He stared at my outstretched hand as if he didn’t know what to do with it, then suddenly turned and picked up the handle of the trunk. When he turned back to me, the charming smile was gone. His face was flushed, his eyes were blazing, and his mouth was drawn tight in a look of undisguised fury.
“Frankly,” he said as he began to move away from us with long strides, “I expected more of you.”
Stunned, it took me a moment to find my voice, and then all I could manage was “Travis?”
But he was almost out of the room by then.
“Travis!” I called out.
He stopped and said, “Forget it. And don’t try to follow me.”
Everyone in the place was staring at us by then. The librarian said, “I don’t understand-”
“They’re family,” Rachel said, as if that explained everything. She took hold of my elbow and began steering me out the front door.
“He’s not going anywhere,” she said calmly, moving toward the parking lot.
“In the mood he’s in, he just might back over your sedan,” I said.
“Naw,” Rachel said. “That pickup truck looked new. And he won’t want to mess up that purple paint job.”
“You don’t know-”
We heard a loud bang.
“-the Maguires,” I finished, just before we heard the second bang.
12
Rachel’s legs are a little longer than mine, but I do a lot of running, so I was around the corner of the building first. Travis was stepping out of the pickup, looking shaken. Rachel started shouting in Italian-what I understood of it made me pray all other Italians were out of earshot. But anyone who didn’t speak the language could read the gestures.
The right front side of the car was not looking good. The wheel stood at a crazy lopsided angle, antifreeze was puddling onto the asphalt, and the headlamp was history. The pickup had surprisingly little damage. Its rear bumper was scraped and dented.
Travis stared at the car and his truck, as if he had only just awakened and found unexpected chaos. Rachel bounded over to him and grabbed him by the shirt collar, shoved him off balance and smacked his back up hard against the camper shell.
“No! Don’t hurt him!” I shouted. She gave me a sharp look that said I just might be next, but let him go. She turned away from him, put her hands on top of her head, clenched her teeth and closed her eyes tightly, as if trying to contain an explosion.
He slumped a little, but otherwise didn’t move. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m terribly sorry. I’ll pay for the damage.”
She opened her eyes. “You’re goddamned right you will!”
“I will! I will! Every cent. And I’ll-I’ll take you wherever you need to go-rent a car for you. Whatever is necessary. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”
I could have told him that I knew what came over him and that it runs in the family, but just then Ms. Galvan opened the back door of the library. “Oh, no!” she said. “Is anyone hurt?”
“No, no one is hurt,” I said. “We were in such a rush, afraid we’d miss my cousin. We stupidly left the car here and of course Travis-er, Cosmo-didn’t see it.” Rachel was glaring at me, but I went on. “Is there a good body shop nearby?”
Throughout the process of arranging for the car to be towed, nobody seemed to want to do much talking. Travis was still shaken, and didn’t make much eye contact with me. I was fine with avoidance. I certainly didn’t want to follow up this scene with the news I had to give him.
Rachel was probably thinking about that, too. Even though he had just battered her car, she seemed to make an effort to be friendly.
This began while we followed the tow truck to the body shop; on the way over, she apologized for being rough with him, and asked if she had hurt him. He shook his head.
“No? Well, you’re either made of steel or you’ll be feeling it later.”
He smiled and said, “I’m not made of steel.”
She laughed.
At the body shop, Travis looked over the loaner cars and told the shop owner that he would rent something for Ms. Giocopazzi elsewhere. It was decided that elsewhere would be in Las Piernas; if we were up in Los Angeles much longer, we’d hit the evening rush hour. Evening rush hour is also about four hours long. Travis offered to drive us home. “I’ll buy you a late lunch there, too,” he said, although only to her. “It’s the least I can do.”
We got into the pickup, all of us in the front seat. Rachel took the middle. Before starting the engine, Travis curled his fingers tightly on the steering wheel, leaned over and spoke directly to me for the first time since trying to take leave of me in the library.
“How much?” he asked.
“How much what?”
“Look, your friend Ms. Giocopazzi is being very decent about all of this, so I owe it to her to at least hear you out. You might not get what you came for, and I’m sad to see that Patrick Kelly’s children aren’t as proud as he was-not that I ever had any great admiration for your stiff-rumped old man, but at least he did have pride.”
I swallowed a little of mine along with a retort about someone else’s admirable old man and said, “Forgive me, Travis, but I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“How much?” he demanded.
Rachel said, “Travis.”
He looked at her.
“You’re about to make a Clydesdale-sized horse’s ass out of yourself- for the second time in less than two hours. It’s kinda amusing to me, because your cousin here gets herself in trouble the same way you do-she’s a hothead, too.”
“I’ll fight my own fights, thank you very much,” I said.
“See what I mean?” she went on. “But what I’m trying to tell you is, Irene isn’t here for your money.”
“Is that what you thought?” I said to him, outraged. “You thought I came up here to borrow money? From someone I haven’t seen in over twenty years? Of all the-”
“Irene-” Rachel said.
“If it’s true that you aren’t after money,” Travis said, “then I’m sorry. Perhaps I jumped to a conclusion.”
“No perhaps about it,” I said.
“Then why are you here?”
I hesitated. “Because-”
“Not now,” Rachel said firmly. To Travis, she said, “Drive us back to Las Piernas. You know where Mary Kelly lives?”
He thought for a moment. “Irene’s great-aunt? The one who drives the Mustang?”
“Yes.”
“Not exactly. I haven’t seen her in over a dozen years. Is she the one who needs money?”
“For godsakes,” I said, “nobody wants your damned money.”
“You couldn’t be more wrong about that,” he said.
“Well, Aunt Mary doesn’t. I don’t. Rachel doesn’t want more of it than will be needed to fix her car.”
“Mary asked Irene to find you,” Rachel said, holding a hand up to silence me. “It wasn’t easy, and-well, I think we should go to Las Piernas, to Mary’s house, and we can explain it there.”
“All right,” he said, starting the motor. “But now you’ve really piqued my curiosity.”
That was enough to shut me up. At least for a few minutes. Until Travis said, “Rachel, Irene did warn you that you’re accepting a ride from the bastard son of a murdering bigamist?”
“Oh, for pitysakes-” I began, but Rachel elbowed me.
“I’ve heard something of the family history,” she admitted. “Maybe I should hear your version, though.”
He smiled again. “I’ll warn you ahead of time-I’m a liar. Being my father’s son, what else could you expect-right, Irene? That’s why I went into storytelling-a gratifying way to use my natural abilities.”
I thought of taking a different tack, of telling him how much we had enjoyed watching his storytelling performance, but I saw him look over at me, trying to see if he had riled me. There was something smug about that look. I started watching cars again.