The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (18 page)

“Well, that just shows how little you know, then, because I have no earthly intention of keeping Leroy for good. All I want to do is drop in on them this afternoon and make my offer, which might just incidentally cause Fiona to reconsider a bit about Jesse.”

“Jesse?”

“Jesse our son, Ira.”

“Yes, Maggie, I know Jesse’s our son, but I can’t imagine what you think she could reconsider. They’re finished. She walked out on him. Her lawyer sent him those papers to sign and he signed them every one and sent them back.”

“And has never, ever been the same since,” Maggie said. “He or Fiona, either. But anytime he makes a move to reconcile, she is passing through a stage where she won’t speak to him, and then when
she
makes a move he has
slammed off somewhere with hurt feelings and doesn’t know she’s trying. It’s like some awful kind of dance, some out-of-sync dance where every step’s a mistake.”

“Well? So?” Ira said. “I would think that ought to tell you something.”

“Tell me what?”

“Tell you those two are a lost cause, Maggie.”

“Oh, Ira, you just don’t give enough credit to luck,” Maggie said. “Good luck or bad luck, either one. Watch out for that car in front of you.”

She meant the red Chevy—an outdated model, big as a barge, its finish worn down to the color of a dull red rubber eraser. Ira was already watching it. He didn’t like the way it kept drifting from side to side and changing speeds.

“Honk,” Maggie instructed him.

Ira said, “Oh, I’ll just—”

He would just get past the fellow, he was going to say. Some incompetent idiot; best to put such people far behind you. He pressed the accelerator and checked the rearview mirror, but at the same time Maggie reached over to jab his horn. The long, insistent blare startled him. He seized Maggie’s hand and returned it firmly to her lap. Only then did he realize that the Chevy driver, no doubt equally startled, had slowed sharply just feet ahead. Maggie made a grab for the dashboard. Ira had no choice; he swerved right and plowed off the side of the road.

Dust rose around them like smoke. The Chevy picked up speed and rounded a curve and vanished.

“Jesus,” Ira said.

Somehow their car had come to a stop, although he couldn’t recall braking. In fact, the engine had died. Ira was still gripping the wheel, and the keys were still
swinging from the ignition, softly jingling against each other.

“You just had to butt in, Maggie, didn’t you,” he said.

“Me? You’re blaming this on me? What did I do?”

“Oh, nothing. Only honked the horn when I was the one driving. Only scared that fellow so he lost what last few wits he had. Just once in your life, Maggie, I wish you would manage not to stick your nose in what doesn’t concern you.”

“And if I didn’t, who would?” she asked him. “And how can you say it doesn’t concern me when here I sit in what’s known far and wide as the death seat? And also, it wasn’t my honking that caused the trouble; it was that crazy driver, slowing down for no apparent reason.”

Ira sighed. “Anyway,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“I could just strangle him!” she said.

He supposed that meant she was fine.

He restarted the engine. It coughed a couple of times and then took hold. He checked for traffic and pulled out onto the highway again. After the gravelly roadside, the pavement felt too frictionless, too easy. He noticed how his hands were shaking on the steering wheel.

“That man was a maniac,” Maggie said.

“Good thing we had our seat belts fastened.”

“We ought to report him.”

“Oh, well. So long as no one was hurt.”

“Go faster, will you, Ira?”

He glanced over at her.

“I want to get his license number,” she said. Her tangled curls gave her the look of a wild woman.

Ira said, “Now, Maggie. When you think about it, it was really as much our doing as his.”

“How can you say that? When he was driving by fits
and starts and wandering every which way; have you forgotten?”

Where did she find the energy? he wondered. How come she had so much to expend? He was hot and his left shoulder ached where he’d slammed against his seat belt. He shifted position, relieving the pressure of the belt across his chest.

“You don’t want him causing a serious accident, do you?” Maggie asked.

“Well, no.”

“Probably he’s been drinking. Remember that public-service message on TV? We have a civic duty to report him. Speed up, Ira.”

He obeyed, mostly out of exhaustion.

They passed an electrician’s van that had passed them earlier and then, as they crested a hill, they caught sight of the Chevy just ahead. It was whipping right along as if nothing had happened. Ira was surprised by a flash of anger. Damn fool driver. And who said it had to be a man? More likely a woman, strewing chaos everywhere without a thought. He pressed harder on the accelerator. Maggie said, “Good,” and rolled down her window.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Go faster.”

