A Patchwork Planet

13

“WE ARE PROBABLY the only family in America eating a potluck Thanksgiving dinner,” my mother said, gazing around the table.

“Oh, surely that can’t be true,” Gram said. “Good heavens! Many’s the time, in the old days, I was asked to bring my marshmallow-yam casserole when Aunt Mary had the dinner at her house.”

“That’s one kind of potluck, Mother. The organized kind, where the hostess assigns a dish to each guest. But I’m talking about the other kind: catch as catch can. Pot luck, with the emphasis on ‘luck.’ Who else would be doing this?”

Mom’s own dish was a redundancy; that’s why she was annoyed. She had made one of her famous pumpkin chiffon pies, which turned out to be what Wicky had made too. (Using Mom’s recipe. I could see how that might have been a faux pas.) Also, there was no turkey. At Jeff’s insistence, he and Wicky were hosting the dinner this year, and so everybody assumed that they would supply the turkey. But they hadn’t. Wicky said her oven was too small for a turkey that would feed ten people. It seemed all her efforts had gone instead into the decorations: twists of crepe paper in harvest gold and orange festooning the dining room, and an entire family of Pilgrims marching the length of the table, with lighted candlewicks sticking up out of their heads. Plus, at the start of the meal she had made us all join hands and sing “Come Ye Thankful People, Come.” Except that she and Sophia were the only ones who knew the words beyond the very first line.

Our menu was: two pumpkin chiffon pies, Gram’s marshmallow-yam casserole, Sophia’s Crock-Pot Applesauce Cake, and a salad that Opal had tossed with a vinaigrette dressing. This was nice for Opal, because we were all so glad to see something nonsweet that her contribution was the hit of the day.

Me, I’d chosen the easy way out and brought four bottles of wine. I guess I could have complained myself, since I had specifically purchased a wine designed to complement turkey. But hey. This way, I figured, I would probably get to carry a couple of bottles home with me.

“I did inquire,” my mother was saying. “I asked Wicky at least two weeks ago: ‘Wicky, what category of food should I bring?’ But, ‘Oh, whatever you want,’ she said. ‘I’m sure it will all work out.’ ” Mom trilled her fingers in a breezy manner, apparently mimicking Wicky. “ ‘We’ll each of us just do our own thing,’ was what she told me. ‘That will be much more fun, don’t you feel?’”

I’d have taken umbrage, if I were Wicky, but Wicky smiled obliviously and handed J.P. a carrot disk from the salad.

“Oh, well,” my grandpa said. “The important thing is, we’re together. That’s what Thanksgiving is all about! Everyone gathered together. Wouldn’t you agree, Jeffrey?”

My father said, “Eh? Ah. Yes, indeed,” and poured himself more wine. He tended to remove himself when Pop-Pop started one of his homilies.

“And we’ve all got our health, knock on wood. Mother’s blood pressure’s under control; my eyesight’s no worse for the moment. Opal is with us this year, and she’s turned into a young lady! J.P.’s been upped to a booster seat____”

Evidently Pop-Pop was proceeding in order around the table. Some Thanksgivings he went by age, but today he began with Gram, at his left (wearing her sequined turkey T-shirt), and then himself, and then Opal and J.P. on his right — J.P. in a miniature business suit, already smeared with pumpkin.

Next came my brother, at the head of the table. “Jeff is on the road to being a stock-market millionaire,” Pop-Pop said, and Jeff leaned back with a genial laugh and laced his hands across the front of his suit. The successful patriarch; that must be the image he was aiming for. I don’t know why I hadn’t understood that till now. The only patriarch in Jeff’s acquaintance had been our Grandfather Gaitlin, a big-bellied man who’d loved a good cigar, which would explain why Jeff was nursing an imaginary paunch and letting his laugh trail off in an emphysemic wheeze. “Well, not exactly a millionaire,” he was saying through a smoker’s cough. No wonder he was so keen on hosting all family gatherings!

Pop-Pop moved on to Mom. “Margot here’s the new chairwoman of the Harbor Arts Club,” he said, while Mom gave a Queen Elizabeth smile, first to her left and then to her right. “And Jeffrey, of course, continues to set an example for all of us with his philanthropic activities….” My father winced, bowed, and took another sip of wine.

