“Laughing Arch Truitt,” she said across the roof of the car.
Laughter transformed his face in just the way it always had. “Yeah, well,” he said sheepishly. “You might not believe it but some people want to shake my hand.”
“I want to shake your hand.”
But they couldn’t reach across the car roof. Instead, she rattled the keys in an affectionate way. They both got in. Cracker started the engine, pulled into traffic.
“You don’t mind driving in town?” he asked.
“Not anymore. Not for ages.”
In the years of their marriage she’d been a nervous driver. Indeed, she had never driven a sober Arch anywhere; she only took the wheel when he was sodden with drink and cheerful enough to let her do it.
“You own an alley with Roy,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I would have thought he’d give it up. He hated it, didn’t he?”
“Our place is different.”
“You wouldn’t recognize our place,” she said.
“Oh, now it’s yours? Huh.”
They were at a red light. She ran her hands around the steering wheel in a caressing way. “You don’t have a car?”
“Don’t drive. Seizures.”
Maybe this was a lie to cover up drinking, or maybe it was the truth and the seizures were caused by drinking. Surely there was nothing about Arch that didn’t touch drink.
“You still drinking?” she asked.
“Nah,” he said, as though answering a different question.
“You ready to see your mother?”
He reached over and touched the dashboard, like a painting on a wall he meant to straighten. “Remind me. She’s a little woman, right? Sweet in her way?”
“Sweeter, you want to know the truth.”
“Holy cow.”
“She’s forgotten all her grudges.”
“Nice for her,” he said. “I’m nervous. Can we stop for a drink?”
“I thought you weren’t drinking.”
“I’m not drinking drinking.”
“Not drinking drinking,” she said. “What is that in fluid ounces?”
“Forget it,” he said.
They crossed the bridge over the mouth of the Charles that would take them to Salford.
“Roy never married,” she said at last.
“No.”
“Lady friends?”
“Maybe. Look, I can’t talk to you about my brother.”
“Your brother. Why not?”
“Because you don’t know why not.”
“I didn’t break his heart,” she said.
“Sure,” said Arch, who wanted to protect Roy. Chiefly, how boring Roy was. Roy’s entire existence was devoted to boring things: locks, history. Not until those things became interesting, but until the dullness was so utterly mapped anyone could understand the topography: the heights of boredom, the depths of boredom, the bedrock, the gravitational pull. He was terrifically interested in grammar. He thought he might write a book on the representation of stained linen in Homer. Then he would start his magnum opus: a history of bowling. Even Arch didn’t want to read that. They would sell it at their bowling alley, which was called, simply, Bowl.
“Ah, Roy,” said Arch. “Listen, I gotta honor his wishes. You know?”
“All right. I invited Amy and Ben over for dinner, and the baby, Bobby. He’s wonderful.”
“I met the wonderful Bobby,” Arch said in a cheerful voice. “I met Brenda’s guy, too. Lars.”
“Oh.”
“Oh God my mother makes me crazy,” he said. “Will she know who I am?”
“Of course! Don’t worry.”
“Almost prefer it if she didn’t, you wanna know the truth.”
She looked at Arch then, his flinty blue eyes, his hair that needed cutting. They were in Salford. “Let’s get that drink,” she said.
Oh, the darling!” said Margaret when she saw Arch. “Oh my sweetheart! Lift me up! Lift me up so I can kiss you!”
He did. He scooped her up in the way of Rhett Butler, or the Creature from the Black Lagoon. She kissed his cheek and beamed.
“Now I’m done for,” she said happily.
“Done for, Mother?” Cracker asked.
“Taken care of,” said Margaret. “Now we’ll be all right, won’t we.”
Years ago Amy had so relentlessly admired a neighbor girl’s canopy bed that it had been given to her, and it was here, after dinner with his mother, his wife, his daughter and grandson, that Arch Truitt was put to sleep his first night back in Salford. It struck him as unhealthy, or spiritually unsound, to sleep under a canopy. Your hopes would fester and choke you. Your nightmares would never dissipate. Eventually he got up, found Amy’s plaid-and-duck-patterned sleeping bag in her closet, and went to sleep in the little room between bedrooms that had once been the nursery.
Even he was not sure why he’d gone there. To be close to his mother, or to Cracker? Like a spy or a household pet? The sleeping bag was soft and musty, like a chrysalis. Perhaps he would bust out a new man. He could hear the noises of the women on either side of him, lights snapping off and on, creaking beds, sighs unintended for the ears of men, which he was stunned to realize sounded exactly the same as the other sort. All those years it wasn’t him that caused that exasperated noise he could never decode, the satisfied noise! It was life itself!
He hadn’t brought a pillow; he could feel the seams between the floorboards with the back of his head as he tilted back to look out the one window in the room. What he could see: tree branches and stars, the mobile light of satellites, or UFOs, or meteors. When he was a young man the mysteries of the world seemed like generosity—you can think anything you want! Now the universe withheld things. It was like luck. Luck once meant anything could happen. Now it meant he was doomed. But maybe it didn’t need to.
Maybe he could have this one thing he had loved and never stopped wanting. To be part of a family. To be loved by his wife.
Cracker snored. His mother cried in her dreams. He fell asleep, of course. He was Arch Truitt. Longest love story in his life.
He was woken in the dark by Cracker tripping over his toes.
“What are you doing here?” Then, “She’s crying.”
“I know she’s crying.”
“Then why are you asleep.”
He stood up in the sleeping bag then let it fall around his ankles, stepped out of it. Sleepy whimpering in the other room, and Cracker’s familiar shushing, ssh, you’re all right, I’m right here. He went in. His mother was in the covers up to her neck. She had the puppety look of the dentureless, and he thought if there was life on other planets, and they did come to take us over, they would look for the sad creatures who kept their teeth outside their bodies at night.
“She didn’t even wake up,” said Cracker. She slept in the same sort of long loose nightgown she always had, which concealed the shape of her body with its shape and revealed it with its sheerness. White, with one pale pink rose at her breastbone. “Why were you sleeping on the floor, funny man?”
The funny man said, “I missed you.”
In north Salford, by the fens, lived a woman who could not stop adopting wild animals. This was in the olden days. As a child she took in frogs and snakes and pantry mice. Then rats. A raccoon, a possum. She eyed a skunk but drew the line. The animals chewed the walls of her little house. It was their house, too. The neighbors called the police.
“Humans were not designed to live with animals,” the visiting policeman said to the woman.