Turn Signal

by Howard Owen

  “Because I don’t try to snake my friends’ dates.”

  She laid the bags in the trunk and moved close to him.

  “What makes you think I’d go out with you anyhow?”

  He said he was damned if he knew, that she’d have to be an idiot to do such a thing. He said he guessed he was hoping she just wasn’t very smart.

  “Hey, Class Dunce, class of ’77,” she said.

  “OK, then, how about a movie tomorrow night?”

  She stepped back a half-step. “Well, I’ll have to ask Milo.” She paused a beat, then added, “Just kidding.”

  He realized, driving home that day, that he should call Milo and ask his permission to date the woman Milo referred to as “the raven-haired beauty.” But he didn’t. He mentioned to Milo, after he and Gina had gone to a basketball game on their second date, that he had dated “the RHB,” and Milo laughed it off, told him he wished him better luck than he’d had.

  She was a beauty. She was five-feet-nine and weighed no more than 125 pounds. She had then and still has the most hypnotic eyes Jack has ever seen. He imagines that even in old age she’ll still be captivating men with those emeralds.

  What happened in the Giant parking lot, they both agreed, was kismet. It made them both feel a little easier about Milo, who in any case was married again within nine months, and divorced again two years after that.

  The only time Milo has ever mentioned any of it with anything approaching seriousness was one night at the diner, after he had drunk a few beers and he and Jack had listened to too many songs of their youth.

  “The only girl I think I ever could have stayed with,” he said, “was the RHB.”

  There were a few seconds of nothing but “Brown-Eyed Girl” on the jukebox, and then Milo laughed, “But you know, I’d have fucked that up, too. Everybody’s better off. Right?”

  “Right,” Jack said, not knowing whether to agree or shut up.

  The marriage was in August of 1984.

  Gina tried to get along with Brady. Jack really believes that. But there was too much there. She was impatient. And the boy was fond of reminding her, any time she tried to make him do something he didn’t want to do, that she wasn’t his mother. He had been a sweet-natured if headstrong child, but neither he nor Gina was prepared for the step-ness of their relationship.

  “No,” she told him one day, when she’d had enough, “I’m not your mother. I didn’t run off, so I must not be your mother.”

  She had regretted it, the way he looked, like he was going to cry even though he was almost 10 years old by then. She wished he had cried, because then maybe she could have held him and sought his forgiveness, and maybe they would have turned some kind of corner.

  But he didn’t. He pulled his mouth into a tight little line and walked out the door, slowly, stopping down the hallway and turning to utter one word, in a voice barely over a whisper: “Bitch.”

  Some of Gina’s favorite memories from that time are of being on the road with Jack. With her at his side, he finally saw some of the sights just beyond the interstates. In the first two years of their marriage, she crossed the country eight times with her husband, and they delighted in keeping count of the number of states in which they had made love.

  She was always a fast typist, capable of 70 words a minute. It was a limiting talent, she knew, but it enabled her to get work as a court reporter, and she could hammer away in the little room they fixed up for her at the farmhouse, then go away for a week at a time, leaving Brady with his grandmother.

  She made her last trip with Jack in November of 1986, four months before Shannon was born. They both agreed she would resume traveling with him, after things settled down, but she never rode cross-country with him again. After a while, Jack stopped asking. It wasn’t as if she weren’t busy, working part-time and raising a baby.

  The attention she lavished on their new daughter only made things worse with Brady, who ran away from home that spring and almost had to repeat the sixth grade. Gina knew she was failing him, but she was so busy and so tired, and in the end she was more than willing to let Ellen continue to do most of what rearing Brady would get, along with Jack when he was, as she put it, “actually around.”

  On Carly’s one and only visit, she just showed up.

  She told her parents in Fredericksburg, still in shock over her surprise appearance, that she was going down to Speakeasy to look up a couple of old friends, but she went straight to the old farmhouse where she had spent her brief sentence as Mrs. Stone.

