“It’s the leather cleaner I use. They ought to make it into an aftershave. This is a 1954 Bentley Sports Saloon. It was built in England, which is why the steering is on the right. You should have seen it when it came on the lot, it would have made you cry. Restoring these old beauties is my passion, like your aunt’s passion is painting. I love this automobile. Pray God nobody makes me an offer I can’t refuse. Fasten your seat belt. I was required to install them if I planned to drive in traffic. When I was your age, Marcus, nobody dreamed of seat belts in cars. We expected them on airplanes but that was it.” He keyed on the ignition and pulled away from the curb. The engine sound was a discreet, obedient murmur.
As we were driving across the causeway he said, “I’m very sorry about your mother.” (muh-thah) “Charlotte told me about it. But your aunt’s a good person. You can trust her. That doesn’t mean she can’t be provoking sometimes, but we all have our warts. I used to provoke her on a regular basis.”
“How, if it’s not rude to ask?”
“She said I tried to repair people like I do cars. And I nagged her about—certain of her habits. Like not ever picking up the phone. And some other things. Are you looking forward to school?”
“Some parts of it.”
“Which parts are those?”
“Well, I really like studying and learning things. Making friends is the hard part. I had a best friend at my old school, but then Mom and I had to move away and I never found anybody at my next school.”
“What grade will you be in?”
“I’ll be in eighth. I skipped a grade.”
“You’ll like our middle school. My second wife’s daughter went there. She loved it. The kids are friendly. It’s too bad you had to leave your best friend, but my guess is that a new one is already waiting in the wings for you to show up.”
“What happened was, Mom worked in this furniture factory in North Carolina. Then we moved across the state to the mountains and she worked for a small outfit that made custom furniture for people. It was time for us to make a change.” That had been Mom’s and my story after we moved away and I thought it sounded very credible as I told it to Lachicotte Hayes.
“I’ve always been partial to the mountains myself,” he said.
“After I got older and could be on my own, Mom was planning to take the high school equivalency exam and go on to college. She wanted to make something of herself.”
Lachicotte Hayes took some time to mull this over. “I would say she had already made a great deal of herself by bringing you up so well.”
XIII.
It was a subdued Aunt Charlotte that Lachicotte Hayes and I helped into the passenger seat of the Bentley. Gone was her edginess, her gritty independence. It was as though she had hired a stand-in to represent her in the role of the humble invalid who was grateful for any help offered to her by fully-mobile people until she could resume her self-sufficient remoteness.
She had been stoically awaiting us in a chair in her hospital room, dressed in last night’s clothes and sheathed in two serious-looking casts. She looked smaller and defeated. In the other bed was a lady watching a game show with the sound turned up much too loud. But for all that, Aunt Charlotte might have been deaf. I am not actually here, her face said. When the nurse came with the wheelchair, which was “policy,” she allowed herself to be folded into it and wheeled out to Lachicotte’s car. I carried the shiny new walker she had been issued, stowing it beside me on the backseat. By the time Lachicotte got her settled into the Bentley, she had mumbled several half-audible thank-yous without appearing particularly glad to see either of us, though she did call me by name once. Lachicotte didn’t get even that: she called him “you” and I saw her roll her eyes at him once when he attempted to say something optimistic. He helped her fasten her seat belt and told me to fasten mine, and off we went with a swish of tires. In the backseat it sounded like I was riding inside the wind. Lachicotte told Aunt Charlotte we had found me a bike and it would be delivered to the house, along with its accoutrements, later today. “Repay you” was her barely audible reply. These were her only words on the trip home.
Just before we reached the causeway, Lachicotte announced he was going to take a “teeny shoaht-cut” in order to drive by the middle school I would be going to. He cruised slowly around its circular driveway, the Bentley’s reserved engine ticking over, and pointed out where the school bus would unload me. “I used to pick up my second wife’s little daughter from this school and take her to my shop on the days her mother had classes: she was studying to be a psychologist.” The school was a single-story brick building that had been added onto. Its grounds were well kept and there were bright shrubs in bloom. Though Lachicotte had meant well, I felt queasy at the thought of school buses and classrooms and recesses, the whole thing starting over.
“Some days, if I happened to get there a little early,” Lachicotte said, “I would go inside and wander the halls. There’s a school smell that carries you right back: floor polish, metal lockers, chewing gum. I loved my one year in middle school, only back then they called it junior high.”
“Why did you have just the one year?”
“My folks sent me off to boarding school. It was the customary thing. My sister had to go, too, when the time came. She loved her school in Virginia. I about froze to death in New Hampshire. I ended up going to four boarding schools, but each one was farther south so at least I got warmer.”
“Then did you go to college?” I asked.
“I lasted half a year at the College of Charleston. Then I embarked upon my true calling as grease monkey.”
Aunt Charlotte uttered a scornful humpf.
When we got home, I unfolded the walker and with Lachicotte’s assistance she made it up the front stairs and into the kitchen, where she planted herself in a chair and announced she was perfectly all right. “It’s not as though I’ve been permanently damaged,” she said, as if we had inferred she was.
“You might want to consider getting someone in,” suggested Lachicotte. “I could rustle up some names for you, if you like.”
“Marcus and I will manage on our own,” she said firmly. “But thank you, Lash.” It sounded like she was dismissing him and he must have picked up on it because he left, saying to call him if we needed anything.
When he was gone, she said, “Listen, Marcus. I want us to go on as before. You’ll have to put up with the annoyance of my hopping around the house, but other than that things won’t be all that different—except I can’t paint! I may be symmetrically challenged, but I still have a working right leg and left arm. I can dress and undress myself; I can also get myself from one room to another and open and close the refrigerator door.”
“But I want to help. Are you in pain?”
“The painkillers haven’t worn off and I have the rest of the container and a prescription for more if I want them. But I’ll probably tear it up.”
“No, don’t do that.”
“I don’t want to become an addict or anything. Of course you can help, Marcus, but I don’t want you to feel trapped.” Then she laughed, which I thought was a promising sign. “But since you’re here, could you bring me a bottle of wine and a glass? You’ll have to open a new one. I can’t manage the corkscrew. And while you’re at it, you’d better uncork an extra bottle. I think I’ll sleep away the afternoon. Maybe when I wake up, I’ll discover all of this has been a bad dream.”