Ann Beattie - Secrets & Surprises

“A sheep in wolf’s clothing. In the morning you just say, ‘Goodbye, Margaret,’ and drive away with me.”

She said it, but a bit more elaborately. Max and Tom took a walk while Margaret and Elena had coffee. She told Margaret that she was going to spend the week with Tom, that after the week was up, she would be back, to decide what to do.

Margaret nodded, as if she hadn’t really heard. Just as Elena was about to repeat herself, Margaret looked up and said, “I always thought that Daddy liked me best. Although maybe he didn’t, Elena. Maybe he teased you so much because you were his favorite.”

Max came into the kitchen, followed by Tom.

“We ought to get moving,” Tom said. “Thank you, Margaret, for your hospitality.” He held out his hand.

Margaret shook his hand.

“Snow forecast,” Max said. “I heard it on the radio when I was warming up the car.”

The car was running. Elena could hear it. This departure was too abrupt. Earlier Tom had carried out two boxes of books and her papers. Max was swinging her suitcase.

Max kissed Margaret’s cheek. Perhaps earlier he had said he would call her. Perhaps Margaret already understood that, and it wasn’t as bad as it looked. After all, Margaret had been pretty silent about other things. Hadn’t Tom made that clear?

Max held open the back door. Elena hugged Margaret and told her again that she’d be back.

“Stay put if you’re happy,” Margaret said. It was hard to tell with what tone she said it.

They walked single file to the car. Elena sat between them. The radio was on, and Max turned up the volume. Margaret disappeared from the door, then reappeared, waving, wind blowing the white poncho away from her body. Elena could not tell who was singing on the radio because she never listened to country music. When the song ended, she changed stations. There was a weather forecast for snow before evening. She looked up through the tinted glass of the windshield and saw that the snow would start any minute; it wasn’t only the gray glass that made the sky look that ominous.

“God, I’m happy,” Tom said and hugged her. Max moved the dial back to the country-music station and began to sing along with the song. She looked at him to see if that was deliberate, but he was looking out the window. As he sang she looked at him again, to make sure that he wasn’t teasing her. Her father had loved to tease her. When she was small, her father used to toss her in the air, to the count of three. Usually he gave one toss for each count. Sometimes, though, he would throw her high and run the words together “onetwothree.” That frightened her. She told him that it did, and one time she cried. Her mother yelled at her father then for going too far. “How is she going to be an acrobat if she’s afraid of height?” her father said. He always tried to turn things into a joke. She could still close her eyes and see him clearly, in his silk bathrobe with his black velvet slippers monogrammed in silver, coming for her to toss her in the air.

They stopped at a restaurant for lunch. Max put a quarter in the jukebox and played country songs. Elena was beginning to dislike him. She already regretted leaving her sister so abruptly. But everything Tom said had been the truth. Margaret probably wanted her to go.

“Your shrink would be happy to see that smile on your face,” Max said to Tom. “He’d know that he was worth the money.”

“How long have you been seeing a shrink?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Tom said. “Six months, maybe. Is that about right, Max?”

“His ladylove left him,” Max said, “almost six months to the day.”

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Tom said. “What did you say that for?”

“Was it a secret?”

“It wasn’t a secret. It’s just that I hadn’t discussed it with her yet.”

“Sorry,” Max said. “I’ll wash out my mouth with soap. Believe me, I intended nothing by it. If you knew how lousy my own love life was, you’d know I wasn’t passing judgment.”

The snow started as they ate. Elena looked toward the window because there was such a draft she thought it might be open a crack, saw that it was closed, saw the snow.

“I guess we’d better hit the road while the road’s still visible,” Max said, waving to the waitress. Tom took Elena’s hand and kissed her knuckles. She had left almost all of her sandwich.

Outside, they all stopped. They stood staring at a van, with a deer strapped to the top. Elena looked down and fingered the buttons on her coat. When she looked up, the deer was still there, on its side on the rack on top of a blue van. Tom went over to the van. He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and wrote “Murdering Motherfucker” and swung open the door and dropped the paper on the driver’s seat.

“Let’s get out of here before he comes out and starts a fight,” Max said.

Tom took a turn at the wheel. Max stretched out in the back seat. The driving was getting more difficult, so Tom let go of Elena’s hand to drive with both hands on the wheel. She turned off the radio, and nobody said anything. “That bastard was the one who should have been shot,” Max said. She turned around and saw him: eyes closed, knees raised so his feet would fit on the seat. She no longer hated him. She hoped that Margaret had taken in wood before the snow started. The place where it was stacked was hardly sheltered at all.

When the car started to swerve, she grabbed Tom’s arm — the worst thing she could have done — and sucked in her breath. Max sat up and started cursing. She watched as the car drifted farther and farther to the right, onto the shoulder of the road. It bumped to a stop. “Goddamn tire,” Max said, and opened the back door and got out. Tom got out on his side, leaving the door open. Snow blew into the car. No cars had been behind them when it happened. They had been lucky. Elena heard Tom complaining that there was a jack, but no spare tire. “I’ll walk back,” Max said and kicked his foot in the gravel. “There’s got to be somebody who’ll come out, snow or not. I’ll call somebody.” He did not sound as if he believed what he was saying.

Tom got back in the car and slammed the door. “How stupid can we be, to take this trip without a spare?” he said. “Now we sit here and freeze, like a couple of idiots.” He looked up into the rear-view mirror, at Max walking back to where they had come from. No cars came along the road. Elena took his hand, but he withdrew it.

“We’ll get going again,” she said.

“But I can’t believe how stupid we were.”

“It’s Max’s car,” she said. “He should have had the spare with him.”

“It’s Max’s car, but we’re all in the same boat. You took that I-am-not-my-brother’s-keeper lecture too much to heart.”

“You believed what you told me, didn’t you?”

“Oh, leave me alone. I’ve had to argue and discuss all weekend.”

She turned the rear-view mirror toward her to see what progress Max was making, but the back window was entirely covered with snow. The light was dimming. She took Tom’s hand again and this time he let her, but didn’t look at her.

“You’ll hate me again,” he said, “because I never change.”

“I won’t,” she said.

“What about what Max said in the restaurant? You don’t want to hear about all that crap, do you?”

“I guess not.”

“If I bullied you into leaving Margaret, you can go back. I wouldn’t hate you for it. Maybe I said too much. It just struck me that I’m not the best one to be giving advice.”

“What are you trying to do?” Elena said. “Are you trying to get me to back out?”

Tom sighed. Elena moved over next to him for warmth. As they sat huddled together, a car pulled up behind them. Tom opened the door to get out. Elena looked around him, hoping to see a policeman. She saw a short man with a camouflage hat that buckled under the chin. Tom pushed the door shut behind him, but it didn’t click and slowly swung open as the man talked. Elena reached across the seat to close the door, and as she did that she looked farther than she had the first time and saw that it was the blue van with the deer on top. She was terrified. Certainly the man had seen, from the restaurant, who put the note in the van. She took her hand off the handle and leaned across the seat to watch the conversation. In a while the man in the camouflage hat laughed. Tom laughed too. Then he walked to the man’s van with him. Elena moved into the driver’s seat and stuck her head out the door. She felt the snow soaking her hair. Max was nowhere to be seen. Tom and the man were nodding at the deer. Then Tom turned and came back to the car, and Elena moved into her seat again.