  That August, it was over 100 degrees six days in a row. It was the year Jack would finally have central air-conditioning put into the old house.

  Saturday, the sixth day, he had taken the lawn mower to a little shop on Third Street. As was its custom, it had died on the hottest day of the year. Jack spent five fruitless, stroke-inducing minutes trying to start it.

  Gina had taken little Shannon to the community pool. Only Ellen and Brady were home, watching television in two of the three rooms cooled by window units.

  Brady answered the door. The woman standing there, wiping sweat from her face, was wearing a thrift-shop dress. She was barefoot. Her hair was in bangs and appeared not to have been professionally cut.

  “Brady,” she said. “I’ll bet you don’t remember me.”

  He didn’t say anything, but he knew.

  She asked him if she could come in, and he stood aside and let her.

  He showed her to his room. They both walked quietly. Ellen, whose hearing wasn’t the best, never knew her ex-daughter-in-law was there until the sheriff’s deputy came by later.

  She sat on the edge of his unmade bed; there was nowhere else to sit. She asked him how he was doing, did he have a girlfriend, what college he wanted to go to, was he going to church regularly. He could barely make out any trace of a Southern accent. She might have been born in London.

  He answered her as tersely as possible.

  Finally, he asked his question:

  “What are you doing here?”

  He had always known she would come back some day, no matter what they told him. He had imagined a thousand times what he would say to her. He would make her ashamed, or he would let her take him away with her, or he would just pound the crap out of her for leaving him. The last one had become his favorite in the last couple of years.

  “You know I never stopped thinking about you,” she said, trying to take his face into her hands as he backed away. “I never even had a picture to remember you by.”

  He didn’t remind her that she could have taken one if she had wanted to. There were plenty of his baby pictures around the house, in frames and albums.

  There were even pictures of Carly, in old albums nobody ever bothered to throw away. He had torn her likeness out of a large family-picnic photograph when he was nine; he still had it hidden in the back of his sock drawer.

  He asked her again why.

  She said the Lord had told her to come. She said not even her parents knew she was coming to America until she showed up. Brother Aaron had not come with her but blessed her visit, she informed her son, who never asked who the hell Brother Aaron was.

  “I’ve come here,” she told him, “to baptize you. Only the chosen few will see heaven, Brady, and because you’re mine, I’ve been told you can be among the saved.”

  She went on to inform him that the chosen few had gotten the word: The world was going to end on September 27. So, there wasn’t much time.

  “We’ll need some candles and some water,” she said. “And we have to find a bird somewhere, maybe we can buy one in a pet store.”

  He knew she wasn’t quite right. In the picture, she had been a little overweight. Now, she was shrunken. Her short frame couldn’t have carried more than 90 pounds. Her collarbone stuck out. Even her feet looked emaciated. And her eyes, so bright in his picture, were dark holes, as if she were looking out from twin caves. But she had come for him.

  “Come on,” she told him, ho
lding her finger to her lips. “We’ll go find a bird.”

  They walked quietly back out. When Ellen asked through the door who was there, Brady said a friend, that they were going to town, and she told him to be back by supper.

  Outside, Carly told him she was Sister Carlotta now, that she was a deaconness in the One Church, that she lived far away in England. They got into the little rental car and went off in search of a bird.

  Brady suggested the Kmart, which seemed to sell everything. On the way there, she would take her eyes off the road for disturbingly long periods, looking at him. She told him she was having trouble getting adjusted to driving again, and especially on the right side of the road. Twice, she ran off the pavement onto the narrow shoulder.

  They sat in the parking lot, with the air-conditioning failing against the heat rising up from the melting asphalt. Brady turned to her.

  “Mom …” It was a hard word to say. He hadn’t said it often.

  “Sister Carlotta,” she corrected him.

  “What are you going to do? I mean, after you baptize me or whatever, am I, do you want me to go back with you … or what?” He realized he was holding his breath.

