Inside, the air was colder, and damp, the dark, closed box a natural refrigerator. The Olds sat in the dimness, filling the single bay, the far window throwing precise, elongated panes of sunlight across the roof, tattooed with the tracks of the Coles’ cat, Buster. How he got in was a mystery, but, as with his occasional murder of her friendly visitors, the birds (or her hated enemies, the voles), she’d long ceased trying to curb what was obviously a force of nature. Still, did he have to pee on everything?
She pressed the button and the sectioned door rumbled up, the steel wheels creaking, letting in the day. Rufus escaped to the courtyard between their garage and the Coles’, sniffing at the grated drain in the middle, which for years had served as the tip-off circle for Kenneth and his friends’ basketball games.
Aside from the silt of dust and the cobwebs decorating the antenna, the car was pristine. After her last accident, her insurance had paid for a new grille and front bumper. She’d carefully driven home from the dealer, then left the Olds out front with the hazards on while she asked Jim Cole to put it in the garage for her. It hadn’t moved since.
She’d taken the necessary precautions mothballing it—literally, dosing the glove box and seats and carpet as she would an old suit before storing it in a closet. She’d disconnected the battery as Henry did with the motorboat every winter, though she suspected it was dead from disuse. A jump and it would be as good as new.
Like the house, the garage had been built in the twenties, and was designed for nothing larger than a Model T. The gap between the Olds and the wall was so narrow that Emily had to sidle along the car as if she were inching across a ledge. The door was locked against thieves. At the sound of her key popping the knob, Rufus came dashing back in as if he might be left behind.
“Fine,” she said, and he squeezed by and jumped into the front seat, taking his place as her passenger. She leaned down and reached under the dash until she felt the latch of the hood release, pulled it with a clunk, then shut him in.
She’d misremembered. The battery wasn’t disconnected. It was gone.
“Curiouser and curiouser.”
The only place it could be was downstairs, under Henry’s workbench. That was exactly where she and Rufus found it, identified by a note in her own hand. She or possibly Jim Cole had had the foresight to bring it inside so it wouldn’t freeze. It might even be good, but it was far too heavy for her to carry upstairs, let alone across the backyard. It was Tuesday—Jim was teaching. She was stymied, unless Marcia was at home.
Her Honda hybrid was out front, so Emily crossed the driveway and rang the bell. The Coles were the most accommodating of their new neighbors—the only ones she could count on now that the old crowd was gone—and she tried not to impose on them too often. When Marcia answered the door in her sweats and slippers, her hair mussed as if she were sick, Emily felt compelled to apologize even before she explained her situation.
“I’m sorry. I’ve turned into such a weakling.”
“It’s no trouble, honestly,” Marcia said, pointing her bare toes into her hiking boots. “I was just doing my yoga.”
She added a fleece jacket and a Steelers baseball cap. It was an outfit Emily wouldn’t dare go outside in, and less than flattering to Marcia, who was Margaret’s age and, as Emily’s own mother had liked to say, pleasingly plump.
Emily led her across the lawn and inside, shooing Rufus, who knew Marcia but sniffed at her crotch anyway. “Watch your head,” she said on the stairs, not sure if Marcia had ever seen Henry’s workshop. Normally it was Jim who helped her.
Marcia squatted and, with effort, lifted the battery and set it on the workbench. “It’s heavy.”
“Last year it wouldn’t have been a problem for me,” Emily said. “I just don’t have that kind of strength anymore.”
“And we’re taking it to the garage?”
“If you can manage it.”
“I can try.”
At the top of the stairs Marcia had to set it down, and then at the edge of the back porch, and just before the door of the garage. “If nothing else, it’s good exercise.”
“Thank you,” Emily apologized.
Inside, she thought it would be rude to point out Buster’s tracks, though they were everywhere. Likewise, there was no need to comment on the smell.
When Marcia finally hefted the battery up and in, the leads didn’t reach the terminals.
