The Ninth Wife (30 page)

“You seem like you were having a good time there.”

“Yes. Carol was my favorite person. Now Bess is my favorite. Mr. and Mrs. Steinbloom are my second and third favorites, but only because they’re old, like my mother.”

“Your mother’s not old, Gerald,” says Rory, though he is a terrible judge of age. Maybe she is as old as Bess’s grandparents but doesn’t look it.

Gerald pokes at his temples. “She’s always saying she’s
getting
old and if you keep
getting
old you have to
be
old soon. Also she snores.”

Gerald sounds almost logical, though how did snoring get to be his threshold for old age? Should he tell Gerald that he snores? Even Bess snores—or at least breathes heavily—when she’s on her back. It’s kind of cute.

Poor Gerald. With only his mom left to take care of him, maybe he’s angry at her for getting older. Rory is starting to feel a fatherly protectiveness for this boy-man. And he suddenly misses his own dad, picturing him either asleep on his threadbare couch or behind the wheel of his Volkswagen Golf. Rory’s older brother, Eamonn, had been his father’s favorite, that was clear in his father’s nostalgic and often drunken indulgences whenever Rory lent him an ear. Not surprisingly, Rory grew up looking for ways to gain his favor. But that didn’t mean his father didn’t love him. Rory knew better. His father was a quiet, thoughtful, well-meaning man. Since his mother passed away fifteen years ago (
God rest her warm and loving soul
), he and his dad talk on the phone at least once a month and have managed to see each other every three or four years, the last time in Disney World in Orlando, one of his father’s dream destinations. He suspects his dad would love Bess. As would his sisters, though he speaks to them much less often.

“I think your mom will be around for a good long time, Gerald,” says Rory. “And I know Bess will always be there for you.”

Gerald sits up straight and slaps the carpet three times. Then he reaches over for the farthest box. “This,” he says, pointing to a shiny beetle about an inch and a half long. “This is my Bess beetle.”

Rory leans in to look. It’s not one of the more interesting beetles in the collection, but it’s the only one that has a little smiley face sticker next to its label. The sticker is faded and peeling at the edges. “That’s nice that you named a beetle after Bess, Gerald.”

Gerald erupts, pounding the carpet with his fists, yelling, “NO NO NO NO NO!”

Rory holds out his hands, careful not to touch him. “It’s okay, Gerald. Calm down. It’s okay. I’m sorry. I take it back.”

“Everything okay in here?” says Vivian, poking her head in.

Gerald quiets down, rubs his hair. “We’re fine, Mom.”

Rory gives her a reassuring nod.

“All right, Gerald. I see you have your bugs out.”

“Beetles, Mom, they’re beetles.
You’re
a bug.
You
bug me.”

Was that a joke? Did Gerald just say something funny? Rory laughs out loud, mostly to let Gerald know he got it. Vivian gives Rory a knowing look, then withdraws. They hear her footsteps down the stairs.

“Good one, Gerald,” says Rory.

Gerald doesn’t smile or look up from his beetles, but he says, “Thank you.” He pops up and darts to his desk. He brings back a large book, sits back down on the floor, and opens to a page marked with a yellow sticky note. “Read! Read now!”

Rory takes the book and reads the paragraph under a photo of the beetle that looks like the one they’re talking about. “Odontotaenius disjunctus,” he says, “also known as the Bess beetle or Bess bug.” He looks up at Gerald. “I’m sorry, Gerald. I stand corrected.” He reads more—about how they are usually found in the woods in decaying logs and stumps, that they don’t bite, and most interestingly, they like to live together and form small colonies showing social behavior, a rare trait among beetles. “This is very special.”

Gerald is sitting quietly, fidgeting with his hands, looking out his window.

Rory looks at Gerald and thinks of his lifelong friendship with Bess. He is moved by their affection for each other, their bigheartedness, by Bess’s kindness toward Gerald over the years. “Gerald,” he says, “do you have a dream?”

“Everyone dreams four to six times per night during R-E-M sleep. R-E-M stands for rapid eye movements.”

“No, I mean something you would love to do someday before you yourself get old.”

Gerald tilts his head. He pushes down on his bottom teeth with his knuckles. He hums.

“Gerald?”

