"He knew what you didn't know," Nelson points out. "That he wasn't your real father. And your mother knew it loo."
"She had no idea what he was doing, I'm positive. But it was so much a relief when he died that I blamed myself. It had got to be a secret between us, as if I wanted it too, when I hated it!" Her tears are coming freely now, pent-up, accusing. Nelson squints into the high headlights, trucks and those fucking SUVs, that afflict his eyes from behind and ahead. The traffic is hurrying in both directions toward some disaster, the end of time as they've known it. Annabelle goes the next step, crying, "I felt I'd killed him! Good for me!" Her round face flashes in his rearview mirror, one teary eye meeting his.
"Right," Nelson says calmly. "It really screwed you up with men since, didn't it? How come, do you think, you've never married?"
"Oh stop it!" she protests. "Why do you want me married, why do you care?" She sinks back, sobbing now with a muffled, burbling quality that suggests Billy is comforting her. Nelson can't risk turning his head to look into the back seat; his sensation of a fifth person in the car is so strong he needs to strengthen his grip on the steering wheel.
Billy says, "Great going, Nelson. So that's psychotherapy."
"It helps to get things in the open," he sulkily says. "Then you go from there." He stares ahead. He has always disliked this flat side of Brewer, as opposed to the tilting Mt. Judge side. Serve-yourself gas stations with ranks of pumps, fast-food franchises with plastic mini-playgrounds for obese toddlers, dismal six-store strip malls, carpet and linoleum outlets, vegetable stands boarded up for the winter, cutesy Amish cut-outs beckoning ignorant tourists from the inner cities to Real Pa. Dutch Cuisine. He knows where he is now. If he stays on this new improved 222 a bypass will hurl him right around Brewer southwest toward Lancaster and the Turnpike; instead he turns off, by the mattress warehouse with the Aurora Massage Parlor tucked in behind, on old Route 111, which runs parallel to the river, the silhouette of Mt. Judge far to their right, crowned by the distant lights of the Pinnacle Hotel, where they had been, the four of them, sitting and eating and making polite conversation, a few hours ago. Time does wonders.
Pru says, twisting her head to talk to Annabelle, "So you got pawed. So did I. My father was a crumb-bum, when you think about it. It's not the end of the world." She is tough. Her nose looks sharp as a witch's in profile but he senses her bulk, her body in the shimmery silk dress and rust-brown overcoat, as radiating warmth. Her long hands lie idle in her shadowy lap. He reaches down to adjust the car heat, and his own hand and Pru's knees show similarly pale in the dash-light glow. He remembers how once when she was new to their family she surprisingly comforted him by telling him, Why, honey. I think from what I've seen your parents are quite fond of each other. Couples that have stayed together that long, they must have something.
In the back seat, his sister is sniffling and Billy is saying, "Easy, easy. We're talking ancient history."
The road has stoplights now, and up ahead somebody, a car dealer or club owner, has gone to the expense of renting a bank of spotlights; three of them stir the sky to the limits of the local haze.
"We are passing," Nelson announces in a tour guide's droning tone, "the former site of Springer Motors Toyota Agency, now derelict."
Mom sold the acreage and building to a computer-components company that never took off; a sudden turn in technology left it behind. By inner moonlight Nelson sees the ghosts of his father and himself and Charlie Stavros and Elvira Ollenbach standing at the boarded-up windows looking out at Route 111 for customers that will never come.
"My father's!" Annabelle says, sitting up with a rustle. "I remember. With Jamie. He bought an orange Corolla, eventually."
"It was my mother's, more," Nelson says. "It's sad to see. The company that bought it from her is still in bankruptcy proceedings, ten years later. They've probably forgotten that they own it. I heard a Barnes and Noble was interested, to make a superstore."
The spotlights are a little farther down Route 111, in front of what was once a Planter's Peanuts store and became, added on to, a disco in the Seventies. The tall thin silhouette of Mr. Peanut outside, a twelve-foot billboard, became a nearly nude dancing girl with her naughty parts covered by bubbles, but that was too sexist to last. Now the humanoid shape holds a cowgirl in short white skirt and high white boots advertising PURE COUNTRY MUSIC. Country music keeps coming back. Or is it just slow to go away? The parking lot looks only half full. People with sense are staying home tonight, exhausted by the hype, petrified of fanatic Arabs sneaking in from Canada.
"Hey, Nellie," Billy pipes up. "It's getting close to midnight, and we're nowhere."
"I know, I'm going as fast as I can. If you hadn't got me lost-"
"Did Nelson ever tell you the story," Pru asks Annabelle, "how he lost the agency up his nose?"
"No, not really." Her voice sounds dried out, for now.
"Say, thanks a lot," Nelson complains to his wife.
"Siblings should have no secrets," Pru says, and makes, he knows without looking, that prudish little mouth of hers, as if sucking on something tart. "Nelson wasn't always such a saint."
"He was a pill of a sissy, in fact," Billy contributes, making the fun rougher. "A real little mamma's boy, terrified of his father, who was a pretty nice guy, actually."
"Unlike yours," Nelson tells him. "What a sleazebag."
"Very musical, though," Billy tells Annabelle. "He could play anything, any instrument, by ear."
"Oh, I've always wanted to be able to do that!" she responds, snuggling from the way her voice squeezes down. Does Nelson imagine it, or is there the purr of a zipper being unzipped, that long diagonal zipper on the front of her dress? His sister giggles, and a hand is lightly slapped.
Nelson drives the Corolla through West Brewer. Those new-style icicle lights hang like bright napkins from the little porches of the row houses that slant down to the river and the Weiser Street Bridge. The Bridge has old-fashioned lamp standards, yellow glass balls and iron curlicues going green with age, but the light falls cold and contemporary from tall violet tubes on aluminum stems. At the far end of the bridge sits an upscale coffee bar that used to be a black hangout, Jimbo's Friendly Lounge, before the blacks were chased out of South Brewer by gentrification. Then there unrolls beneath the wheels of the Corolla Brewer's main drag in all its Yuletide glory: the trees rimming Weiser Square are looped with necklaces of white lights, scribbles in three dimensions. The square, an open farmer's market originally, was decades ago blocked to form an ill-advised pedestrian park to revive the downtown, but it turned into a dangerous forest, and by a newer plan has been reopened to automobile traffic. They pass Fourth Street, and the bronze statue of Conrad Weiser in Mohawk headdress in the center of the traffic circle at Fifth Street. Trolley cars used to go east, west, north, and south from this point, to amusement parks and picnic groves. The human traffic thickens; the city fathers have laid on a Millennium Ball in the atrium of the glass-enclosed mall between Fifth and Sixth on the left side of the street, as well as the Christian-rock concert a block up on the right, in the great hole. A dim din penetrates the car windows.
"Hey Nelson," Billy says. "The Sunflower Beer clock says it's midnight! Here it's the millennium and we're all stuck in this little Jap jalopy! Nothing's moving!"