I never could tell who, exactly, Pop-Pop was conveying his information to. We ourselves already knew it. God, maybe? I glanced up at the ceiling.

“Sophia, Miss Sophia, is sharing our Thanksgiving for the very first time,” Pop-Pop said, “but we’re hoping it won’t be the last, by a long shot.” Sophia flushed and directed a smile toward her bosom. She was wearing her hair drawn up high on her head today, which made her look formal and elegant.

“We credit Sophia with helping a certain young man begin to settle down,” Pop-Pop said. “Speaking of who …” And then it was my turn.

“Didn’t I always tell everyone Barnaby would be fine? He’s a good, good boy,” Pop-Pop said, leaning across the table to gaze earnestly into my face. “In fact, I think some might say he’s found his angel. Hah? Hah?” And he sat back and looked around at the others. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

But no one would take him up on that (a Kazmerow had no business tossing around the subject of the Gaitlins’ angels), and so he proceeded to Wicky. “And last but not least, our charming hostess. Nazdrowie, Wicky!”

“To Wicky,” we chimed in, raising our glasses. (All except for J.P., who was busy with a marshmallow.) Even Opal shyly held up her Pepsi can. Wicky said, “Oh, go on. I didn’t do anything much!”

I saw Dad give Mom a look from under his eyebrows, warning her not to second that.

If a meal is mainly dessert, it’s hard to know when it’s over. Wicky got up to clear, finally, but she refused all offers of help, and so the rest of us went on sitting around the table. I saw my reserve bottles of wine rapidly disappearing. In fact, I suspected Jeff was getting tipsy. “Pass that bottle on down” he said at one point, in his new, fat-man voice. “Who’s hogging the bottle?” And when it turned out to be finished, he sent me for some of his own private stock from the basement. Or the “cellar,” was what he called it. “Fetch me a cabernet from the cellar, will you, Barn? There’s a good fellow.” His accent was becoming just the teeniest bit British.

I rose obediently — I was feeling very sober and responsible, maybe on account of Pop-Pop’s speech — and went through the kitchen and down the stairs to the basement. A fully stocked wooden wine rack sat next to the washing machine. I picked out the most expensive-looking cabernet I could find and climbed the stairs with it.

In the kitchen, Wicky was scraping plates. Her dress was a beige knit, cut narrow as a tube, and she was standing in a way that made her rear end look like two small, tight grapefruits nudging against the fabric. They just called out to be cupped by two hands. They ordered it. I got one of my irresistible urges, and I set the wine bottle on the counter and took a step closer.

My mother said, “Barnaby.”

My heart stopped.

I whirled around and said, “What? I was just getting wine! Jeff asked me to bring up some wine.”

“Yes, but I don’t think we need it, do you? We’ve all had more than enough,” Mom said.

“Oh,” Wicky said, turning. “Should I be making coffee?”

“Let me do it,” Mom told her. “You go out and sit awhile.”

“Why, thank you. That’s so nice of you!” Wicky said.

Of course, she had no idea that Mom claimed the coffee tasted more like tea when Wicky made it.

I grabbed the wine bottle and started to follow Wicky into the dining room, but Mom laid a hand on my arm “Barnaby,” she said again.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I still wasn’t sure if she’d guessed what I’d had in mind for Wicky’s two grapefruits.

“I want you to take this back,” Mom said, and from somewhere in her clothing she brought out a folded powder-blue check.

I said, “Huh?”

“It’s your money.”

“What money?”

She pressed it into my hand. I think it was because it was in the form of a check that I was so slow on the uptake. First I set the wine bottle down on the counter; then I unfolded the check and peered at it for a moment. Pay to the order of Barnaby Gaitlin, Eight thousand seven hundred and no/100 dollars.

“Why?” I asked her.

“I’ve decided not to keep it.”

This didn’t thrill me as much as you might expect. I went on studying the check, hoping it would tell me something further. The space after For had been left blank. If only she had filled it in! I raised my eyes, finally.

“Why?” I asked her again.

“Oh …,” she said, and she turned away and reached for the percolator. “It just seemed the right course of action,” she tossed over her shoulder.

“But you’ve always said I should pay it back.”

“Oh …”

“You said that was the right course of action.”