“What did you open your window for?”

“Hurry, Ira! We’re losing him.”

“Be funny if we got a ticket for this,” Ira said.

But he let the speedometer inch up to sixty-five, to sixty-eight. They drew close behind the Chevy. Its rear window was so dusty that Ira had trouble seeing inside. All he could tell was that the driver wore a hat of some kind and sat very low in the seat. There didn’t seem to be any passengers. The license plate was dusty too—a Pennsylvania plate, navy and yellow, the yellow mottled with gray as if mildewed.

“Y two eight—” Ira read out.

“Yes, yes, I have it,” Maggie said. (She was the type who could still reel off her childhood telephone number.) “Now let’s pass him,” she told Ira.

“Oh, well …”

“You see what kind of driver he is. I think we ought to pass.”

Well, that made sense. Ira veered left.

Just as they came alongside the Chevy, Maggie leaned out her window and pointed downward with her index finger. “Your wheel!” she shouted. “Your wheel! Your front wheel is falling off!”

“Good grief,” Ira said.

He checked the mirror. Sure enough, the Chevy had slowed and was moving toward the shoulder.

“Well, he believed you,” he said.

He had to admit it was sort of a satisfaction.

Maggie twisted around in her seat, gazing out the rear window. Then she turned to Ira. There was a stricken look on her face that he couldn’t account for. “Oh, Ira,” she said.

“Now what.”

“He was old, Ira.”

Ira said, “These goddamn senior-citizen drivers …”

“Not only was he old,” she said. “He was black.”

“So?”

“I didn’t see him clearly till I’d said that about the wheel,” she said. “He didn’t mean to run us off the road! I bet he doesn’t even know it happened. He had this wrinkled, dignified face and when I told him about the wheel his mouth dropped open but still he remembered to touch the brim of his hat. His hat! His gray felt hat like my grandfather wore!”

Ira groaned.

Maggie said, “Now he thinks we played a trick on
him. He thinks we’re racist or something and lied about his wheel to be cruel.”

“He doesn’t think any such thing,” Ira said. “As a matter of fact, he has no way of knowing his wheel
isn’t
falling off. How would he check it? He’d have to watch it in motion.”

“You mean he’s still sitting there?”

“No, no,” Ira said hastily. “I mean he’s probably back on the road by now but he’s traveling a little slower, just to make sure it’s all right.”

“
I
wouldn’t do that,” Maggie said.

“Well, you’re not him.”

“He wouldn’t do that, either. He’s old and confused and alone and he’s sitting there in his car, too scared to drive another inch.”

“Oh, Lord,” Ira said.

“We have to go back and tell him.”

Somehow, he’d known that was coming.

“We won’t say we deliberately lied,” Maggie said. “We’ll tell him we just weren’t sure. We’ll ask him to make a test drive while we watch, and then we’ll say, ‘Oops! Our mistake. Your wheel is fine; we must have misjudged.’ ”

“Where’d you get this ‘we’ business?” Ira asked. “I never told him it was loose in the first place.”

“Ira, I’m begging you on bended knee, please turn around and go rescue that man.”

“It is now one-thirty in the afternoon,” Ira said. “With luck we could be home by three. Maybe even two-thirty. I could open the shop for a couple of hours, which may not be much but it’s better than nothing.”

“That poor old man is sitting in his car staring straight in front of him not knowing what to do,” Maggie said. “He’s still hanging on to the steering wheel. I can see him as plain as day.”

So could Ira.

He slowed as they came to a large, prosperous-looking farm. A grassy lane led toward the barn, and he veered onto that without signaling first, in order to make the turn seem more sudden and more exasperated. Maggie’s sunglasses scooted the length of the dashboard. Ira backed up, waited for a stream of traffic that all at once materialized, and then spun out onto Route One again, this time heading north.

Maggie said, “I knew you couldn’t be heartless.”

“Just imagine,” Ira told her. “All up and down this highway, other couples are taking weekend drives together. They’re traveling from Point A to Point B. They’re holding civilized discussions about, I don’t know, current events. Disarmament. Apartheid.”

“He probably thinks we belong to the Ku Klux Klan,” Maggie said. She started chewing her lip the way she always did when she was worried.

“No stops, no detours,” Ira said. “If they take any break at all, it’s for lunch in some classy old inn. Someplace they researched ahead of time, where they even made reservations.”

