Happy for You by Claire Stanford

Author:Claire Stanford [Stanford, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

A few weeks later, I tried to go for a walk to Lands End. Jamie wanted to go with me, but I told him I wanted to go alone. It was a place my mother had liked to go, and I remembered driving up from our suburban cul-de-sac and walking the trails on the edge of the city with her, looking out at the endless horizon. It was a place, she said, where she could just be; these words stuck with me because she was otherwise such a go-go-go person, sweeping my father and me along with her through life like a swift current. I hadn’t been there for many years.

At that moment, I was interested in just being. In not worrying, in not thinking.

But when I got to the parking lot, it was roped off, closed, apparently. A man was standing by the barricades handing out fliers. He looked like he was in his mid-sixties, tall and rangy, with white hair pulled back in a low ponytail and multiple piercings in one ear. He wore a pair of old jeans, brown leather cowboy boots, and a denim shirt that looked like it had been distressed the old-fashioned way—by actual wear.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you know what’s going on?”

“Parks department rented it to a big-shot media company. Filming a commercial,” he said. He continued looking straight ahead, not making eye contact with me, and his voice lacked inflection. “BMW or Audi or some such.”

Next to me, a group of Spanish tourists wearing what looked like high-end designer outfits murmured in disappointed-sounding tones. The man handed them a flier.

“Eleven thousand six hundred and fifty-two dollars. Six hours of filming,” the man said, still not looking at me. “Closed two days. It’s a matter of public record.”

I saw something buzz by in the air, whirling like a miniature helicopter.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Drone,” the man said. “FAA says bystanders have to stay back two hundred feet.”

“Is that even allowed?” I asked, somehow only now noticing a police car parked behind me on the path.

“Eight thousand dollars to the parks department, one thousand to the film commission, two thousand six hundred and fifty-two to the police,” he said. “Everything is for sale these days.”

I took a flier. Across the top, in bold capital letters, it read drones = murder. Underneath that, a grainy black-and-white photo of a car crash, with a small blur in the upper right, a giant Photoshopped arrow pointing to the presumably not-Photoshopped blur.

Underneath that was a bullet-pointed list of the murders supposedly committed by drone since their introduction to US military strategy, extreme in its detail: a hit on a thirty-three-year-old investigative reporter whose cover story on a US Army general’s misdeeds in Afghanistan had led to the general being relieved of his command and who was in the middle of writing a similar exposé of the NSA at the time of his four fifteen a.m. death on a small street in Los Angeles, a crash so bad

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