“I know, I know. We were just thinking about you, that’s all.”
“Is Mom there by any chance?”
“No, hon, she’s at work. What can I do for you?”
There was a hint of a sigh. She would have to deal with me. “Would I be able to have the car tonight? Because I’ve got a bunch of things to do, and I need to go to the mall, and then I have to do some research for this essay, and-”
“Guess what. I bought a car today.”
A hesitation. “Oh my God, are you serious? Like, not to replace the Camry, but a second car?”
“That’s right.”
“That’s so awesome! What did you get?”
“Listen, why don’t I drive down and show it to you? I’ll give you a lift home.”
“Sure, I guess.”
“Now, I have to warn you, you may not like it. The car has not been unanimously endorsed by members of this household.” I glared at Paul, who had reached into the fridge, grabbed a beer bottle, and was miming the act of opening it, looking at me for approval. I shook my head.
“Oh well, as long as it’s got wheels,” she said, and told me to pick her up in front of Galloway Hall at 5:30 P.M., when her last tutorial of the day would be over.
I hung up the phone and barely had time to tell Paul to put the beer back into the fridge when the phone rang again. It was Sarah.
“This retreat thing starts early tomorrow morning,” Sarah said. “So the paper’s paying for a room at the conference center so we can go tonight, be ready to start fresh in the morning, instead of having to get up before dawn and driving an hour and a half.”
“Great,” I said.
“So I’m getting out of here now, gonna come home and throw some stuff in a bag, have a quick bite to eat, and then Bev, you know her? The foreign editor?”
“Yeah.”
“Bev’s being sent to this thing, too, so she’s going to pick me up around six and we’re going to head up.” It was already a little past four.
“If you’re here by five,” I said, “I’ll see you, but I’ve promised Angie I’d pick her up at five-thirty. I’ll get some dinner started.”
I had some pork tenderloin in a mushroom gravy going when Sarah got home at four forty-five. She dropped herself into one of the kitchen chairs.
“I saw the car,” she said. “In the drive.”
I waited.
“It’s kind of cute,” she said.
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, it should do us. Although I looked all around it and couldn’t find the outlet where you plug it in.”
“That joke’s really running out of gas.”
“Hey, that’s a good one,” Sarah said. “I have to say, it’s perfect for Angie getting back and forth to school.”
“Paul hates it,” I said.
Sarah shrugged. You reach a point when you stop worrying about what your teenagers hate.
I called Paul to dinner, setting out three plates, and making up a fourth and covering it with plastic wrap for Angie to eat later. I stood and ate by the sink, Paul grabbed his plate and went to the basement, leaving Sarah the only one to actually sit at the kitchen table to eat her meal. But because she had to be ready to leave in a little more than an hour, she shoveled it down like a teenager.
“Guess who was prowling around the backyard when I got home,” I said.
Sarah glanced over, one cheek puffed out with pork tenderloin. “Urmff?” she said.
“Trevor Wylie.”
“Hmmff?”
“That’s right.” I filled her in on the conversation Lawrence and I had had with the boy. The dog named Morpheus. The satellite program, the six-pack in the backyard.
Sarah drank some water to clear all the food from her mouth. “I don’t know,” she said. “He does sound a bit weird, but lots of kids are like that, they grow out of it. He’s probably harmless.”
“You should meet him yourself.”
“Remember when you were first interested in me, and I lived out on Highway 74, and you came around one night, planning to call up to my window, but when you climbed the fence, you snagged your pants-”
“I know the story.”
“-you snagged your pants as you were coming over the other side, and you kept going but your pants got left behind?”
“I don’t see-”
“And my dad heard the racket and went out to investigate, and there you were in your Jockeys?”
I suffered a moment with the memory, then said, “The difference is, you were interested in me, but Angie’s not interested in Trevor.”
“Actually, at the time, I wasn’t interested in you.”
“You weren’t?”
“Not really. But you kind of grew on me. And it took a lot of convincing for my dad to accept a guy he’d first found standing in our backyard in his skivvies.”
“I think you have some of the details wrong. I was wearing a tuck-in shirt that had long tails front and back, so you could hardly even see my shorts.”
Sarah nodded. “I think you’re right. You were the picture of dignity.”
“So you’re saying finding Trevor in our backyard isn’t that big a deal?”
“Did he have his pants on?”
“Yes.”
“Well then, he’s one up on you, isn’t he?”
I finished the last bite of my dinner, rinsed off the plate in the sink and left it sitting in there. This didn’t seem like a good time to tell Sarah about the course of action I was contemplating for after dinner.
“I have to go,” I said. I gave Sarah a kiss. She said she would leave a note on the counter with the details of where she was going to be for the next two days.
“And you can always get me on my cell,” she said, and I ran out the door. Sarah’s Camry was parked behind our new Virtue, so I did some driveway car juggling so I could take the new one to show Angie.
Traffic heading back downtown toward the university was light, and I was down there in about fifteen minutes. It was a nice evening, so I opened the sunroof and occasionally raised the fingers of my right hand into the passing breeze.
What I’d forgotten was that to pull up in front of Galloway Hall meant paying a parking entrance fee to enter the system of roads within the university grounds. I protested to the gatekeeper who handed me my ticket.
“I’m just picking someone up,” I said.
He looked at me with dull eyes. He’d heard this lament before. “If you’re back within five minutes, there’s no charge.”
Given that I’d shown up ten minutes earlier than Angie had asked me to be there, it looked like I was going to be out the five. Slowly, I drove onto the grounds and past the stately, vine-covered buildings. The Virtue, with its little sewing-machine motor, barely made a sound as I wound my way through the narrow, some of them cobblestone, streets.
I found Galloway Hall and a curbside spot a short ways down from it. Angie wouldn’t know what car to look for, so I got up and leaned against our new wheels, keeping an eye on the building’s front door.
Fifteen minutes later, Angie appeared. She spotted me, waved, and walked my way. She gave me a somewhat tentative hug and then stood back to look at the car.
“I like it,” she said.
“Tell your brother,” I said.
“Oh, ignore him. So, I can use this for school?”
“Not every day, but probably when you need it.”
“Can I drive it?” She was doing a circle around the car. As I watched her, I felt, as I so rarely do, at ease, relaxed even. She was here, in front of me, safe, far from Trevor, and looking so grown up as she checked out the vehicle.
I tossed her the keys and she got behind the wheel. I settled in next to her. Angie had slipped the key into the ignition and was familiarizing herself with the controls. “Lights, radio-CD player?”
“Looks like it,” I said.
“And a sunroof! I love a sunroof. We’ve never had a car with a sunroof.”
Angie turned the key, tilted her head, puzzled. “I don’t hear anything,” she said. “Is it on?”
“It’s on, don’t worry about it. Just put it in gear and go.”