“We don’t need things,” Brendan said. He was amazed that Henry couldn’t feel the urgency, the absolute importance of leaving town that instant. “What do we need?”
“A little road food. A couple of thermoses, lots of coffee, some blankets, maybe some sleeping bags — you know. Stuff for a weekend trip.”
Henry hummed and drove, seeming each minute to be in a better mood. Behind him Brendan lapsed into silence and tried not to sulk. He had never, in his long life, made a weekend trip; he was in Henry’s hands and could do nothing without him and it was useless, he knew, to resist. Better to let go of his own will and to find some joy in surrender. He gazed at the maple trees lining the road, with their soft green leaves spread out like flounces. He peered into the windows of the passing cars and marveled at the faces. He thought how, at the Home, the aides would be loading the lunch trays and Roxanne would be finishing her third old man of the morning. He still felt the warmth of her hands on his back, and he knew that his success with Henry was due in part to her. Henry’s lust and longing had filled that room like a cloud and rendered him incapable of thought.
Henry turned off the highway, drove down a road Brendan had never seen, and pulled into a strip of stores built so recently that the trees along the sides were no more than stems propped up by sturdy poles and wires. They grew melons here, Brendan thought. When I was Henry’s age. And potatoes and onions and cucumbers and squash.
“I’ll just be a minute,” Henry said, and then he hopped out and vanished behind the bright facade of a 7-Eleven. He returned a minute later, frowning. “Do you have any cash?”
“Me?” Brendan’s clubbed hands beat at his pockets. “Maybe ten dollars,” he said, considering what might be left of the thirty dollars he received from the Home each month. “Look in my coat.”
Had they brought his coat? Henry frowned again, picked up the plastic bag containing Brendan’s clothes, and then threw it down without looking. “We’re a little low on funds,” Henry said. “We’ll have to think of something to do about that.”
Brendan had given no thought to money at all, but he had assumed Henry would take care of whatever came up. Now he saw that their trip was going to require wits as well as luck, and for some reason this cheered him. They could move across the state like friars with their begging bowls, living on whatever came to them.
Henry vanished into the store again and returned a few minutes later with a small bag and two huge plastic mugs that smelled of burnt coffee. He handed Brendan one of the mugs. “Here you go. This’ll charge you up for the trip.”
Brendan bent his palms around the mug, which was capped and seemed to be insulated. He sipped through the tiny opening in the lid. The coffee was scorched and doctored with milk and sugar; he usually drank it black and he was prepared to dislike it. But the muddy fluid was hot and sweet and tasted wonderful.
A police cruiser entered the lot behind them and nearly clipped the bumper of the van. Brendan bowed his head and sipped from the mug. It’s over then, he thought. Over before we’ve even begun. He’d had this coffee, different from any he’d had before, and a decade’s worth of sights from their brief drive. Those would have to be enough. He sang a psalm to himself and waited for the rap on the window, the head stuck inside the door. Henry started the engine and drove past the cruiser as if it were only another car.
“One more stop,” he said, and Brendan lifted his head in amazement. The policeman seemed unaware of them. He had rolled down his window and was talking to a girl in a halter top. “One more stop,” Henry said, “and then we’re on our way.”
8
HENRY HAD ALMOST FORGOTTEN HOW DELICIOUS IT WAS TO BE behind a wheel. The van handled well despite its size; the steering was tight and the highway was as smooth as a woman’s leg. He sped down the stretch between the plaza and the turnoff to Irondequoit, and when he caught the light at Titus he cornered with a small but satisfying squeal and then slowed when he heard his uncle gasp. Through the broad curving lands of his old neighborhood, past the culs-de-sac and the handsome houses and the islands planted with magnolias and bulbs, he drove smoothly, rhythmically, enjoying both the feel of the van and the sight of all he’d created in what had once been a melon field. Kitty used to tell him that he loved this first development of his the way another man would love a first child, and he knew, looking at the smooth green lawns, that she was right.
His sense of well-being vanished when he saw Lise’s car parked next to Kitty’s in front of his old house. Lise, his oldest daughter, wasn’t speaking to him and wouldn’t answer his calls. More than her younger sister, Delia, she seemed to be unable to forgive him. She might have accepted his failure and financial ruin — she had made it through college, she had a job, she was safer than the rest of them. But when Kitty, on the night she’d cursed Henry and thrown him out, had called both Lise and Delia and told them it wasn’t just the way Henry had trashed their futures, nor the way he’d gambled everything on his foolish project and lost, but the lying, the cheating, the girlfriends — Anita, most of all — the girls had turned their backs on him.
Anita, Henry said to himself, and he nearly groaned aloud as he parked the van and lowered his uncle to the ground. Useless for him to try to explain that Anita had also abandoned him. Lise and Delia had turned away from him, sped to their mother’s side and embraced her cause completely. Kitty, who wore the role of wronged wife as if she’d been born to it, hadn’t spoken to Henry in more than a month. He had hoped to find the house empty today.
He wheeled Brendan up the flagstone walk he’d laid so carefully when the girls were young. “Does she know we’re coming?” Brendan asked.
“No,” Henry said. His heart skipped several beats. The pachysandra around the beech looked ratty and dry and the lawn was riddled with grubs. The screens still leaned against the garage where he’d left them. One wheel of Brendan’s chair caught the corner of a stone thrown up by frost, and the fact that Kitty hadn’t had the stone replaced annoyed Henry enormously. His house was falling apart already, and by the time the bank auctioned it off it was bound to look hollow, haunted, unloved. Whoever bought it would have only contempt for the man who had let this happen.
Brendan said, “Why don’t I wait out here?”
“Come in with me,” Henry pleaded. “You haven’t seen Kitty in ages.” He rang his own doorbell and then stood behind the wheelchair, hoping his uncle’s presence might neutralize Kitty’s venom.
His dog, Bongo, yelped and yowled inside the house. His daughter opened the door, stared at him, and then said, “Grunkie,” after a moment’s poisonous silence.
Lise had cut her hair, and within its smooth brown frame Henry saw his own face reflected. She had his bumpy nose, which looked craggy in his face but was too strong and large in hers. She had his jaw, a bit too square, and his pale blue, almost lashless eyes. It pained him that she wasn’t more attractive, and he wished that Anita, or someone like her, would take her aside and teach her how to dress and wear makeup. She was almost aggressively homely, and in her refusal to decorate herself, in her blunt manners and sensible clothes, Henry saw his own stubbornness. Delia, dainty and feminine, so much resembled Kitty that he felt he’d had no part in making her. But Lise was his, so much like him that he both rejoiced and despaired.
Lise stared steadily at him and then slipped her eyes to Brendan’s neck brace. “What a surprise,” she said.