The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (19 page)

“Yes, we made it up,” Maggie said.

“Aw, no,” Mr. Otis said, shaking his head, “you just trying to stop me from worrying.”

“A while back you kind of, like, more or less, slowed down too suddenly in front of us,” Maggie said, “and caused us to run off the road. Not intending to, I realize, but—”

“I did that?”

“Not intending to,” Maggie assured him.

“And besides,” Ira said, “you probably slowed because we accidentally honked. So it’s not as if—”

“Oh, I declare. Florence, that’s my niece, she is all the time after me to turn in my driver’s license, but I surely never expected—”

“Anyhow, I did a very inconsiderate thing,” Maggie told him. “I said your wheel was falling off when really it was fine.”

“Why, I call that a very
Christian
thing,” Mr. Otis said. “When I had caused you to run off the road! You folks been awful nice about this.”

“No, see, really the wheel was—”

“Many would’ve let me ride on to my death,” Mr. Otis said.

“The wheel was fine!” Maggie told him. “It wasn’t wobbling in the slightest.”

Mr. Otis tipped his head back and studied her. His lowered eyelids gave him such a haughty, hooded expression that it seemed he might finally have grasped her meaning. But then he said, “Naw, that can’t be right. Can it? Naw. I tell you: Now that I recollect, that car was driving funny all this morning. I knew it and yet
didn’t
know it, you know? And I reckon it must’ve hit you-all the same way—kindly like you half glimpsed it out of the corner of your vision so you were moved to say what you did, not understanding just why.”

That settled it; Ira took action. “Well, then,” he said, “nothing to do but test it. Keys inside?” And he strode briskly to the Chevy and opened the door and slid in.

“Aw, now!” Mr. Otis cried. “Don’t you go risking your neck for
me
, mister!”

“He’ll be all right,” Maggie told him.

Ira gave Mr. Otis a reassuring wave.

Even though the window was open, the Chevy was pulsing with heat. The clear plastic seat cover seemed to have partially melted, and there was a strong smell of overripe banana. No wonder: The remains of a bag lunch sat on the passenger seat—a crumpled sack, a banana peel, and a screw of cellophane.

Ira turned the key in the ignition. When the engine roared up he leaned out toward Maggie and Mr. Otis and said, “Watch carefully.”

They said nothing. For two people who looked so little alike, they wore oddly similar expressions: wary and guarded, as if braced for the worst.

Ira put the car in gear and started rolling along the
shoulder. He felt he was driving something that stood out too far on all sides—a double bed, for instance. Also, there was a rattle in the exhaust system.

After a few yards, he braked and cocked his head out the window. The others had not moved from where they stood; they’d merely turned their faces in his direction.

“Well?” he called.

There was a pause. Then Mr. Otis said, “Yessir, seem like I did see a bit of jiggling motion to it.”

“You did?” Ira asked.

He quirked an eyebrow at Maggie.

“But you didn’t,” he said.

“Well, I’m not certain,” Maggie told him.

“Excuse me?”

“Maybe I just imagined it,” she said, “but I thought there was a little, sort of, I don’t know …”

Ira shifted gears and backed up with a jolt. When he was alongside them once more he said, “Now I want you both to watch very, very closely.”

He drove farther this time, a dozen yards or so. They were forced to follow him. He glanced in the side-view mirror and saw Maggie scurrying along with her arms folded beneath her bosom. He stopped the car and climbed out to face them.

“Oh, that wheel is loose, all right,” Mr. Otis called as he arrived.

Ira said, “Maggie?”

“It reminded me of a top, just before it stops spinning and falls over,” Maggie said.

“Now listen here, Maggie—”

“I know! I know!” she said. “But I can’t help it, Ira; I really saw it wobble. And also it looked kind of squashy.”

“Well, that’s a whole different problem,” Ira said.
“The tire may be underinflated. But that wheel is on tight as a drum, I swear it. I could feel it. I can’t believe you’re doing this, Maggie.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” she said stubbornly, “but I refuse to say I didn’t see what I saw with my own two eyes. I just think we’re going to have to take him to that Texaco.”

Ira looked at Mr. Otis. “You got a lug wrench?” he asked.

“A … sir?”

“If you’ve got a lug wrench, I could tighten that wheel myself.”

“Oh, why … Is a lug wrench like a ordinary wrench?”

“You probably have one in your trunk,” Ira told him, “where you keep your jack.”

