Drives Like a Dream (33 page)

"Where do you think she's calling from this time? Canada? Prison?" Jessica picked up the phone.

But it wasn't her mother; it was the woman with the kids from the yard sale. She and her husband liked the house a great deal, she said, and wanted to come back in the next day or so with other members of their family. She asked if an offer was already on the table and Jessica said she couldn't answer that question; her mother was away at the moment.

"The price is too high, but if you're willing to negotiate..." the woman's voice trailed off.

Jessica took her name and number and told her that Lydia would call her back.

"See, I told you," she said to Ivan, her voice rising. "Now we've definitely let things go too far. That was somebody putting an offer on the house." Jessica gripped the edge of the counter. "Already. Can you believe it?"

Ivan took a swig of beer.

"What? It doesn't bother you?"

"No, not really," he said.

"Davy?"

"Well, I kind of knew it was going to happen, didn't you? When you put up a
FOR SALE
sign, eventually you get a buyer."

"So you're just going to sit there?" Jessica couldn't believe how casually they were taking this. "It's a big deal, you know. This is where we grew up! Don't you care?"

"We don't live here anymore, you know." Ivan seemed nonchalant. "It's Mom's life, and she's trying to get on with it. Who are we to stop her?"

"That's what you always say. Whatever she does is fine with you. Maybe she
is
off robbing banks. You'd be all for that, if she said it made her happy. You never think for yourself, Ivan. You just do her bidding."

"Hey, I'm not the one who flew back here in a tizzy."

"She made me fly back here."

"Nobody made you do anything," Ivan snapped.

"She said she was
eloping,
remember? And the way she described Norm sounded like an FBI profile. She kept disappearing. I couldn't reach her. Disappearing, like she has now. And the two of you sat back and watched. You kept apologizing for the guy. And look at you now, still chewing your cud."

This got Davy's attention. "Come on, Jess—this isn't about Norm. It's about selling the house. That's what's getting to you.
But you're the one who put the ad in the paper for the yard sale. And you've been pretty much helping Mom pack up for three weeks. So don't blame us."

"But I didn't do all that to sell the house. I came here to make sure that Mom was all right and to prevent her from tossing everything away. I thought it would be good to thin out the closets, and I wanted to help her get rid of Dad's stuff in the basement. I was even having a good time until last week when suddenly this yard sale turned into a huge bazaar. As soon as you got here, Ivan, this whole moving thing kicked into high gear."

"So, you're upset that Mom's selling the house, and now it's all my fault," he said, rolling his eyes.

"Do you realize that she doesn't even have a new house to move into? She's under the spell of this troll we still know nothing about. She's spent thousands of dollars that she doesn't even have, essentially forcing herself to downsize—and now suddenly she's selling
everything.
She even pawned off the Nomad without telling anyone. Look at us." A helpless feeling came over Jessica. "Here we are again, all gathered in the kitchen exactly as we were a couple of months ago, trying to figure out what's happened to one of our parents."

Davy raised his eyebrows. Ivan pushed his plate aside, looking exasperated, though all he said was, "Dad's wedding was different. That was like a sendoff to the netherworld. With Mom it's a new beginning, and she knows how to take care of herself."

Jessica threw up her hands. "I forgot—Dad is the root of all evil. Are you going to be fifty years old and still saying, 'I hate my daddy'? He's not a monster; he's just weak, that's all. And if you've got a problem, you ought to let him know about it."

"Oh, this is rich." He laughed. "You've been spinning your wheels since college. Running off with a New Age idiot, shacking up in Oregon because why the fuck not, taking a job at a grocery, throwing your life into a
void
, basically blowing your entire education. And you're giving me advice."

Davy slammed his hands on the table. "Enough already! I'm so goddamned sick of fighting!" He got up suddenly, and Jessica followed him as he took off for the stairs. "We're not finished here," she called out. "You wouldn't be so miserable if you didn't run away all the time."

Davy stopped at the landing and turned around. "Oh, is that so?"

