The Goodbye Summer (32 page)

Caddie couldn’t think of anything to say. Magill either; he kept his head down, as if rereading parts of the poem to himself. She didn’t want to gush, it would embarrass Cornel to death, but she was moved. He’d sat
stony and silent through the funeral and Thea’s interment in the Wake family plot in Michaelstown, not shedding a tear. Caddie had thought this trip to Cape May was as far as he could go, that he was capable of honoring Thea with
action
but nothing else.

And it turned out she was completely wrong.

“Well, I
told
you it was just a draft,” he said in a shaky, defiant voice, and somehow that freed her to tell him what she thought: that she loved his poem, Thea would’ve been so touched and so glad, it was a lovely poem—how did he know how to write poetry?

Magill said the best thing, though. “I never thought you were all that crooked, myself. I know it’s not the same, but any time you feel like you need straightening out, you can come to me. You know that, right?”

“Why,” said Cornel, taking his poem back, “because it takes one to know one?” He said it with a smirk, trying to be cool now, probably half sorry he’d revealed so much of himself.

“Yes,” Magill answered, looking into his eyes.

Cornel’s turtle lips curved into a genuine smile before he ducked his head and mumbled, “Okay, deal. Likewise.”

A pleasantly self-conscious silence settled over them.

“She used to say I oughta write my own biography,” Cornel broke it to say. “Make it turn out any way I wanted.”

“She told me that, too,” Magill said.

“Me, too,” Caddie said.

They looked at one another, then away, smiling. They crested a hill, and all the colors of autumn unfolded like a carpet rolling away to the horizon. Red horses grazed by a stream in a leafy, faraway meadow, and the clouds rolled high in the sky, casting shadows like moving mountains on the highway.

“But,” Cornel said, “I get mad at her sometimes. I feel like telling her off.”

“What for?”

“Lying.”

Caddie didn’t like that word applied to Thea. “Don’t say that.”

“What else do you call it? Why couldn’t she at least tell us who she was? Why keep it a secret?”

“Why not keep it a secret?” Magill said. “What good would telling it have done?”

“At least she coulda told
me
she was sick. We talked about things like that. I told
her
things.” He sounded cheated.

“What would you have done if she had told you?” Magill asked.

“I would’ve…”

“Not loved her?”

“Maybe I would’ve held back some. If you go to the pet store and they sell you a sick dog, you…”

Magill turned around in his seat.

“You feel like suing ’em,” Cornel finished weakly. “You got cheated. Hip dysplasia. Don’t look at me like that.”

“I know how you feel,” Caddie admitted. “I’ve felt the same way, angry with her for not telling, not trusting. But Cornel, we can’t hold back. We don’t want to get our hearts broken, but we can’t just—love the healthy dogs.”

“Hell, I know that.”

“I know you do.”

Magill looked like he wasn’t so sure.

What a relief to be able to talk about Thea this way. At Wake House some kind of niceness or reticence had come over people, they could only say the most conventional things about her and about their sorrow over losing her. Maybe that’s how it always was when they lost one of their own—maybe it came too close, they could say only the kinds of things they’d want said, when the time came, about themselves. But today, the three of them in this car, the ones who had loved Thea the best, could tell one another the truth, and it didn’t have to sound pretty or dignified, it could be as confused as they felt. They could admit what they didn’t understand about her and not worry about anybody mistaking it for dis-loyalty or bad faith.

“Hey, guys?” Caddie said. “I’ve made up my mind about something.” Was this the right time to tell them? It felt right. “Thea helped me decide. Not directly, because we didn’t talk about it all that much, not really, and she was pretty careful not to give me advice, as in do this, don’t do that.”
She glanced around. She had their attention, although Cornel was starting to look impatient.

“I’ve decided to keep the baby.”

She knew they’d be glad. Cornel leaned over and smacked her hard on both shoulders, crying, “Good! Good!” Magill laughed out loud. “That’s…” He shook his head. “Great. It’s great, Caddie. Finally, some good news.”

“I know—that’s what I thought, too, finally some good news. And I know it’s a selfish decision—”

“No, it’s not,” they said in unison.

“No, but you should see these people who register at the agency, they’re
perfect.
They’d be much better parents than me, they have money, they have each other—they have everything.”