She noisily ran water into the percolator.

“You just want me to stay fixed in my accustomed role,” I said. “You would feel more comfortable if I went on being indebted.”

“Don’t be absurd,” she told me, shutting off the water.

“Now that I’ve repaid you, you’ve got nothing to hold over me.”

“That’s absurd. You can never repay me.”

“Pardon?”

She wouldn’t answer. She made a big show of measuring out the coffee.

“I just did repay you,” I said.

She kept her lips clamped shut.

“Eighty-seven hundred dollars,” I reminded her. “Every cent. In cold cash.”

She wheeled on me. She said, “Do you honestly believe money will make up for what I went through? Visiting all our high-class neighbors, throwing myself on their mercy, pleading with them not to press charges?”

“I never asked you to do that,” I said.

“ ‘Well, Mrs. Gaitlin, we’ll need to think this over,’ ” she said, putting on a pinched and simpering tone of voice. “ ‘We’ll need to give it some thought,’ they told me. That insufferable Jim McLeod: ‘I doubt if you fully comprehend, Mrs. Gaitlin, what a rare and valuable object that ivory happened to be.’ They loved to see me beg! Upstart Margot Gaitlin. It goes to show, they were thinking: you can take the girl out of Canton, but you can’t take Canton out of the … ‘Just look at her son, if you need proof,’ they said. Oh, always you were my son. I suppose I felt that way myself. Jeff was more related to Dad, but you were related to me. You I had to personally apologize for. You think you can repay me for that? You can never repay me. Not with eight thousand, not with eight hundred thousand! Take your money back.”

“Don’t you wish,” I told her, and I ripped the check in two. Then I made confetti of it, ripping it again and again and letting the little pieces flutter to the floor. My mother just stared — her mouth open, a spoonful of ground coffee suspended between us.

I had imagined that we’d been shouting, but when I stormed into the dining room I realized none of the others had heard us. They were still lounging around the table, and all Jeff said when he saw me was, “Where’s the wine, bro?”

“Oops,” I said, and I made a U-turn into the kitchen and retrieved the bottle. It was no affair of mine how much he drank.

The Pilgrim candles were headless now, their shoulders curly-edged bowls of wax. They looked like torture victims. Wicky rose and blew them out, saying, “Let’s adjourn to the living room, shall we?” By the time Mom brought in the coffee tray, I was on the couch, playing a game of cribbage with Opal. I waved the tray off without looking up, and no one thought anything of it.

Opal had learned cribbage just the day before, her first evening at my parents’, but already she was good at it. I felt kind of proud of her. “Fifteen-two, a run of three for five, and his nobs for six,” she said smartly. I never remembered to call the jack “his nobs.” I said, “Way to go, Ope,” and she sat back and grinned at me. With her legs tucked under her, you could see that the knees of her black tights were about to develop holes. I found that encouraging, somehow.

I had this sudden, startling thought: Would Opal get a visit from her angel, somewhere on down the line?

She was a Gaitlin, after all. Strange to realize that. She did have my last name and at least a few of my genes, even if they weren’t obvious.

Wicky was rocking J.P. to sleep, humming something tuneless. Jeff was poking the fire. (Another patriarchal activity, I guessed.) Sophia sat next to Gram on the love seat, and Dad occupied the one remaining chair. So when Pop-Pop returned from a trip to the John, he had to nudge me down the couch a ways. “Ah, me,” he said, sinking heavily into the cushions. “How’s the car, Barnaby?”

“Um …”

As luck would have it, my mother approached him just then with the tray. “Coffee, Daddy? It’s decaf.”

“Now, what the hell do I want decaf for? What’s the point of coffee if it don’t have any kick to it?”

“Think how much better you’ll sleep, though, Daddy.”

“Ha,” he said, but he helped himself to a cup and stirred in several spoonsful of sugar, while she waited.

“Jeffrey?” my mother said next, heading toward Dad.

“Yes, thanks. I will have some.”

She bent to rest her tray on the lamp table beside him. “Barnaby won’t let me give him back his money,” she told him.

“Eh?” my father said.

“His eighty-seven hundred. He won’t take it.”

