Drives Like a Dream (28 page)

But when the cab pulled up to the curb ten minutes late, Davy still hadn't finished packing, and Jessica sat on the porch with a cup of coffee. She wore sweatpants and an old red pullover, making no effort to look presentable. Lydia went down to hold the taxi.

She was leaning into the passenger's side window when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Norm's convertible coming up the street. She looked toward the porch, where Davy had joined his sister. Lydia stepped away from the cab, and as Norm pulled up behind it, she turned to wave to the kids. "Here he is now," she yelled. "My goodness, we're running late."

She saw Jessica and Davy squinting at the man behind the wheel. Norm parked and began to get out of the car, when Lydia rushed over to him and nearly shut his leg in the door trying to stop him from going any further. "Look over there. It's my kids. Go on," she said. "Wave hello."

Norm seemed confused, so she grabbed his elbow and held up his arm. He gave a partial wave while pulling away from her saying, "What? What are you doing?" Lydia ducked under his arm and gave him a big I-haven't-seen-my-lover-in-two-weeks hug. Then she pushed him back into the driver's seat and slammed the door shut.

Hurrying around to the passenger's side she called up to the kids, who were now making their way down the steps. "Bye, Davy. Have a safe trip. Bye, Jess." She waved. "I left the Spiveys' info on the kitchen table. Love you," she yelled and climbed into the car. She leaned over to Norm. "Let's go!"

They pulled out even as Jessica and Davy were walking toward them. "Bye!" Lydia said to fill the air. "Bye!" She turned toward Norm as if to kiss him. Only when they were safely out of range did she draw back and ask, as if everything were perfectly normal, "So, are you ready for your talk?"

"What the hell was that all about?" Norm asked.

"Oh, I'm sorry. I always get emotional when my kids leave. Davy had to go back to Chicago early."

"You were certainly in a hurry to get out of there."

They turned onto Woodward and headed toward the highway. "I'm terrible with departures," Lydia said, leaning away. "Why linger and prolong the letdown?"

Norm adjusted his side mirrors. "Well, it sure took me by surprise," he said. He smoothed his ponytail and touched the rims of his glasses, as if to busy his hands while recovering from an affront.

Lydia felt the urge to change the topic. Without thinking, she launched into the story that M.J. had revealed, filling in the spaces with her own deductions, about what really happened to Tucker. She said that she couldn't believe it at first, but Norm's conspiracy theory had turned out to be true.

"There were a lot of people out to get Tucker," she explained as Norm turned off I-96 and headed for Dearborn. "But one man had all the inside scoop. I can't tell you his name because I promised not to betray my source. But a single individual had access to all of Tucker's records, and he alone leaked them to GM.

"So, just like you said, Norm, there
was
a Big Three conspiracy. GM passed all the mole's information onto the press and prosecutors at the SEC. Not long after that, Tucker was too busy with court dates to make cars."

"That's quite a story, Lydia." Norm didn't seem as shocked as she'd expected, but he wasn't smug about the news either. For that, at least, she was grateful.

As they drove past Fairlane, Henry Ford's sprawling estate, and turned at the Ford Museum, Lydia wondered again if she would ever fully process what her father's likely betrayal had meant to her, to her work, to countless lives both during and after Tucker's swift rise and fall. Tens of millions of dollars and thousands of jobs had been lost. The impact on the future of postwar transportation was immeasurable, all because of her father's wounded pride.

Norm pulled into a park within view of the famous Ford Rouge plant. "A lot of Ford people will be here, actually. I think they're starting to think in the right direction, if we can wean them off SUVs." He told the parking lot attendant that he was with the convention, then pulled onto the grass, parking under a sign that read
FUEL CELL CONVERTIBLES.

Norm grabbed his briefcase from the back of the car, took out some typewritten pages, and started writing in the margins.

Lydia began to have misgivings about what she'd said. She worried that he'd try to track down her "source," that he'd go to the car archives and find out that her father worked for Tucker. Why did she keep putting herself in a position, with her children, with Norm, with everyone lately, where she had to say
something,
and the words kept coming out? "I hope you won't use my name." Lydia looked him in the eye.