Gerald gets up and from under his mattress pulls out a February 2001 issue of
National Geographic
with a large red and yellow beetle on the cover. He hands it to Rory. The beetle, says the title, is called a jewel scarab. “You want one of these?”

“Yes,” says Gerald. “But I would like to collect it myself.”

Rory skims the article. The jewel scarab is a particularly colorful beetle found only in the cloud forests of Honduras’s Cusuco National Park. Maybe, thinks Rory, he and Bess can take Gerald to Honduras some day. That would be lovely. “I hope someday you get to go,” he says, feeling the sincerity of his statement deep in his gut. Then he stands. “And now, I’m afraid, I have to go.” Rory takes pen and paper from Gerald’s desk and writes down his phone number. “I don’t have a cell phone, but here’s my home phone. Give me a call if you ever want to catch a ball game or something.”

Gerald holds the paper, pointing to each number Rory wrote like he’s counting to make sure there are the correct number of digits. Then he writes down his phone number and hands it to Rory. “Here’s my phone number. Don’t call after nine
P.M
. Or before eight
A.M.
”

“Okay. And hey, thanks for showing me your collection.”

“You’re welcome.”

Rory reaches out to shake hands. Gerald hesitates, staring at Rory’s hand, then obliges with a weak, quick-second gesture. He leads Rory to the front door. Vivian seems to be somewhere else.

“Say good-bye to your mom for me, won’t you?” says Rory, as he puts on his sneakers.

“Yes. When is Bess coming back?”

“Not soon enough. But I’ll make sure she visits you as soon as she does.”

“Okay.” Gerald and Rory walk out to the driveway. The midday sun is hot, the air thick with moisture, the sky threatening to storm. Gerald kicks the hose. “You can come with Bess when she visits.”

Rory smiles. “Thanks, Gerald. I look forward to seeing you again.”

Chapter Twenty-one

E
ver since Bess was little, she has dreamed of driving across America. She never thought about the particulars, the long hours of numbing boredom, the flat roads with nothing but gas stations and billboards, the neck aches from sitting upright too long. To a five-year-old in the 1970s, a car was an amusement ride with rock-and-roll radio stations. Highways had other cars with passengers to wave the peace sign at and license plates to spark letter games. She remembered trips like that from D.C. to upstate New York and if the short ones were fun, she could only imagine how exciting the longer rides would be.

But she never did drive across the country. Her father’s car accident left her mother fearful of automobiles, angry at all drivers, and so sad as to become mildly agoraphobic. And that ruined the dream for Bess, too, for a time, seeing her mom like that and understanding at the age of eight only that her dad was laughing with her one day and gone every day after, evaporating from their home over time until he became, not a separate entity, but a part of her like an occasional ache.

But in her late teens the dream returned and took on mythical proportions. Her eleventh grade teacher assigned Kerouac’s
On the Road
, and Bess reread it until the pages were frayed and fanned out from overuse. When she got her driver’s license, she wanted nothing more than to
use
it, to search out her Holy Grail, her Shangri-La, her El Dorado. But then over the years, the idea of a cross-country drive for Bess reemerged as a quiet meditation, a desire to escape the blinders of daily life and see life anew.

She has therefore concluded that the emphasis for the next couple of weeks should be on the journey itself, and as such has let go of any strong desire to see a particular place. A few ex-wives perhaps, if she could find them, but not a place. This isn’t, ultimately, about her, she told herself. It is about spending time with her grandparents and making sure that they see what
they
want to see, if indeed it is to be a last hurrah. But when asked, Millie and Irv weren’t all that obliging. Millie wanted to spend time in Chicago to see her sister, and beyond that, she said, maybe it would be nice to see the galleries in Santa Fe. Irv said he wanted to see Alaska and Tahiti. Millie didn’t think that was funny. Bess told them about the kitschy, manmade, usually large-sized pop art across the plains, but Millie and Irv didn’t get kitsch.
What do I need with a seventy-foot ketchup bottle?
said Millie. And for once Irv agreed.

Bess was able to make a few suggestions that stuck: Fallingwater, the house built by Frank Lloyd Wright, was on the way to Chicago and an hour south of Pittsburgh, where they could spend their first night. The following day they would drive direct to Chicago. Beyond that, they’d decide later which way they wanted to head first, south or west. And now with Cricket pointing them toward Denver, they had more of a plan.

