The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (255 page)

We’re not even back on the highway yet, and Africa’s already fighting a losing battle against his cone, licking and slurping at the melting ice cream that’s dripping onto his shorts. Minnie’s looking out the window, watching the stores go by, oblivious. Oblivious, too, to his just having bitten off the pointy end of his cone and begun sucking out the ice cream from the bottom. Andrew used to do the same thing, and it would drive me up the wall.

Andrew: I’m excited to see him, but a lot of my apprehension about the next few days centers around him—how he’ll react to Viveca, and she to him if his disapproval is obvious. And now he’ll have Lorenzo to deal with, too, I suppose. Lorenzo’s such a flirt. Why did he, of all people, have to drive up here early? . . . I just hope Andrew didn’t feel he
had
to come because she sent him those plane tickets. If she had only told me she was planning to do that, I would have said it was a bad idea. His conservative Christian fiancée had a ticket, too, but she isn’t coming. Is she busy, or is she boycotting?

Hector eases back into the flow of traffic on the interstate. Africa hasn’t paid me much attention on this trip, but now that he’s riding in back, he’s staring at me. Wearing his ice cream mustache and studying me with those big dark eyes of his. Instead of returning my smile, he asks me how old I am. “How old do you think?” I say. “Take a guess.”

“Eighty?”

His mother swivels back toward him, mortified. “Miz Anna ain’t no eighty! Thass rude! You say you’re sorry.”

“It’s fine, Minnie.” I give him a smile. Tell him I’m fifty-two.

“How come you just gettin’ married if you old?”

Minnie frowns and opens her mouth again, but I hold up my hand to stop her. “Well, honey, I was married before, but I got divorced. So now I’m marrying somebody else.”

“Him?” he asks, pointing up at Hector.

“No, no, the woman I live with. The one your mother works for.”

“Oh,” he says. “You got kids?”

“Yes, I do. Hector and I were just talking about—”

“They got Xbox?”

“Gee, I don’t know. Probably not, though. They’re grown-ups. My son is in the army.”

His eyes widen. “How many bad guys he kill?”

“Well, he doesn’t fight in the wars, honey. He works at a hospital in Texas. Do you know where Texas is?”

He shakes his head. “How come you marrying a lady?”

“Mind your bidness, Africa! Eat your ice cream!”

“No, it’s okay. We’re getting married because we love each other.”

“Oh,” he says. No longer interested, he puts the bottom of his cone to his lips and sucks some more. “Hey!” he protests when his mother yanks it away. “Gimme it back, Mama! It’s mine!”

“You don’t know how to eat a ice cream right, you can go without.” She puts her window down and throws the cone out onto the highway. When Africa begins to cry, she asks him if he wants her to
give
him something to cry about. Starts swiping at his mouth with her stack of napkins. “Look at them shorts,” she sputters. “You wearin’ more than you ate. You ain’t been nothin’ but trouble this whole trip. I oughta have Mr. Hector pull over and drop you off on the side of the road.” I hold my tongue, but what a horrible thing to say to the boy. Was I ever that rough on my kids?

After Africa stops sniveling, the car becomes quiet except for the hum of the tires on the road. Suddenly, I’m jarred by a memory I wish to god hadn’t resurfaced. . . .

I’m at the wheel up front and the three kids are in back, the baby strapped into her car seat, finally asleep, and Andrew and Ariane on either side of her. They’re peevish, both of them. They’ve been at each other all day, and I’m sick of it. “If you two wake up your sister, you’re going to be sorry you did,” I warn them.

“You’re ugly and stupid,” Ariane tells her brother.

“I know you are, but what am I?”

“Ow!” In the mirror, I see them reaching past their little sister and hitting each other. “Mama! Andrew just scratched me!”

“Goddamn you two!” I slam on the brake. Pull off the road and face them. “I’ve had it with both of you! Get out of the car.” They look at each other, shocked. “You heard me. Out!” And when they obey, I gun it. Glimpse their fear in the rearview mirror. Good! Let them be scared for a few minutes. Maybe that will teach them.

Half a mile down the road, I take a right, and then another. One more and I’ll be back there. But when I pass a secondhand store I’ve never seen before, I brake. Put the car in reverse. The baby’s still asleep, so I get out with the motor running. This is just the kind of place where I’ve found some of the raw materials for my best work. GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! a sign in the window says. I don’t have time to go inside—I have to get back to the twins—but I can at least take a quick look at the stuff that’s out on the sidewalk: used pots and pans, old
Life
magazines, a rack of clothes, a wooden coat tree. A man comes out and sees me eyeing two hideous-looking animals, dead and stuffed—a weasel of some kind and . . . is it a wolf?

