This evening she wore a mint-green housedress that bore an unfortunate resemblance to a mental patient’s uniform. She was having one of her good spells, though, and got both our names right. “What I’d like, Martine,” she said, “is, you take the small things, the pots and pans and things, and stack them in the far corner of the dining room. Barnaby, you can take the furniture and the microwave.”
But Martine had to show off and grab the microwave herself. She staggered away with it, her arms straining out of her undershirt like two brown wires. I followed, with a chair in each hand, and Mrs. Alford came last, clasping a single skillet to her bosom. “You leave this to us,” I told her. Already she was sounding out of breath. She said, “Oh, well, I suppose …” She laid the skillet on the buffet and retreated to the living room. We could hear her footsteps padding across the carpet, and a moment later, the creak, pause, creak of her rocking chair.
Before we moved the step stool, Martine climbed onto it and took down all the curtains. It was starting to get dark out, and the naked, blue-black windowpanes made the kitchen look depressing. Shadows loomed in the corners. Bare spots showed where the clock had been, and the spice rack, and the calendar. I stole a glance through the calendar after I took it down. I saw all the medical appointments — doctor this, doctor that, mammogram, podiatrist. Anything to do with her family had an exclamation mark after it. Grandkids coming! Ernie spending night! Edward here for Labor Day! Then I checked the times I had come, but she didn’t refer to me by name. Rent-a-Back 7 p.m., she wrote. And no exclamation mark.
“What’re you looking at?” Martine asked. She was standing so close behind me that I jumped. I laid the calendar aside without answering.
When everything had been moved, Martine ran a dust mop around the tops of the walls, while I swept the floor. I found a dime, a red button, and a furry white pill. The pill didn’t look all that intriguing, so I set it in a saucer with the dime and the button. Then we went out to the living room. Mrs. Alford was sitting in her rocker, with her hands folded — not reading, not sewing or watching TV — her face exhausted and empty. But when I cleared my throat, she instantly put on this animated expression and said, “Oh! All done? My, wasn’t that speedy!” And she asked if we’d like a soft drink or something, but we told her we had to be going.
In the car, Martine got started on her favorite subject: Everett. How glad she was to be shed of him; how she couldn’t imagine now what she’d ever seen in him. I wanted to discuss my own troubles, but she was rattling on so, I couldn’t get a word in. She said Everett had given her every Willie Nelson tape that ever existed, given them as gifts, and now was demanding them back; and it was true she no longer listened to them, but still he shouldn’t expect them returned just because she had dumped him.
“Mm-hmm,” I said, and drove on.
I didn’t want to see Sophia tonight. I just didn’t; I wasn’t sure why. I thought of her wide, gentle face and her kind smile, the way her blue eyes seemed lit from within whenever she stood in sunshine, and I got this wormy, shriveled feeling. I couldn’t explain it.
“Here’s an example,” Martine was saying. Example of what? She’d lost me. “Say he’s walking down the street and a man jumps off a roof,” she said. Everett, she probably meant. “Know what he would say? He’d say, ‘Hey! Why is this happening to me? Hey, isn’t it amazing that someone should jump off a roof just as I’m passing by!’ That’s Everett for you. He thinks the world exists purely for his benefit. If he’s not there, then nothing else is, either.”
“Solipsistic,” I said. I remembered the word from philosophy class.
“Right,” she said, digging through her packet of pork rinds.
“Green light, now: figure it out,” I told the car ahead of me. “What do we do when a light turns green? Ah. Very good.”
Martine crumpled her packet and stuffed it in my ashtray. “So,” she said. “Did you decide yet?”
“Huh?”
“About the truck. Yes, or no?”
“What truck?” I asked.
“Everett’s truck; what else. It’s a pretty good piece of machinery, you have to admit.”
I didn’t have the remotest opinion of Everett’s truck, and I couldn’t imagine why she thought I would. I put our conversation on Rewind. Came up empty. “Well, um,” I said. “It’s always looked fine to me. But face it: I’m no Mr. Goodwrench.”
“You don’t think it’s a stupid idea, though.”
“What idea is that?” I asked her.
“You and me going in on it.”
“Going in on it?” I asked. “You mean, as in buying it? You and me? Buying a truck?”
“Jesus! Where have you been?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I must have missed something.”
We were on her block now, and I had been planning just to let her out in the street. Instead I pulled into a parking space. “I’ve got a lot on my mind,” I told her. “Maybe it’s nothing to you that I’m a victim of rank injustice, but—”
“What was the point! What have I wasted my breath for?”
She could have chosen a better moment for this. On the other hand, she was just about the last friend I had left in the world, and so I turned to face her and said, “Martine, I sincerely apologize. Run it by me again.”
She sighed. “See, Everett bought that truck off a lady in Howard County—” she said.
“Howard County; yes.” I tried to look as knowing as possible.
“—and he was supposed to pay for it in thirty-six monthly installments. Only he kept falling behind and his mom had to do it for him. And now he wants to move to New York, he says, where a truck wouldn’t be any use to him; so he says to his mom, ‘You take the truck; I can’t keep up the payments.’ She says, ‘When did you ever, I’d like to know? And what would I do with a truck?’ And that’s why she phoned me and asked if I wanted to buy it.”
In the dusk, Martine was all black-and-white, like a photo. Black eyes slitted with purpose, black hair sticking out at drastic angles around her high white cheekbones.
“And you’re suggesting the two of us should go in on it together,” I said.
“Well, for sure I can’t swing it on my own. But I can manage the installments, just barely, if you’d give his mom what she’s already paid: twenty-four hundred dollars.”
“Twenty-four hundred!” I said. “Martine. My total assets come to exactly half of that. And I’m still in debt to my parents, don’t forget.”
“Oh, well,” she said, “but not if you sold off your car.”
“Pardon?”
“Your car’s worth thirty thousand, did you know that? I looked it up in a book.”
I started laughing. I said, “My car’s worth what?”
“They’ve got these books that give you the price of every used car ever made. So I went to the bookstore and, like, flipped through one, and there it was: a ‘63 Corvette Sting Ray coupe in excellent condition is worth thirty thousand dollars.”
I was stunned. But I did think to say, “We could hardly claim my car is in excellent condition.”
“Okay; so knock off a few thousand. You’d still be rolling in money. Haven’t you always told me your car was a collector’s item?”
“Theoretically, I suppose it is,” I said. “But it was pretty well worn out way back when my Pop-Pop bought it, and you may have noticed I haven’t exactly cosseted the poor thing.”
“Oh! You’re so negative!”
She bopped me on the kneecap with one of her fists. I said, “Hey, now.” I took hold of her fist and set it back in her lap. Then I laid an arm across her shoulders. “I’m not trying to be a spoilsport here—”