“Talk to me, Thelma, I’m bored,” says Cricket, pulling down the car’s visor against the bright sun. They’ve been driving west for two hours with little more to look at than fallow fields and silos and black cows. Occasionally, their ears pop. Smaller signs on the side of the highway beckon them to the Waffle House and Bob Evans Restaurant and Sheetz gas station and convenience stores, while larger green signs overhead let them know which Maryland towns they’re passing by—Frederick, Boonsboro, Hagerstown. The route flirts with the Pennsylvania border all the way. It’s the part of Maryland that makes the state look greedy, the long thin beak of the bird nudging out a slice of West Virginia. Bess takes a quick look behind her in the van. Millie and Irv, and Stella she assumes, have been lulled into sleep. Peace, on the other hand, is still wide awake and waving to passersby. “What do you want to talk about?” she says.

“I hate when people ask that, so unimaginative. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

Bess yawns. “I was thinking I was tired, actually. I got up early this morning.” She’s had the AC on in the van to keep down the noise, but she feels the need for some fresh air. She cracks open her window. “And I guess I was thinking about my dad.”

Cricket is polite in his silence, giving her space to elaborate.

“You know he died in a car accident. It’s probably why I never got my own car.”

“Remind me what happened.”

“A Mack truck moved into his lane. Smashed him up against a cement barrier.”

“And your mother sued the bastard.”

“She won a suit. We basically lived off the settlement for a long time. That and whatever my grandparents gave us.” She pauses, then continues. “I mean, I don’t mind driving. But it sometimes makes me think about him, what he must have been feeling. He was dead when they found him, but none of us ever knew if he died on impact.”

Millie stirs audibly in her sleep. Bess looks in the mirror to see her roll her head to the other side of the seatback. She had always gotten the feeling that Millie didn’t think much of her dad. It was a comment here and there that made Bess defensive. “You know,” she says, “my dad used to wake me up for school every morning with a shout song.”

“What’s a shout song, it sounds awful.” Cricket uses a yellow handkerchief to adjust the vent on the dashboard, then folds it into fours.

“It’s what shack rousters used to sing. The guys hired to wake up the work camps.” Bess sings: “Wake up, Jacob. Day’s a-breakin’, peas in the pot and hoe cake’s bakin’. Early in the mornin’, almost day, if you don’t come soon, gonna throw it all away.”

“Charming,” says Cricket. “Dare I ask what a hoe cake is?”

“I don’t really know. He’d finish singing and I’d ask him to come back in an hour. He’d say no. I’d say, a half hour? He’d say no, all the time taking a step closer to my bed. Ten minutes? Nope. One minute? One minute, he’d say, and sit at the edge of my bed, rub my legs, and whisper the shout song until I sat up.”

Cricket, uncharacteristically without some kind of movement about his person, sits quietly. “He sounds like a nice father. You must miss him.”

“I do miss him sometimes. When I think of him, it’s usually in the morning, maybe because of that memory. It’s one of my favorites. And because he was often cheerful in the morning. He’d wake up in a good mood and then all the problems of the world would get to him and he’d be sullen by evening.”

“I know the type.”

“Was your father like that?”

“My father was never cheerful. His shouts, unfortunately, never turned into songs.”

Right
, thinks Bess. She had forgotten what Cricket’s father was like: a traveling salesman who
drank his shame and hit to blame
, he had told her.

A few green signs pass overhead. “So how come I hardly know anything about your father?” says Cricket. “Shame on you.”

Bess looks at Cricket. “I probably never told you I was married before, either, did I,” she teases. “In fact,” she says, amusing herself, “I’ve been married eight times.”

“All right, now.”

“Actually . . .” she says, sinking into a more serious mood. Now might be a perfect time to tell Cricket about Rory’s ex-wives, she thinks. She should have told him days ago; as it is he’ll be hurt that she waited this long. “I need to tell you some—” she begins, but is interrupted by her cell phone ringing from inside her purse.

Cricket looks to see if he can make out a number or caller. “Should I answer this?”

“No, give it here.”

“That’s not safe while you’re driving.”

“Cricket!” Cricket hands it to her and she flips it open, but misses the call. She checks the number. It’s a New York area code, which reminds her of Maggie.