“Oh, shit.” Em slaps her hand across her mouth. “Is she going to be okay?”
“She seems fine. They’re running tests, but I don’t know. I should be with her. . . .” My anger’s rising again. I need to cool it. “But I’m not in the emergency room because a certain someone did not leave her cell phone on.”
“I told you I couldn’t leave it on because the battery—”
“I know what you told me. You’re missing the point.”
“Hey!” Nadia gestures her carmellato toward the outside doors. “Isn’t that your mom’s car?”
My mother’s car? I think stupidly, as I turn to see my trusty green Subaru moving on its own, the front end up and attached to a blinking tow truck. A tow truck!
“Stop! Stop!” I scream, running to the revolving doors where a security officer—the same rent-a-cop who helped with crowd control outside of C-Rite—intercepts me.
“Is that your car?” he asks, taking out a pad.
“I was there five minutes. I had to get my daughter. You remember me, right?”
He cocks his head, puzzled.
“I’m Julie Mueller, the daughter of the woman who collapsed at C-RITE today. My mother’s in the emergency room and . . . you’ve got to stop him. I need my car. I need to get back to the hospital.”
“Can’t.” He shakes his head. “Once you’re towed, you’re towed.”
Pointing to the walkie-talkie on his belt, I say, “Please, call him. You can call him. You called him to pick up my car. Surely, you can call him to drop it off.”
“Mall policy,” he says. “Liability issues. Code two, section 13C. Contracted hauler BTV Towing is not allowed to deposit vehicles on mall premises once said vehicles have been placed in possession of BTV Towing until BTV Towing arrives at a properly statuted repossession yard.”
Bullshit. You don’t even know the meaning of what you just said.
Properly statuted repossession yard.
What the heck is that?
You’re not going to get anywhere yelling at this doofus, I remind myself. What you want is to get your car back and fast. Do what you have to do, Julie. Pull a girly.
“Officer?” I whimper. “Officer, I don’t know what to do. You’ve got to help me. My mother’s in the hospital . . .”
Em is hanging on my every word, every eyelash bat.
“. . . dying. For all I know she might already be . . . gone.”
Nadia says, “Get out. Your grandma’s not dead, is she?”
Em tells Nadia to shut up.
A genuine tear rolls down my cheek. “I have no idea how I’ll get to the properly statuted repossession yard, unless . . .” Doe eyes in his direction.
Like cake he crumbles. “Okay, okay. I know what you’re trying to do. I’ll give you a lift to the yard. Though my advice is to get out some cash now. They don’t take credit cards or checks.” He waves his arm to the ATM in the corner.
In all the days of my days, this has been the worst, ever. My afternoon with Michael has been ruined. I can’t find a swimsuit to save my life, though I do find vast swaths of brand-new cellulite. I’m two colors, like the Riddler from Batman. My mother collapses and is taken to the hospital. I fight with my lovely, loving, and good daughter. My car is towed, and to top it off . . . ?
ATM fees. An outrageous three dollars to access my own money. Not the bank’s—mine. Has our financial industry overlooked that little detail?
But I’m wrong. The ATM fees are not the worst part. Nor is my mother’s collapse.
An hour later, after I’ve waited in line to pay one hundred dollars to retrieve my car, Nadia is riding shotgun and Em is in the backseat as we’re a block from MetroSouth in Framingham when I feel a tap on my shoulder.
“Mom, I hate to bring this up,” Em says in a little voice.
“If you have to go to the bathroom, you’ll have to wait until the hospital. We’re almost there.”
“It’s about Quinn McVeigh.”
I have no idea who Quinn McVeigh is.
“My boss’s daughter.”
Oh, right. Chris McVeigh’s daughter. Teeny girl. Strawberry blond with pigtails. Adorable. Sometimes Chris brings her down to Brigham’s and we all take turns squeezing her.
“I was supposed to be at her house ten minutes ago to babysit.”
My hands grip the wheel so hard the knuckles turn white. This cannot be happening. “Doesn’t Chris McVeigh live in Natick?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Weren’t we
just in
Natick?”
“Yes, but I thought we were going straight home and then I could drive myself.”
