The Breakdown Lane

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “Futures change, Peg,” my mother said. “We have to adapt and change with them. I’m going to miss you, too. I’m going to miss a lot of things around here. The paper. Cathy—wow. And my in-laws. And I’m going to miss Luke like crazy. I’m glad he and Gabe are friends again.” It was funny. Mom was her ordinary self, the way it had been when Peg dropped over all the time, even though Peg had basically seemed to lose her ability to see Mom on the street when Luke had become a sports hero and Mom a divorced crip. Futures change. You adapt. You give up what sucks because it takes too much out of you.

  I had to admit it. My mother set a classy example.

  That was when the WRX STI pulled into the driveway. I knew it was last year’s model, but it was classic black, silver fleck, leather seats. A guy knocked on the door. “Gabe Gillis?” he asked when I answered. He had a clipboard and a shirt on with a patch from Mellony Motors.

  “Sure,” I said uncertainly.

  “Uh-oh,” said Luke. “What befalleth us?”

  I turned and went back into the house.

  “Listen, there’s no way,” I told Matt, who was on the phone with caterers and marriage-license guys and junk. “Really, man, get off the phone a minute.” He said he’d get back in touch and faced me. “The bribe thing,” I said. “You don’t need to. She’s the one you’re marrying.”

  “What’s the point, Gabe?” he asked. He took me by surprise.

  “Of what?”

  “The Man Without a Country act,” Matt said. “You marry a woman, and you marry her whole family. That’s the fact.”

  Luke followed me in. “That’s a flat four-banger with a turbo charge. Listen, I’m basically willing for you to adopt me,” he said to Matt.

  “You can send it back or keep it,” Matt said. “I got my daughter a classic Mustang. It’s just a damn car.”

  “I’m not your son.”

  “No, you’re her son. And that means I owe you. For taking care of her so long. But if you feel like it makes an ass out of you, I’ll tell the guy to drive it back to the lot.”

  I thought it over. It was possible the car had strings attached, but there was no way I was going to get out of this without some obligation to Matt. I might as well enjoy it. “That is the ride of my dreams, Matt. Proud to welcome you to the family,” I said. I shook his hand and he kind of half hugged me.

  “And I as well,” added Luke.

  We drove all over the fucking town, until midnight. Even Luke’s hair-teeth former buddies, sitting in their cars eating fries at the ice-cream place that used to be my grandparents’ store, were blown back. It wasn’t that bad.

  The next morning was three-ring chaos.

  My mother had packed for both of us. Sport coat. White shirt. Tie. Jeans. Swim trunks. She’d forgotten shoes. I got some out, red Converse high-tops. A small gesture, but important, I thought. I wondered what sort of getup Caro would wear. I tried to picture handwoven Hudson River goth. They were sure I had no clue. But I’d heard the whispered references to “her,” and “her plane.” I was prepared to suspend overt hostilities for the weekend, for the sake of Mom’s tranquillity. Gram and Gramp showed up before nine in the morning, just to make sure they didn’t miss anything. They sat there asking shouldn’t we leave for the airport? Matt asked Mom, “Did you remember your shoes?”

  “Go to hell,” she said, like a little girl, sassing. They both cracked up. This was evidently a huge private joke.

  Cath packed mother-and-daughter dresses for her and Abby Sun. With like, fifteen minutes before the limo came, Gram remembered she forgot her dental appliance.

  “Leave it, Hannah,” my grandfather grumbled.

  “I’ll have a migraine the whole weekend,” she all but yelled at him.

  I volunteered to get it. After all, I’d had the car only one night. We somehow dragged ourselves and our various traps onto the plane.

  This hotel, it had fountains that danced to Frank Sinatra songs. The Eiffel Tower was across the goddamned street. “This place has changed,” Matt marveled. “It’s like Disneyland for adults.”

  “It’s obscene,” my mother said, staring around her with her bags at her feet, at a lobby that couldn’t seem to decide whether it was an art museum, a waterfall, or a sculpture garden. “But in a kind of nuts, beautiful way.”

  “No, it’s garish,” Matt said. “That’s an entirely different thing. Garish is okay.”

