“OK. Second, I understand I need to be in New Mexico on Sunday morning at eight.”
“That’s correct.” Kevin again.
“OK. Now you know what that entails, right? Today is Wednesday. I have no wiggle room. If I get a flat tire, blow a gasket, hit some traffic, that deadline might be threatened. I’m not making excuses. I intend to be there, but it’s a very close call.”
“We know,” said Kevin. “We’re going too.”
“Excuse me?”
“We’re going too. The reason I’m late this morning is I had to go pick up the motor home. The oxygen company is coming over later. We’re going to fill the Winnebago with tanks and head to New Mexico as soon as you guys are finished tonight. Mom can’t fly. We’ll meet you there Sunday morning.”
“Really? You two are quite a pair. Can I ask why it has to be Sunday?”
Kevin looked over at his silent mother. “You can ask. We’ve all asked. She won’t say. When Dad died yesterday, all she said was ‘Let’s go. We can be there by Sunday.’ She’s a force of nature. I don’t recommend trying to thwart her.”
“I’ve no intention of trying to thwart her. My job is to do whatever your mom wants me to do. The job was explained to me last night by Mr. Joyce. I’m on your team on this. We’re partners.”
“That’s very nice to hear.”
“You know it’s probably illegal to transport that much oxygen in a Winnebago?”
“We already researched it, Mr. Finn,” chimed in Mrs. McMahon. “It’s so illegal we’re not telling the oxygen company. They’re going to put the tanks in the garage. I was going to ask you to get your guys to load them into the camper. Will you do that?”
“We’ll do that. I’ve got straps and tie-downs. We’ll figure out a way to keep them from shifting. I’m going to start the packing in the dining room, Mrs. McMahon. I like to pack the high-value items myself. Mr. Joyce said something about Indian artifacts. Can we go in there and look things over?”
“You go in with Kevin. He can explain. I’ll be right along. It takes me a while to get anywhere.”
Kevin and I walked across the house to the dining room. He looked at me and smiled a sad smile. “She’s not crazy, you know.”
“No, she’s not. I think she’s wonderful.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve no idea how much better I feel hearing that from you. She is wonderful. Her body is falling apart, but her mind and her will are spot on. I really don’t know why everything needs to be done in such a hurry. I think it has to do with this stuff.” Kevin indicated the dining room. Every wall was filled with pottery shards. Some were in the shapes of animals, some were jars, some plates, some looked like toys. There were thousands of them. “My father was an archaeologist. He went to New Mexico for his postdoc and hooked up with a native group around the Four Corners. You never met my dad, but he was as remarkable as my mom. The Indians trusted him. He went back to UConn for a couple years, but he found his home and his calling in New Mexico. I grew up there, and Dad worked with the Indians. He set up a system for their artifacts. He got rid of the thieves and the rogue traders. Some of their good stuff goes for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Back in the seventies people were just stealing everything.”
“What’s all this stuff here?”
“Junk. There’s not an unbroken item in this collection. There are places in the desert where it’s piled in heaps. Dad didn’t care if they were broken. He knew what the designs meant and what the purpose was, and that was what was important to him. He was never what you would call a collector of artifacts. He hated collectors. When he got sick he felt he had to move back to Connecticut. My aunts are here, the hospital is here. Of course Mom didn’t want to go, but she did. They’ve only been here two months. We’ve got boxes from the first move in the basement still untouched. Dad was in chemo, and Mom can barely breathe in this humidity. They never settled in. Mom, as you know, has no intention of settling in.”
“What about you, Kevin? Can you just drop everything and do this?”
“Well, I am dropping everything. I’ve got three young kids at home, and it’s summer vacation. My wife’s been great, but this—this move today, delivering Sunday, driving Mom across the country in a camper loaded with illegal oxygen—has flipped her out. She thinks my mom is being overbearing and selfish.”
Mrs. McMahon lurched into the room, heaving and wheezing on her walker. “What’s my son been telling you about me? That I’m an overbearing, selfish old woman?”
I smirked at her. “It’s not always about you, Mrs. McMahon. Kevin was telling me about the artifacts. My scientific interest is limited, to be honest. I’m a mover. I care about transporting stuff safely. When I pack dishes and art objects, I’m supposed to write an inventory of existing damage. So if there’s a chip in a Waterford glass before I pack it, I make a note so I don’t have to pay a damage claim at the other end. How do I write up this stuff? You could claim I broke it all and sue the van line for fifty million dollars.”
Mrs. McMahon gave me a steely stare. “I don’t want fifty million dollars, Mr. Great White Finn. Fifty million dollars sounds like a whole lot of trouble. What I really want is to be able to breathe. In fact, if I could breathe I’d give you fifty million dollars.”
“Do you have fifty million dollars?”
“No. Unfortunately, I have fifty million pieces of clay from Indian garbage mounds. Want one?”
“No thanks.”
“You’re not into objects either. I can tell. Neither am I. This was my husband’s stuff.”
“Moving other people’s things for twenty years has pretty much cured me of acquisitiveness, Mrs. McMahon. I don’t own much, and I don’t even know where that is half the time.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to get this house empty today and be in New Mexico by Sunday.”
“That’s all?”
“Right now, that’s all.”
“What about later?”
“Later? In my view, Mrs. McMahon, American culture underrates the value of short-term goals. We can talk about other goals in New Mexico. After we’re unloaded you can serve me cold Coronas and we’ll talk about life, the universe, and everything. Right now we’re running your train, and you said the house must be empty today. I think you’re losing focus.”
“Touché, Mr. Mover. They’ve all been waiting for me to lose focus, but my body’s going to give way before my brain.”
“Jeez. You and Willie Joyce must have got on like blood brothers. You’re cut from the same cloth.”
“Mr. Joyce and I share certain surface characteristics. We’re overweight and intelligent. My interests are broader, however. I’d like to put my brain in that gorgeous black man’s body over there. Then you’d see some focus.”