hanging drywall today.”

“The thing about kids,” Laurie said, her gaze following the bartender, “is you think you know them. Have them all figured out. I mean, who else knows them better than you? Then something happens and you have to ask yourself, who are they? Did somebody, you know, like birds do? Lay a different egg in your nest?”

“What are you talking about?” Sean said. “Birds?”

“Sorry.” The silver stuff she’d put over her eyes was getting streaky. She smiled and he was distracted by the weirdness of her wriggling shiny eyebrows. “Sorry, I was just running off at the mouth.”

“No problem.”

“Tell me more about your work,” she said brightly. “I think I’d like to hear more details. I find them interesting.”

“Yeah, they are. Somebody’s going to make a movie about it all someday.”

Her new drink came and she latched on to it in a way that made him consider she might have run her ad just as a way to subsidize her bar time. When she put the glass back down she said, “What I meant was, with birds, everything is instinct. Birds always know how to be birds. They don’t all of a sudden start acting like snakes.”

He was beginning to think she was either drunk or flaky or both. “Yeah, flying snakes, that would be weird.”

Laurie took a measuring look at the drink before her, as if it was part of the conversation. She said, “Do you come here often? I haven’t, up until now, but I’m considering doing so.”

“Are you feeling OK? Seriously.”

“I am seriously, seriously fine.”

“I think maybe you’ve had enough to drink already.”

She appeared to give this some thought. “No, but there is a limit to what drinking can accomplish.”

“You never told me where you were from,” Sean said, mostly as conversational filler. He was getting bored with her. Normal in most respects. Whatever. He was only waiting to finish his beer and call it a night. His back was being tied into knots with ropes of fire.

“Ohio,” Laurie said. “The Buckeye State.”

Sean waited. “So, why did you leave?”

“It became very not grounded for me there. Like those old Road Runner cartoons where he runs off the edge of a cliff and just kind of stands there a second with a stupid look on his face and then gravity catches up with him and he falls and there’s this whistling sound, and then he lands, ka-boom. I just had to get out of there.”

“Sure,” Sean agreed. As if any of that had made sense.

“Make a new start.”

“Sure,” he said again, and this part he did understand, though the closest he was going to come to that was bankruptcy.

“I’d like it if you talked to me,” she announced. “About anything at all. You have a nice voice, Steve. All low and growly. Sometimes I think that’s the thing I love best about men, their voices.”

“I’m running a little dry on talk,” Sean said. “Like I said a while ago when I was being interesting, I really messed up my back today and I should probably go home and tend to it.”

“I have a son just a year older than yours,” she informed him.

“Yeah?” Now that he’d announced his intention of leaving, she seemed to be making more of an effort. “Where is he, he come out here with you?”

“No. He’s back in Ohio.” She looked around the room, frowning, as if expecting someone who had not yet arrived.

“So it’s really not a complicated question, whether or not you have kids.”

“I don’t know why I said that. It’s more like, he got himself into some complicated trouble.”

“That tends to come with the territory,” Sean said