How she came to the conclusion that we were going straight home, in the opposite direction of MetroSouth, is baffling. Did she think that I’d abandon my mother at the hospital and go home to check the mail, water the garden, get a soda? Pulling a U-turn and heading right back from whence I came, not for the first time do I ask myself, will this day end?
I hear a
sniff
, turn to find Em in the backseat crying, and my heart melts. “It’s okay, Em. I’m sorry I got so mad,” I say, patting her knee.
“It’s not that it’s, I wasn’t thinking about what we were doing. I was too worried about Grandma. Is she going to . . . ?”
“NO!” Now I’ve done it. I screamed at a poor, rattled teenager who believes her beloved grandmother’s on her deathbed. “She’s fine. So fine that the doctor’s releasing her right away. It was just a dizzy spell brought on by the fact Grandma was dehydrated in the heat and she hadn’t eaten.”
Em’s eyes go wide. “Grandma not eating. Now I really know something’s wrong.”
After dropping off Em at the McVeighs’, I stop by the hospital to check on Mom, who tells me she won’t be leaving with me, she’ll be leaving with Lois because Dad has gone on an overnight fishing trip to Maine with his old friend, Buster Rubick. Hence, his “reason” for not being able to drive Mom to the mall.
This seems like a fairly important fact, the kind you’d say right off if you were in your right mind. That Mom held off telling us until I was about to cruise Watertown’s more popular public works projects looking for him tells me her mind is anything but right.
“Lois has central air,” Mom tells me. “The doctor called that a medical necessity in my condition.”
So I go home and pack a bag for Mom to take to Lois’s. (Mom gave me a list.) Then I have to drop off Nadia, who seems perfectly happy to hang around like a witch’s familiar sucking on lollypops and looking vacantly out the window as I tour her around the greater Boston area, from the mall to the hospital in Framingham, back to Natick, to the hospital again, and finally to her house in Watertown, where she gets out and says, “Thanks, Mrs. M. That was fun.”
It’s impossible not to love that girl.
Back at the hospital yet again, I find Mom has checked out without waiting for me.
Of course.
Of course
she’s checked out. Because for her to have waited for me would have been . . . normal. And normal is something my family does not do.
Turns out Mom is at Lois’s house all the way in Lexington, where I find her feet up, eating lime sherbet with raspberry sauce, and watching a rerun of
Keeping Up Appearances
on public television as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened, as if a day that was supposed to start as a half-hour glasses fitting hadn’t ended up in the emergency room.
“By the way,” Mom says, after I deposit her bag in Lois’s doorway. “I left my glasses at the mall. You wouldn’t mind picking them up, would you? They don’t close until nine.”
It’s too much. It’s too much!
Mom’s shoulders begin to shake. And Lois, who’s stepped out of the kitchen with a dishcloth over her shoulder, lets out a giggle. Soon they’re both in hysterics over my reaction to Mom’s “joke.” Everyone’s having a laugh riot but me. I want to cry.
“Lighten up, Julie,” Mom says, dipping into her sherbet. “You take life way too seriously.”
“I love you, Mom.” I blow her a kiss and envision the sherbet bowl dumped upside down on her head, green and raspberry goo running over her cheeks. The imagination is a wonderful thing; it allows for all manner of undiscoverable sins.
Wearily and woozily, I teeter out to my car, start it up, check my mirrors, and get about ten miles down the road when a scruffy man in a rusted pickup truck pulls next to me at a light and begins gesturing obscenely at my rear bumper.
Being a veteran reporter, however, I am onto his tricks. I can’t count how many stories I’ve done about sick men conning vulnerable women into pulling to the side of a deserted road or rolling down their windows all the way, only to find the man has a gun and evil deeds on his mind.
Surreptitiously, I lock my doors and stare straight ahead.
“Lady!” He’s leaned over and rolled down his own window, even though the light’s about to change. “Your left rear goddamn (and lots of other expletives) tire is fucking flat.”
The light turns green and this being Boston, everyone behind us immediately leans on their horns.
I can’t believe it. A flat tire. Of all the things to have happened on this, the lousiest of days. And in Lexington, too, where gas stations are few and far between. Yanking my car into a dirt parking lot at Minute Man Park, I get out and survey the damage. Oh, it’s flat all right. It is dead and lifeless.
