Richard Russo - That Old CapeMagic

“Okay, fine, but go away for a minute.”

Harold reluctantly did as he was told, but, remembering Griffin, he stopped halfway to his car. “Did I mention I better not hear you were mean to her?”

“Ignore him,” Marguerite advised when Harold’s car door shut behind him. “It’s just how he is.” After she scrunched up her shoulders, they embraced one last time. “Write a movie with a girl like me in it sometime,” she suggested when they separated. “With Susan Sarandon. She’d make a good me.”

In Falmouth he gassed up at a 7-Eleven and he bought himself a sticky bun and a coffee for the road. He’d had no appetite back at the B and B, but after saying goodbye to Marguerite he was suddenly hungry and ate the pastry right there in the parking lot. It was ten-thirty, and normally it would’ve made the most sense to head straight up Route 28, cross the canal at the Bourne Bridge, then shoot across 195 to 95, but if he left now he’d almost certainly get home before Joy. The last of her family was flying out of Portland this morning, and there was no way she’d head back to Connecticut before they all were airborne. If he arrived before she did, he’d have an unpleasant decision to make: sit in his own driveway and wait for her or just use his key and go inside. The former would make him feel like the fool he was, but having walked away from that house last June he really had no right to enter it now without invitation.

He needed to kill an hour or two and was too antsy to just sit around. If he got going now and crossed the canal at the Sagamore instead of the Bourne, he could head up Route 3 toward Boston for a while, then loop back down I-95. The idea of crossing the bridge of his unhappy childhood one last time was appealing. Now that he’d finally scattered his parents’ ashes, he doubted he’d be returning to the Cape again. He felt finished with both the place and its false promises. Also, on the Sagamore he’d likely find out if his mother was really through haunting him or was just waiting for Marguerite, his guardian angel, to depart. When he knew for certain that she was at rest, he’d be able to think about what he’d say when he arrived home without fear of her sarcastic comments.

Wiping his fingers on a napkin, he adjusted the mirror, turned the key in the ignition and shifted into reverse. He’d have to apologize, of course, for everything he’d allowed to happen, but he knew it wasn’t really apologies Joy cared about. She’d been right all along that his parents, not hers, had intruded on their marriage with such disastrous consequences, which meant that he had to figure out how to convince her that all that was finally over, that they could begin again with a clean slate.

Clean slate . Those were the exact words in his head at the moment of impact. The sound was explosive: the initial boom, then the shattering of glass and the shriek of metal on metal, as the back of Griffin ’s head hit the padded rest. “Ow!” he said, rubbing his neck, just as he’d always done as a kid after one of his father’s rear-enders, all of which had occurred just like this one, completely without warning. Ow . A child’s word, and he’d spoken it in a child’s voice, full of grievance and resentment. He half expected to see a child’s startled, betrayed eyes, not his father’s knowing, sad ones, staring back at him from the rearview.

The driver of the other car, a teenaged boy with an acne-ravaged face, appeared at his window. “You okay?” he said.

Griffin couldn’t tell whether the boy was asking if he was hurt or why on earth he was laughing. Griffin rolled down his window and told him he was fine, just surprised.

“I don’t see what’s so funny,” the kid said tentatively, as if, given the difference in their ages, he wasn’t sure he was entitled to this opinion.

“Wait a few years,” Griffin told him, unlatching his seat belt and getting out.

The other vehicle was a late-model BMW. The boy had also been backing out. Griffin identified the parking space he’d just vacated, saw in his mind’s eye the perfect arc in space and time that had resulted in their violent meeting, each blind to the other’s existence until the instant of collision. Both trunks had sprung and were standing up at perfect right angles. Griffin tried to close his, but the lock mechanism wasn’t properly aligned anymore, and it popped right up again. Both sets of taillights were smashed, both bumpers crumpled. It was the kind of wreck that would’ve cost his father a few hundred bucks to repair, but today would run into thousands. Otherwise, the vehicles looked drivable. “I guess we should exchange insurance information,” he said.

At this the boy visibly wilted, as if the necessity were tantamount to admitting that, yes, they’d just had an accident, something he still hoped might be avoided.

Griffin got a pen and a piece of paper from the car and handed them to him.

The boy said, “Couldn’t we just…,” then lapsed into silence.

The cops would have to be called, of course, but when Griffin went back to the car he saw that the cup holder where his cell had been sitting was now empty. He finally located the phone on the floor under the rear seat. Its screen was black, and when he pressed the space bar it stayed black. He pressed several other keys and was about to give up when the screen suddenly leapt to life with a message: CALLING JOY. Before he could hit the button to disconnect, he heard his wife answer, her voice sounding tinny and far away.

“Joy,” he said. He was about to explain that he hadn’t meant to call when he realized that this might just be the moment of grace he’d been waiting for yesterday and had given up on. “Is this a bad time?”

“I’m in the car,” she admitted. “I’m surprised to hear your voice. I guess I thought you’d be halfway back to L.A. ”

He decided on a jaunty tone. “No, I’m on the Cape. I called to tell you it’s official. I’ve become my father. I just backed my rental car into a brand-new BMW. We scattered his ashes yesterday, and I think this might be his way of telling me I won’t be rid of him so easily.” When she didn’t immediately respond, he realized just how forced the jauntiness must have sounded. “We did Mom, too,” he continued more seriously. “Near Chatham. Her favorite part of the Cape.”

“Are you okay? Was anyone injured?”

“No.” To both questions.

Silence again. So why tell me about it? was what she must have been thinking.

“And here’s the really weird part,” he said, unsure whether he was just talking to keep her on the line or, in some roundabout fashion, finally coming to the point. “Since yesterday, maybe for a while before that, I’ve been wondering…” He stopped here, unsure how to continue, though what he’d been wondering couldn’t have been simpler. “I’ve been wondering if maybe I loved them. It’s crazy, I know, but… do you think that’s possible?”

“Oh, Jack,” Joy said, as if she would’ve liked to ask where in the world he’d done his graduate work. “Of course you did. What do you think I’ve been trying to tell you?”

In the rearview mirror Griffin could see the boy, pen in hand, staring blankly at the piece of paper, as if he’d forgotten his very identity.

“Jack?”

“I’m here,” he told her, then, a moment later, heard himself ask, “Is there anything left, Joy, or did I kill it all?”

She didn’t answer immediately, and he understood that the long, painful beat of silence was what he’d been dreading far more than the final verdict. “You came close,” she finally admitted, sniffling. “But no. You killed only the part that could be killed.”

They talked for another minute or two, though only about logistics. She offered to drive down to Falmouth, but he told her that wouldn’t be necessary. In a town this size he shouldn’t have any trouble finding a bungee cord to secure the trunk, his father’s time-honored solution and good enough for now. It’d probably take him an hour or so with the cops, after which, if the car was drivable, he’d be back on the road. They left it that they’d meet just over the Sagamore. They could have some lunch around there, call the rental-car company and find out what they wanted him to do with the wreck, then drive home together.