Then he was wide awake again and listening, for what he wasn’t sure. According to the clock it was just after one. The window closest to the bed had been cracked open a couple inches, and in the unnaturally still Maine night he heard the thunk of a car trunk below. Someone stealing his urns was his first, lunatic thought.
Struggling out of bed, he padded barefoot over to the window and saw a taxi idling in the circular drive. Its driver pulled a suitcase from the trunk and handed it to his fare, a well-dressed young man who gave him some money. Apparently surprised by his generosity, the driver said, “Hey, thanks, pal,” and when the young man turned toward the inn, Griffin smiled, realizing it was Sunny Kim who’d just arrived.
There was stirring behind him now. “Jack? Is everything okay?” Her husky voice was low and intimate in the dark.
Yes, he told her. Everything was fine.
“Good,” said Marguerite.
11 Plumb Some
The night of his daughter’s wedding Griffin had a particularly vivid (no doubt alcohol-and anxiety-induced) dream in which he was driving over the Sagamore Bridge in a pouring rain that made the surface slick and treacherous. The bridge went on forever, and his was the only vehicle on it. Harve, for some reason, was in the backseat, instructing him. You’re never too old to learn to drive, he was saying, in the same tone of voice he used when telling Griffin how to play golf. You just have to keep both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road.
Griffin explained that he already knew how to drive, but Harve paid no attention.
It’s not complicated, he went on. Just the two things to remember: hands on the wheel, eyes on the road. Hell, I taught my three daughters to drive, then both my sons. If those two can learn, so can you.
Harve, Griffin said, listen to me. I already-
Car! his father-in-law shouted, pointing in alarm, and Griffin hit the brake. Immediately the car’s rear end lost traction and came around, which meant, according to the dream’s curious logic, that he was now facing Harve, who was sitting in the backseat and saying, Both hands on the wheel. Griffin braced for impact against one of the bridge’s stone buttresses, but when it came, it was surprisingly gentle, like a boat nosing into a dock.
I just wanted to test your reflexes, Harve explained. Without good reflexes you’ re just an accident waiting to happen.
When Griffin got out to inspect the damage, he saw that the trunk had popped open and both his parents’ urns had ruptured. The trunk was full of their mingled ash, about a hundred urns’ worth, it looked like, and the rain was turning it all to mud.
Now you’ve done it, said Harve, who’d materialized at his elbow. How you going to figure out who’s who?
Rather than contemplate the problem, Griffin woke up.
It was raining out, less hard than in his dream but definitely coming down. The soft dream-collision had been occasioned in the real world by Marguerite getting out of bed. Not quite ready to face a new day, he closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep. Marguerite adored weddings and after yesterday’s she would be, he feared, in one of her best and brightest moods, and he wasn’t sure he could confront either it or her just yet. He sensed her standing there, observing him, probably suspicious, but eventually he heard the bathroom door open and close, and when the shower rumbled on moments later he realized he’d been holding his breath.
“Well, I think it was a lovely wedding,” she told him fifteen minutes later, her first words of the day, as if he’d expressed a contrarian view in his sleep. She was toweling off unself-consciously at the foot of the bed. It was amazing, really, how different she was from Joy, how confident and secure she was in her own naked, glistening skin. Even fully dressed, she always managed to convey that she was patiently waiting for someone to suggest a skinny-dip. Maybe her body wasn’t what it once was, but she remained confident there were men around who desired it and probably would be for quite some time. “Are you going to shower,” she said, “or did you have something else in mind?” That was the other thing. Marguerite loved sex, as fervently as you loved something you’d been denied when you were young and which you were now making up for.
“Shower,” he said, because they had a long drive ahead of them and a task at the end of it-the scattering, finally, of his parents’ ashes-that was unpleasant enough to have wormed its way into his dreams. “How about tonight?”
She was right, though, Griffin thought as he stepped under the burst of hot water. The wedding had been lovely-and, like all events that involved months of intricate planning, over surprisingly quickly. It had gone off without further melodrama, a well-earned blessing, all agreed, after the catastrophic rehearsal. Despite the scratches on her forearms, Laura had been, just as he’d promised her, a heartbreakingly beautiful bride. Drawing on some reserve of optimism that hadn’t been there the night before, she’d given herself over fully to richly deserved joy. Only once, just minutes before the ceremony was to commence, did she allow herself to express any fear. The bridesmaids and groomsmen were lining up at the end of the corridor for the procession, and she and Griffin were cloistered in a small anteroom. He’d told her how lovely she was and how proud he and Joy were of her, and she’d told him he looked very L.A. (he’d found a pair of very dark glasses to cover his still-hideous but not-quite-so-swollen left eye). But when Pachelbel’s Canon leaked into the room, she took a deep breath, looped her arm through his and said, “I don’t want you and Mom to get old.”
It was, of course, her familiar fear-that he and her mother would divorce-now mutated. Either that or, after yesterday, Harve and the various humiliations of old age were on her mind.
After much discussion her grandfather, battered but unbowed, had been allowed to attend the wedding. His doctors were understandably reluctant. Harve’s physical injuries were relatively minor, but the trauma he’d suffered in the hedge wasn’t insignificant, especially for someone his age. At the hospital he’d exhibited signs of confusion and agitation, though the former, according to his children, was normal and the latter occasioned by the possibility he wouldn’t get his way. The physicians finally gave in, on the condition that someone would attend him at all times.
That someone was the redoubtable Dot (damn it!), who’d finally been located down in Portland, where she’d checked into an airport motel with every intention of catching the first flight back to California in the morning. But the family, one sibling after another, had pleaded for her return, and then finally Harve himself got on the phone and told her that she was indispensable to the day’s proceedings, a fairly transparent lie, it seemed to Griffin, but apparently the very one she wanted to hear, and so the twins had been dispatched to Portland to fetch her back up the coast. At the ceremony she seemed to be in reasonably good spirits, and Griffin kept expecting her to come over and apologize for telling him to fuck off, especially since he was the only one in the family who’d showed her the slightest kindness or consideration during what he’d already come to think of as the Ordeal of the Hedge, but she rather pointedly kept her distance, as if to suggest that by correctly diagnosing and sympathizing with her plight he’d assumed responsibility for it.
The ceremony had been performed by a Unitarian minister, a friend of Andy’s family, and Joy needn’t have worried about there being too many religious overtones, because this fellow seemed utterly unencumbered by liturgical obligation. He clearly fancied himself a comedian, though, and used those parts of the service that might otherwise have been given over to prayer to relive the more memorable moments of the rehearsal dinner, which he himself had not attended but obviously had been briefed on. While the smattering of nervous laughter that his attempts at humor occasioned couldn’t have been terribly gratifying, he’d soldiered on, his faith in his own comic talent apparently as deep and unshakable as his belief in the Almighty. When he described for the edification of those who’d been present that the bride’s grandfather had had to be removed from a Venus-flytrap hedge by means of a chain saw, Harve, hearing himself alluded to, loudly asked, his voice still raspy from yesterday’s bellowing, “Who the hell is this guy?”