“
Eh,
” said Magill. “Who wants perfect parents.”

“Anyway,” said Cornel, “there’s no such thing.”

“Well, that’s kind of what I thought.” She laughed and let it go. The biggest decision of her life had been a little more complicated than that, but it wasn’t the right time to explain.

“What are you now, four months? When is it due?” Magill asked.

“Three and a half. She’s due in late March, which is perfect. Because then it’s spring, and then summer. So she can go outside.”

“She?”

“No question. That’s what we have.”

“You Winger women.”

She told them about her doctor, who looked like Patty Duke. “She says I can gain thirty or forty
pounds
if I want to, because of my height. Can you
imagine
?”

Magill looked at her as if he were trying to imagine it.

“I’ll have to get another car, something newer and safer. But I’ll be able to keep working the whole time, and I can start back right away, too.” She kept on, aware that she was babbling. Poor men, they were the first, after Nana, to hear about her decision, and she had a lot stored up. She wasn’t nauseated anymore, she told them, but she couldn’t even be in the same room with cooking meat. Being pregnant took a lot of mopey, empty-headed energy, so she was tired a lot. It made time slow down, too; she did
a lot of staring into space and thinking about nothing, because nothing seemed to matter very much. Except gestating.

She didn’t tell them how ashamed she felt for once thinking she could give her baby away.
I apologize,
she told it all the time.
I’ll never tell you. I hope you don’t know anyway, through blood or enzymes or something.
She didn’t tell them how primitive her love was. She’d been like a kite with a snapped string, floating loose high in the air, and now there was somebody to keep the line taut, to pull back when she tugged. Now that she knew she could keep her, she was letting herself love this baby so
hard.

“I’m hungry,” Cornel said. “When do we eat?”

They hadn’t even gotten to the Bay Bridge yet. Fast food wouldn’t do; he had to have a sit-down restaurant with waiters and silverware and water glasses. “Okay, okay,” Magill agreed, and Caddie joined in quickly, “Fine, no problem.” They were in league, humoring Cornel so that he couldn’t work up a head of steam. Fast-food restaurants would set him off, and from there it would be litter, concrete, cars, graffiti, moral decay—then immigrants and people on welfare, smog, lines, rap, and MTV. And then how comparatively wonderful everything had been in his day. It was easier to just find a sit-down restaurant.

He brought his map with him into a place on Route 50 called the Pig and Hen. “I got some scenic routes in mind.” He spread the map on the table, covering up the menus, knocking over the salt shaker.

“Scenic routes?” Caddie looked at her watch.

“Look here.” He put his horny forefinger on Talbot County. “Sure you can go 404 if all you want to do is get there. But why not take some of these byways, see the real country, your vanishing America.”

“It’s the Delmarva,” Magill said. “It’s flat farmland.”

“I don’t mind,” Caddie said, “as long as we catch the ferry early so we can find a place to stay in Cape May while it’s still light.” They should’ve made reservations, she
knew
it.

“No problem,” Cornel said breezily. “Look, we just go along here instead of here, and we see more. It’s more civilized.”

“You can’t see anything without your glasses,” Magill pointed out, “so what do you care?”

That set them off on one of their eternal, needling arguments. Caddie glanced idly at the map, and a name jumped out at her.
Clover.
It was on one of Cornel’s byways.

She ordered a tuna fish sandwich and a vanilla milkshake and withdrew from the conversation. Let the men decide on the route. She agreed with everything.
It’s out of my hands.
Then Cornel said this way it was more like a pilgrimage, seeing more of the countryside where Thea used to live (which wasn’t even true; she and Will had lived in Maryland, down by Berlin, nowhere near Clover, Delaware), and after that Caddie had no grounds at all to protest the scenic route. Who could be against a pilgrimage?

So it was fate.

And anyway, all they were going to do was drive through.

Magill was right, Talbot County was mostly flat farmland. So was Caroline County. But it was ripe, golden autumn, and the wide fields of brown, foot-high cornstalks stretched far away to forests of changing oaks and sycamores and scruffy pine trees. Geese honked overhead in formation or strutted in gray-and-white hordes on the low-lying grasses. Pumpkins lolled for acres, and the air was dusty and mellow. The fields, the infrequent houses, even the changing trees had a drowsy, bedraggled look, as if they were pleasantly tired and passively waiting for winter.