“Coyote,” the man says. “And the other one’s a fisher cat. There used to be plenty of them around here, but you don’t see them much anymore. I can let you have them both for seventy-five bucks. They’re worth more.” When I shake my head, he says okay, fifty then. I tell him I’m in a hurry but that I’ll be back. I run to the car and take off.

Approaching the place where I made them get out, I see a gray station wagon stopped at the side of the road, its directional signal blinking. There’s a man squatting beside them, talking to them. Oh god! Oh no! I slam on the brake, fly out of the car, and run toward them, screaming. “Get away from them! Don’t you dare talk to my kids!” He stands, hurries back to his car, calling over his shoulder that he was only trying to help them. “What kind of mother leaves her children by the side of the road and—”

“Shut up!” I reach them, grab on to them, hold them tightly to me. “Get out of here before I call the police!”

“Someone ought to call the police on
you
!” he shouts back. Slams his car door and takes off, his back tires spitting up gravel, his signal still blinking.

I was only gone for a few minutes. I only wanted to teach them a lesson. But oh god, what if . . . what if . . . what kind of a mother . . .

I drive away, sobbing. From the backseat, Ariane consoles me. “It’s okay, Mama. I told him you were coming back. We won’t fight anymore.” When I look in the mirror, I see Andrew staring at me, in stunned disbelief still.

Later, sitting at the counter of the five-and-ten, I watch them eat their sundaes. Ask them if they’re going to tell their father. They shake their heads. And when, that weekend Orion spells me and I’m free to go off on one of my hunting expeditions, I drive around, looking for that secondhand shop. When I finally find it and pull up to the front, there’s nothing out on the sidewalk. I get out of the car, look at the sign in the window. There’s a big red ex across the word
GOING
and, above it, the word
GONE
. It’s dark inside, but in the pile of stuff that hasn’t yet been cleared out, I see the coyote and the fisher cat. I’m too late. The piece I’ve been imagining for the past three days, constructing in my head and sketching out on paper, will never be made. . . .

My eyes fill with tears. I turn and look out the window so that Minnie won’t see. All
she
did was make an empty threat, but I actually left them there and drove off. Tried to scare them. Maybe that man who stopped
was
just trying to help them. I hear him again:
What kind of a mother
. . . A terrible one, that’s what kind I was. A mother who was angry and resentful and so focused on her art that . . . They deserved someone better—someone as patient and even-keeled as their father. I probably shouldn’t even have had kids. . . . But they turned out all right, didn’t they? Survived my mistakes. Oh god, I can’t wait to see them. Hug them and hear about their lives. Not so much Marissa; I’m caught up on my New York daughter. Sometimes I wish she’d give me
less
information about what she’s up to. Not so the twins: Andrew, who’s private and closemouthed the way so many men are, and Ariane, who’s always so busy with her work. I’m hungry to see them. To be with the three of them.

“You okay back there, Miss Oh?” Hector asks. Our eyes meet in his rearview mirror. I nod, tell him I’m fine. “You mind if I play some music?”

“No, not at all.”

He turns on the radio and finds a Spanish station. “That too loud?”

“No, no. It sounds nice. Salsa, right?”

He nods, smiles back at me. “This is Victor Manuelle. He’s one of my favorites. Him and Los Van Van. They’re great, too. Nobody makes salsa and merengue music like the Cubans.”

“Is that right?” For the next several miles, we listen to the music, the commercials in rapid-fire Spanish.

“S
ee that sign, Africa?” I ask the boy. “Can you read what it says?”

He squints. “Three . . . Rivers . . . whassat next word?”

“Wequonnoc,” I tell him.

“Three Rivers, Wequonnoc . . .”

“Nation,” his mother says. “Where your brains at, boy?” She turns to me, shaking her head. “What they teachin’ them at that school anyway?”

“Three Rivers is where we’re going,” I tell Africa, overriding his mother’s embarrassment. “So that means we’re almost there.”

He nods. Sticks his finger in his nose and digs around in there until Minnie bats it away. Maybe Viveca was right. I probably should have just hired a car service. This has been one long, difficult ride.

A few minutes later, it gets worse. Africa begins to whimper. “What now?” his mother asks him.