"Oh, don't worry about that." Norm hastily scribbled on the back of a page. "I'm talking about the fate of maverick designers. It's a cautionary tale."

"I still haven't even confirmed what I just told you."

Norm stopped writing for a moment. "The whole point of my talk is to get the big corporations to listen to the visionaries. I don't want the Tucker tragedy to happen again." He gestured all around him. The park was dotted with cars like Norm's—ordinary-looking compacts that ran on natural gas, hydrogen, or electricity.

"Okay," Lydia said, while Norm continued to write. "I just want to be sure."

"So, what do you think?" He looked at his watch. "We've got more than an hour to kill before my talk. If you don't mind, I'd like to make some changes to this. Why don't you look around, check out the exhibits."

It was calming to tour the booths on emergent technologies, watching engineers demonstrate their inventions, and after a while Lydia felt sorry for not saying a real goodbye to Davy. She had left without her purse or keys and here she was, stuck, playing up to Norm in order to keep her secret. She had almost handed over her father's name to him.

She took flyers from the Sustainable Energy Association, Electricore of Illinois, the Sons and Daughters of Mother Earth. Many had driven long distances just to park their hybrid cars and stand next to poster boards that read
MPG Unlimited
and
Take a Pass on Greenhouse Gas.
She checked out the display for the Electric Drag Racing Club and the Great American Solar Challenge, where later today ten solar cars would begin a race across the plains, over the Rockies, to finish in, of all places, Oregon.

When Lydia returned to the spot where she'd left Norm, she couldn't find him. She waited for ten minutes next to his green convertible and, when he still did not appear, she went into the main tent to find a seat for his talk.

A colleague of Norm's was introducing him as a "pragmatic Utopian" and a "modern-day green knight." Norm took the dais and surveyed the crowd of no more than fifty people. His eyes stopped briefly on Lydia, and she could have sworn that she saw him press his lips together, as if to say,
I'm not responsible for these words.

A
FTER DAVY LEFT
, Jessica sat on the front porch, stunned by her mother's swift departure. She had assumed after all the build-up that Norm would stop in for breakfast or at least come up and introduce himself. He'd been gone for over two weeks, had never met the family, and still had barely bothered to get out of his car.

For all the time Jessica had put in worrying about him, though, he didn't look so threatening. From a distance, anyway, he seemed nothing like the hulking figure that she had imagined. If this was a "man of appetites," he had an impressive metabolism. He looked like a lot of people in Eugene—a little stooped and washed out. This should have given her comfort, but it only addled her more that Norm wasn't the man she'd expected.

Inside the house, the air felt trapped and heavy. Jessica wanted to call her mother's cell phone and demand to know what was going on, but there were Lydia's purse and phone on the front hall table. It made no sense, how she'd taken off like a shot, waving her arms. She hadn't even said what time she'd be back or when Ivan would arrive. The more Jessica thought about this rescue mission for the Spiveys, the angrier she got. Someone had to put her foot down. If Lydia wouldn't do it, then it was up to her.

Jessica went into the kitchen and grabbed her mother's note. It had Cy's number in Arizona and Casper and M.J.'s hotel information in Saugatuck. Enough was enough. Her father would have to solve this problem on his own.

"You sound very tense," he said, after Jessica had told him she had far too much work to do. "I know change can be hard. We've been in transition ourselves. Ellen and I are getting into Pilates. You should try it. We got the instructional video and the ball. It's doing wonders for our stress—"

"Dad," she interrupted him. "I don't think you understand. I'm
not
picking up the Spiveys. Period. That's it."

"I think your mother will be disappointed."

"You're in no position to speak for her. If you want the Spiveys to have a ride home you should fly here and do it yourself."

Nothing seemed to register with her father. "I'm reminded of a Hopi saying: Do not allow anger to poison you."

"This is not about my anger, Dad. It's about you dumping your troubles on other people. You know what I've been doing? Going through the basement, which is filled entirely with your crap. What do you want me to do with it?"

"This kind of conversation is not constructive, Jess. But when you feel better, I want you to know that I'm always available." He spoke at an oddly rapid pace, his voice rising. She recognized this as his obscuring mechanism, like a squid clouding the water with ink.