I felt Sophia glance over at me, but the others paid no attention. “Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, and a double run for twelve,” Opal announced, while Jeff set aside his poker and took another swig of wine.

“I tried to give it back to him,” my mother said, “but he tore up the check.”

“We’ll discuss this some other time, shall we?” my father said pleasantly.

“I want to get this settled, though.”

“Another time, I told you.”

“What other time? We hardly ever lay eyes on him!”

“Margot,” my father said. “Do you suppose we could make it through one holiday without your tiresome fishwife act?”

Wicky stopped humming. There was a pause, and then my mother lifted her tray and proceeded back to the kitchen at a dignified pace. A second later, we heard the tray slamming onto a counter. A faucet started running. Dishes started clattering. Wicky looked over at Jeff, but he minutely shook his head, and so she stayed seated.

Gram cleared her throat. “Sophia, dear!” she said. “Tell us! What dots your family do for Thanksgiving?”

Well, at least they didn’t publicly demolish each other, Sophia could have said; but she told Gram, “Oh, nothing very exciting, I’m afraid. Usually, Mother’s two cousins come for dinner, along with one cousin’s husband. And then this year she’s invited my Aunt Grace from Baltimore too.”

“She’s invited your Aunt Grace?” I asked.

But I don’t think Sophia heard, because Gram was saying, “Isn’t that lovely! And will they be serving a turkey?”

“Oh, yes. In fact, it’s kind of like you-all’s arrangement — a potluck — although Mother does assign specific dishes. For instance, Aunt Grace is bringing her chestnut dressing. She fixed it ahead of time, except for the baking, and I helped her onto the train with it, but Lord knows how she’ll manage at the other end of the trip.”

“You helped her onto the train?” I asked.

All this was news to me, I can tell you.

Sophia sent me an absentminded smile. “The cousins are in charge of the vegetables,” she said, “and Cousin Dotty’s husband makes the pies. He’s an excellent cook, although in all other respects he’s considered something of a—”

There was a crash in the kitchen, followed by the tinkling of glass. Sophia stopped short. The rest of us exchanged glances.

Gram said, “Yes, dear? Something of a …?”

“Oh! Something of a … ne’er-do-well, I suppose. But—”

A metal object clanged so loudly that it gave off an echo, like a gong.

“Maybe I should go out there,” Wicky said.

“Stay where you are, why don’t you,” my father told her blandly.

She sat back, drawing J.P.’s deadweight body closer against her.

Sophia looked from one of us to the other.

“Ne’er-do-well!” I said.

Sophia said, “What?”

“I haven’t heard that term in ages!”

“You haven’t heard … ‘ne’er-do-well’?”

“It’s almost Old English, don’t you think?” I asked the room at large. I had to raise my voice to be heard above the racket from the kitchen. “It’s almost something Robin Hood might have said! In fact, a lot of those bad-guy words are like that: so quaint and antiquey. ‘Ruffian.’ ‘Knave.’ ‘Wastrel.’ ‘Scoundrel.’ Ever noticed?”

No one had, apparently.

“ ‘Layabout.’ ‘Rapscallion,’ ” I said. “ ‘Scofflaw.’ ‘Scum of the earth.’ ”

“ ‘Beast of burden,’ ” Opal offered unexpectedly.

“Well, that’s a little off the subject … or maybe not, come to think of it. And ‘ill-gotten gains.’ ‘Misspent youth.’ Or, let’s see …”

“ ‘Besetting sins,’ ” my father said from his armchair.

“Right! Besetting sins. But it’s not the same for good-guy words, at least not as far as I’ve—”

The telephone rang. We were all so relieved that every last one of us stirred as if to go answer it, but Mom picked it up in the kitchen. We could hear her intonation, if not her exact words. “Mm? Mm? Hmm-hmm-hmm.”

Then she appeared in the doorway. “Barnaby,” she said — her voice noncommittal, her face composed, not a hair out of place—“that was that Martine person, and she says to tell you she has the truck but she’ll bring it by in the morning.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Pop-Pop asked, “What truck is that?”

I said, “Oh, just the, you know, work truck.”

“Fool kid sold off the Sting Ray,” my father told my grandpa.

“He did what?”

“Sold off the Corvette Sting Ray and bought a used Ford pickup.”