  “Back with me?” She stared at him, her hand on the door handle. “Back to London? Oh, no, dear. I don’t think we could do that. Brother Aaron might not approve. And the children barely have enough room to sleep in as it is. But we’ll all be together soon.”

  Brady let out his breath and tried not to cry.

  “Then what do you want? What are you here for?” He sat on his hands so he wouldn’t hit her.

  “Why,” she said, her eyes wide at his obtuseness, “why, to save your soul, of course. To save your immortal soul.”

  He couldn’t believe it. He had trained himself not to expect much, and he already knew he’d been tricked.

  “Save my soul?” he said, his hands raised now and balled into fists, his eyes wet. “Save me, goddammit! Save me!”

  He tried to grab her across the seat, but she was amazingly quick and darted out the door before he could get a good grip.

  She hopped across the parking lot, her bare feet burning on the asphalt.

  Brady knew how to drive. His father let him practice with the old Opal, in the back yard and in parking lots like this one. He started the car and began chasing his mother, who was trying, leaping as if she were playing hopscotch, to reach a small shady spot at the edge of the lot, where a stunted row of Bradford pears separated the store from the highway.

  She hopped and jumped for 50 feet before she reached the cool grass, and one last turn put a large green light pole between her and Brady. When he zagged to follow her, he hit it head-on. The pole, when it fell, completed the job of totaling the little rental car.

  The deputy who arrived first estimated that Brady was going between 30 and 35 miles an hour as he tried to run over Carly. Brady had to be cut away from the wreck. He told his father later that he could hear his leg snap, just above the ankle.

  By the time Brady had made the deputy understand that the woman driving the car, his mother, was lying on the grass, Carly had slipped away to a phone booth a block away, her feet wrapped in a scarf and an empty grocery bag she found lying beside her.

  Her father came down and retrieved her. He took her to an emergency room outside Richmond, and by the time Jack had the time to go looking for her, she was on her way back to Dulles Airport with her feet in bandages. From there, she would catch her flight to London, leaving her parents to clean up the mess. She had been in Virginia less than 24 hours.

  Brady never told his father everything. He couldn’t bear it. He said his mother had gone inside to get something, and she’d left the keys in the car. He was just practicing in the parking lot, and he hit the wrong pedal. And then she “just freaked” and disappeared.

  Jack hadn’t talked much with Carly’s parents since she left, just a couple of times on the phone long-distance. He always figured they blamed him, and he blamed them a little, too. He assumed that she told them things she didn’t tell him, information he might have used to try to keep her from going.

  Jack knew, the way Jim Hamner offered right away to square things with the rental car company, that there was more to the story, but Brady kept it to himself.

  The boy took great satisfaction, though, when he awoke the morning of September 28 to find the sun still shining, the sky still blue, the birds still singing in the trees.

  When he had time to think it over, after his leg had healed and the hurt had been worn down to hard calluses, he felt a little better about his mother. He was not, despite what Gina sometimes thought, a mean person. He could only muster so much hate for the former Carly Stone, a woman who thought the world was going to end on September 27, 1989, and would cross an ocean to save her son’s mortal soul.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Until he met the old man, he never really gave the concept of fate much thought. Sure, when he considers it now, he realizes that his parents always said, “It’s God’s will,” when someone with a family and a mortgage fell over dead or a house burned down with innocent children inside. But it seems to him now as if this was just a way of explaining the unthinkable, a ruse to keep people from losing their minds.

  And it was tempting the Fates to exult too much in good fortune, as if you actually had earned and deserved it. Everyone knew that.

  The idea of fate as a one-way, no-exit road down which a life must travel, though, was something new. He’d heard, as a boy, of a young man “getting the call” to become a minister. In other, more worldly pursuits, though, you made your own way, determined your own destiny.

  These days, though, Jack Stone is a true believer.

