I knew the moment I said it, it was not a good thing to say. We don’t talk that way to each other. I think we both try to be as gentle with each other and the girls as we can. Cindy has a special aversion to sarcasm, which, as she has told me many times, especially after one of her mother’s visits, she considers “the lowest form of humor.”
And now I couldn’t bear that look in her eyes. I stepped back and put my arms around her and pulled her up against me. “I’m sorry, baby. I just . . .”
She rubbed her hand around in a circle between my shoulder blades. “Not enough sleep and an upset stomach, I know. Let’s forget about a barbecue today.”
“I’ll be fine,” I told her. “I really do want Pops to get a little sunshine before it’s gone for the year.”
“You’re going to end up making yourself even sicker.”
“I’m a big boy,” I told her, and I kissed the side of her head.
“A big stubborn baby,” she said, but she gave me another squeeze before she let go and turned back to the kitchen.
The yard that day seemed twice as big as usual. I kept wanting to turn the lawn tractor out onto the sidewalk, and keep on going until there was nowhere left to go.
While I was mowing and dreaming of driving straight into the ocean, Cindy called Pops to remind him about the barbecue and ask what time he wanted to come over. And Pops, being Pops, said something like, “Let me have my secretary check the schedule. I know I have a board meeting at eleven, I address Congress at twelve, and from one to two I’m supposed to go skinny-dipping with Lucy Liu. But I can put those off until tomorrow, especially for some of Russell’s burned spareribs.”
Cindy thought Pops was hilarious. He never made fun of other people, only himself. And sometimes politicians and actors and millionaire athletes. But the real people, as he called the rest of us, he left alone.
Anyway, they decided on 3:00 p.m., and Cindy talked him out of driving over himself, said it would be a waste of gas since I had to go right past his place anyway to pick up a few things from the store. “And of course,” Cindy told me, “he argued that it would be a waste of even more gas for you to drive the whole way over there when he could go to the store himself.”
I hadn’t noticed any major problems with his driving skills up till then except for the slowness and a tendency to drift to the right, which he blamed on the Lumina being out of alignment, but Cindy has always been very protective of him and seems to worry about him even more than I do. And the thing about Pops is, if a man asks him to do something, Pops will argue until kingdom come, but if a woman asks, he’s eventually going to end up doing whatever she wants.
So after I showered and made a quick stop at Giant Eagle, I went to pick him up—and there he was waiting on the bench out front of Brookside, exactly like I knew he would be. He climbed in and buckled up, and I said, “Lucy Liu, Pops?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t think she’s a beautiful woman.”
“I never said that.”
“Name a woman more beautiful than her.”
“I don’t know. Maybe, uh . . .”
“Don’t even try, son. It’s an exercise in futility.”
Being around Pops always made me feel better. All day long my head had felt like it was being squeezed in a vise, while at the same time it was swelling from the inside out. But now, for the first time in forty-eight hours, the pressure let up a little bit.
There was something about Pops’ attitude, I guess, even when he wasn’t saying anything. I mean there he was almost eighty years old, and still wearing the sleeves of his T-shirt rolled up so as to show off his biceps. Within an hour he’d be doing one-handed push-ups in the yard with one of the girls riding on his back. I used to marvel at the way he’d make a speed bag sing. He was the toughest old bird I knew, and yet the softest when it came down to his family. I guess it’s fair to say he was everything I wanted to be, but now believed I never could. Even if I gave the money back, I would always be a thief. I would be like the glass deer I broke and then glued back into place. Maybe nobody else ever noticed the damage, but I always knew it was there. And I was always worried that sooner or later somebody else would see it too.
On the way out of town I played with the idea of telling him everything. But then he said, “You get that furniture moved around out in the unit?”
I nodded, because I couldn’t bear to lie to him out loud. “There’s your key in the console,” I told him. “Thanks a lot.”
“Is there enough room for your bike?”
“Plenty,” I said.
“Things must be going pretty good at the plant if you’re thinking about getting a car.”
“Real well,” I told him. Then, “Hey, by the way, do me a favor and don’t mention anything about a new car to Cindy. I was going to surprise her with the idea, but in fact I’m having second thoughts about putting the bike away so early. I can’t let one little skid spook me into not riding. Not with at least two more months of good riding left.”
“It’s not the skid that’s important, though. It’s those babies of yours.”
“I know, Pops. I know.”
I could feel him looking at me a couple of times, but he didn’t say anything more.
Then I saw the Get-Go up ahead, and that’s when I decided I couldn’t wait until later to satisfy my curiosity. I had planned to run past the naked girl’s house after I took Pops home that night, but it would be dark by then and besides I would probably be half-crazy with nervousness wondering if the place had gotten busted or not.
So I flipped my turn signal on and said, “You mind if we take the scenic route home?”
“As long as you can keep it to a minimum,” he said. “Too much scenery might throw me into a seizure of some kind.”
Not only was there no police tape around the little house, but the windows weren’t blacked out now, and the pit bull was chained up closer to the house and sleeping in the shade by the front steps. It didn’t make any sense to me.
Pops said, “What are you slowing down for? You’re driving like me now.”
“This is where I almost lost it on the bike. Car pulled out in front of me.”
“Out of that driveway?”
“That’s the one. You have any idea who lives in that place?”
“Somebody who needs a couple of driving lessons, is all I know. What kind of car was it?”
“To be honest with you, Pops, I don’t even remember. I hit the brakes and started fishtailing. By the time I got the bike straightened out, the car was long gone.”
“Well,” he said, looking out at the trees now, “let’s hope this little excursion past the scene of the crime has exorcised your demons.”
We were still a couple of miles from home when I said to him, “Hey, you know what I all of sudden remembered when I was out in your unit yesterday? Those times you took me shooting in the dump.”
Pops smiled and looked out the window. “That old dump’s long gone now. Some fella put a motel or something up along the edge of that ravine.”
“Bed and breakfast,” I told him. “Built to look like a little English castle. You can’t even tell it’s all modular construction. Went up in four days.”
“Probably took longer than that to clean out the dump.”
“Probably did.” I let a few seconds pass. “Hey, whatever happened to that gun we used? That old revolver.”