Pop-Pop leaned forward on the couch to peer at me. I could feel his stare, even though I had my back to him. I turned and told him, “I was planning to mention that.”

“You sold the Sting Ray?”

He was so amazed, the whites of his eyes showed all around the irises.

“Well, yes, I did,” I said.

“Why?”

I said, “I needed the money.”

“The money, son: you could have borrowed money from me! I’d have been glad to lend you money!”

“Well, see … the whole point was, not to be in debt anymore. Not to owe anybody.”

Pop-Pop’s jaw went slack.

“But, Barnaby,” he said finally. “That was the only year the Corvette had a split rear window.”

“Oh, damn that split rear window!” I said. Then I said, “Sorry.” I looked around at the others. They all wore the same accusing expression — even Opal. (Or maybe I was imagining things.) “I mean,” I said, “I do know what a big deal it was, Pop-Pop—”

“Shoot,” Jeff said suddenly. “It broke my heart when Pop-Pop gave the Corvette to you.”

“It did?” I asked.

“I would have killed for that car!”

“You would?”

I sat there a minute absorbing this, chewing the inside of my cheek. Dad, meanwhile, took over the conversation. “Of course, when I was Barnaby’s age,” he said, “I went out and worked if I needed money, but nowadays, it seems—”

“With all due respect, Dad,” I told him, “you were never my age.”

“Excuse me?”

“Times are different, Dad, okay? What I’ve experienced, you haven’t. And vice versa, no doubt. So you can’t compare us, is what I’m saying.” I turned back to my grandpa. “I’m sorry, Pop-Pop,” I told him. “Giving me that car was the best thing anyone’s ever done for me, and don’t think I don’t know that. But I’m trying really hard to grow up now, don’t you see? And I had to sell the car to get there. I hope you understand.”

I could hear the rustle of Mom’s apron as she wrapped her hands in it. Then Pop-Pop said, “Why, sure, son. It was yours to do what you liked with.”

After that we had a fairly normal evening, but that was just because all of us were exhausted.

Sophia and I had driven over in the Saab, and we’d both assumed that I would go back to her house for the night, since the roommate was out of town. But on Jeff’s front walk I said, “Why don’t you drive, and that way you can drop me off at my place.” Then I felt the need to invent too many excuses. “I have to get to work so early tomorrow, and Martine won’t know where to pick me up, and besides, Opal mentioned something about breakfast____”

Sophia just said, “All right,” and we set off toward her car. I got the impression she was glad, even. Probably she could use a night alone herself.

Earlier it had been raining, and now the air had a damp, chilly feel. The car windows misted over before we’d gone a block. I grew extremely conscious of how closed in we were. Our breaths were too loud, and the tinny sound of Sophia’s cake platter, sliding across the back seat at each turn, made our silence more noticeable.

Finally she said, “You didn’t tell me your mother offered to give you back that money.”

“How could I? It just now happened,” I said.

“I don’t see why you refused it.”

I stared at her. I said, “What: you too?”

“It’s eighty-seven hundred dollars, after all. Think what we could do with that.”

“Well, lots. Obviously. But that’s beside the point. I didn’t want to worry about that money anymore.”

“So you’d rather I worry about money.”

“You? How do you figure that?”

“Well, I’m the one who couldn’t buy a new outfit for Thanksgiving because my money’s in the flour bin.”

“So? Get it out of the flour bin. You said yourself you’ve been in touch with your aunt again.”

“Oh, I knew you’d hold that against me!” she cried, swinging the car onto Northern Parkway.

I said, “Huh? Hold what against you?”

“She’s my aunt, Barnaby. I don’t have so many relatives that I can afford to discard a perfectly good aunt.”

“Well, sure. I realize that,” I told her.

“And it made me feel just awful, being on the outs with her. So I called her on the phone one day last week. I meant to tell you about it; honestly I did, but somehow it slipped my mind. I asked her how she was, and she said she had a cold. Well, what could I do? Hang up on a sick old woman? I went by to see her at lunch hour. I brought her some soup and some nose drops. I couldn’t just let her fend for herself!”

“Of course you couldn’t,” I said.

Did she think I didn’t know how these family messes operated? The most unforgivable things got … oh, not forgiven. Never forgiven. But swept beneath the rug, at least; brushed temporarily to one side; buried in a shallow grave. I knew all about it.

