Drives Like a Dream (25 page)

She forced a smile. "I want to be certain it's true first."

They stopped at the car—a '97 Corolla wagon—and Walter gave her the keys. "I think you're going to be happy with this. You know my daughter's a nurse, so she's taken great care of it, and I checked it over just to make sure. If you have any trouble at all, Lydia, please call me. This car comes with my exclusive Walter Hill warranty. Won't cost you a dime. Guaranteed long life."

Lydia admired the silver wagon, which looked as if it had been detailed that morning. Even the hubcaps gleamed. Though she'd spent a good part of her career studying theories of car design, she had never paid much attention to what she drove. It hadn't crossed her mind that Cy might long for a luxury car, something sleek and showy.

"Oh, and I have another thing for you, too." Walter reached into his pocket and handed her a gold coin with the number 7 embossed on one side and a horseshoe on the other. He must have picked it up from his weekly trip to the casino. "It's your lucky chip," he said. "Hang on to that, Lydia."

She put the lucky chip in her purse and hugged him. "I will." She went over to the driver's side and opened the car door. "Thanks for everything, Walter. You've been a godsend."

In the days that had followed, Lydia tried to dismiss M.J.'s account, but the more she went back over the pieces, the more she saw how they fit. Gilbert Warren may have been loyal to some, like Harley Earl, but he had turned his back on his father-in-law. Time and again he'd chosen GM over his own family, something she didn't like to remind herself. In fact, her dad was plenty capable of betrayal. M.J.'s theory only confirmed once more that Lydia had never really known her father.

On the afternoon before the Fourth of July, Lydia had her first close call. While Jessica was taking Bedlam for a walk, the handyman showed up at the door unannounced. The sign on his van, parked at the curb, read
MIKE "CHICKIE" PATERAKIS, GENERAL CONTRACTOR
. Lydia liked him well enough, but she was convinced that he could have gotten a lot more done by now if he weren't such a talker. He had degrees in English and Religion from Wayne State and was back in school again, this time at General Motors Technical College. He had hollow cheekbones, gray streaks in his hair and beard, and the look of someone who rarely ate or slept,
HONK IF YOU THINK I'M JESUS
, read the bumper sticker on his van. Lydia guessed he'd had more than a few takers.

She worried about Jessica's returning too soon as Chickie walked into the foyer, his utility belt hula-hooping around his bony hips. He'd fashioned an extra compartment on the belt for a paperback and liked to go on at length about whatever he was reading.

"Chickie," Lydia said. "I thought you were all finished. I mailed the check a couple days ago."

"I got it." He grabbed his paperback out of its holster, removed the check from between its pages, and set it on the hallway table. It was for four thousand dollars, materials included. "Have you read this one, by the way?" It was his usual opening line. He held up the paperback—
1957 Chevrolet Parts & Accessories
—thesame book that Cy had used when he was fixing up the Nomad. "I want to propose a deal," Chickie said. "I need a restoration project."

A week ago, working near the garage, he had first noticed the Nomad through the window and asked Lydia if she wouldn't mind if he took it for a spin. The car hadn't been driven more than a handful of times since Cy had rebuilt the engine. He had bought new tires for it and taken the car up and down Woodward. Lydia had passed on going along for the ride; "I'll wait until you're finished," she said. But Cy never did get around to the chassis, the trim, the console, the rest of the car. The old body remained.

Chickie had driven his van up the driveway that day to jump-start the Nomad. He asked Lydia how often the car was driven. She told him that her sons sometimes warmed it up when they came home for holidays. "But that's never more than two or three times a year." Chickie looked under the hood and checked the fluids and tires. He was surprised at how well the engine idled.

Lydia watched him steer the Nomad down the street.

"You were certainly gone a long time," she had said when he returned from his test drive.

"I went up Woodward, all the way out to Waterford, gassed it up in Birmingham."

"So how was it?" she asked.

"Like they always tell you," he said with a grin. "Drives like a dream."

Now he put a second check down on the table, this one for six thousand dollars. "I love that car. I want to make it my first big job. What would you say if I took it off your hands for ten thousand dollars? It's a classic, but you know the body needs a lot of work."

