by Pamela Morsi
The flock of caregivers finished their tasks quickly and efficiently and in a short time Tom found himself alone with the old woman. She fumbled around the bed railing until she found the controller and raised the head of the mattress into something that resembled a sitting position.
She smiled again at Tom and he was uncomfortable. He felt silly for having come to see her and didn’t really have any idea what to say.
“I brought some flowers,” he told her.
“Well, isn’t that nice,” she said. “Your mother certainly raised you to have good manners.”
That was so far from the truth, Tom could have rightly offered an adamant denial. Instead he gave credit where credit was due.
“Actually my son told me to bring them,” he said. “Quint’s only six, but I value his opinion. He said that you don’t visit the hospital without bringing flowers.”
Mrs. Gilfred chuckled. “Well, he sounds like a very bright boy,” she said. “He’s either observant and sensitive or he’s angling for an endorsement contract from the Society of American Florists.”
Tom grinned at her.
“So you’ve come to talk about my Clara,” Mrs. Gilfred said.
He nodded.
“Please pull up a chair and tell me what you think.”
Tom did just that.
Although he’d written up a complete assessment, which he’d brought to her, he found himself simply telling her what problems he’d found and what options he thought she had.
“The carburetor damage is worse than I’d thought,” he told her. “The throttle valve and choke plate are both seriously frozen and the intake manifold is completely shot. There’s not really a good rebuild option. The transmission is in surprisingly good shape, except for the torque converter, which has corroded pretty badly. The cooling system needs an overhaul, the radiator is badly rusted, you’ll need all new hoses. The crankshaft seems okay, but you’ll probably need a new water pump. As I said initially, Mrs. Gilfred, the body is in excellent shape, though the running gear, the suspension and steering are going to need some TLC.”
“You’ve got to call me Guffy,” the woman told him.
Tom grinned at her. “I thought that name was only for your friends,” he said, referencing her previous comments upon her nurse’s familiarity.
She raised an eyebrow at him before returning his smile. “Any friend of Clara’s is a friend of mine.”
Tom laughed.
“So how much is this going to cost?” she asked him.
“That depends a lot on the direction we go,” he answered. “If we do it quickly, buy new parts or parts available, it’s going to run a fairly high price tag. And along with that, since you are planning to sell, you need to know that one of the things you’ve got going for you in this car is that it’s in virtually original condition. If the car is up and running and in original condition, collectors pay a premium for that. If we put new, off-the-shelf parts in…” He shook his head. “If we do that, we might as well just pull the engine and start all over. We get no credit for the original parts we’ve saved.”
Guffy nodded slowly.
“If Clara were your car, Mr. Bentley, what would you do?” she asked.
“I’d try to have patience,” Tom said. “There are junkyards and pick-and-pulls all over the country that have parts for these Buicks. If you can sit tight and give me time, I may be able to do everything with vintage parts scavenged from other vehicles. It will, I think, ultimately be a little cheaper and enhance the value, but it’s going to take time.”
She thought about that for a minute.
“I know the phrase, ‘time is money,’ so if you just want me to get on with it, I can absolutely do that.”
“Time is money,” Mrs. Gilfred repeated, and then smiled. “From where I sit, time is in very short supply and no amount of money can make up for that.”
Tom nodded.
“Still, I’d like to find the right person for Clara,” the older woman said. After another thoughtful moment she smiled broadly, her eyes nearly disappearing in the creases. “Perhaps I should think of it as the choice between having her come out as a debutante or just trying to meet men in a honky-tonk.”
Tom shook his head and chuckled. “So which should it be?” he asked.
“Clara never really had the temperament of a debutante, so I’m counting on you to smooth over the rough edges.”
Tom laughed. “I’ll do my best, ma’am.”
“So the next question is, I suppose, how do I pay for this?” she asked. “Beyond my house and Clara, I only have a small pension.”
Tom thought about that for just a couple of seconds. “You can pay me out of the profit from the sale,” he said.
“It could be months, you said so yourself,” she pointed out. “Can you afford to carry me that long?”
“I’ll work something out,” he assured her. “Besides, you need to be figuring out how to break out of this place. That jailer I saw on the way in looked pretty formidable.”
She laughed as he hoped that she would.
“You get Clara running, get her revved up and in the driveway outside the back door, and I’ll make a break for it,” she promised.
Erica still hadn’t told Tom about the extra money. It wasn’t on purpose, she assured herself. It was just that it hadn’t come up in conversation. She was going to tell him. Of course, she was going to tell him. But that fact had not kept her from checking out prices on washing machines.
As she rode the bus from work to the shop, she was thinking that her mother was not completely wrong. A little household fund to pay for things that break down or get damaged or just need to be replaced—there was nothing wrong with that. In fact, it could be completely right. An unexpected expense could make a terrible mess of their monthly budget. Sure, losing the washer was only a big inconvenience, but what if the refrigerator went out? She sure couldn’t take the groceries to a coin-op cold storage. She’d made up her mind completely that the extra money would be for the house. Tom was sure to go along with that. If he didn’t get it at first, she’d just convince him.