I rolled down my window a quarter of an inch, thinking it might help defog the windshield. I said, “But you still haven’t gotten your money out of the flour bin.”

“No.”

The whistling sound from my window helped to fill the silence.

“Why not?” I asked her finally.

“Hmm?” she said. She leaned forward to swab the windshield with her palm — a mistake, but I didn’t point that out.

“Why haven’t you gotten your money?”

“Oh, it’s … never been the right time,” she said.

“Now would be a good time,” I told her. “While your aunt’s in Philadelphia.”

“Barnaby! I can’t just sneak in like a thief!”

She kept her eyes on the road while she said that. It made her indignation sound fake. All at once I found her irritating beyond endurance. I noticed how the streetlights lit the fuzz along her jawline — fur, it almost was — and how large and square and bossy her hands looked on the steering wheel. Managerial: that was the word. Wasn’t that why her other romances had ended, if you read between the lines? “I’m probably too … definite,” I seemed to remember her saying. “Too definite for men to feel comfortable with.” Darn right she was too definite!

And then that lingering, doting voice she used when she spoke of herself as a child—“When I was a little girl …”—as if she had been more special than other little girls. And her eternal Crock-Pot dinners; oh, Lord. If I had to eat one more stewy-tasting, mixed-and-mingled, gray-colored one-dish meal, I’d croak!

And her predictability: her Sunday-night shampoos and panty-hose washing, her total lack of adventurousness. (Wasn’t it a flaw, rather than a virtue, that she’d been so incurious when the passport man gave her that envelope?) Her even temper, her boring steadfastness, her self-congratulatory loyalty when she assumed I had stolen from her aunt. Here I’d been hoping she would bring me up to her level, infuse me with her goodness! Instead she had fallen all over herself rushing to protect my badness.

I said, “Sophia. Let’s go get that money.”

“Absolutely not,” she said, and she was so prompt about it, she practically overlapped my words.

“Why not? If it belongs to you, why can’t you?”

She said, “Don’t badger me, please. It’s really none of your concern what I do with my own private funds.”

“In fact, it is, though,” I said. “In fact, every time I turn around, you’re telling me how hard your life is now that you’ve lost your money. You’re going on and on about all the things you can’t afford because your money’s in the flour bin, and you know what I think, Sophia? I think you like to have it in the flour bin. I think you feel that as long as it’s in the flour bin, I owe you something. I’m starting to suspect you have no intention of getting it back. You prefer it that I’m beholden to you for your sacrifice.”

“Well, that’s just simply not true,” Sophia told me.

You would think she’d have raised her voice, at least, but she didn’t. Her tone was low and reasonable, and she went on staring straight ahead, and she remembered to signal before she pulled into my driveway. Even that I found irritating. She was just as angry as I was; I knew it for a fact, but she’d already lost two boyfriends, and she’d promised herself she would hang on to this one no matter what a … ne’er-do-well he might turn out to be. Oh, I could read her like a book!

I remembered what I’d told Mrs. Alford when I was describing Great-Grandpa’s visit from his angel. Angels leave a better impression, I’d said, if they don’t hang around too long. Or something to that effect. If they don’t hang around making chitchat and letting you get to know them.

Here is how my Pop-Pop happened to give me the Sting Ray:

I was just about to graduate from the Renascence School, and I’d been accepted at Towson State, and Dad had promised to find a summer job for me. So far he hadn’t succeeded, but that’s a whole other story. The point is, I was doing okay for once. My life was looking up. There was a lot of talk about clean slates and new beginnings, et cetera, et cetera.

Then, at Easter, I came home for the long weekend and got into a little trouble. Well, I’ll just go ahead and say it: I locked my parents out of the house and set fire to the dining room.