She was going to tell him how sad she felt the other day thinking of Teresa on the train to Cleveland. She remembered that moment she decided to go to Oregon with Blane; she had felt reckless, free, yet as she threw her duffel into the back of his van, she already knew when she would call her mother—hours later, after they'd crossed the Mississippi into Iowa. Jessica had intended to stay in Oregon for a week or two, but after a while she found that it was easier just to remain there, and so she did. "I guess all of us are runaways," she said to Davy. "Seems to be a family trait."

After a while Davy came back downstairs.

"Sorry." Jessica was scratching Bedlam, who cowered at her feet.

"So do you feel better?" Ivan asked.

"I'm fine," Davy said. "You should ask Jess."

She thought of telling her brothers that she was applying to graduate school, that in fact she had been thinking about it for some time. She didn't know where she'd be next year, but it felt good to have the beginning of a plan. As much as she wanted them to know about it now, she didn't want to make any promises until she was sure. Stay tuned, she wanted to say. "Yeah. How about you, Ivan?"

"I'm all right, a little beat."

Davy cleared the table and put the dishes in the dishwasher. "When Mom comes home, let's let her do the talking. No need to drag an explanation out of her."

Jessica agreed, and they all went into the living room to talk the rest through.

L
YDIA WAS SITTING
on the sidewalk patio of the Acorn Café in Royal Oak when rain clouds moved overhead, sending everyone inside. After the open house she had returned to her car, sat in the driver's seat for a few minutes, then decided to walk into town to let more time pass. She ordered a seltzer at the café and sat in the shade, trying not to think about the alarm incident. She was sure that she could come up with something to say, and the more she lingered in Royal Oak, the less she worried about it. Instead, she found herself thinking about
Dream Machines.

She took out a notepad from her purse and began to fill it with memories about her father. It had been a long time since she had sat down and actually worked. Now it was all she wanted to do, no longer just an idea or a way to escape her disappointments.

The rain caught everyone by surprise, and she waited it out huddled with a group of strangers under the café awning. Looking toward the sidewalk, she watched a young girl in a sky blue dress rush to the door of a parked car; a large woman, probably her grandmother, trundled behind her with a newspaper over her head. The woman opened the door, and the child yelled at her as she went around to the driver's side.

It occurred to Lydia now that her whole idea—luring her kids home in the hope that they might stay—had been crazy, almost as crazy as the lies she had told and the trouble the lies had gotten her into. But now with all her children home again, gathered together for her sake, she realized that it was far too much to ask. She didn't know if she even wanted it anymore.

When the summer shower abruptly ended, Lydia walked back to her car in the damp heat and drove home.

Besides the
FOR SALE
sign now closer to the curb and the tamped-down front lawn, there was little evidence that the yard sale had ever happened. The garage door was closed, the fence back up, and the Spiveys' rented van nowhere in sight.

Lydia ran her hands over her hair before going into the house.

"Over here," Jessica called from the living room, more pleasantly than Lydia had expected.

She went in and sat down on the rocking chair. "I found my keys," she said weakly.

"Quite a day." Jessica seemed contemplative, as if she'd been on the living room couch all afternoon. She sat between her brothers, the three of them in a row, like a jury. Lydia waited for
Where have you been?
or
What was that all about?
But her daughter remained quiet. Lydia wondered if her kids already knew everything and were ticking like bombs, waiting for another white lie to set them off.

"Did you have a chance to meet Norm?" she asked, and almost hoped that Jessica would blow up right now, just let her have it and put an end to the charade, once and for all. But Jessica said, "Not really. We'd only just begun to say hello when I heard the alarm."

"So you didn't talk to him?" she asked again.

Davy shook his head.

"I wasn't even sure who he was," Ivan said.

Lydia couldn't stop herself, knew that she was going to make something up again. "Sorry I flew off like that. Norm found an open house in Royal Oak. We had just that small window of time."

