He shrugged. “Maybe he’d go alone.”
“Did he say that to you?”
“No, he didn’t say it. I just thought that since you’re separated he might not take a vacation with us this year.”
“Yes he will,” his mother said. She didn’t sound sure. The air conditioning was already making his knees cold. He drew up his legs.
“Are you going to tell me about the fight you had with Parker?”
“I told you. It wasn’t any fight. He’s just stupid.”
“I’m not too crazy about him myself. Did something happen in New York with Parker — is that why you don’t want to go back?”
“I’m going back next week. I’ve got to get braces, don’t I?”
“I mean for fun. And yes, you have to get braces. I know you don’t like the idea, but you wouldn’t like crooked teeth when you grew up, either.”
“I wouldn’t care.”
“You’d care then.”
“I wouldn’t care,” he said again.
“God,” she said, sighing. “Maybe you wouldn’t. You’re a pretty blasé kid.”
“What does that mean?”
“Blasé? It means you let everything roll off your back like water.” She smiled. “I didn’t realize what an old-fashioned expression that was,” she said. “I guess it is.”
She always came to a full stop at stop signs. It drove him crazy. A dog was running at the side of the road. He waited for her to say something about her dog. She looked, but didn’t say anything.
“I’ll tell you one thing Parker did. We went to the museum and he told me his mother would pay me back if I showed her the tickets, and then he—” He broke off, and decided it would be better to hedge on the truth. “Parker tore up the ticket stubs.”
“On purpose?”
“Sure, on purpose.”
“What was the point of that?” she said.
He shrugged. “He’s stupid.”
“The other thing that surprises me is that you went to a museum. What did you see?”
“Where’d you think we’d go? Some porn movie?”
“I do have some faith in you, John Joel. I just didn’t think the two of you would go to a museum. I think it’s wonderful that you did.”
“Nick took me the week before,” he said.
“Really? And you liked it and went back?”
“I sort of liked it. It was these plaster people.”
“Oh,” she said. “You saw the Segal show at the Whitney.”
He shrugged.
“Well, tell me about it,” she said.
“I read what he wrote about one of the things, and he said it was his friends. One of them was all blue, and it had a face like a goat.”
“I’d like to see that,” she said.
“Some of it was dumb,” he said. He decided not to tell her about the people naked in bed, or the women’s bodies.
“Do you like Nick?” she asked him.
“Sure. He’s okay.”
“Just okay?”
“I don’t love him or anything.”
“Your father does. Your father worships him.”
John Joel shrugged. “He’s a nice guy,” he said.
“Maybe I’m just jealous,” she said. She turned down the air conditioner. They were passing the reservoir, with the geyser of white water shooting up.
“Nick’s got a pretty girlfriend,” he said.
“A lot of them,” she said. “Was this one black or foreign? Or white for a change?”
“She had huge eyes and she was pretty. She worked at some department store. Nick was surprised to see her, when she showed up outside the museum. Dad was late. He finally showed.”
“Nick finds a new one every week,” she said.
“Her name was Nina,” he said. “I just remembered.”
“Nina who works in a department store. Let me guess: Bloomie’s?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Bloomie’s. And she was twenty-five, right?”
“You would have liked her,” he said.
“Right?” she said.
“About,” he said.
“They don’t come over twenty-five. That model gets discontinued.”
“You sound like you’re talking to Dad.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I envy those lunches — flirting with somebody nice, all of it paid for with an expense account.”
“You want to flirt with somebody?” he said.
“Oh, you know what I mean. Or maybe you don’t.”
“You shouldn’t dislike Nick,” he said. “He’s okay.”
“So I hear. Constantly.”
“You’re the one who wanted to talk about him,” he said.
They were going up the steep hill that led to Tiffy’s house. Another dog, out on a lawn; this time it was a German shepherd, the kind his mother’s had been, and he would have bet all the money in his wallet that she’d say something. He would never forget being out on the front lawn with his mother the day Mr. Blue was hit by a car. His own scream had sounded like a woman’s, and his mother had opened her mouth but made no sound at all. The paper boy — there had been a new paper boy, and he would throw the paper onto the lawn from the other side of the street… his mother’s dog had been standing at the side of the house, and it had seen the paper boy raise his arm with the rolled-up paper, and suddenly the dog had gone bounding into the street because he thought the paper boy was playing “get the stick” with him. He had lunged into a car with a heavy thump. Now, John Joel looked at his mother. She was looking in the rear-view mirror and had seen the dog, but wasn’t saying anything. She said: “This is pretty in here. It’s quiet, too — off the main road.”
“Do you wish you worked in New York?” he said.
“Why do you ask that?”
“I thought you might.”
“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes I like it here. I think I’m lucky that we have enough money that I don’t have to work and that when the sun is shining and I’m feeling pretty good, I can go meet a friend and have a picnic and pick strawberries. It’s a pretty nice life.” She came to a full stop at the stop sign, then went slowly forward about twenty feet and stopped again, where she could see. “I don’t know what kind of a job I could get anyway,” she said.
“Tiffy’s got a job.”
“Tiffy has a Ph.D. and teaches at NYU and will probably be booted out before she gets tenure, on general principles.”
“Couldn’t you be a teacher?” he said.
“What’s this? You’re trying to send your mother off to work?”
“Just if you wanted a job,” he said. “You could get a job.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Seriously. I’m glad you have faith in me.”
While he wasn’t looking, a little dog ran across a lawn close to the car, and she said, “I wish I had had a job when Mr. Blue died. I don’t know why I took it so hard, but to this day it’s all I can do to look at a dog that reminds me of Mr. Blue in any way. That one was nothing like him — just the way it was having fun, running across the lawn after something.”
“I was talking about the cats to Parker. He said his mother told him to drown them.”
“You shouldn’t talk about that,” his mother said. “He’s going to a psychiatrist. Things like that you should probably leave to the two of them to talk about.”
“Yeah, but you don’t even think he should tell the truth?”
“I think he’s embarrassed the story got around. I don’t know how it did. I think his mother told some people. I think part of Parker’s problem is that his mother is more interested in everybody else than she is in her own son.”
“Yeah, but he said it was an alley cat.”
Louise laughed. “A two-hundred-dollar chocolate point,” she said. “That’s crazy, too: his mother paying that kind of money for a cat, and then having it put to sleep. It wasn’t the cat’s fault that he tried to go after it and the kittens. You’d think at least she would have tried to find a good home for it.”