I can’t explain exactly how it started. How do these things ever start? It was your average Saturday-night supper; nothing special. My brother had brought a girlfriend. He was living on his own by then, in an apartment down on Chase Street, and he wanted us to meet this Joanna, or Joanne, or whatever her name was. But that was not the problem. The girl was innocuous enough. And my parents were putting on their happycouple act, telling how they themselves had met and so on — my father describing Mom as lively and vivacious and “spunky” (his favorite word for her); my mother turning her eyes up to him in this adoring, First Lady manner. No problem there, either. I’d seen them do that plenty of times. Oh, I’ve never claimed my parents were to blame for my mistakes. My mother might lay it on a little thick — working so hard at her Guilford Matron act, wearing her carefully casual outfits and frantically dragging the furniture around before all major parties — but I realize there are far worse crimes. So, I don’t know. I was just in a mood, I guess. All through supper I kept fighting off my old fear that I might burst out with some scandalous remark. It was more pronounced than usual, even. (Do you think I might have Tourette’s syndrome — a mild, borderline version? I’ve often wondered.) But I made it through the evening. Bade Jeff and What’s-her-name a civil goodbye in the front hall, watched Mom and Dad walk them to the street.

Then I locked every single door behind them and stood inside with my arms folded, listening to my parents knock and ring and shout. (“Barnaby? Barn? You’ve had your little joke now. Let us in now, please.”) I didn’t say a word. When my father stepped off the front stoop, finally, and picked his way through the azaleas to peer in the dining-room window, I snatched up the silver box of matches my mother lit her candles with and I struck a match without a thought and set fire to the curtains. They were some kind of gauzy material, and they burned lickety-split. My father said, “Call the fire department!” (He was speaking to me, I had to surmise, since who else was near a phone?) But my mother said, “No! Think of the neighbors!” and that’s when I picked up a dining-room chair and sent it through the window. It felt spectacular. I can still remember the satisfaction. It made such a clean, explosive crash. Although it also provided Dad with an entryway into the house.

I didn’t try to stop him. I just sort of wandered off to my room, noticing the whole while that I seemed to be behaving like a crazy man. I climbed the stairs with my hands hanging loose at my sides and my expression spacey and vacant, and I watched myself doing it or even overdoing it, the same way years ago I’d overdone my limp when I sprained my ankle once, putting everything I had into the role of a cripple.

Well, you can imagine the brouhaha. Long-distance calls to Renascence, reaming them out for sending home a dangerous individual. Telephone consultations with the headmaster and my adviser. But not my psychologist, oddly enough. I did have one, of a fair-to-middling sort; but the focus here seemed to be my criminal intent rather than my mental state. There was talk, even, of bringing in the police, although that was probably just for effect. My father went so far as to mention jail. “I saved you from jail once before, but I’m not doing it again,” he said. I just kept my same vacant expression. I felt mildly interested, as if it didn’t involve me. I remember reflecting on the bizarreness of jail as a punishment — like sending someone to his room, really. Just put him away! What a concept. But did it ever occur to people that getting put away could come as a relief, on occasion?

Anyhow: the next day was Easter. So we all assembled for Easter dinner — me and my folks; Jeff minus the girlfriend (I believe she’d been hastily disinvited, due to recent developments); my Grandmother Gaitlin, who was still alive at the time; and Gram and Pop-Pop Kazmerow. Of course The Event had been thoroughly discussed behind my back, and I could tell it was the only thing on anyone’s mind. Much shaking of heads, much whispering in the front hall. Sidelong glances at the cardboard-covered window and the charred and blistered frame. Surreptitious sniffs of the tarry-smelling air.

Except for Pop-Pop.

He just walked straight up to me. I was standing alone in front of the unlit fireplace in the living room, feeling like a Martian, and Pop-Pop walked straight up and said, “Happy Easter, Barnaby.”

“Well. Same,” I said.

“It’s wonderful to see you.”

“It’s good to see you too, Pop-Pop.”

Then he reached out and put something in my hand. The Chevrolet key ring.

I said, “What’s this for?”

He said, “You know about my eyesight. I shouldn’t have kept on driving even as long as I have.”

“But what’s—?”

“I want you to have my car,” he said. “She’s still got a lot of miles left in her! And she’s quite a machine, Barnaby. Only Corvette ever made with a split rear window.”

“You’re giving me the Corvette?” I asked him.

He nodded.

“You’re giving it, as in giving it?”

“I can’t think of anyone better, son,” he said.

I have no idea what Jeff’s face looked like at that moment. Did he, in fact, envy me? I never even glanced at him. I was staring down at the checkered flags and blinking back the tears.