“Thank you, Caroline.”
“I was running—”
“Thank you.” Gary snagged the cordless and held it at arm’s length, as if to keep his mother at bay, while he proceeded into the dining room. Here he was waylaid by Caleb, who had a finger buried in the slick leaves of a catalogue. “Dad, can I talk to you for a second?”
“Not now, Caleb, your grandmother is on the phone.”
“I just want—”
“Not now, I said.”
Caleb shook his head and smiled in disbelief, like a much-televised athlete who’d failed to draw a penalty.
Gary crossed the marble-floored main hall into his very large living room and said hello into the little phone.
“I told Caroline,” Enid said, “that I would call you back if you weren’t near the phone.”
“Your calls cost seven cents a minute,” Gary said.
“Or you could have called me back.”
“Mother, we’re talking about twenty-five cents.”
“I’ve been trying to reach you all day,” she said. “The travel agent needs an answer by tomorrow morning at the latest. And, you know, we’re still hoping you’ll come for one last Christmas, like I promised Jonah, so—”
“Hang on a second,” Gary said. “I’ll check with Caroline.”
“Gary, you’ve had months to discuss this. I’m not going to sit here and wait while you—”
“One second.”
He blocked the perforations in the phone’s mouthpiece with his thumb and returned to the kitchen, where Jonah was standing on a chair with a package of Oreos. Caroline, still slumped at the table, was breathing shallowly. “I did something terrible,” she said, “when I ran to catch the phone.”
“You were out there slipping around in the rain for two hours,” Gary said.
“No, I was fine until I ran to get the phone.”
“Caroline, I saw you limping before you—”
“I was fine,” she said, “until I ran to get the phone, which was ringing for the fiftieth time—”
“Good, all right,” Gary said, “it’s my mother’s fault. Now tell me what you want me to say about Christmas.”
“Well, whatever. They’re welcome to come here.”
“We’d talked about the possibility of going there.”
Caroline shook her head thoroughly, as if erasing something. “No. You talked about it. I never talked about it.”
“Caroline—”
“I can’t discuss this when she’s on the phone. Have her call back next week.”
Jonah was realizing that he could take as many cookies as he wanted and neither parent would notice.
“She needs to make arrangements now,” Gary said. “They’re trying to decide if they should stop here next month, after their cruise. It depends on Christmas.”
“It’s like I slipped a disk.”
“If you won’t talk about it,” he said, “I’ll tell her we’re considering coming to St. Jude.”
“No way! That was not the agreement.”
“I’m proposing a one-time exception to the agreement.”
“No! No!” Wet tangles of blond hair lashed and twisted as Caroline registered refusal. “You can’t change the rules like that.”
“A one-time exception isn’t changing the rules.”
“God, I think I need an X-ray,” Caroline said.
Gary could feel the buzzing of his mother’s voice against his thumb. “A yes or a no here?”
Standing up, Caroline leaned into him and buried her face in his sweater. She knocked lightly on his sternum with a little fist. “Please,” she said, nuzzling his collarbone. “Tell her you’ll call her later. Please? I really hurt my back.”
Gary held the phone out to one side, his arm rigid, as she pressed against him. “Caroline. They’ve come here eight years in a row. It’s not extreme of me to propose a one-time exception. Can I at least say we’re considering the possibility?”
Caroline shook her head woefully and sank onto the chair.
“OK, fine,” Gary said. “I’ll make my own decision.”
He strode into the dining room, where Aaron, who’d been listening, stared at him as if he were a monster of spousal cruelty.
“Dad,” Caleb said, “if you’re not talking to Grandma, can I ask you something?”
“No, Caleb, I’m talking to Grandma.”
“Then can I talk to you right afterward?”
“Oh, God, oh, God,” Caroline was saying.
In the living room Jonah had settled onto the larger leather sofa with his tower of cookies and Prince Caspian.
“Mother?”
“I don’t understand this,” Enid said. “If it’s not a good time to talk, all right, call me back, but to make me wait ten minutes—”
“Yes, but here I am.”
“Well, so, and what have you decided?”
Before Gary could answer, there burst from the kitchen a piteous raw feline wailing, a cry such as Caroline had produced during intercourse fifteen years ago, before there were boys to hear her.
“Mom, sorry, one second.”
“This is not right,” Enid said. “This is not polite.”
“Caroline,” Gary called into the kitchen, “do you think we can behave like adults for a few minutes?”
“Ah, ah, uh! Uh!” Caroline cried.
“Nobody ever died of a backache, Caroline.”
“Please,” she cried, “call her later. I tripped on the last step when I was running inside, Gary, it hurts—”
He turned his back on the kitchen. “Sorry, Mom.”
“What on earth is going on there?”
“Caroline hurt her back a little bit playing soccer.”
“You know, I hate to say this,” Enid said, “but aches and pains are a part of getting older. I could talk about pain all day long if I wanted to. My hip is always hurting. As you get older, though, hopefully you get a little more matoor.”
“Oh! Ahh! Ahh!” Caroline cried out voluptuously.
“Yeah, that’s the hope,” Gary said.
“Anyhow, what did you decide?”
“The jury’s still out on Christmas,” he said, “but maybe you should plan on stopping here—”
“Ow! Ow! Ow!”
“It’s getting awfully late to be making Christmas reservations,” Enid said severely. “You know, the Schumperts made their Hawaii reservations back in April, because last year, when they waited until September, they couldn’t get the seats they—”
Aaron came running from the kitchen. “Dad!”
“I’m on the phone, Aaron.”
“Dad!”
“I’m on the telephone, Aaron, as you can see.”
“Dave has a colostomy,” Enid said.
“You’ve got to do something right now,” Aaron said. “Mom is really hurting. She says you have to drive her to the hospital!”
“Actually, Dad,” said Caleb, sidling in with his catalogue, “there’s someplace you can drive me, too.”
“No, Caleb.”
“No, but there’s a store I really actually do need to get to?”
“The affordable seats fill up early,” Enid said.
“Aaron?” Caroline shouted from the kitchen. “Aaron! Where are you? Where’s your father? Where’s Caleb?”
“It certainly is noisy in here for a person trying to concentrate,” Jonah said.
“Mother, sorry,” Gary said, “I’m going someplace quieter.”
“It’s getting very late,” Enid said, in her voice the panic of a woman for whom each passing day, each hour, signified the booking of more seats on late-December flights and thus the particle-by-particle disintegration of any hope that Gary and Caroline would bring their boys to St. Jude for one last Christmas.