“She’s been on the Cape since yesterday. She’s in the wedding party, remember?”
Well, now that he thought about it, he did. “I’ll call her when I get to the B and B,” he promised.
“Good. She could use some reassuring.”
“About what?”
“She can’t understand why we’re arriving in separate cars. Explain that to her, will you? Then she can explain it to me.”
Griffin sighed. He’d succeeded in deflecting Joy from her purpose by complaining about his mother, but now they’d circled back. Best to get it over with and apologize. “I should’ve waited for you,” he admitted, pausing a beat before adding, “ Boston wasn’t much fun without you.” And, when she still didn’t say anything, “I meant to spite you and ended up spiting myself… Are you still there?”
“I’m here.”
“I hope you aren’t waiting for me to humble myself further, because that’s all I’ve got for you.”
“No,” she said. “That should do it.”
By the time Griffin drove back down the Cape and checked into the B and B, it was nearly noon. He brought his travel bag and satchel up to the room, leaving the trunk empty except for his father’s ashes. He’d passed a couple of peaceful, secluded spots, but there’d been a brisk breeze, and he feared that when he opened the urn a strong gust might come up and he’d be wearing his father. Also, he’d feel less self-conscious saying a few words in his memory if there was someone besides himself to hear them, so he decided to wait for Joy.
His father had died of a massive embolism the previous September, and the circumstances were nothing if not peculiar. He’d been found in his car in a plaza on the Mass Pike. Like most rest stops, this one had a huge parking lot, and his father’s car was on the very perimeter, far from other vehicles. It was unclear how long it had been there before someone noticed him slumped over in the passenger seat, his head resting against the window. Except for the trickle of blood, dried and crusty, below his left nostril, he might have been taking a nap. But why wasn’t he behind the wheel? The glove box was open. Had he been rummaging around in it, looking for something? On the backseat the road atlas was open to Massachusetts, with Griffin ’s phone number scrawled on the top of the page. The key was in the ignition in the ON position. The car had apparently run out of gas there in the lot.
“Must’ve been coming to see you,” the young cop said when Griffin arrived on the scene to identify his father.
“It’s possible,” Griffin told him.
“He didn’t mention it, though? Coming to visit?”
Griffin said no, that it’d been a good six months since he’d seen him and almost as long since they’d spoken on the phone.
“That normal?”
He wasn’t sure what this fellow was getting at. Normal for them, or normal for other adult fathers and sons?
“I mean, you didn’t get along?” the cop said. He seemed less suspicious than saddened to consider the possibility that over time his relationship with his own dad might similarly devolve.
“We got along fine.”
“It just seems… I don’t know. What do you make of the fact that he was in the passenger seat?”
“I have no idea,” Griffin said, though that wasn’t true. The inference to be drawn was inescapable. He’d been in the passenger seat because someone else had been driving. All his life he’d stopped for pretty hitchhikers, a habit that had infuriated Griffin ’s mother. “Better me than somebody else,” he always argued, lamely. “The next guy might be a pervert.” (At this she’d roll her eyes. “Yeah, right. The next guy.”) The other possible explanation was that he’d talked one of his coeds into making the trip with him. Though he’d retired the year before, the university still allowed him to teach one seminar each fall. More than once he’d let on to Griffin that girls at Christian schools like this one were often interested in exploring a more secular approach to life and love, if this could be done discreetly. Boys their own age offered neither experience nor discretion. It had been a woman, possibly a young woman, Griffin learned from the cop, who’d made the anonymous call to the state police about the man slumped over in his car in the rest-stop parking lot.
It was unconscionable he’d waited so long to dispose of his father’s ashes, Griffin thought as he unpacked, hanging his suit in the closet and placing his shaving kit in the tiny bathroom. He should have made a special trip to the Cape last fall. His father had left a will but no instructions on where he wished to spend eternity. But on the drive back home from the turnpike plaza, Griffin had come to what had seemed an obvious conclusion. His father hadn’t been on his way to see him and Joy, since if he’d meant to pay them an unannounced visit he would’ve gotten off the pike at the previous exit. No, he was headed for the Cape. Griffin advanced that theory to his mother when he called to tell her what had happened. “His suitcase was packed with summer clothes,” he told her. “He had two big tubes of sunblock.”
She hadn’t answered right away, which made him wonder if she was trying to compose herself. “I could have told him he’d never make it” was all she said before hanging up.
The B and B had a large wraparound porch, so Griffin brought his satchel full of student papers down and set up shop in a rocking chair in the sun, where he sat trying to remember how that famous Shakespeare sonnet about death went. “Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun…” was as far as he’d gotten when his cell vibrated, Joy calling him back.
“I forgot to ask,” she said. “Did Sid get ahold of you?”
“No,” he said, sitting up straight. Sid was his agent back in L.A., in his late eighties and still a legend in the business, despite his shrinking client list. Griffin sincerely hoped he was calling about a job. Money had been worrying him of late. Joy, who kept the books and wrote the checks, insisted they were fine, but if Laura got engaged, as she’d been warning them might happen soon, maybe even this weekend, there’d be a wedding to pay for, and a quick studio rewrite would be just what the doctor ordered. “When did he call?”
“Last night. He wanted to know if you’d turned your grades in yet. It sounded like he meant for you to drop everything, hop on a plane and drop into the Universal lot by parachute.”
Joy, since they moved to Connecticut, had little patience with Sid, whose ongoing, albeit sporadic presence in their lives she considered vestigial, an appendix that was liable one day to rupture. He was also one of those Angelenos who never took time zones into account when telephoning. Four in the afternoon-seven back East, about the time Griffin and Joy usually sat down to eat-was when he took the bottle out of his desk drawer, unscrewed the cap and poured, then started calling people. She might have been less peeved, Griffin thought, if Sid was calling with work, but mostly he just wanted to reminisce about old Hollywood-Bogart and Mitchum and Lancaster and Holden-until nostalgia morphed into anger that the town was now overrun by “bitches,” his term for the current generation of young male stars, action-movie pretty boys pretending, not very convincingly, to be tough guys. “Not a one of ’em could take Renée Zellweger in a fair fight,” he was fond of observing. “You did the right thing getting out when you did, kid. Who needs it?”
Who needed him? was the better question, according to Joy. Why couldn’t he understand that they’d moved on?
Toward the end of their conversations Griffin always reminded him that he was still a dues-paying member of the Guild and that if the right gig came along, especially in the summer… but before he could finish, Sid always interrupted. “My advice?” he said, as if he’d just extended such an offer. “Don’t lower yourself. You’ve got respectable, grown-up work now.” Joy had usually finished eating and was loading the dishwasher by the time Griffin managed to get off the phone.