I said, “Sophia. Let’s go get that money.”
“Absolutely not,” she said, and she was so prompt about it, she practically overlapped my words.
“Why not? If it belongs to you, why can’t you?”
She said, “Don’t badger me, please. It’s really none of your concern what I do with my own private funds.”
“In fact, it is, though,” I said. “In fact, every time I turn around, you’re telling me how hard your life is now that you’ve lost your money. You’re going on and on about all the things you can’t afford because your money’s in the flour bin, and you know what I think, Sophia? I think you like to have it in the flour bin. I think you feel that as long as it’s in the flour bin, I owe you something. I’m starting to suspect you have no intention of getting it back. You prefer it that I’m beholden to you for your sacrifice.”
“Well, that’s just simply not true,” Sophia told me.
You would think she’d have raised her voice, at least, but she didn’t. Her tone was low and reasonable, and she went on staring straight ahead, and she remembered to signal before she pulled into my driveway. Even that I found irritating. She was just as angry as I was; I knew it for a fact, but she’d already lost two boyfriends, and she’d promised herself she would hang on to this one no matter what a … ne’er-do-well he might turn out to be. Oh, I could read her like a book!
I remembered what I’d told Mrs. Alford when I was describing Great-Grandpa’s visit from his angel. Angels leave a better impression, I’d said, if they don’t hang around too long. Or something to that effect. If they don’t hang around making chitchat and letting you get to know them.
Here is how my Pop-Pop happened to give me the Sting Ray:
I was just about to graduate from the Renascence School, and I’d been accepted at Towson State, and Dad had promised to find a summer job for me. So far he hadn’t succeeded, but that’s a whole other story. The point is, I was doing okay for once. My life was looking up. There was a lot of talk about clean slates and new beginnings, et cetera, et cetera.
Then, at Easter, I came home for the long weekend and got into a little trouble. Well, I’ll just go ahead and say it: I locked my parents out of the house and set fire to the dining room.
I can’t explain exactly how it started. How do these things ever start? It was your average Saturday-night supper; nothing special. My brother had brought a girlfriend. He was living on his own by then, in an apartment down on Chase Street, and he wanted us to meet this Joanna, or Joanne, or whatever her name was. But that was not the problem. The girl was innocuous enough. And my parents were putting on their happycouple act, telling how they themselves had met and so on — my father describing Mom as lively and vivacious and “spunky” (his favorite word for her); my mother turning her eyes up to him in this adoring, First Lady manner. No problem there, either. I’d seen them do that plenty of times. Oh, I’ve never claimed my parents were to blame for my mistakes. My mother might lay it on a little thick — working so hard at her Guilford Matron act, wearing her carefully casual outfits and frantically dragging the furniture around before all major parties — but I realize there are far worse crimes. So, I don’t know. I was just in a mood, I guess. All through supper I kept fighting off my old fear that I might burst out with some scandalous remark. It was more pronounced than usual, even. (Do you think I might have Tourette’s syndrome — a mild, borderline version? I’ve often wondered.) But I made it through the evening. Bade Jeff and What’s-her-name a civil goodbye in the front hall, watched Mom and Dad walk them to the street.
Then I locked every single door behind them and stood inside with my arms folded, listening to my parents knock and ring and shout. (“Barnaby? Barn? You’ve had your little joke now. Let us in now, please.”) I didn’t say a word. When my father stepped off the front stoop, finally, and picked his way through the azaleas to peer in the dining-room window, I snatched up the silver box of matches my mother lit her candles with and I struck a match without a thought and set fire to the curtains. They were some kind of gauzy material, and they burned lickety-split. My father said, “Call the fire department!” (He was speaking to me, I had to surmise, since who else was near a phone?) But my mother said, “No! Think of the neighbors!” and that’s when I picked up a dining-room chair and sent it through the window. It felt spectacular. I can still remember the satisfaction. It made such a clean, explosive crash. Although it also provided Dad with an entryway into the house.
I didn’t try to stop him. I just sort of wandered off to my room, noticing the whole while that I seemed to be behaving like a crazy man. I climbed the stairs with my hands hanging loose at my sides and my expression spacey and vacant, and I watched myself doing it or even overdoing it, the same way years ago I’d overdone my limp when I sprained my ankle once, putting everything I had into the role of a cripple.
Well, you can imagine the brouhaha. Long-distance calls to Renascence, reaming them out for sending home a dangerous individual. Telephone consultations with the headmaster and my adviser. But not my psychologist, oddly enough. I did have one, of a fair-to-middling sort; but the focus here seemed to be my criminal intent rather than my mental state. There was talk, even, of bringing in the police, although that was probably just for effect. My father went so far as to mention jail. “I saved you from jail once before, but I’m not doing it again,” he said. I just kept my same vacant expression. I felt mildly interested, as if it didn’t involve me. I remember reflecting on the bizarreness of jail as a punishment — like sending someone to his room, really. Just put him away! What a concept. But did it ever occur to people that getting put away could come as a relief, on occasion?
Anyhow: the next day was Easter. So we all assembled for Easter dinner — me and my folks; Jeff minus the girlfriend (I believe she’d been hastily disinvited, due to recent developments); my Grandmother Gaitlin, who was still alive at the time; and Gram and Pop-Pop Kazmerow. Of course The Event had been thoroughly discussed behind my back, and I could tell it was the only thing on anyone’s mind. Much shaking of heads, much whispering in the front hall. Sidelong glances at the cardboard-covered window and the charred and blistered frame. Surreptitious sniffs of the tarry-smelling air.
Except for Pop-Pop.
He just walked straight up to me. I was standing alone in front of the unlit fireplace in the living room, feeling like a Martian, and Pop-Pop walked straight up and said, “Happy Easter, Barnaby.”
“Well. Same,” I said.
“It’s wonderful to see you.”
“It’s good to see you too, Pop-Pop.”
Then he reached out and put something in my hand. The Chevrolet key ring.
I said, “What’s this for?”
He said, “You know about my eyesight. I shouldn’t have kept on driving even as long as I have.”
“But what’s—?”
“I want you to have my car,” he said. “She’s still got a lot of miles left in her! And she’s quite a machine, Barnaby. Only Corvette ever made with a split rear window.”
“You’re giving me the Corvette?” I asked him.
He nodded.
“You’re giving it, as in giving it?”