  He doesn’t really care that the bank has refused to allow him any kind of bridge loan, with his unpublished novel as collateral. They said they wanted something a little more substantial.

  Home equity loans also seem to be out of the question, with the current, abused status of the Stones’ credit cards. He sent the Octagon Group most of the mortgage payment for November, and he’s written them again, telling them that, after Christmas, he’ll have the rest. The insurance money from his mother’s house should be coming in the new year. He’d hoped to use that for Shannon’s college fund, which is there in name only these days, but he’ll do what he has to do.

  Soon, it won’t be a problem anyhow.

  Good as his word, he is finished. He has put the final touches on the rewrite. He’s ready to send it back to Gerald Prince, ready to follow fate where he knows it will lead him. He’s sure that, among other things, Gerald Prince’s publishing company will advance him whatever he needs.

  Jack Stone believes.

  He doesn’t realize Gina is home until she speaks to him from the spiral staircase, only her head visible.

  “Are you up here in the dark?” She seems tentative.

  It is dark, or almost.

  “Shortest day of the year,” he says, and laughs.

  He doesn’t know how long he’s been sitting there, his world illuminated by one desk lamp. He started printing chapters sometime after noon, and now the whole manuscript sits before him, clean and white and perfectly rectangular.

  “Done,” he says. “Merry Christmas.”

  She isn’t smiling. She comes up and sits across the desk from him, the computer humming away between them.

  “Jack,” she says, “we have to talk. I got a call today from somebody at Octagon. They said we’re two months past due. You told me you paid the mortgage last month.”

  He hadn’t wanted to worry her unnecessarily.

  “I paid most of it,” he says. “I’ll pay this month’s, too. I’ll pay it out of the advance.”

  “But, honey,” she says, and the way she says “honey” sounds much like it would if she were explaining the true nature of Santa Claus to a six-year-old. “They aren’t going to wait. Banks don’t wait. They’ll take our house.”

  “We’ll be OK.”

  She ge
ts up and walks back and forth for a few seconds. She is a silhouette, the light in the outer room behind her.

  “You promised me,” she says finally. “You promised me that we would not lose this house.

  “I’ve done all the Christmas shopping. I’ve been making excuses, every kind of excuse you can imagine. ‘He’s trying to wrap it up before Christmas.’ ‘He’ll come to your next game, I’m sure.’ ‘He’s got a lot on his mind.’ ‘The check is in the mail.’

  “I don’t mind doing all that. I would mind, though, doing it for nothing.”

  He feels a calm that her rising anger can’t dent, and that seems to make her angrier.

  “Where are you? Hello?” she says, stepping forward out of the darkness. “The lights are on, but I don’t think anybody’s home. What’s going to happen to us?”

  “Good things.”

  “When? How? You haven’t worked in six weeks. We don’t have two hundred dollars in the bank. I’m buying Christmas presents out of my Christmas bonus, which was one damn week’s salary. I’m too far along, Jack, too far along to lose all this now.”

  He wishes she had more faith, but he knows she’ll look back some day soon and laugh about all this, or maybe kiss him, tears in her eyes, apologizing for ever doubting him.

  He tells her, for what must be the hundredth time, not to worry, and that he will be down soon.

  “I’m ready to let you read it,” he tells her as she descends the spiral staircase. She does not reply.

  He knows that the house means a lot to her.

  It if had been up to him, they never would have moved. He had not lived anywhere but the farmhouse since he returned after his father’s death. It had been home through the coming and going of Carly, through the bachelor days on the road, through 13 mostly happy years with Gina. All his memories of Brady and Shannon were tied to the place.

  The one constant had been his mother. Even when Gina was lobbying for a home of their own, and she lobbied for five years before he gave in, Ellen never seemed to be part of the reason. Gina had never been that close to her own mother, and while Ellen did not become that most elusive of things, “the mother she never had,” the two were friends. The only friction they had, really, was over Brady.