“Turn here,” Cornel said.

“Wait, now.” Signs on the road they’d turned off of a while ago had designated it a “Scenic Byway”; this new detour would be a scenic byway times three.

“Turn.”

She turned. “Why? What’s up here?”

“Nothing that I know of.”

Magill chuckled, but Caddie wasn’t amused. What about fate? What about driving through Clover? If Cornel was going to alter the scenic route whenever the spirit moved him, they’d miss it. That wasn’t fate, that was—childish. “This road doesn’t even have a number,” she complained. “Cornel, there’s scenic and then there’s just…”

“Nothing.” Magill had Finney on his sharp thighs, holding him steady when the car shot around curves. The dog stared straight ahead with wide eyes and cocked ears, stiff as a hood ornament.

Farmer John’s Market, white wooden benches under an open tent canopy, was closed for the season. A house on cinder blocks had a satellite dish on the roof and a lone black goat in the garden. Farmland, farmland. Plastic-covered greenhouses, chicken coops, a tiny graveyard in the middle of nowhere.

“You never know what you might find,” Cornel explained. “That’s the point. When I was a kid I used to take my bike and a penny or a nickel, and every corner I came to I’d flip the coin. Right, heads, left, tails. It’s an adventure.”

“So you could never go straight,” Magill noticed.

“No, sometimes I’d say head, straight, tails—what have you. The point is—”

“But that would be cheating.”

“The point—No, it wouldn’t.”

“How far ahead of time would you decide heads was straight?”

“How the hell do I know? A block.”

“So you’d see what was coming and change the rules if you knew you wanted to go one way instead of the other.”

“I did
not.
Anyway, I still only had a fifty-fifty chance, I wasn’t changing any
rules.
Would you shut up? I was ten years old, for—Why are we stopping?”

Caddie wanted to know the same thing. The accelerator didn’t work. One minute they were sailing along fine, and the next the car didn’t have any power. “Look—nothing.” She showed them by beating the pedal with her foot. “It won’t go!”

“Turn the wheel, get off the road,” Magill said. “Hurry.”

Too late. With alarming speed the car rolled to a stop, leaving the back end stuck out four feet over the faded white side line.

“Put it in neutral and steer. Do the lights work? Put on the blinkers. Come on,” he said to Cornel, opening the door, “let’s push.”

Luckily no cars were coming. Luckily they weren’t on a hill. They pushed and she steered, over the verge onto the strip of grass between the road and a ditch. Beyond the ditch lay a broad, dusty cornfield and nothing else. Same thing on the other side.

“Stay,” she told the excited dog, and got out of the car. “Well, this is great. Can you believe it?”

“I don’t know why you’re surprised,” Cornel groused, “your car’s a pile of junk.”

“I just had it inspected. You know, if we’d stayed on 404 and then gotten on 18—”

“This wouldn’t have happened?”

“There’d be cars going by to help us.”

“Now, ladies.” Magill fiddled with the latch and popped the hood, raised it over his head and stood staring into the black, hissing engine. “Yep,” he said eventually, securing the hood with the rod. “It’s your scraffinator.”

“The—” Oh. Ha-ha.

“Did the generator light come on?”

“Um, I don’t know,” Caddie said, “I didn’t have time to notice.”

“Check and see.”

She looked in the car window. “Yes! It’s on!”

“Could be your generator,” Cornel said, pursing his lips and rubbing his chin.

“No, it would run off the battery for a while. It wouldn’t stop dead.” Magill wriggled hoses and poked at fastenings as if he knew what he was doing. “Could be the fuel pump.” He disconnected a hose going into the big round thing she thought was the carburetor. “Caddie, turn the key.”

“In the car?”

He looked over and smiled at her.

“Right.” She got in the car and turned the key.

“Okay.”

“What happened?” She had to hold Finney by the collar to get out of the car without him.

“Fuel pump’s okay.” Magill was wiping gasoline off his hands with a red handkerchief.

“Something electrical?” Cornel guessed.