He was starving, come to think of it. He hadn’t eaten a thing at Serena’s.

“It was right about here,” Maggie said, perking up. “I recognize those silos. It was just before those mesh-looking silos. There he is.”

Yes, there he was, not sitting in his car after all but walking around it in a wavery circle—a stoop-shouldered man the color of a rolltop desk, wearing one of those elderly suits that seem longer in front than in back. He was studying the tires of the Chevy, which might have been abandoned years ago; it had a settled, resigned appearance. Ira signaled and made a U-turn, arriving neatly behind so the two cars’ bumpers almost touched. He
opened the door and stepped out. “Can we help?” he called.

Maggie got out too but seemed willing for once to let Ira do the talking.

“It’s my wheel,” the old man said. “Lady back up the road a ways pointed out my wheel was falling off.”

“That was us,” Ira told him. “Or my wife, at least. But you know, I believe she might have been wrong. That wheel seems fine to me.”

The old man looked at him directly now. He had a skull-like, deeply lined face, and the whites of his eyes were so yellow they were almost brown. “Oh, well, surely,
seems
fine,” he said. “When the car is setting stark still like it is.”

“But I mean even before,” Ira told him. “Back when you were still on the road.”

The old man appeared unconvinced. He prodded the tire with the toe of his shoe. “Anyhow,” he said. “Mighty nice of you folks to stop.”

Maggie said, “Nice! It’s the least we could do.” She stepped forward. “I’m Maggie Moran,” she said. “This is my husband, Ira.”

“My name’s Mr. Daniel Otis,” the old man said, touching the brim of his hat.

“Mr. Otis, see, I had this sort of, like, mirage as we were driving past your car,” Maggie said. “I thought I noticed your wheel wobbling. But then the very next instant I said, ‘No, I believe I imagined it.’ Didn’t I, Ira? Just ask Ira. ‘I believe I made that driver stop for no good reason,’ I told him.”

“They’s all kindly explanations why you might have seen it wobble,” Mr. Otis said.

“Why, certainly!” Maggie cried. “Heat waves, maybe, rippling above the pavement. Or maybe, I don’t know—”

“Might have been a sign, too,” Mr. Otis said.

“Sign?”

“Might have been the Lord was trying to warn me.”

“Warn you about what?”

“Warn me my left front wheel was fixing to drop off.”

Maggie said, “Well, but—”

“Mr. Otis,” Ira said. “I think it’s more likely my wife just made a mistake.”

“Now, you can’t know that.”

“An understandable mistake,” Ira said, “but all the same, a mistake. So what we ought to do is, you get into your car and drive it just a few yards down the shoulder. Maggie and I will watch. If your wheel’s not loose, you’re free and clear. If it is, we’ll take you to a service station.”

“Oh, why, I appreciate that,” Mr. Otis said. “Maybe Buford, if it ain’t too much trouble.”

“Pardon?”

“Buford Texaco. It’s up ahead a piece; my nephew works there.”

“Sure, anywhere,” Ira said, “but I’m willing to bet—”

“In fact, if it ain’t too much trouble you might just go on and carry me there right now,” Mr. Otis said.

“Now?”

“I don’t relish driving a car with a wheel about to drop off.”

“Mr. Otis,” Ira said. “We’ll test the wheel. That’s what I’ve been telling you.”

“I’ll test it,” Maggie said.

“Yes, Maggie will test it. Maggie? Honey, maybe I should be the one.”

“Shoot, yes; it’s way too risky for a lady,” Mr. Otis told her.

Ira had been thinking of the risk to the Chevy, but he said, “Right. You and Mr. Otis watch; I’ll drive.”

“No, sir, I can’t allow you to do that,” Mr. Otis said. “I appreciate it, but I can’t allow it. Too much danger. You
folks just carry me to the Texaco, please, and my nephew will come fetch the car with the tow truck.”

Ira looked at Maggie. Maggie looked back at him helplessly. The sounds of traffic whizzing past reminded him of those TV thrillers where spies rendezvoused in modern wastelands, on the edges of superhighways or roaring industrial complexes.

“Listen,” Ira said. “I’ll just come right out with this—”

“Or don’t carry me! Don’t,” Mr. Otis cried. “I already inconvenienced you-all enough, I know that.”

“The fact is, we feel responsible,” Ira told him. “What we said about your wheel wasn’t so much a mistake as a plain and simple, um, exaggeration.”