“I think it goes the other way,” Emily suggested, and then there was the trip to the basement to find the proper wrench. She brought back a handful.
Marcia stood clear as if she feared being electrocuted. “After all this, it better work.”
“We’ll find out. It may need a jump anyway.”
Again, Rufus took his seat beside her, convinced they were going somewhere.
“You really think so?” Emily said, and turned the key.
Nothing but a clicking.
“Try it again.”
Click-click-click-click.
“I figured as much,” Emily said. “I’ve got cables in the trunk.”
“I don’t know if you can jump it from my battery. It’s a completely different system.”
“It should say in the manual. Or I could just call triple-A.”
“Let me look,” Marcia said, and went trotting off down the drive.
Emily opened the trunk—bare as Henry’s workbench—and took out the zippered plastic pouch that contained the jumper cables, a Christmas gift from Arlene, then stood there waiting, considering the chromed bulk of the Olds. It had been his, and she loved it for that, but it was far too large. She worried that she would tear the mirrors off trying to back out. She couldn’t ask Jim or Marcia for help every time she had to put the car away. The registration was valid, but the inspection sticker had lapsed. She had no doubt it would pass. It would have been easier if it were falling apart. It was typical of Henry, with his engineer’s love of the indestructible. He’d been so proud of the mileage, celebrating each showy turn of the odometer. “Every time we drive this car,” he said, “we’re making money,” which made sense to Emily, their shared thriftiness both a source of easy comedy to their friends and a touchstone of their marriage. Her father had been the same way, hanging on to his Bible-black Plymouth with its Keystone Kops running boards and bug-eyed headlights until her high school friends teased her. Now, out of necessity—or was it convenience?—she had to overcome all of that history and do something she wasn’t sure Henry or her father would understand.
Marcia’s hybrid was so quiet it startled Rufus from his vigil at the drain as she pulled into the courtyard. She turned for the far garage, then backed up.
The battery was in the trunk, a regular twelve-volt model. Emily stretched the cables as far as they’d go.
“You’ve done this before, obviously,” Marcia commented.
“When you have teenagers, you learn,” Emily said, then regretted it. The Coles were childless, and while they’d never discussed the issue, Emily gathered that it was not by choice. Occasionally, when they were relaxing on their back deck, or when Emily lingered on the stair landing to peek through their living room window, she’d see Marcia or Jim pick up Buster and cradle him like a baby.
Emily shuttled between the two batteries, sidling along the wall, using both hands to open the clamps. When she clipped the ground to a flange on the Olds’ engine block, a spark crackled.
“Is it supposed to do that?” Marcia asked.
“It means we’ve got a good connection. Now we sit and let it charge a little.”
The wait gave Emily the chance to inspect Marcia’s car. Next to the Olds it looked sleek and futuristic, a tidy white space capsule. The inside was surprisingly roomy. Marcia said it didn’t use a key, just push a button and it started. The controls were all in a small clump on the dashboard, including the shifter.
“That’s different,” Emily said.
“It’s strange at first, but you get used to it.”
“How is i
t on the highway?”
“It’s just like a regular car. It’s not going to go a hundred miles an hour, but it can do eighty, no problem, and you never have to stop for gas.”
“Never?”
“Almost never. I think, highway, it’s rated around seventy. What does yours get?”
“Not seventy,” Emily said.
Getting back in the Olds was like time-travel. The couchlike bench seat, the olive upholstery, the fake wood accents of the dash, the chrome knobs of the radio—it all belonged to an era she and Henry had passed through but could not properly call theirs. It was an ’82, meaning Henry had just turned fifty-three—still young. It was the largest Olds they made, a long, solid car befitting a department head at Westinghouse, and utterly impractical. The children were gone, it was just the two of them, but Emily understood: this was his reward. Arlene made fun of it, calling it Henry’s Braddock Cadillac, after the rusted sixties monstrosities that crisscrossed the poorer sections of the East End, and while Emily never laughed at the jab, privately she thought Arlene wasn’t so far off. Driving the biggest car made a statement. Unlike Arlene, she didn’t think advertising one’s status was bad, especially if you’d worked hard for it, and no one worked harder than Henry.