“Well, except it would still run off the battery for a while. Then again, if a coil broke…but that’s not likely. My guess is it’s the timing belt.”

“Huh,” Cornel said, nodding wisely. “Timing belt.”

“What is it?” Caddie asked. “Can we fix it?”

“It’s in here.” He touched a metal cover behind the ticking radiator. “The belt runs off the crankshaft and operates the valves, see, two valves per piston. It connects to the camshaft and turns—”

“Can you fix it?”

“No. Well, if I had tools. But to get to it you have to take out the radiator and the fan belt, some of the electrical wiring, maybe some pumps. What we need is a mechanic.”

They looked at each other. They looked around at the buff-colored, spreading expanse of nothing. In the field on the other side of the road, a flock of starlings suddenly shot up in the air like a raggedy black net.

“Do you have a cell phone?” Magill asked.

“No.” She stuck her hand through the passenger-side door and petted Finney to calm him down. “Sorry. I don’t. A car!”

A pickup truck, coming toward them in the far lane. It slowed as it approached—she could hear the engine change notes—but the occupants, a whiskery, red-faced man and a white-haired woman, craned their necks, bug-eyed, and never stopped.

“How could you not have a cell phone?” Cornel wanted to know. “Everybody in the world’s got a cell phone.”

“Except any of us,” Magill said, sweeping them with a rueful glance.
Misfits,
he was thinking. Caddie knew, because she was thinking it, too.

“And I suppose nobody belongs to an auto club,” Cornel guessed. “Christ almighty. What a bunch.”

Another car passed by without stopping, even when all three of them waved at it.

“I don’t get it. Do we look like the Barrow gang or something? If nobody’s stopping, I might as well let the dog out. He hasn’t been for a walk in a whole
hour,
” Caddie added grumpily.

“Lift your skirt next time,” Cornel suggested. “Ever see that movie? Claudette Colbert lifts her skirt—”

“I’ve seen it. I’m not lifting my skirt.” Her back was killing her. This wasn’t supposed to happen. They should’ve been in Lewes by now, waiting in line for the ferry. Not only that, the sky, which had been bright blue
thirty minutes ago, was filling up with mean-looking gray clouds. Oh, terrific, a storm, that’s just what they needed.

“I’ll take him.” Magill gently took Finney’s leash from her hand.

Immediately the dog pulled him over the ditch and up the other side into the stubbly cornfield. “Don’t fall—!” But she had to laugh, they looked so funny, long-legged man running after short-legged dog, the man’s jacket flying out behind him and his pants flapping around his calves. Finney was on the scent of something, probably a field mouse, and when that happened nothing could stop him.

“He’s getting better, isn’t he?” Cornel said, resting his backside on the taillight.

“Finney? Not really, he’s—”

“Magill.”

“Oh.” She squinted against the glare of sky at his dark silhouette, thin legs churning, one long arm stretched out toward the dog. He made her think of Ichabod Crane. “I hope so. Do you think he is?”

Cornel glared at her in a searching, peevish way. “Why don’t you pay more attention to him?”

“What?”

“Don’t you know how he feels?”

“Um, about…”

“You.”

She looked away sharply. She laughed. She sidled away, moved out into the empty lane. “No. Are you kidding? No. Don’t be silly.”

Cornel clucked his tongue and shook his head, but he didn’t say anything else.

“Silly,” she repeated, to encourage him. She had the queerest flush, she could feel the heat of it crawling up her neck. “You’re crazy, we’re not like that.”

Cornel wasn’t even looking at her, he was peering over her shoulder. “Car coming. Lift your skirt.”

She wanted to muse on what Cornel had said, she wanted to ponder and ruminate and figure out what she thought about it. But an old station wagon, older than her car, and rustier, slowed and then stopped right
beside her. A thick-shouldered man rolled down his window and put his elbow on the ledge. He had grizzled white hair and a lined, dignified face the color of muddy coffee, and he wore the strangest pair of round, cobalt-blue spectacles. As if he were blind.

“Hi,” said Caddie, and “Howdy,” said Cornel when the man didn’t speak first. “We’ve had some trouble with our car.”

He gave a slow nod of agreement. Just then Finney saw his car and began to bark madly and drag Magill across the field toward it.

