it was humped and rounded, probably more than twenty years old. Its grill was now mashed back into itself like the mouth of a fish.
“God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Mom.” Drew opened the car door to get out. “God, why did it have to be a Mercedes?”
I unbuckled myself, then checked George and Mandy to see if they were really all right.
“Boy, you sure hit the fart, Drew. I mean you really hit the fart!”
Drew was standing beside our car. Smoke was coming up out of the one we’d hit, and we could hear the Palm Key fire siren. The station was only half a block away.
Mandy walked up to the man who was getting out of the Mercedes, and she stood beside him while he, too, stood looking at the front of his car. He was really tall. That was nearly all I thought about. And that we hadn’t killed him. Or maimed him. In fact, he seemed fine. Long blond hair, a good way over his collar in back, and a mustache. And then I realized that I knew who he was. Last week his picture had been in the Palm Key paper. He was the new and only physician Palm Key had. The one the town council had recruited. And they’d had a pretty hard time getting some doctor to come to Palm Key, too.
I went over closer to him. “How bad do you think it is?” He looked down at me, then back at his car. “Oh, I don’t think it’s too serious. The smoke makes it look bad.”
“I know you’re upset.” I was staring at the Mercedes. Mandy moved next to me and, even though I thought she’d outgrown this, she reached over and held a fistful of my skirt. ‘’This is obviously a fine car,” I said, my voice running on, fast. “Being so old, it’s probably worth a lot—at least to you. It’s probably real valuable and you love it. And, well, my son, Drew, he just got his learner’s permit. I mean, really just got it—this afternoon.”
“He failed the test two times,” Mandy added.
“And I wonder,” I went on, “do you think we could just not make too big a deal out of this? You know, it might really blow his confidence. I’d really appreciate it.”
I was sounding great. But when I came to the last part of my speech, my voice cracked. I was telling myself; You cry, sister, and you won’t see another sunrise. I switched glasses again, reaching in my pocket, and getting out the dark ones.
He stood there, listening to everything I said. Then he looked back at his car. We both did, just stood there and stared. In a few minutes, he walked toward it. ‘’Why don’t I see if it’ll start?” He got in, and the firemen surrounded it.
“Aren’t you afraid it’ll blow up?” I followed him to the car as he opened the door. Mandy was practically riding my feet. I was ready, though, to run back at the first sound of a pop, throw my body across Mandy, Drew, and George the Second.
The firemen raised the hood and were looking down in it, holding fire extinguishers. Drew was hanging onto George by the hand, just standing there in the middle of the street like he was about to be hanged. The whole town seemed to be watching us. A fireman squirted something into the hood, and the car hissed and the smoke stopped. The new doctor was grinding the motor, and then it caught.
By then the editor of the Palm Key Sentinel was walking around us, taking photographs, using a lot of flashbulbs because it was pretty dark.
The new doctor leaned out of the car window and said to me, “I think it’s going to be fine. But we ought to exchange names and phone numbers and who our insurance companies are. Your car doesn’t look much better.”
I turned around and saw that, as far as a trunk was concerned, my car had just been relieved of one. In fact, the whole back end was just about gone. Good, I thought. George the First had bought that car right before he moved out, and it’d been part of my settlement. I’d always even wondered if he’d driven that tart somewhere in it and they might have even. . . in it. And now it was just one less thing between me and him.
Then, just as though to add the final topping to publicly knocking the hell out of the new Palm Key doctor, George the Second got loose from Drew and circled the Mercedes. “Boy, we sure knocked this fart, didn’t we? It’s an old fart, too, in’t it?”
I had to stand there and watch that: the Palm Key firemen and this new doctor, listening to my child call everything and everybody farts, right after my other son had caused the only wreck in Palm Key in three years.
When I got back in the car, I dug around in the bottom of my purse for loose change. It was clear: We were going to have to drive through some place for some fast food, quick. I was too shot to eat, much less to cook. But, as usual, George the Second wouldn’t be.
And I probably don’t need to add, I guess, that when I got home, I didn’t really sleep much that night, or even for the next few weeks.
3.
Drew
I knew my mother hated her job at the county dump. She didn’t piss and moan about it, but still, I knew. Sometimes I’d hear her cussing out her boss while she was putting stuff in the washing machine, thinking the sound of the water swishing and all that would cover up what she said. So I guess it really was a good thing that happened the day I was baby-sitting George, except that for a while, it sure looked like a tragedy in the making.
It was one of those school holidays—teacher conference day—which always made things hard for us. Because Dad was at the school, couldn’t watch George or Mandy, and Mom had to be at The Dump. So between her and me, we worked it out. If I stayed home and watched George and Mandy, she’d save a little on day care. Mandy was too old for it anyway,but not old enough to stay home alone. So Mom would go to work, and we’d both forget that my teachers needed conferencing. “Your dad ought to take care of that, anyway,” she said. It was my first year in high school; I’d only been in the ninth grade for nine weeks, so how bad could it be?
She taught me how to make grilled cheese sandwiches, balance it off with a can of pears and a sliced apple and a heated-up can of baked beans. That way Mandy and George, as well as me, would have one of the meals she believed in. She always said we had to have something raw, yellow or green; something white like potatoes or rice; and a lot of milk. My mother fixed meals with a color wheel, and she never gave in.
It was about two o’clock. I’d already cleaned up the kitchen after our lunch. And I’d just about had it taking care of Mandy and George. The summer before, when Dad had driven us down to a white-sand beach for a long weekend, Mandy had sat up in the hotel room while the rest of us went out for a swim. And when Poltergeist came on a cable channel, Mandy didn’t do a damn thing about turning it off. (At home, Mom wouldn’t let us have cable, so when we got in a hotel room, we went nuts.) So there Mandy sat, getting the wits scared out of her, so that ever since last summer, I’d had to escort her to the bathroom and just about everywhere else in the house where she had to go alone. (And neither of us wanted to tell Mom why either, so we snuck around in front of her when she was home.) Already that day I’d gone into the bathroom ahead of Mandy twice to check behind the john, in the cabinets, behind the shower curtain. And all the while, she had just stood in the doorway watching me, and when I complained that the poltergeist thing was not really real, she yelled at me: “It happened in a house, Drew, don’t you understand! It could happen in a house like this.”
“It was just a movie, Mandy.”
“Yeah, but did you check in the hamper?”
And then I’d have to go through all the dirty