She fitted the key in the ignition. “Here goes nothing,” she told Rufus, and twisted her wrist.
The starter chugged, juddering, spewing a blue-white cloud over Marcia’s car, then sputtered, coughed and died.
It caught on the second try, running rough before settling to a steady idle. She revved the engine a few times to make sure, then stepped out and unhooked the cables in the reverse order.
“While I’ve got you here,” she asked Marcia, “I hope you don’t mind if I press you into service,” and had her spot her as she backed out of the garage.
All she needed to do was keep her wheels straight. She knew this, yet she was tentative, unable to gauge the true bounds of the fenders.
“You’re good,” Marcia called, craning and waving her on, until, halfway out, Emily eased up on the brake and, on faith alone, let the Olds slide—too fast—backward into the courtyard. That she cleared both sides she attributed to luck as much as fear.
Marcia clapped for her. “Well done.”
“Thank you. There’s no way I could have done that by myself.”
“Looks like someone paid you a visit.” Marcia pointed to the paw prints on the hood.
“That’s all right, I need to wash it anyway.”
“I wonder if it was that big tortoiseshell that’s been hanging around. Have you heard him serenading his lady friend?”
“Is that what that was?”
“He and Buster had a run-in last week. Now I just keep him inside at night. It’s not worth a trip to the vet.”
“No,” Emily agreed, then thanked her again.
Marcia walked ahead of her down the driveway, turned backward, motioning Emily left to keep her from bumping their fence. Emily didn’t need any help, but followed at a crawl, waving as Marcia climbed the porch stairs and stood there watching.
Before pulling onto Grafton, Emily paused. She needed to drive around awhile to recharge the battery. She’d thought resuscitating the car—and before lunch—was a major accomplishment, but now she realized she had nowhere to go. Out of habit, she turned downhill, toward Highland. Once they were moving, Rufus lay down and curled up on the seat as if he were cold. She should take it to a garage and have it looked at, but for that she’d need an appointment. She could drive through the park, up past the AquaZoo, where the roads were wide and empty this time of day. As she pictured the school buses lining the winding curves, she had the terrible feeling that she’d left the back door of the house unlocked. Too late now. At the corner she signaled left, headed for East Liberty—but really, what was the sense in pretending?—for Regent Square and Arlene’s. It was the route she’d be taking the most, and as her first, looping turn confirmed, she needed the practice.
PILGRIMS
Kenneth called in the middle of the afternoon, practically shouting over the clash of voices in the background. “Everyone’s watching the game,” he explained, and she could hear the beer in his voice. Emily turned down her own stereo, as if that might help. She’d been having a quiet day until then, listening to Britten’s War Requiem as she leafed through her basket of catalogs, dog-earing possible Christmas gifts for the grandchildren.
Kenneth had caught her daydreaming of Coventry, the music calling up the solemn awe she’d felt as she and Henry walked the stones of the bombed cathedral, its lacework arches open to the blue sky. The new cathedral Emily thought less than successful, unnecessarily modern (now, just forty years later, it seemed dated, plainly ugly), but the ruins more than compensated. Henry must have spent five rolls of film trying to capture the warm orange the setting sun brought out of the stone. Everything was a picture. St. Michael and the Devil. The cross of charred beams by the altar with FATHER FORGIVE in gilt on the wall. The stained glass of the baptistry. She wished he would put down the camera, but she knew, too, that they’d never be back again, and, like her, he wanted to keep it. At night, from the window of their dingy inn, after a heavy dinner downstairs topped off with a syrupy port, they could see the spire, lit against the dark sky, and she imagined the planes leaving their bases in Germany and climbing into the freezing air. She’d listened to the radio dispatches from London as a child, safe in the endless hills of central Pennsylvania, and had thought, naively, of what she would do if the Nazis blitzed Kersey. As silly as that sounded now, it wasn’t an idle game. Her fear was real, and to finally be there, where people had survived and carried on with grace and good humor, was both humbling and inspiring. The trip had been Henry’s birthday present to her, the fulfillment of a long-ago promise, a dream of hers, and revisiting it filled her with a wistful satisfaction. The phone had broken the spell. She wasn’t surprised that it was Kenneth. He’d always had bad timing. Though part of her resentment—petty, she recognized—was that he’d chosen Lisa’s family over his own.