“Oh! But where do I keep my jack, I wonder,” Mr. Otis said.

“In your trunk,” Ira repeated doggedly, and he reached inside the car for the keys and handed them over. He was keeping his face as impassive as possible, but inwardly he felt the way he felt anytime he stopped by Maggie’s nursing home: utterly despairing. He couldn’t see how this Mr. Otis fellow made it from day to day, bumbling along as he did.

“Lug wrench, lug wrench,” Mr. Otis was murmuring. He unlocked the trunk and flung the lid up. “Now let me just …”

At first glance, the trunk’s interior seemed a solid block of fabric. Blankets, clothes, and pillows had been packed inside so tightly that they had congealed together. “Oh, me,” Mr. Otis said, and he plucked at a corner of a graying quilt, which didn’t budge.

“Never mind,” Ira told him. “I’ll get mine.”

He walked back to the Dodge. It suddenly seemed very well kept, if you overlooked what Maggie had done to
the left front fender. He took his keys from the ignition and unlocked the trunk and opened it.

Nothing.

Where once there’d been a spare tire, tucked into the well beneath the floor mat, now there was an empty space. And not a sign of the gray vinyl pouch in which he kept his tools.

He called, “Maggie?”

She turned lazily from her position by the Chevy and tilted her head in his direction.

“What happened to my spare tire?” he asked.

“It’s on the car.”

“
On
the car?”

She nodded vigorously.

“You mean it’s in use?”

“Right.”

“Then where’s the original tire?”

“It’s getting patched at the Exxon back home.”

“Well, how did …?”

No, never mind; better not get sidetracked. “So where are the tools, then?” he called.

“What tools?”

He slammed the lid down and walked back to the Chevy. There was no point shouting; he could see his lug wrench was not going to be anywhere within reach. “The tools you changed the tire with,” he told her.

“Oh, I didn’t change the tire. A man stopped and helped me.”

“Did he use the tools in the trunk?”

“I guess so, yes.”

“Did he put them back?”

“Well, he must have,” Maggie said. She frowned, evidently trying to recall.

“They’re not there, Maggie.”

“Well, I’m sure he didn’t steal them, if that’s what you’re
thinking. He was a very nice man. He wouldn’t even accept any money; he said he had a wife of his own and—”

“I’m not saying he stole them; I’m just asking where they are.”

Maggie said, “Maybe on the …” and then mumbled something further, he wasn’t sure what.

“Pardon?”

“I said, maybe on the corner of Charles Street and Northern Parkway!” she shouted.

Ira turned to Mr. Otis. The old man was watching him with his eyes half closed; he appeared to be falling asleep on his feet.

“I guess we’ll have to unpack your trunk,” Ira told him.

Mr. Otis nodded several times but made no move to begin.

“Shall we just unload it?” Ira asked.

“Well, we could do that,” Mr. Otis said doubtfully.

There was a pause.

Ira said, “Well? Shall we start?”

“We could start if you like,” Mr. Otis told him, “but I’d be very much surprised if we was to find a wheel wrench.”

“Everybody has a wheel wrench. Lug wrench,” Ira said. “It comes with the car.”

“I never saw it.”

“Oh, Ira,” Maggie said. “Can’t we just drive him to the Texaco and get his nephew to fix it properly?”

“And how do you think he would do that, Maggie? He’d take a wrench and tighten the lug nuts, not that they need it.”

Mr. Otis, meanwhile, had managed to remove a single item from the trunk: a pair of flannel pajama bottoms. He held them up and considered them.

Maybe it was the dubious expression on his face, or maybe it was the pajamas themselves—crinkled and
withered, trailing a frazzled drawstring—but at any rate, Ira all at once gave in. “Oh, what the hell,” he said. “Let’s just go to the Texaco.”

“Thank you, Ira,” Maggie told him sweetly.

And Mr. Otis said, “Well, if you sure it ain’t too much trouble.”

“No, no …” Ira passed a hand across his forehead. “So I guess we’d better lock up the Chevy,” he said.

Maggie said, “What Chevy?”

“That’s what kind of car this is, Maggie.”

“Ain’t hardly no point locking it with a wheel about to fly off,” Mr. Otis said.

Ira had a brief moment when he wondered if this whole situation might be Mr. Otis’s particularly passive, devilish way of getting even.