"I'm not doing it," she repeated, but quietly now. "You'll have to find some other way."

After hanging up, Jessica went to her room and found Bedlam pawing through old sheets, making a nest for himself on the floor. She finished going through the boxes of towels, sheets, duvets, blankets, none of them worth keeping. Then she went up in the attic and tunneled in deeper, working in the inferno without bothering to bring the boxes down. It felt good to sweat, the dust turning to dirt, sweat sliding down her arms. She pushed aside the furniture, tore through boxes barely looking at their contents before deciding
this is to keep, this is to throw away.

She set Ivan's toys by the stairs. There were matchbox cars, hot wheels and metal soldiers, a poster he used to keep over his desk of Evel Knievel up on one wheel, his red, white, and blue cape flowing behind him: "There's a little Evel in all of us."

She hunted down everything she could find that she knew with certainty was her father's. She couldn't believe how much stuff he had left. Not just video equipment, adding machines, radios, golf clubs, and the laminator that Davy had used to make fake IDs for his band. Cy had left his baseball card collection with the complete 1961 Tigers, high school report cards, projects and diplomas, even his birth certificate. He had left a box of his father's poker chips and the vintage card table where Kurt Modine hosted his UAW friends on Saturday nights; next to it were half a dozen more boxes of his mother's pictures, letters, jewelry, and clothes. Jessica set all this aside to mail to Cy in boxes stamped
FRAGILE, HANDLE WITH CARE
. The rest of it she hauled down to the garage. When she had moved everything of her father's she could find, his stuff for the yard sale spilled onto the driveway.

Jessica was lying on her back on the warm slate patio when her mother appeared around the side of the house. "What are you still doing here?" she called out.

"Don't look at me. How about you? What exactly were you up to this morning? You took off so fast you forgot your purse and keys."

"Wait a minute. That's not what I'm talking about," Lydia said. "You were supposed to pick up the Spiveys. Why aren't you on your way to Saugatuck?"

Jessica looked at her watch. Four o'clock. It wasn't like her mother to ask her to leave the house to drive clear across the state on an errand. Lydia was the type to overcompensate, always going out of her way to take care of every small detail. She never would have asked her kids to do something like this before. "Sorry, Mom," Jessica said. "But there's been a change of plan. I called Dad and told him to come get the Spiveys himself."

"You didn't."

"Sure I did."

"He's in Arizona, for God's sake." A worried look crossed her mother's face. "Dammit," she said, and went inside.

Clouds had bunched to the south over the zoo, the scent of a coming thundershower in the air. Jessica got up and stretched her back, then went into the house to grab trash bags for her father's junk.

Her mother slammed down the kitchen phone. "They already bought tickets. Can you believe that? They're actually coming." She sat down heavily at the table. "I wish you'd told me you didn't want to go."

"We have too much to do." Jessica couldn't help but smile a little. She felt almost happy at the thought that she had finally gotten through to her father.

"He said you were very negative."

"I have every damn right to be."

Lydia looked out the kitchen window, where the sky had grown dark. "I know it's not your fault, but I thought we'd agreed you were going to do this."

"Well, it doesn't matter now, does it? Why do you care so much about the Spiveys, anyway?"

The question hung in the air. Her mother sighed and looked out toward the garage. "What's that stuff?"

"It's Dad's. It won't even all fit in there." Jessica grabbed a handful of trash bags, but as she started to tear them into sheets, the rain poured down.

She and her mother shot out the back door and tried to cover Cy's boxes, but with nothing to secure them, the bags kept blowing away. Lydia was trying to cover an old globe, and Jessica was doing the same with some winter coats, when the two of them stopped and looked at each other, both drenched, and began to laugh. Jessica threw the coats into the air. The globe, made of paper and cardboard, seemed to melt in her mother's hands.

Back inside, Jessica showered and put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt from the organic grocery with the words
Shiitake Happens
on the front. She took Bedlam down to the kitchen and saw that the rain had let up, and her mother and Ivan were laying Cy's things around the patio to dry. Jessica went out to say hello to her brother.