However, when she got to the shop, he wasn’t there.
“Dad went to visit a lady at the hospital,” Quint told her.
“Really? Was it a friend of ours? Did he say who was sick?”
Quint shook his head. “No, he didn’t say.”
“Is she in my hospital? Where I work?”
Her son shrugged. “I dunno.”
“Okay,” Erica said. “Well, when Daddy left, did he drive up the street or down?”
“Down,” Quint answered quickly, as pleased with himself as if it were a question on a math quiz.
“All right!” Erica answered, praising his observation.
“I remember because he was going to the store to get her flowers.”
“Flowers?”
“Yep, a bouquet,” Quint said. “Bouquet is a big word that means flowers.”
Erica gave her son a smile. “Actually bouquet and flowers are the same size, seven letters.”
Quint screwed up his face in disappointment. “Why even have a harder word if it’s not bigger?” he asked.
Erica had no answer for that.
“Put your stuff in your book bag and I’ll tell the guys that I’m taking you home.”
Her son nodded and Erica went through the side door into the shop. Cliff was under the hood of a Trans Am nearby. He was noisily using hydraulic wrenches to reseat an engine block. She didn’t really want to yell at him over the noise. From the open back door, she could see Hector and Gus talking together in the shade of the building. Their backs were to her, but she could see that Hector was casually drinking a can of cold cola and Gus was puffing on a cigarette. She could tell them as easily as Cliff and without any disruption of their work.
She stepped out of the back of the building and walked toward them, hearing just a snippet of conversation before she caught their attention “You’re an idiot if you thin
k a man and a woman go off together for hours to look at car parts,” Gus told Hector. “They’re looking at parts all right…each other’s.”
The two men laughed lewdly, before Hector spotted her.
“Mrs. Bentley! Uh…good afternoon.”
Gus turned in her direction as well and gave her a half-bowing kind of nod. “Miz Bentley.”
She smiled sweetly at them both, letting them believe she hadn’t caught the two of them gossiping like a couple of old maids.
“Quint and I are headed to the house,” she told them. “So if you miss your office help, well, he’s been recruited away for work as an assistant room straightener and table setter.”
Hector smiled and Gus nodded as he tamped out the dregs of his cigarette with his boot heel. “He’s a good little boy,” the man said.
“Hey, Quint,” Hector called out.
Erica turned to see her son was at the door, his heavy backpack slung over one shoulder.
“We’ll see you tomorrow, guy,” Hector told him.
The six-year-old grinned and waved as he made his way toward the old sedan.
Erica met him there and, after turning on the car, rolled down the window to allow the worst of the autumn afternoon heat to escape the car. She glanced in the rearview mirror to see Quint buckling himself in his seat without conversation. He was yawning. The word nap could never be mentioned in her son’s presence, but this time of day he was always dragging a bit. She missed not having their regular conversation, but let him lapse into sluggish silence as she drove home.
Mentally she took inventory of the refrigerator, hoping to come up with an interesting idea for dinner. She was still debating chicken cutlets versus chicken curry when she turned onto her street and spied a familiar car parked in her driveway. The aging silver Mercedes was shiny and immaculate—it looked brand-new. Erica knew, however, that it took a lot of her husband’s time and effort to keep its worn-out engine running. The Mercedes, like its owner, had a beauty that was mainly skin-deep.
“Ann Marie is here,” Quint piped up from the backseat.
Erica didn’t correct her son’s appellation. Ann Marie had never really liked designations such as mommy, mama or ever mother. She positively hated anything that smacked of “grand.” She had insisted since babyhood that Quint call her by her given name.
Erica pulled into her parking spot as her mother stepped out of the car.
Quint made quick work of his seat belt and rushed out to meet her. Erica saw her mother hold her hands out in front of her at Quint’s rushed approach. Some might have thought she was reaching for the boy, but Erica knew the intent had more to do with protecting her clothes.
Ann Marie managed to grasp her grandson by the shoulders. She was smiling at him, speaking to him, charmingly and congenially. She was also keeping him firmly at arm’s length.
Erica almost laughed at the sight. There was a certain dark humor to Ann Marie’s uncomfortable grandparenting. It would have been truly funny if her own heart hadn’t ached in sympathy for her ever-optimistic son.
“Would you like to see my race-car track?” Quint was asking. “Aunt Letty helped me put it all together and we fixed it so the upside-down part actually goes right through a Lego block tunnel.”
“That sounds very nice, Quinton,” she answered. “Perhaps I will see it later.”
Erica had raised the door on the garage. When her mother caught sight of it she frowned.
“Erica, you have a perfectly acceptable front entrance to your home,” Ann Marie said pointedly. “Only tacky women who live in little cracker-box houses enter through the garage.”
The fact that there was more love in Erica’s little cracker-box home than any of the larger, lavish houses her mother had shared with her daughters was not something that Erica felt it was politic to mention. Her mother preferred to cavort with the well-heeled. The Monte Vista manse that she shared with her current gentleman friend, Melvin Schoenleber, was filled to the brim with fabulous objects and beautiful clothes, collected by the man’s late wife. The gossip was that Ann Marie had been working for the caterer that served at the poor woman’s funeral reception. Ann Marie had taken one look at the house, and the widower had taken one look at Ann Marie, and they made a mutual decision that she would simply never leave.