Nobody asked a follow-up question:
What about the alarm? Why did you take so long? Where's Norm now? What about the problems you said you two were having?
Jessica looked at her like a therapist, stoic and unblinking. Ivan and Davy would not quite meet her eyes. To fill the space Lydia went into a long description of the open house: "The place is just perfect for two. Bright and open. It has a lovely writing studio in the back."

"Sounds nice," Davy said. None of the kids seemed angry, just quiet and depleted.

Lydia changed the subject. "So, how did the yard sale go? It almost looks as if it never happened."

Davy and Ivan had calculated how much they'd made: sixteen hundred and thirty dollars. "Dad's not a bad salesman, either," Ivan said, in what seemed a genuine compliment.

"People will buy anything," Davy added. They'd sold the one-eyed camel, the pink wicker furniture, the Evel Knievel Stunt Action Play Set, even the office partitions. "Your friend Walter stopped by after everyone had gone home. We told him not to worry about it, but he insisted on helping clean up. He really wanted to see you."

Jessica leaned forward and broke in. "You got a phone call, Mom," she said, then casually, as if it were just another message she was passing on, "Someone wants to buy the house."

"Who?" Lydia sat up.

"That family you showed it to."

"What did they say?" Lydia asked.

"They want to come by tomorrow."

"Gosh. I hadn't realized this would happen so soon." Here was a good opportunity to remove herself from the jury's gaze. "I think I'll go upstairs and take care of some things before I call them."

No one said anything as she hurried up the stairs. Lydia closed her office door and sat down.

She was startled to find that the idea of selling her house—
something she had never seriously considered—did not seem so far-fetched after all. Not just because she'd overspent fixing it up and had gone so far as to put a sign in the front yard. Not for practical reasons. Even before she saw the bungalow in Royal Oak today, she had somehow imagined herself in such a place. It was as though just picturing another possibility, with or without the apocryphal mate, had eased her away from here. In the past six weeks, she had begun to let go of this house.

It would be easy, she realized, to continue with her invented story. She saw now that her children would let her. All Lydia had to say was that she and Norm had broken up and that she was moving on with her own life.

But the thought of this seemed, finally, unbearable. She knew there had to be an end to her inventions. How could she expect her book to be true if she couldn't tell the truth herself?

She sat at her computer picturing her father typing out his letter, thinking of what to say. "Dear Norm," she began. She wrote a few lines, deleted them, wrote a few more, until finally:

I started this message apologizing for my behavior this morning, but it occurred to me that I've spent much of our correspondence apologizing to you. I have no idea why I should be saying I'm sorry when, ever since we met for lunch you've been rude, selfish, and petulant. Ultimately I have nothing to apologize for, though perhaps I ought to say that you've been caught in the crossfire of some family issues.

As for the Tucker situation, I wish you hadn't betrayed my confidence the other day, especially since I have now discovered that what I told you was untrue.

If you want a more detailed explanation, you can read my next book.

Lydia

***

After sending the e-mail, she flipped through the pages of the notepad she'd been writing in, and found the realtor's business card. As she set it down she saw, amid some loose change on her desk, the gold coin with the number 7, her lucky chip from Walter. She turned it over and rubbed her thumb on the horseshoe embossed on the other side. She thought about how generous Walter had been, helping with her research, getting her such a deal on the Corolla, stopping by to help out with the yard sale. She would go by the library, tomorrow if she could, and take him out to lunch, thank him for all he'd done for her. She slipped the lucky coin into her purse, picked up the phone, and dialed.

It was five o'clock when she went back downstairs. The kids were in the kitchen reading the newspaper. The room seemed still, as if no one had spoken for hours. "So do you want to see the new house?" she asked.

They looked at each other as if caught unprepared. Jessica folded the paper and laid it down on the table.

"The new house?" Davy said. "Okay."

Soon they were all piled into the station wagon, driving across Woodward through the main drag of Royal Oak. The car was silent as a temple, which made Lydia partly grateful but anxious all the same. She turned left at Plymouth, the first residential street, and four blocks later pulled up to the curb by the
OPEN HOUSE
sign: number 313.