“And when they do finally get up they’ll just tell us they have to take a nap,” Caroline said. It was true. The parents napped like febrile toddlers. All the children nodded their heads. Cal was next to the window in the booth and he turned away from the rest of them to stare at the road. Albie was pounding the bottom of a ketchup bottle with the flat of his palm until finally the ketchup poured out onto his pancakes.
“Jesus,” Cal said and snatched the bottle away. “Can’t you sit here without doing something disgusting?”
“Look,” Albie said, and held up the pancake, dripping ketchup, in front of his face.
Jeanette pinned her toast to her plate with two fingers and removed the crusts with a knife.
“I’m not just going to sit here all day waiting for them,” Caroline said.
“What else can we do?” Franny asked, because there wasn’t anything to do. See if the motel had any board games maybe? A deck of cards? It was still so early, just now seven o’clock, and the sun came through the window of the diner like an invitation delivered to their table on a silver tray. It would have been a good day to swim.
“We came here to go to the lake so we should go to the lake,” Caroline said, reading her sister’s mind, or half of it. She was wearing her swimsuit under her clothes. They all were. Caroline was a lot angrier than the rest of them. It was there in her voice all the time. Then again, it could have been that Cal was the angriest and his anger just manifested itself in different ways.
Jeanette lifted her eyes from her toast. “Let’s go,” she said. It was the first thing she had said since they left Arlington the day before and so that settled it. Why should they wait for the parents to wake up? When they did go out with the parents, the children were divided into two groups—the big kids: Cal, Caroline, and Holly; and the little kids—Jeanette, Franny, and Albie. The big kids were allowed to wander off, swim in deep water without life jackets, hike out past anyone’s view, and decide what they wanted for lunch. The little kids might as well have been tied to a tree and made to eat from a single dish. The little kids were never to be trusted. With no further discussion, the six of them decided it would be better to see this as an opportunity.
At the cash register they added a six-pack of Coke and twelve candy bars to their breakfast tab, enough to see them through to lunch if necessary.
“How far is it to the lake?” Holly asked the waitress who was ringing them up.
“Maybe two miles, a little less. You just get back on Route 98.”
“What if you walk?”
The waitress studied the children for a minute. So many of them looked to be exactly the same size. Franny and Jeanette were thirty-eight days apart in age. “Where’re your parents?”
“Getting dressed,” Caroline said in the voice of a bored child. “They want us all to walk together. They said it was going to be an adventure. We’re supposed to get directions.”
The other children beamed at her for lying so deftly. The waitress took a paper placemat off the stack and turned it over. “There’s a shortcut if you walk.” On one end of the placemat she drew a rectangle to represent the motel (which she labeled “P”) and on the other end a circle for the lake (“L”). The broken line she drew to connect the two was their ticket out.
In the parking lot, Cal tried all the doors to the locked station wagon. Franny asked him what he needed out of the car and he said, “Something. Mind your own business.” He cupped his hands around his eyes and peered in the window, trying to see whatever it was he wanted.
“I can break in,” Caroline said. “If it’s something you really need.”
“Liar,” Cal said, not bothering to look at her.
“I can,” she said and then she pointed at Jeanette. “Go get me a coat hanger out of the closet.”
It was true. Their father had shown them how that very summer. Their uncle Joe Mike had locked his keys in Aunt Bonnie’s car when they were all at their grandparents’ house that last weekend, and their father had unlocked the door with a coat hanger to save Joe Mike the twelve dollars it would have cost to call a locksmith. After that Fix had both girls practice because they were interested. He said it was a good thing to know.
“The mistake people make is that they think they’re supposed to pull up on something and you’re not, you push down,” he’d told them.
Caroline set about untwisting the wire hanger. That was the hardest part.
“You’re wasting time,” Cal said.
“Whose time?” Holly said. “If you’re in such a hurry then go.” She was curious, and it was plain to all of them that Cal was curious too.
Albie walked in wide circles around the car, swinging his hips from side to side and doing the boom-boom thing.
“Pipe down,” Cal said to him. “If you wake Dad up he’ll take your head off.” That was when the rest of them remembered whose room the car was parked in front of and made a point to be quiet.
Caroline picked back the rubber seal at the bottom of the window with her pointer finger and stuck the coat hanger in while the other children pressed close to watch. Caroline was a little worried that locks might be different from one car to another. The station wagon was an Oldsmobile and Aunt Bonnie’s car was something else, a Dodge maybe. The tip of her tongue pushed up at the corner of her mouth while she guided the coat hanger blindly towards what her father called the sweet spot about ten inches down from the button lock. Then she felt it, the wire against the mechanism of the lock. She didn’t try to hook it though the temptation was there. It was just a little bump and she pushed straight down the way she’d been taught.
The lock popped up.
It was a victory for all the girls that they remembered not to scream. Caroline pulled the coat hanger out and opened the door like it was some sort of natural act. Even Albie put his arms around her waist. “You broke the car!” he said, his loud whisper making him sound like a movie gangster.
“That’s right,” she said and gave him the hanger as the morning’s souvenir. Albie immediately went to the car next to theirs and began jamming the hanger down against the window. Oh, what Caroline wouldn’t have given to call her father from the motel phone! She wanted him to know what a good job she’d done.
Cal took the coat hanger from his brother and studied it in light of this new potential. “You can teach me how to do this?” he said, either to Caroline or the coat hanger.
“Only police officers are allowed to do it,” Franny said. “And their children. Otherwise you’re a criminal.”
“I’d be a criminal,” Cal said. He slid into the front seat of the station wagon, opened the glove compartment. He took out a gun and a fifth of gin, the seal still on.
No one was surprised that there was a gun in the car, even though Cal was the only one who’d known it was there, and he only knew about it because he’d been nosing around in the glove compartment a few days before while Beverly was in the grocery store and he’d found it, proving yet again that sometimes a person just has to look. What surprised all of them though, Cal included, was that Bert had left it in the car. It made them think he must have another gun in his motel room. Bert liked a gun in his briefcase, in the nightstand, in the drawer of his office desk. He liked to talk about the criminals he had put away, and how a person never knew, and how he had to protect his family, and how he wasn’t going to let the other guy make the first move, but really it was just that Bert liked guns.
The mesmerizing item was the gin. The parents might enjoy a drink every now and then but it wasn’t like they had to take it with them. They had never seen gin in the car before. That was something special.
“You know you can’t take it,” Holly said, looking back to the door of the parents’ room. She was talking about both the gun and the gin.