  “At least it’s air-conditioned,” my mother said, taking his arm. I could see her wilting, and wasn’t sure whether she was having second thoughts—on the whole, at her age, not a bad idea—or simply needed to sleep. “I’m packing it in, party animals,” she said. “I’m going upstairs.”

  And so instead of the spa haircut and massage she’d been gifted with by Matt, my mother slept away her wedding eve, not because she was sick but because, she later told me, sleep makes women over forty beautiful. But Matt and Cathy, along with Matt’s thirty or so friends and my grandfather, who was shameless, played blackjack until two >A.M. Gramp was out of his tree. He won two thousand bucks, and, being Grandpa Steiner, he saw this in terms of what it could buy him—a new pier for the cottage—and stopped. Everyone else was outraged.

  Rory was bug-eyed, but I took her to watch the Cirque du Soleil show called O, in which nuts with the bodies of gods and goddesses dived and flipped and soared onto a stage that was, minute by minute, either covered with enough water to keep them from spinal damage or barely enough to wet the sole of a shoe. “Are they God?” Rory asked.

  “Yes,” I answered. We stood on the balcony and watched the fountains play “Singing in the Rain.”

  “Tired out, shortcake?” I asked her. We could feel the spray from where we sat on the balcony. I looked down. Rory was asleep with her head on the wrought-iron table. I picked her up and carried her, struggling to find my room card. Cathy tucked Rory in.

  “Are you doing okay?” I asked.

  “It’s kind of much,” Cathy said.

  “I think it’s what Matt wants. He’s trying pretty hard.”

  “Yeah, and that’s a good thing,” Cathy said. “It’s good for him to want to be over the top for her sake. And she knows how hard Matt tried to get Caroline to come, and as much as she’s trying not to grieve about that, it’s pulling her under. That’s probably half of why she went to sleep.” I nodded, with a half smile, knowing Matt usually got what he wanted. “At least, she has until three tomorrow to rest. What are you going to do? Matt wanted to see you….”

  I had been thinking of turning in with a movie.

  “He asked me specifically to have you check in with him before you go to bed,” said Cathy.

  So let him have his surprise, I thought. I wandered down to the casino. Matt was in full roar, his shirt open at the neck, Gramp next to him, cheering him on. They were basically shit-faced. It was probably two in the morning. “Hey,” I said, “what did you need?”

  “I looked in on your mom,” he said. “She’s okay; she really is. Little overwhelmed. Sad about your sister.”

  “So Cathy said. It’s cool. I was just up there. She’s not used to noise, and, Jesus, this place would stun anybody, Matt,” I told him. “I’m calling it a night. That’s probably against the sword code of teenagers or something, but I’m whipped. Got to get my give-my-mother-away sleep.” He checked his watch.

  “You’re not losing a mother, Gabe. You’re gaining a nut. It should be okay by now,” he said. He gave me another room key. “Listen. I got you a different room. With a view.” Like he thought I enjoyed hearing the same Celine Dion song every forty-five minutes.

  “It’s okay. My stuff ’s already in the one room,” I said.

  “Indulge me.” I remembered the Subaru, and shrugged. I took the key and struggled, half in a fog, up to the nineteenth floor. It finally came to me. It was my sister up there. I stood outside the door, bleary with lack of sleep, confused by the whole business, eager to get it over with. I inserted the key. And there she was. Perhaps an
inch taller. Sitting on the bed, wearing jeans and a soft silk sweater, her eyes glued to the whirling, dancing fountains.

  It was a room with a view all right.

  Tian.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Gabe’s Journal

  “I’ve only just come here, Gabe,” she said, jumping up off the bed and up onto her toes. “You thought I would never be here again. And here I am. And look!” She threw open her closet. “My dress from our prom. It’s still fit. I came in a limousine from the airport. All this Matt set up for me. I think he must want to make you happy.”

  But I was speechless. I held out my hand. She bypassed it and ran into my arms, kissing me with all the fervor I remembered from the year before last. It wasn’t a gift, putting the two of us alone in a Las Vegas hotel room, because there was only so much we could do. Tian’s father would expect me to treat her with respect; and I knew my mother would, but she wriggled like a goldfish on the bed, and, somehow, the sweater was off, and I saw and touched the tops of her breasts, and then the glory part, and then, thinking I would die, I put my mouth there. She reached inside my shirt and held my ribs closer to her. “I have missed you so much,” she said.

