“Well, that’s a little off the subject … or maybe not, come to think of it. And ‘ill-gotten gains.’ ‘Misspent youth.’ Or, let’s see …”
“ ‘Besetting sins,’ ” my father said from his armchair.
“Right! Besetting sins. But it’s not the same for good-guy words, at least not as far as I’ve—”
The telephone rang. We were all so relieved that every last one of us stirred as if to go answer it, but Mom picked it up in the kitchen. We could hear her intonation, if not her exact words. “Mm? Mm? Hmm-hmm-hmm.”
Then she appeared in the doorway. “Barnaby,” she said — her voice noncommittal, her face composed, not a hair out of place—“that was that Martine person, and she says to tell you she has the truck but she’ll bring it by in the morning.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Pop-Pop asked, “What truck is that?”
I said, “Oh, just the, you know, work truck.”
“Fool kid sold off the Sting Ray,” my father told my grandpa.
“He did what?”
“Sold off the Corvette Sting Ray and bought a used Ford pickup.”
Pop-Pop leaned forward on the couch to peer at me. I could feel his stare, even though I had my back to him. I turned and told him, “I was planning to mention that.”
“You sold the Sting Ray?”
He was so amazed, the whites of his eyes showed all around the irises.
“Well, yes, I did,” I said.
“Why?”
I said, “I needed the money.”
“The money, son: you could have borrowed money from me! I’d have been glad to lend you money!”
“Well, see … the whole point was, not to be in debt anymore. Not to owe anybody.”
Pop-Pop’s jaw went slack.
“But, Barnaby,” he said finally. “That was the only year the Corvette had a split rear window.”
“Oh, damn that split rear window!” I said. Then I said, “Sorry.” I looked around at the others. They all wore the same accusing expression — even Opal. (Or maybe I was imagining things.) “I mean,” I said, “I do know what a big deal it was, Pop-Pop—”
“Shoot,” Jeff said suddenly. “It broke my heart when Pop-Pop gave the Corvette to you.”
“It did?” I asked.
“I would have killed for that car!”
“You would?”
I sat there a minute absorbing this, chewing the inside of my cheek. Dad, meanwhile, took over the conversation. “Of course, when I was Barnaby’s age,” he said, “I went out and worked if I needed money, but nowadays, it seems—”
“With all due respect, Dad,” I told him, “you were never my age.”
“Excuse me?”
“Times are different, Dad, okay? What I’ve experienced, you haven’t. And vice versa, no doubt. So you can’t compare us, is what I’m saying.” I turned back to my grandpa. “I’m sorry, Pop-Pop,” I told him. “Giving me that car was the best thing anyone’s ever done for me, and don’t think I don’t know that. But I’m trying really hard to grow up now, don’t you see? And I had to sell the car to get there. I hope you understand.”
I could hear the rustle of Mom’s apron as she wrapped her hands in it. Then Pop-Pop said, “Why, sure, son. It was yours to do what you liked with.”
After that we had a fairly normal evening, but that was just because all of us were exhausted.
Sophia and I had driven over in the Saab, and we’d both assumed that I would go back to her house for the night, since the roommate was out of town. But on Jeff’s front walk I said, “Why don’t you drive, and that way you can drop me off at my place.” Then I felt the need to invent too many excuses. “I have to get to work so early tomorrow, and Martine won’t know where to pick me up, and besides, Opal mentioned something about breakfast____”
Sophia just said, “All right,” and we set off toward her car. I got the impression she was glad, even. Probably she could use a night alone herself.
Earlier it had been raining, and now the air had a damp, chilly feel. The car windows misted over before we’d gone a block. I grew extremely conscious of how closed in we were. Our breaths were too loud, and the tinny sound of Sophia’s cake platter, sliding across the back seat at each turn, made our silence more noticeable.
Finally she said, “You didn’t tell me your mother offered to give you back that money.”
“How could I? It just now happened,” I said.
“I don’t see why you refused it.”
I stared at her. I said, “What: you too?”
“It’s eighty-seven hundred dollars, after all. Think what we could do with that.”
“Well, lots. Obviously. But that’s beside the point. I didn’t want to worry about that money anymore.”
“So you’d rather I worry about money.”
“You? How do you figure that?”
“Well, I’m the one who couldn’t buy a new outfit for Thanksgiving because my money’s in the flour bin.”
“So? Get it out of the flour bin. You said yourself you’ve been in touch with your aunt again.”
“Oh, I knew you’d hold that against me!” she cried, swinging the car onto Northern Parkway.
I said, “Huh? Hold what against you?”
“She’s my aunt, Barnaby. I don’t have so many relatives that I can afford to discard a perfectly good aunt.”
“Well, sure. I realize that,” I told her.
“And it made me feel just awful, being on the outs with her. So I called her on the phone one day last week. I meant to tell you about it; honestly I did, but somehow it slipped my mind. I asked her how she was, and she said she had a cold. Well, what could I do? Hang up on a sick old woman? I went by to see her at lunch hour. I brought her some soup and some nose drops. I couldn’t just let her fend for herself!”
“Of course you couldn’t,” I said.
Did she think I didn’t know how these family messes operated? The most unforgivable things got … oh, not forgiven. Never forgiven. But swept beneath the rug, at least; brushed temporarily to one side; buried in a shallow grave. I knew all about it.
I rolled down my window a quarter of an inch, thinking it might help defog the windshield. I said, “But you still haven’t gotten your money out of the flour bin.”
“No.”
The whistling sound from my window helped to fill the silence.
“Why not?” I asked her finally.
“Hmm?” she said. She leaned forward to swab the windshield with her palm — a mistake, but I didn’t point that out.
“Why haven’t you gotten your money?”
“Oh, it’s … never been the right time,” she said.
“Now would be a good time,” I told her. “While your aunt’s in Philadelphia.”
“Barnaby! I can’t just sneak in like a thief!”
She kept her eyes on the road while she said that. It made her indignation sound fake. All at once I found her irritating beyond endurance. I noticed how the streetlights lit the fuzz along her jawline — fur, it almost was — and how large and square and bossy her hands looked on the steering wheel. Manageriaclass="underline" that was the word. Wasn’t that why her other romances had ended, if you read between the lines? “I’m probably too … definite,” I seemed to remember her saying. “Too definite for men to feel comfortable with.” Darn right she was too definite!
And then that lingering, doting voice she used when she spoke of herself as a child—“When I was a little girl …”—as if she had been more special than other little girls. And her eternal Crock-Pot dinners; oh, Lord. If I had to eat one more stewy-tasting, mixed-and-mingled, gray-colored one-dish meal, I’d croak!
And her predictability: her Sunday-night shampoos and panty-hose washing, her total lack of adventurousness. (Wasn’t it a flaw, rather than a virtue, that she’d been so incurious when the passport man gave her that envelope?) Her even temper, her boring steadfastness, her self-congratulatory loyalty when she assumed I had stolen from her aunt. Here I’d been hoping she would bring me up to her level, infuse me with her goodness! Instead she had fallen all over herself rushing to protect my badness.