Sex for five straight Saturdays, but also the chance to talk face to face again after the long-distance phone conversations during the school week, and on three of those Saturdays Amy hung around long enough to be there when his parents came home from work, which led to three dinners with just the four of them sitting together in the kitchen, his mother so much happier now that he was with Amy and not that drunken Belgian girl and his father amused by her volubility and offbeat remarks, as when, to cite one example from late February, which had been the month of the Beatles’ conquest of America and Cassius Clay’s triumph over Sonny Liston, the two big subjects everyone was talking about, Amy made the nutty but insightful comment that John Lennon and the new heavyweight champion were one and the same person divided up into two different bodies, young men in their early twenties who had captured the attention of the world in precisely the same way, by not taking themselves seriously, by having a gift for saying the most obnoxious things with a boldness and theatricality that made people laugh, I am the greatest, We’re more popular than Jesus Christ, and when Amy repeated those ridiculous but unforgettable statements, Ferguson’s father suddenly started to laugh, not only because Amy had done spot-on imitations of Lennon’s Liverpudlian burr and Clay’s Kentucky drawl, but because she had imitated their facial expressions as well, and once Ferguson’s father had stopped laughing, he said: You’ve got a good point there, Amy. Wise guys with fast tongues and even faster minds. I like that.
Ferguson had no idea if his parents were aware of how he and Amy spent those Saturday mornings and afternoons alone in the house. He suspected his mother might have been onto them (she had come home unannounced on the second Saturday to retrieve a sweater and had caught them smoothing out the covers on the bed), which could have meant she had discussed it with his father, but even if they did know, neither one of them said a word about it, since it was manifestly clear by then that Amy Schneiderman was a positive force in their boy’s life, a one-girl emergency team who was single-handedly nursing him through the agonizing adjustment to his post-accident world, and therefore they encouraged them to be together as often as possible, and even though money was particularly tight just then, they never objected to the high cost of the long-distance calls, which had more than quadrupled their monthly telephone bill. That girl is good stuff, Archie, his mother said to him one day, and as she watched her ex-boss’s granddaughter minister to her son, she herself was ministering to her niece Francie by going to the hospital every afternoon at four o’clock for a one-hour visit, where she steadfastly carried on with her all-love-and-nothing-but-love treatments. Ferguson paid close attention to her nightly reports about Francie’s progress, but he kept worrying that his cousin would say something to his mother about the squeaking bed and how angry she had been at him on the morning of the crash, which could have led to some unpleasant questions from his mother that he would have been compelled to lie about in order to cover up his embarrassment, but when he finally found the courage to raise the subject himself, asking his mother what Francie had told her about the accident, his mother claimed that Francie had never mentioned it. Was that true? he asked himself. Could Francie have blanked out the crash, or was his mother merely playing dumb about the argument because she didn’t want to upset him?
And what about my hand? Ferguson asked. Does she know about that?
Yes, his mother said. Gary told her.
Why would he do that? It seems rather heartless, don’t you think?
Because she has to know. She’ll be getting out of the hospital soon, and no one wants her to be shocked when she sees you again.
She was discharged after three weeks of rest and therapy, and although there would be further breakdowns and hospitalizations in the years to come, she was back on her feet for now, still wearing a sling around her left arm because the clavicle had been slow in mending, but altogether radiant as Ferguson’s mother said after her final visit to the hospital, and when the sling came off a week later and Francie invited Ferguson and his parents for Sunday brunch at her house in West Orange, he found her looking radiant as well, fully restored, no longer the harried, spooked-out woman she had been during that catastrophic weekend in Vermont. It was a fraught moment for both of them, facing each other for the first time since the accident, and when Francie looked at his hand and saw what the accident had done to it, she teared up and threw her arms around him, blubbering out an apology that made Ferguson understand, for the first time since the accident, how much he secretly blamed Francie for what had happened to him, that even if it wasn’t her fault, even if her final glance at him in the car had been the glance of a mad person, someone no longer in control of her thoughts, she was the one who had smashed the car into the tree, and while he wanted to forgive her for everything, he couldn’t quite do it, not all the way down in the deepest part of himself, and even as his mouth was saying all the right words, assuring her that he didn’t hold it against her and all was forgiven, he knew that he was lying and would always hold it against her, that the accident would stand between them for the rest of their lives.
HE TURNED SEVENTEEN on March third. Several days after that, he went to the local branch of the DMV and took the road test for his New Jersey driver’s license, demonstrating his skill at the wheel with his smoothly negotiated turns, the steady pressure he applied to the gas pedal (as if you were putting your foot on an uncooked egg, his father had told him), his mastery at braking and driving in reverse, and last of all his understanding of the maneuvers involved in parallel parking, the tight-squeeze operation that was the downfall of so many would-be motorists. Ferguson had taken hundreds of tests over the years, but passing this one was far more important to him than anything he had accomplished at school. This one was for real, and once he had the license in his pocket, it would have the power to unlock doors and let him out of his cage.
He knew his parents were struggling, that business was down for both of them and the family’s resources were pinched — not yet hard times, perhaps, but getting close, getting closer by the month. Blue Cross/Blue Shield had covered the bulk of the costs for his stay in the Vermont hospital, but there had been some cash expenditures as well, out-of-pocket deductibles and sundry long-distance telephone charges, along with the money spent on the motel room and his mother’s rented car, which couldn’t have been easy on them, walking out into their rainy day with torn umbrellas and no shoes on, and so when March third came around and the only birthday present he received from his parents was a toy car — a miniature replica of a white 1958 Chevy Impala — he interpreted it as a kind of joke present, at once a good-luck charm for the driving exam he was about to take and an admission from his parents that they couldn’t afford anything better. Oh well, he thought, it actually was rather funny, and since both of his parents were smiling, he smiled back at them and said thank you, too distracted to pay attention to what his mother said next: Fear not, Archie. Out of little acorns do mighty oaks grow.