“So?” she asked. “How is everyone?”
“We’re all going out at halftime to play football on the beach. You should see the waves.”
“Isn’t it cold?”
“It’s a tradition.”
“Be careful,” Emily said. “You’re not a teenager anymore.”
“Thanks. Now I’m sure to break something.”
Behind him, the room cheered.
“Who all’s there?”
“The usual crew, plus Ella’s friend Suzanne.”
“I don’t think I know her. Is she new?”
“They’ve been together a while now. I don’t think you’ve ever met her.”
“Is she nice?”
“Very nice, for a Cowboys fan.”
“I must be missing something,” Emily said, suddenly impatient with him.
“The Cowboys are playing. Badly.”
He broke off to respond to a heckler, leaving her speechless. He was doing his duty, and she supposed she should be grateful, but as she waited, noting the sun warming her plants in the bay window, she remembered how busy Thanksgiving used to be, the house and kitchen overrun, every shelf of the fridge crowded, the street bumper-to-bumper with parked cars. She didn’t miss the chaos or the mess, she just wished there were a way she could see the children.
“Sorry,” he said. “You know how Texans are.”
“Not to bring up an unpleasant subject, but have people started working on their Christmas lists?”
“One holiday at a time is all I can handle.”
“It’s coming whether you like it or not.”
“What do you want?” he asked.
“I want us all to be together as a family. That’s my Christmas present this year.”
“Meg’s going to be there.”
She hesitated for only a second, as if her disappointment were fleeting, easily swallowed. “Honestly, at this point I’m trying to get rid of stuff, not add new
things I don’t need.”
“Okay, but if you think of anything.”
“I’m serious. But, please, sweetheart, you really need to let me know what Ella and Sam want. I’d rather avoid cutting things close like last year if at all possible.”
“I’ll do my best,” he said, echoing Henry—always fending off her worries with his noncommittal optimism—and she thought how lately she’d been seeing more and more of him in Kenneth, when before she’d found little resemblance.
“One more thing I wanted to run by you,” she said.
“Shoot.”
“Your father’s car. Are you interested in it?”
“Oh, wow,” he said.
“It’s just too much for me, and it’s so old I wouldn’t get anything for it as a trade-in.”
“A trade-in.”
“I’ve talked to a few people, and they say it’s not worth it. I figured you always liked it.”
“I do,” he said. “I’m just not sure where I’d put it.”
“It runs fine.”
“I’m sure it does, but … You’re actually going to buy a car.”
“Would you rather have your old mother take the bus?”
“No.”
“I still need to get around. I’m thinking something small, maybe a little hybrid like Marcia’s.”
“Have you ever bought a car before?”
“So far I’ve been spared that pleasure. Believe me, I’ve been doing my homework.”
“I’m sure you have.”
“Any tips?”
“Try Cars-dot-com. That’s where we found the Mazda.”
She asked him whether it made more sense, for her own peace of mind, to buy new. She could tell he wasn’t thrilled with the idea that she was driving again, but she could count on him, as she’d counted on Henry, to advise her in practical matters. And while he wouldn’t give her a definite yes on the Olds, she knew that eventually he’d take it. He wouldn’t be able not to.
Rufus, driven upstairs by the music, came down to investigate and sat at her knee, lifting his chin so she could scratch under his collar.
“All righty,” Kenneth finally said, a signal that he was done.
Emily, Alone Page 5