58
They were staying home on New Year’s Eve for the first time in the twenty-eight years since they’d met. Last year all they’d done was drive to the McGuires’ to watch the Times Square telecast, but at least they’d left the house. This year she couldn’t face all the work involved in getting him out. She knew she’d spend the whole night minding him and wouldn’t have any fun.
New Year’s, being the anniversary of the night they met, meant extra to them. When they lived in Jackson Heights, they’d go to balls, Ed in a tux, she in a shimmering gown with pearls. She’d rush around in her slip, blow-drying her hair and applying makeup, and come up short when she saw Ed wrapped in a towel, staring into the mirror as he shaved. They’d leave Connell with Brenda Orlando and come back very late. She’d be contentedly exhausted the next morning as she got the three of them out to Mass.
She sat at the kitchen table in her housecoat and slippers, her hair pulled back in a plastic clip. Connell sat across from her, reading the sports pages.
“What are you doing for New Year’s?”
“Going to a party with Cecilia.”
“Where is it?”
“Somewhere in White Plains. I don’t know.”
“How were you planning to get there?”
“I thought I’d take Dad’s car.”
“Have you asked him yet?”
“I didn’t think I had to. I thought you were staying home.”
Something in his tone irked her. “We were,” she said. “But I’ve changed my mind. I think I’d like us to go out as a family.”
“I have plans.”
“The three of us are going to go to dinner. You can go out after that.”
“I’m supposed to eat with Cecilia and her parents before the party.”
“You’ll simply call her and tell her you’ll see her later.”
“Whatever. Fine.”
Connell left the room in a huff. She called to Ed in the den and told him to go shower. She went up and laid out a sports coat, dress shirt, tie, and neatly pressed pair of pants for him. She put on an evening gown and zipped the plastic sheath off her mink.
? ? ?
It was snowing out. The Caprice was in the driveway, blocking her car in the garage. Ed headed for the driver’s side door. She pulled on his arm.
“You have your car key?” she asked Connell.
“Yes.”
“You drive. Your father and I are tired.”
There was no way she was letting Ed drive in this weather. Even when it was perfect out, lately he gave her a heart attack any time he was behind the wheel. Backing out of the driveway once, he’d hit the stone wall, torn off the side-view mirror, and dragged an ugly streak down the length of the car. Outside church, he’d have run over an old lady in the crosswalk if Eileen hadn’t shouted and thrown her arm across his chest. She’d been trying to think of a way to take his car away from him without turning him against her. She didn’t want to be the one to tell him that that part of his life was over. She couldn’t just take away his keys or sell the car, but she couldn’t just let him crash it either. Someone could end up dead. Ed could end up dead. She would have to figure something out soon.
Connell hopped in. Ed got in the shotgun seat, she in the back. She watched him fumble with the belt buckle until Connell reached over and snapped it in.
Connell turned to her. “Where are we going?”
“Surprise us. Take us to the city. Someplace you like to go.”
“You wouldn’t like the places I go,” he said. “Diners. Pizzeria Uno. I went to the Hard Rock Café once. Ed Debevic’s. You’d hate that place.”
“Just drive. I’ll tell you where.”
The snow was heavier than she’d expected. The roads had iced over. Connell drove carefully, gripping the wheel with both hands. At one point he slid a couple of car lengths and stopped just before he hit a hedgerow-lined stone wall.
“We’d better not risk it,” he said. “We can go out in the neighborhood. The Tap. Town Tavern.”
“Keep driving,” she said. “You’ll be fine.”
“Tumbledown Dick’s.”
“We’re going downtown,” she said firmly.
“Buckle up, please,” he said.
She saw him glancing in the rearview mirror. “You just worry about the road,” she said. When he looked away, she fastened the buckle.
He crawled for another block before he lost control of the Caprice again. They slid a good distance and bounced, hard, off a BMW parked in the street.
The seat belt was squeezing her ribs; she got it unbuckled. Adrenaline made her feel as if she’d touched an electric outlet. “Everyone all right?” Ed looked shocked, but he wasn’t hurt. Connell was fine. So was she.
When she got out, she saw the other car’s rear end had been demolished, along with most of the front of the Caprice.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Connell said.
“Watch that low-class language,” she snarled, and then she softened her tone. “Oh, hell. ‘Shit’ is right.”
She picked her way carefully around the car, holding on as she walked from passenger-side door to the front fender, which was smashed into the wheel well. The frame on the chassis had buckled where it met the door. Ed sat shivering in the car, his hand fishing for the door handle.
“I knew I shouldn’t have driven,” Connell said.
“It’s not going to open, Ed!” she yelled, and shook her head at him. She turned to Connell. “Do you think it’s drivable?”
“It looks pretty bad,” he said. The right front wheel was bent sideways as if kneeling toward the snowy ground. Connell scratched his ear. “I don’t know how the wheel got so bent. I wasn’t going fast.”
“I’d say it’s done, wouldn’t you? A car this old?”
“Probably.”
“Go up there, tell them what happened. Ask them to call the police.” She pointed toward a house, atop a mound and recessed from the street, that looked like a mansion.
She slid into the driver’s seat and reached across Ed—who was slapping at the top of his head with the grim determination of a mortifier of the flesh—into the glove compartment. She pulled out the envelope they’d used for years. It said “Insurance and Registration” in Ed’s old handwriting. It was hard to imagine the man who now communicated in thunderous block letters writing in this fluent script.
She watched Connell disappear with the paperwork up the sloping stairs and started the car. The light from the one working headlamp diffused into the snow and reflected off the mangled BMW. She blasted the heat. When Ed reached to turn it off—it had to be unconscious, the force of habit, because no one, not even him, could be that absurd—she smacked his hand away and turned it up again.
? ? ?
She and the boy stood in the snow waiting for the tow truck to arrive. Ed was in the car.
“What a disaster,” Connell said. “This is going to be expensive.”
She’d fought endlessly with Ed over keeping collision on the Caprice. Time and again she’d said it was a waste of money on a ten-year-old car, but Ed had insisted.
“Maybe not as expensive as it looks. Anyway, that’s what insurance is for.”
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
“Nobody got hurt,” she said. “Nobody died. Cars can be replaced.” Or not, she thought. She felt a hint of a smile cross her lips but stifled it. “Well,” she said under her breath. “That’s one way to get rid of a car.”
“What’d you say?”
“I said, ‘That’s one way to ring in the New Year.’?”
“Happy New Year,” he said glumly.
“Happy New Year.”