  “There’s nothing else I’ve thought of, for months, no matter how bad it got,” I whispered into her hair. “And it got lousy, Tian.”

  “I know. My poor Gabe.”

  “It’s all okay now.” Our mouths were raw by then; her chin looked like someone had buffed it with a Brillo. She was impossibly beautiful, her hair like a black glass ribbon twirled over her shoulder.

  “But we have to get ready for the wedding,” Tian said.

  “Sure, you bet,” I said. “How long will you stay?”

  “Three days!” she trilled. I felt my stomach hit bottom. Three days? To keep in my hip pocket for the rest of my life.

  “Okay,” I said, and it was better than nothing.

  I slept as though I’d been beaten, and woke to the phone. It was Cathy. “Your mom wants to see you.” I thought, No, God, don’t let her have had some rama-lama relapse. But Cathy said it wasn’t that. She also said, “I saw Ben Affleck in the lobby.” What this signified I couldn’t imagine. “I just bought the little girls bridesmaid dresses. Matching green. With crowns. They were like two hundred bucks apiece. I couldn’t resist….Gabe, honey, were you surprised? By Tian?”

  “It was like a dream,” I told her. “And I don’t say that easy.”

  “Did you…?”

  “No, Cath. Not that it’s any—”

  “Any of my business. I know you would have been responsible.”

  “Sheesh. Let’s skip the lecture. Tian’s father would have the Thai mafia murder me.”

  “But you’re happy?” Cath went on.

  “Nothing changed, Cathy. I don’t feel any different. I love her.”

  “Maybe you’ll never stop loving her, Gabe. But she lives in Asia, honey.”

  “She’s going to Yale. A year from now.”

  “Oh, Gabe. You are the sweetest guy,” Cathy said. “Now, you better come and see Mom.”

  “Honey,” my mother said, reaching out for me, from where she sat in the blue chair. She pointed her finger at me like she was firing a pistol and then grinned. “Gotcha,” she said, and grinned. Then, just as suddenly, she looked sort of young and sad. “Am I going to be able to do this?”

  “Piece of cake,” I said.

  “Here’s the weird thing,” she said. “I’m so happy. I’m so happy. I just…feel like I’d be more happy if I could have had your sister here. And even more, and I know you’re not going to get this…I wish Leo was here.”

  She was right. I didn’t get it.

  “I love your dad now like I love Janey. I don’t want to live with him in his life. But I wish him well.”

  “Mom,” I said, “you’re something else.”

  Grandma and Connie came in then. They had one of those walkers with the rubber feet old ladies use.

  “Get away from me with that thing!” my mother scolded. “Yesterday, I was just bushed from the heat and all. I’m fine. I’m really fine. There are just a lot of emotions, coming fast.”

  “I’ll make it beautiful, Julieanne. Just in case. Better to be safe than sorry,” said Grandma.

  Tian came in. “Connie?” They hugged. Tian practically crawled onto my mother’s lap. “You don’t look sick! You look like a magazine model!” Tian looked at the walker. “Do you have to use this?” My mother shook her head.

  “It’s my mother-in-law’s idea. She thinks I might need it, sweetie,” my mom told her. “Tian, look at you! We missed you so much.”

  “And I miss you, Julie. I am sad for all your sadness. And very happy for your happy. I don’t like to see you sick, though.”

  “Secret,” said my mother. “I’m not as sick as they think. I was. But I’m not now. I think I’ll make it down the aisle. Unless it’s a mile long!”

  I leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. I thought twice about the red Converse shoes, and whether I was being disrespectful. But only briefly. It was, after all, a bizarre place. Then Cathy came in, all royal in this green suit with shoes dyed to match, which I pointed at, and Cathy actually blushed, and shooed us all out of the room. “No one can see the bride before the wedding. And she’s got to get dressed now.”

  “Do you want to bring bad luck down on this?” Connie reprimanded us, slipping past with all these flowery things like pipe cleaners she started twisting around the walker.

  “Connie!” I heard my mom yell as I shut the door. “Stop that! I feel like you’re putting flowers on my grave! I don’t need that!”