Lydia was speechless. She had rim up huge bills in the last month, and the money would be a great help. She thought of the people she associated with the car—Cy, who had moved to Phoenix; her father, a different man, possibly, than the one she thought she knew. Lydia couldn't remember the last time she had been in the Nomad. What was she keeping it for, anyway? It was a relic from a world that no longer existed.

Jessica would be back any minute. How could Lydia explain a handyman when all this time she'd told the kids that Norm was doing the fix-it work around the house?

"The car is yours," she said.

Chickie slapped his book against his thigh. "Hot damn. Just like that?"

"The keys are under the seat. I don't mean to be rude, but I'm expecting someone."

He put the
1951 Chevrolet Parts & Accessories
back in its holster and shook Lydia's hand. "So we have a deal." He smiled. "I'll pick up the van later, if that's all right by you. I want to drive my new car off the lot."

Lydia followed him outside to the garage. She didn't want Jessica to see the car. Knowing that her daughter usually walked toward the zoo, Lydia said, "I do have one odd request: if you could take a right-hand turn out of the driveway, I'd be grateful."

"I understand superstition," Chickie said conspiratorially.

Lydia watched as he started the car, pulled onto the driveway, got out and shut the garage door behind him. He gave her a thumbs up, and, just like that, "the beauty queen of all station wagons" was gone.

A
S SOON AS
Jessica removed Bedlam's leash, he dashed for the water bowl. She put her keys on the front table and picked up a couple of checks that were sitting there: one from someone named Mike "Chickie" Paterakis written out to her mother and another from Lydia to Paterakis General Contracting. Same name as on the van parked in front of the house. "What's all this money for?" Jessica asked.

Her mother came into the foyer looking surprised. "Oh, you just missed the guy who bought the Nomad. He came by to pick it up."

"The Nomad? You sold it?" That was awfully fast, Jessica thought. She bet Norm had found out about Cy's restoration project. He'd probably gotten jealous and wanted nothing more to do with the car. It didn't seem like Lydia to sell one of Grandpa Warren's designs so suddenly. "Did you tell Ivan and Davy?"

"I don't think they'll mind."

Jessica wasn't so sure. "Why is there a check from you to this guy?"

Lydia seemed at a loss for words. "Oh, I told him I'd pay for body paint and any extra parts. That's what the four thousand is for," she said. "Then the six he just gave me is the final payment. He mailed me the first installment already He did it that way for bookkeeping. Unorthodox, I know—" She grabbed the checks and started hurrying up the stairs. "Anyway, we made a tidy sum."

Two checks for bookkeeping?
We made a tidy sum?
This didn't sound like her mother.

A couple of weeks ago Lydia had been impossible to track down, urgent to finish the house, and had threatened to elope. Now she'd sold the Nomad to a man named Chickie, let Norm run off to Minnesota, didn't seem to mind that the house was only half-painted, the kitchen covered in drop cloths, every room littered with partially packed boxes. And all she'd said about eloping when Jessica had asked was, "Oh, we're still thinking about it. But that's off in the future."

Jessica hadn't known what to expect when she got home—an intervention, perhaps, if it came to that. She had imagined herself facing off against an adversary, or at least finding out what Norm was after. But he was gone for the week. His carrot juice was in the fridge; his power bars and vitamin supplements huddled on a shelf of the cupboard. His work boots sat just outside the back door looking large and tired. His paint-speckled plaid shirts—
I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay
—were everywhere; he must have left one in each room, as if marking his territory.

Jessica hadn't spent so much time alone with her mother since college. She found herself sorting through her old things slowly, often bringing pictures to Lydia's office. "Remember this?" she'd say, holding up a browning photo from the seventies. Jessica liked hearing the stories she'd forgotten: how Lydia sold fire alarms door to door when she was pregnant with Ivan, or the time she met Diana Ross at the downtown Hudson's; what Jessica was like as an infant—choleric, determined, quickest out of the bassinet, first to walk. Here, just the two of them, Jessica and Lydia had quiet dinners, watched Audrey Hepburn movies, and ate Neapolitan ice cream from the box. And her mother hadn't once needled her with
What are you going to do
with your life?
or
How long will you stay out west?
Two was a good number, she thought, a simple line. Three, four, and five made a more complex geometry.