“My dog,” Caddie said quickly, “he’s terrible, he barks at
everybody.
” That was true; Finney was an equal-opportunity nuisance.

No reply; the old man sat resigned, stoic, as if some white people’s yappy little dog was the least of his worries. He looked like a country preacher, Caddie thought, except that he didn’t have much to say.

Magill snatched Finney up in his arms and somehow made it over to the car without falling. Muttering curses, he dumped him in the front seat, leash and all, and slammed the door. “Hi,” he called cheerfully. He started to tilt over backward and grabbed for the side mirror. Using the car for handholds, he made it around to where Caddie and Cornel were standing. “How’s it going? Thanks for stopping.”

“Is there a gas station around here?” Caddie asked. “Or a garage? With a mechanic? Anybody with a tow truck?”

The old man pushed his lips out, thinking. When he stared straight ahead, she could see from the side of his blue glasses that he had bleary, light gray eyes. “There’s Ernest Holly’s,” he finally answered in a smooth, surprisingly youthful voice.

“Is he a mechanic? Can he fix cars?”

He gave the long, thoughtful nod again.

Pause.

“Would you happen to have a cell phone?” Magill asked politely.

Finney was hurling himself from one side of the car to the other; the frantic, muffled bangs sounded like a mental patient trying to get out of his cell.

The old man shook his head.

Long pause.

“I guess I could carry you up to Ernest’s.”

“Oh, that would be great! How far is it?” Caddie asked.

“About half a mile.”

They decided Magill should go with Mr. Clark, as he turned out to be, while Caddie and Cornel stayed with the car and the dog. Magill was back in practically no time, in a red-and-white pickup truck beside a skinny, hatchet-faced young man in denim coveralls and a leather cap. Ernest Holly.

Ernest diagnosed the problem quickly. “Gotta be your timing belt. Ever had a new one? What’s this, an ’83, ’84? Belts can go twenty years, but then you’re pushing it.”

“Can you fix it?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Ah. “Today?”

Ernest had a gold eyetooth. Caddie saw it when he grinned at her as if he appreciated her sense of humor. “Not today.”

“Why not?”

“Gotta call over to Denton or Bridgeville for the part. It’s Saturday, I’m backed up till late. But I can get to it first thing in the morning, you’re on your way by eleven. That’s if I don’t run into anything funny.”

“Funny?”

Ernest reached up under his cap in back and scratched his head. He smelled like burnt oil. “Car this age, you never know. Might find anything.”

She looked at Magill.
Is this guy okay? Can we trust him?
Not that they had any choice.

Cornel had his map spread out on the trunk of the car. “Okay, so where’s to stay around here? They got a motel in Denton?”

“In Denton?” Ernest flashed his gold tooth again.

“How about Bridgeville?”

“Not that I ever heard of.” He put a grease-blackened finger on the map. Fate again: Caddie half expected him to say there was a motel in
Clover. “Place here, maybe eight or nine miles north of where we are, which is here. It’s sort of a motel, like.”

Hmm.

“Use to be for goose hunters, just cabins, no electricity or what you might call luxuries.”

“Well, you know—”

“But it got sold, then it got sold again, and these new folks fixed it up. I
hear;
can’t promise you nothing.” He looked at their faces with a certain satisfaction. “Bad place to break down. You’re in kind of a pickle, aren’t you?”

“How would we get there? Could you drive us?” Caddie asked.

“Nope. You saw all them cars I got stacked up,” he said to Magill, who had to confirm that by nodding. “Everybody waits till the end o’ the month to get inspected, nobody plans ahead. Tell you what.” He narrowed his eyes on each of them in turn. They must look pretty harmless, because he decided, “I’ll add twenty-five bucks to the bill and loan you my wife’s car.”

“Twenty-five dollars!” Cornel exploded.

“Deal,” said Magill.

“You might have to buy gas. She never remembers to fill it up.”

“You know, from here they don’t look so bad.”

Caddie poured more coffee for everybody and added a splash of cream to hers. She never used to take cream, but these days coffee without it gave her heartburn.

“They
aren’t
that bad,” Magill said, pushing away his plate with half a ham sandwich still on it.

“No, but the outside is nicer than the inside, you have to admit,” she said. “Were you not going to finish that?”