  “Better safe than sorry,” Connie told her.

  Matt was out in the hall, pacing like a guy in old movies waiting for his baby to be born. “Kiddo,” he said to me, “I’m forty-eight years old. You wouldn’t think I’d get the willies, like a nervous groom.”

  I said, “I don’t think getting married gets to be something you’re blasé about. Unless you do it, like, eight times.”

  But Matt was still quite the wreck. “What’s taking her so long?” he asked me. I was to learn that surgeons are all cowboys, used to telling ’em to head ’em up and move ’em out. And Matt was used to being around subservient, adoring nurses—such as on the Good Ship Hospital, or whatever the hell it was, that traveled to places like Guatemala and Vietnam to fix kids’ faces. He could get impatient when things didn’t go his way. This, I knew, was a red flag the size of Lambeau Field for Miss Julieanne Gillis, who was basically the same way.

  I went into my room and, trying desperately not to wrinkle it with hands that suddenly felt like I had on catcher’s mitts, put on my tux.

  Then I knocked on Tian’s door, and steered her and me into my room, where we made out on the bed with some idiot movie turned on loud, both of us keeping stiff as sticks so we didn’t wreck my suit. It was after two when she said, “Gabe.” And then louder, “Gabe! I have to dress now. And to put makeup on my chin.”

  I made my way back to my mom’s room. Cathy peeked out and grinned. Matt was still pacing up and down again, but now in a black tux, with three sort of Matt-clone friends pacing up and down in identical tuxes. It looked like waiters in a parade. “Where have you been?” he said, but more softly than before.

  “Take it easy, Matt. This is out of your hands,” I said. I went into my room. The phone rang. It was Gram Steiner, from down the hall, asking how Mom was and saying Cat had called, would I please call her back? As a gesture to the fates, I did, and I got the goddamned answering machine. “We’re out among the flowers,” said the voice of Joyous, “but your call matters to us. Blessed be.”

  “Uh, this would be Gabe Gillis,” I said quickly. “My sister, Caroline Steiner, aka Cat, called me here at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I’ll tell her mother that Cat’s thinking about her. Later.”

  For the next forty-five minutes, I sat there trying not to sweat. It didn’t work. I finally called my grandmother, who came rushing o
ver in this cute little beaded old lady dress, with a hat and veil, and called one of the millions of minions at this place, which looked like a gangster’s idea of a summer home, who steamed the wrinkles out of the tuxedo. Gram fixed the bow tie, which I had managed to fool with until it was vertical instead of horizontal, and dabbed some of the stuff she put on the bags under her eyes on my zits. “Gabe,” she said, “I know you brush your hair straight down. But pardon me, you look like Hitler.” So I put some water on it and messed it up a little. It was intended to be the Brad Pitt effect. But then Gram had to blow-dry the front of my shirt. By that point, I was about ready to sweat again, the volume of Hoover Dam. At the last minute, I took off the patent-leather pumps that came with the thing, and laced up my red Converse high-tops.

  We all came out into the hall at more or less the same time. Matt was already downstairs, getting his troops in order. His best man was his partner in his practice, Louis. Lou’s brother, Joe, was standing up, too. Mom’s best ladies were Connie and Stella. Her ring carrier was Tian, and the little girls had on green dresses and little fake flower crowns on their heads. They kept twirling around so fast that Abby Sun finally fell over flat. It was the only time I ever heard Connie yell at her. She made her go sit on the floor.

  Finally, Connie opened the door, and one of the bellmen from the hotel came running with this wheelchair.

  And my mom sat down in the wheelchair. The look in her eyes, when she saw me, was bemused. “Looks like we aren’t in Sheboygan anymore, Toto. This is a little baroque.”

  “Well, Mom, the guy just gave me a car for a party favor. And, you know, it’s his wedding day,” I said, surprising myself. “He’s trying to give you a good old time. He doesn’t know you’d rather have gone to City Hall.” The fountains jumped then, in the sunlight, to the sound of “Memory.” (My mom loves that song, but frankly, I could stand to hear it one more time, then never again for the rest of my life.) My mother smiled at me. The sun came out and hit the water as it leapt up, movie-style.