Well, no point feeling sorry for myself. Let’s change this sucker and get home so I can take a shower, pour a nice cold glass of wine, and relax. Except . . . there’s no spare tire in the trunk. What happened to the spare?
Then I remember. The tire that’s flat IS the spare because the original was ripped to shreds last winter and I never replaced it.
I give up. Do you hear that, God! You win. I give up.
And I do. I don’t even go back to the car. Instead, I walk into the woods, sit down against a big tree, and close my eyes. It’s very peaceful here, site of the famous battle where the famous shot was heard around the world. Around me, stones mark the slow progression of the British and the minutemen as they shot their way from Concord to Lexington, the first bloody steps in the march toward American democracy.
Who am I to complain about a flat tire, then, when so many gave up their lives so future generations could be free?
My cell phone rings, jolting me back to the twenty-first century. It’s Michael.
“Hi,” he says. “I just got back from seeing Mom and picked up your message. I figured if you were tied up this afternoon we could do something else tonight. Is Betty okay?”
I relay a shortened version of her collapse and tell him she’s fine. “I, however, am not. My car has a flat, I’m without a spare, so I’m sitting here in Minute Man Park waiting for the Rapture because I’m done. I want off this Earth.”
He doesn’t wait a beat. “Stay right there. I’ll come to get you.”
A lump rises in my throat. Yes, I know I’m not supposed to rely on men to save me and I’m proud to say I rarely do. But at a time like this, is anything more welcome than a capable man with a free ride?
“You don’t have to do that,” I lie. “I can call AAA.”
“Shut up, Julie. Don’t even pretend like you don’t want me to get you out of this. Just sit still and try not to get mugged.”
“It’s Lexington. At worst, some prepper in multilayered Ralph Lauren will try to rush me.”
“Now you’ve got me really worried. Whatever you do, don’t let them talk you into a G&T. That’s their gateway drug.”
“Gotcha.”
“Be right there.” And he hangs up.
For the first time today, I find myself smiling.
Chapter Fifteen
The course of true love never did run smooth
—A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, ACT I, SCENE 1
“You’re kidding me. You don’t have even one air conditioner?”
“I can live with the heat, that’s not the problem. It’s my mother who can’t deal,” I tell him as we pull up to my house in his gorgeous silver BMW convertible, top down. “The doctor wouldn’t even let her come home tonight because we didn’t have A/C. So she had to stay at Lois’s.”
Michael says, “That’s it,” and starts up the car. “I’m going to get a couple of window units. She can’t live like this.”
“Don’t be crazy. Mom will be fine as soon as the weather breaks.”
He pays me no heed as we hook a left and head for the box stores. “Look, Julie. After all your mother did for me, the least I can do is install a couple of air conditioners—one for her, one for you. It’s not like your father can lift those things anymore.”
"But ...”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you and I know going to Home Depot isn’t the same as lobster on the dock, but have faith. I’m not entirely without charm. Let’s just take care of your mother first, and then I’ll take care of you.”
An hour later the BMW is crammed with not one, but three Frigidaires. One for Em’s bedroom, one for mine, and another for my parents, though I have my doubts. They’re weird about A/C.
“The Legionnaires ruined it for them,” I say, helping him haul the backbreaking unit up the steps of my parent’s apartment. “Remember that? A bunch of guys at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia developed pneumonia from contaminated hotel air-conditioning and overnight they had their own disease.”
“Lucky bastards.” He winces, taking most of the weight as we back through the house from Mom’s heavily upholstered living room done up in variations of dusty rose, through the colonial blue dining room with its matching dark mahogany furniture and polished silver tea sets, through the hallway with its fuzzy gold wallpaper and all our framed family photographs, and finally to her pristine white bedroom with its damask spread and maple headboard over which hangs a picture of a cherubic Jesus, hands clasped.
We drop the air conditioner by the window and immediately clutch our lower lumbars. Michael nods to the painting. “I could make a crack about that.”
“He’s either there to answer Dad’s prayers to get laid or Mom’s prayers not to.” I can’t believe I just said that. “Oh, my God. I made a crack about my parents’ sex life. I’m sorry.”