He turned and walked back to his own car. Behind him he heard the Chevy’s trunk lid clanging shut and the sound of their feet on the gravel, but he didn’t wait for them to catch up.

Now the Dodge was as hot as the Chevy, and the chrome shaft of the gearshift burned his fingers. He sat there with the motor idling while Maggie helped Mr. Otis settle in the back seat. She seemed to know by instinct that he would require assistance; he had to be folded across the middle in some complicated fashion. The last of him to enter was his feet, which he gathered to him by lifting both knees with his hands. Then he let out a sigh and took his hat off. In the mirror Ira saw a bony, plated-looking scalp, with two cottony puffs of white hair snarling above his ears.

“I surely do appreciate this,” Mr. Otis said.

“Oh, no trouble!” Maggie told him, flouncing onto the front seat.

Speak for yourself, Ira thought sourly.

He waited for a cavalcade of motorcyclists to pass (all
male, unhelmeted, swooping by in long S-curves, as free as birds), and then he pulled onto the highway. “So whereabouts are we headed?” he asked.

“Oh, why, you just drive on past the dairy farm and make a right,” Mr. Otis told him. “It ain’t but three, four miles.”

Maggie craned around in her seat and said, “You must live in this area.”

“Back-air a ways on Dead Crow Road,” Mr. Otis told her. “Or used to, till last week. Lately I been staying with my sister Lurene.”

Then he started telling her about his sister Lurene, who worked off and on at the Kmart when her arthritis wasn’t too bad; and that of course led to a discussion of Mr. Otis’s own arthritis, the sneaky slow manner it had crept up on him and the other things he had thought it was first and how the doctor had marveled and made over his condition when Mr. Otis finally thought to consult him.

“Oh, if you had seen what I have seen,” Maggie said. “People in the nursing home where I work just knotted over; don’t I know it.” She had a tendency to fall into other people’s rhythms of speech while she was talking to them. Close your eyes and you could almost fancy she was black herself, Ira thought.

“It’s a evil, mean-spirited ailment; no two ways about it,” Mr. Otis said. “This here is the dairy farm, mister. You want to take your next right.”

Ira slowed down. They passed a small clump of cows moonily chomping and staring, and then they turned onto a road not two full lanes wide. The pavement was patchy, with hand-painted signs tilting off the grassy embankment:
DANGER LIVESTOCK MAY BE LOOSE
and
SLOW THIS MEANS YOU
and
HOUNDS AND HORSES CROSSING
.

Now Mr. Otis was explaining how arthritis had forced
him to retire. He used to be a roofer, he said, down home in North Carolina. He used to walk those ridgepoles as nimble as a squirrel and now he couldn’t manage the lowest rung of a ladder.

Maggie made a clucking sound.

Ira wondered why Maggie always had to be inviting other people into their lives. She didn’t feel a mere husband was enough, he suspected. Two was not a satisfactory number for her. He remembered all the strays she had welcomed over the years—her brother who spent a winter on their couch when his wife fell in love with her dentist, and Serena that time that Max was in Virginia hunting work, and of course Fiona with her baby and her mountains of baby equipment, her stroller and her playpen and her wind-up infant swing. In his present mood, Ira thought he might include their own children as well, for weren’t Jesse and Daisy also outsiders—interrupting their most private moments, wedging between the two of them? (Hard to believe that some people had children to hold a marriage
together
.) And neither one had been planned for, at least not quite so soon. In the days before Jesse was born, Ira had still had hopes of going back to school. It was supposed to be the next thing in line, after paying off his sister’s medical bills and his father’s new furnace. Maggie would keep on working full time. But then she found out she was pregnant, and she had to take leave from her job. And after that Ira’s sister developed a whole new symptom, some kind of seizures that required hospitalization; and a moving van crashed into the shop one Christmas Eve and damaged the building. Then Maggie got pregnant with Daisy, another surprise. (Had it been unwise, perhaps, to leave matters of contraception to someone so accident-prone?) But that was eight years after Jesse,
and Ira had more or less abandoned his plans by then anyhow.

Sometimes—on a day like today, say, this long, hot day in this dusty car—he experienced the most crushing kind of tiredness. It was an actual weight on his head, as if the ceiling had been lowered. But he supposed that everybody felt that way, now and again.

Maggie was telling Mr. Otis the purpose of their trip. “My oldest, closest friend just lost her husband,” she was saying, “and we had to go to his funeral. It was the saddest occasion.”