“My tummy hurts.” When she tells him to sit still and think about something else, he says he can’t. That it
really
hurts. “Mama, I gon’ be sick!” And sure enough. His head lurches forward and his little belly begins to heave. When I tell Hector to pull over, he nods. Steers into the right lane and then onto the shoulder. But it’s too late. Minnie’s grabbed the big straw bag that she’s packed their clothes in and opened it wide. She shoves Africa’s face down into it and he heaves everything he’s been eating and drinking.

“It’s all right, baby. It’s okay,” she says, wiping his face. “You feel better now?” He nods, rests his head against her bosom, and she takes hold of his small hand and closes her own work-worn hand over it. It’s the first tenderness she’s shown him since we left New York. Hector carries the soiled straw bag around to the back and locks it in the trunk, but the stench lingers. Back on the road again, we ride with the windows open, the wind blowing in our faces.

“This the one?” Hector asks me. I tell him it is, and he takes the exit.

We pass over the bridge and into downtown Three Rivers. It all looks the same: cars lined up at the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru, people standing at the window of the Dairy Queen where Ariane worked one summer. I’m struck with how much fatter people here are than the ones in weight-conscious Manhattan.

The farther up Main Street we ride, the more I see that things
have
changed. The sporting goods store where we used to buy the kids’ sneakers has gone out of business and become a secondhand furniture store. Rosenblatt’s is still here, I see, with the same family of chipped-nose mannequins in the window looking out with their vacant eyes. The Fart family, Andrew nicknamed them one afternoon, to the giggling delight of his younger sister. A number of small ethnic food places have opened along the main drag now: Rosa’s Tacos, Little Saigon, Jamaican Meat Patties Made Fresh Daily! Probably a result of all the immigrants who work entry-level jobs down at the casino. And for the unemployed, here’s a pawnshop. . . . An everything-for-a-dollar store where Blockbuster used to be . . . A check-cashing place that promises
WELFARE CLIENTS WELCOME.

At a traffic stop, a haggard man of undeterminable age holds up a cardboard sign:
OUT OF WORK. PLEASE HELP ME FEED MY FAMILY
. When I reach into my wallet and pull out a ten-dollar bill, he approaches, takes it, and god-blesses me. “At least the bums in Connecticut don’t got squeegies,” Hector says. Another man hurries across the road in front of us. I recognize him: that guy from the newspaper—the one who owns the place on Bride Lake Road where they found those mummified babies. Remembering that bizarre story, I cringe. The light turns green. We move forward.

After the Stop & Shop, Main Street becomes North Main, and then Sachem Plains Road. Single-family houses give way to farmsteads and wooded lots for sale. It’s early still, but some of the leaves have already started turning. Several of the trees look blighted. Approaching our road, we pass the dairy farm where we used to take the kids for hayrides and Halloween pumpkins. Africa grabs his mother’s arm. “Look at them giant cows!” he says, pointing to a cluster of Holsteins grazing in the field.

“Giant?” Minnie says. “What you talking about, dummy? They just regular size.”

“They bite?”

“Oh, no,” I assure him. “Cows are very gentle animals. Would you like Hector to stop so you can get out and get a better look?”

“No!” It’s sad that a boy his age has never seen cows before, except maybe in picture books. I guess to a kid who’s probably never been out of inner-city Newark before, they must seem more frightening than gunshots or junkies in the streets. Minnie’s told me that Africa was with her that time an addict knocked her to the sidewalk and ran off with her purse.

“Take the next right,” I tell Hector, and when he does, the car begins its climb up Jailhouse Hill. The Halvorsens have painted their house a different color. It used to be blue and now it’s putty gray. The Blackwells have put on an addition. A little boy rides his Big Wheel in old Mrs. Fiondella’s driveway. Orion mentioned that she’d died last year, and that a young family had moved in. I smile, recalling the gifts Mrs. Fiondella would leave on our front steps every August: canned tomatoes and peaches; zucchinis the size of caveman clubs; bouquets of basil, the stems wrapped tightly in wet paper towels and aluminum foil. She took a shine to Andrew, especially; after he had shoveled her walkway or raked her leaves, she’d come over and want to pay him. “No, that’s okay,” he’d tell her, and she’d follow him until she’d cornered him, waving away his protests and stuffing dollar bills into the pocket of his shirt. With the exception of crabby old Mr. Genovese across the street, there was a sense of community here back then; it was a nice neighborhood for the kids to grow up in. At our place in New York, the guy in the apartment next door barely manages a hello when we step into the elevator together. “The driveway coming up on the left,” I tell Hector. “You can pull right in.” It’s strange to see a Realtor’s sign on our front lawn. There’s no other car. Andrew and the girls must not have gotten here yet. Maybe they stopped along the way for lunch.