Erica would never ask for the whole story. But she knew her mother well enough to know that she trusted men about as far as she could throw them. Mr. Schoenleber was generous with gifts. Still, she was certain that the old man’s children, similar in age to Ann Marie herself, would never let her walk out of that house with so much as a silver toothpick. But the old man was currently hale and hearty and liked nothing more than attending parties and being a fine-arts patron with the youthful and well-garbed Ann Marie on his arm. Her mother was apparently content to enjoy the high life while it lasted.
And a part of that enjoyment, Erica was sure, included looking down her nose at those, like her daughter, living a more mundane existence.
Erica closed the garage and followed her mother to the front door. Quint was at Ann Marie’s side, talking a mile a minute and skipping with new energy.
Her mother gave the little boy wary attention as if fearful that at any moment he might suddenly demand something from her. Once inside she actually shooed him away as if he were a neighbor’s pesky pet.
“Why is it so hot in here?”
“Because we’ve been gone all day, Mother.”
Ann Marie gave her a disapproving look, as if an empty house were a personal failing.
“Would you like something cool to drink?”
Ann Marie sighed gratefully. “A chablis would be very nice,” she said.
Erica raised an eyebrow. “I’ve got iced tea, orange juice, water or milk.”
“Oh well, then, water I suppose.”
Her mother followed as Erica headed toward the back of the house, pausing to open the windows. In the kitchen, she retrieved a glass from the cupboard and found a few ice cubes in the freezer before filling it under the tap.
When she turned around her mother was already seated at the table, removing her date book, a notepad and a small stack of papers held together with an oversize clip.
“What’s going on?”
“I have some paperwork that I need you to fill out,” Ann Marie said.
Her mother’s tone was so matter-of-fact that Erica immediately suspected a scheme of some sort. She sat at the table across from her and eyed Ann Marie warily.
She pulled one sheet out of the stack of papers and pushed it toward Erica.
“Just fill this out for Tom’s business and don’t worry about the fee, I’ll take care of that.”
Erica read the heading at the top. “Entry form—Chamber of Commerce Christmas Parade?” The question mark was in her tone.
“It’s not for you, it’s for Tom’s business,” Ann Marie told her.
“Tom’s business?”
“Yes, of course. This is how businesses raise their profile. They advertise, and this is like advertising.”
Erica glanced down at the paper. “Bold lettering in the phone book, maybe. But I don’t think entering a float in a Christmas parade is exactly Tom’s kind of advertising.”
“Well, he doesn’t actually have to do it, you just say you’re going to do it.”
“Huh?”
“It’s a community project and I’m involved.”
“Okay,” Erica replied warily. “You’re involved, but I’m not.”
“I’m not asking you to be,” she said. “I just want you to fill out the entrant’s form. I told Cissy Womack that I could sign up five businesses. That prissy old harridan said, ‘Well, do the best you can’ as if I wouldn’t know five business owners to ask.”
“Do you know five business owners?”
“Of course! There is Melvin and there’s Tom and there’s Richard, the owner of the salon where I get my nails done. I know plenty of people and I’m determined to get my five, Cissy Womack
be damned.”
“What do you care what that woman thinks?” Erica said.
“I don’t. I absolutely don’t. But it’s the principle of it. And it’s a learning experience for her.”
“A learning experience?” Erica eyed her mother dubiously.
Ann Marie tutted her dislike and explained herself. “She looks down her nose at me because she’s a wife and I’m not. It’s important that she understand that my being single is a strength not a weakness.”
Ann Marie’s tone was very emphatic.
“Still, I doubt this is something Tom will want to do. And that time of year is so busy for all of us.”
“You don’t have to actually do it,” Ann Marie said. “You just sign up and I pay the money. My point will be made and by the time the holidays roll around, no one will ever notice that you don’t show up.”
Ann Marie handed her the pen. Still Erica hesitated.
“It’s no big deal, just do it. I would have filled it out my self, but I was afraid someone would recognize my handwriting.”
With a sigh, Erica began writing the requested information.
“So,” Ann Marie said, “did you tell Tom about the extra money you’re getting paid?”
Erica’s first thought was to lie to her mother, but she had never been very good at that.
“No,” she answered with feigned casualness, not raising her eyes from the paper. “We’ve been so busy, it just hasn’t come up yet.”
Ann Marie laughed lightly.
“Good for you,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve taken my advice. And it’s about time. If you let Tom decide how to spend your money, every dime of it will be tucked away for a rainy day.”
“Rainy days do happen,” Erica pointed out defensively. “More often than we like to imagine.”
“Of course they do,” her mother agreed. “But wouldn’t it be better to struggle through hard times on a decent couch with some nice curtains?”
Erica shook her head adamantly. “I have every intention of telling him,” she said. “It’s just…it’s just that we’re going to need a new washing machine and I know it will worry him. Once I save up the money, we’ll go together and pick it out. It will be a nice surprise.”
