The Twoweeks
Page 26
“Get away from my head,” said Jake.
“She’s right, bro. There’s half a dozen on this side.”
“So you see, honey, by the time Al brings his first gal home to meet us, that gal will not believe you once had dark hair on your ornery head.”
“Unless I dye it.”
“Not a choice,” said Iris.
“You think your brother is mature enough to meet reality head-on?” said Cicely.
“He’ll curse the gray hair,” said Hetty, “but he’d never color it.”
“Enough of this good clean fun,” said Jake, standing. “Time to get back on the road. Hey, bud, get over here and get your coat on.”
Al and Lorna had moved to the counter, to work the stools. Now Al spun his stool toward Jake, laughed at the coat idea, and kept spinning. Jake got there, applied the hand brakes, and spun him back the opposite way. “Take it easy, bud, you don’t want to upchuck that gooey pie now.”
“No way,” said Al, and then—slightly concerned over the prospect—“Stop spinning me, Daddy.”
They struggled back into their winter armor and stepped into the storm, their six heads angled away from a biting north wind. The highway lanes were covered with rutted slush, while curling waves of whiter uncompressed snow flowed down to the bottomland.
“Thank you, Jake,” said Iris.
“My pleasure, Baby I. You know how I like to grab the really small checks.”
“How much was it?” said Hetty, in her role as the detail person. She didn’t care, she simply wanted to know. Everything.
“Thirty.”
“Thirty bucks for pie?”
“Well, half of that was the tip.”
“Oh, okay. I get it.”
“We all do that, don’t we,” said Iris. “It’s not normal, you know. My friends laugh at me.”
“That one is on Dad,” said Jake. “The common denominator.”
“But my mom and your mom are both really generous people. Maybe all of them are big tippers.”
“That’s what I think,” said Hetty. “Common denominators be damned.”
“What about Bob?” said Iris. Because he only occasionally joined in when the “extended family” gathered, Iris did not know Winnie’s husband nearly as well as she knew Winnie. “Is Big Bob a big tipper?”
“He just does the math. Fifteen percent, on the dot.”
“So I guess not all of them are excessive,” said Jake.
“All the ones who are our DNA parents, is what I meant,” said Iris. “The ones who made us tip ridiculous amounts, like say one hundred percent?”
“It was the right tip.”
“I don’t disagree. I’m just saying.”
“And I’m just hearing, Baby I. Basically, we all want Connie to be happy, right?”
The car had gone cold while they sat inside the diner and for a few minutes they hunched against the chill. Soon, though, the car became so warm that the unreeling wintry landscape seemed unreal, a sort of exaggeration.
Jake was about to do his standard “Cell phones . . . off!” routine when Hetty’s phone beat him to the punch, forcing him to switch riffs: “Carlos calling,” he said, “come in, Carlos.”
“Answer, answer,” said Lorna, though it would turn out to be her grandfather, not her father, on the line.
“Hi Pop,” said Hetty. “We’re getting there. Departed Fairlee at 1600 hours.”
“I’m just calling to remind you about Al and Lorna.”
“What about them?”
“You should go back and get them at the diner.”
“You’re guessing.”
“About the diner? I know you stopped at the diner. I am guessing about whether you remembered the children this time.”
“Pop, we only forgot them once, and they were hiding. Besides, Al is old enough now, he remembers anything we forget.”
“So do I!” protested Lorna.
“Let me have a word with Al. Is he available?”
“Hi, Grandpa,” said Al, wrestling the phone away from his aunt. She had tried to keep a hand on it.
“Hi, Aloysius. I hear you are getting old. Like me.”
“Not like you, Grandpa.”
“No white hairs yet?”
“Silly Grandpa. I’m just a kid!”
“Glad to hear it. Your Aunt Hetty had me worried. Now if you will be so kind, let me have a word with Lorna.”
“She’s asleep,” Al whispered.
“I am not,” said Lorna, grabbing at the phone. The two children fussed over it and suddenly their voices filled the car as though a flock of birds had gotten in.
“All right,” said Jake, “Repo that sucker and shut it off. Tell Dad we’ll be there in forty-four minutes.”
“Passumpsic or Bust,” said Iris, pumping a fist in selfmocking exuberance before she finally closed her eyes and stopped trying to stay awake. Jake reached over and stroked her temple, brushing back the loose-falling hair.
The snow had been coming down for hours, blowing and swirling in the open fields where the wind had carved soft channels like sled runs. But it was tapering off as they came through the town of Wells River (the dark river, which they crossed just north of the village, absorbed each large flake as it fell) and by Ryegate Corners it had stopped. They had emerged on the other side of the storm.
This was unexpected, and cause for suspicion, yet proved to be true. To the west they saw pale blue sky and the implied light of the sun behind the tree line. Then in Passumpsic, where it “always” snowed, the moon had started up (an orange globe, a perfect circle, in perfect focus) so the fresh twilight was composed in equal parts of sunlight, moonlight, snowlight, and finally just the headlights of the car on the barn door, where they saw Cal and Lara crouched low, restraining the eager, excited dogs.