But Davy was coming home tomorrow for the Fourth, Ivan was talking about driving in as soon as he could get a few days off, and the yard sale was coming up in a couple of weeks. She had been surprised when Lydia suggested she call the
Free Press
and place the ad—her mother liked to keep everything, and Jessica couldn't help blaming Norm for all of these changes—but she had to admit it would be good to get rid of years of clutter, and to jettison Cy's museum of hobbies at last. She realized that she was locking herself in to stay at least as long as mid-July, but after all, she had come here to keep an eye on Norm, and the way things were going she wondered if she was ever going to meet him.

The next day Jessica went to Royal Oak to get falafel and grape leaves from Mr. Greek's, and she and her mother ate at the patio table, looking through more photographs Jessica had collected.

"Notice the face you're making in this one," Lydia said. "Do you remember why?"

In the picture the whole family sat in a horse-drawn carriage on the main street of Mackinac Island, a Victorian-era resort off the tip of Lake Huron, where cars were forbidden. Ivan, who must have been eight, smiled toothily in a Tigers cap and held Davy the toddler between his knees. Jessica had tucked herself under her mother's arm and wore the most miserable expression. "Was it something I ate?" she asked.

"Actually, yes," Lydia said. The trip had begun in Oak Grove at Lydia's mother's funeral, where Ivan had run out screaming when he'd laid eyes on Grandmother Warren, waxy and rouged in her open casket. "Your father and I thought we owed you a treat after that, so we went straight up to Mackinac, spur of the moment."

Jessica had been five at the time but thought she recalled the cabin where they had stayed. "It had a dank smell and we could walk to the water. And I remember a map over the fireplace."

"That's right; it showed where all the shipwrecks had been, up and down the coast of Lake Huron. Ivan loved that map. We looked all over the island for a duplicate but never found one." Lydia took a bite of the grape leaves.

"So, there was a patch of toadstools out in front of the cabin and later we figured out that you must have helped yourself to a few that morning. As we walked to town I noticed that you weren't looking so good, but your dad thought it would be nice if we took a carriage ride."

Jessica had never heard this story—surprising, since her mother loved nothing more than a good emergency.

"When it finally dawned on your father that you were sick, we went all over in that stupid horse and buggy from pharmacy to hotel looking for ipecac. But no one stocked it and the ferry to the mainland wasn't leaving for another hour. So the carriage driver—I won't forget him—took us to the marina and actually talked some fisherman there into rushing us over to the mainland."

"Why didn't you stick your finger down my throat?"

"You would have bitten it off."

Jessica laughed. Bedlam came over and lay under the table looking cute so he could get some scraps. Jessica scratched his head with her toes.

"There was a lot of chop out there, and your father kept joking with Ivan that we would be next on the map of maritime disasters. I was furious, completely beside myself. Cy was supposed to have been watching you that morning, but now here he was making light of a crisis. Anyway, the rough ride and the smell on that boat alone should have been enough to make all of us sick. But you held on and we found a pharmacy in Mackinaw City."

"The only real memory I have from up north is when you panicked and couldn't drive across the Mackinac Bridge. God, I was so mortified," Jessica said. "I almost took the wheel, remember? I would rather have driven right off that bridge than sit by the side of the road waiting for a cop. I can still picture the heads turning and staring at us. Why, oh why, do girls have to be thirteen?"

Just then Bedlam shot out from under the table and started barking at the backyard fence.

It was Davy, walking in the back gate. Lydia jumped up from her chair and went to give him a hug.

"Hey, I thought you weren't getting here until tonight," Jessica said. Her brother put down his shoulder bag and rubbed his bloodshot eyes. He was a wreck. Jessica could only imagine what he'd been through in the weeks since he'd left Oregon. She hadn't really spoken to him since then—his cell phone was always off or he didn't pick up—but she knew that he and Teresa were still battling out their relationship. It looked like Davy hadn't packed much, as if he'd left in a hurry.