Calloustown

Is There Anything Wrong with Happier Times?

Harold Lumley needed to check out his mother’s reported lapses in judgment. He had received a call from the executive director of the Calloustown Community Center — a place where Ruth Lumley had volunteered for the past six years reading to the children of migrants, offering English lessons to the workers, and basically being a joyful person in a variety of capacities. She’d refereed Liga Pequeña basketball games up until her hip replacement surgery and had taught a roomful of Latina women how to cook a number of Southern staples when it came to funeral foods, from potato salad to chicken pot pie. Ruth Lumley’d conducted seminars on how to open bank accounts, pass the DMV’s written test, and talk to a child’s teacher without having the teacher feel threatened. She had offered baton-twirling lessons so the little girls could one day feel good about themselves as majorettes.

The woman — Ms. Pickens? Ms. Pickering? — had told Harold over the phone that, although she didn’t want to pry into the Lumley family’s way of treating their elderly relatives, perhaps he should drive down and observe his mother’s recent peculiarities. She said, “I don’t want to judge you or nothing, but I believe your momma might be getting to that point where a retirement facility’s the best option. When they start acting peculiar, it’s a sign. I don’t know for sure, but she seems to have befriended some puppets, and turned her back on the rest of us.”

Harold cradled the phone to his ear. He needed to talk to his franchise owner about firing three people — one for ineptitude, one for stealing herbal Viagra, one for sexual harassment. He managed a place called Other Medicine — a small chain, a constant for Buddhists and Unitarians distrustful of pharmaceutical companies and reassured by the OM in the store’s name. “Can you be more specific?” Harold asked the woman. “Say your name again?”

“This is Berta Parks. I’m the executive director of the Calloustown Community Center down in Calloustown.”

Harold thought, “How did I get Pickens or Pickering out of this? Maybe I’m the one who needs to be reported for dementia.” He thought, “Wasn’t the old Miss America master of ceremonies named Bert Parks — man, how much crap did this woman get for her name?” He said, “Is my mother all right?”

Harold felt guilty about not visiting more often. Evidently his brother, Kenny, visited her two or three times a week. But with a divorce, two high school kids on weekends, and an ever-present rotation of minimum wage — earning high school graduates who confused Niacin with acai, vitamin B with bee pollen, and nickels with quarters, it seemed as though he spent eighteen hours a day outside of his own apartment. He brought his mother up for every other Christmas, for every other birthday. “I can’t come down to spend two or three days in Calloustown,” he used to say. “First off, it sends me into depression and flashbacks of growing up there. Two, I’d get stolen blind if I left someone else in charge of the store.”

To Berta Parks he said, “Okay. Okay. I talk to my mother all the time — almost daily — and she doesn’t sound any different to me. Kenny says she’s doing well, too.”

He’d not spoken to Kenny, who lived in Calloustown still after taking over their father’s extermination business, since he didn’t know when. Berta Parks said, “The elderly find ways of masking their frailties and insecurities. They find ways to adapt, you know. If you start talking to them about an open wound on their head, they can find a way to veer the conversation into something that happened to them in 1945 when open wounds were all the rage.”

Ever the salesman, Harold said, “I can get you some ginseng, gingko biloba, gotu kola, yerba mate, and rhodiola rosea if you think it would be a good idea to have some on hand for any of the older people who frequent the community center. These are all fine herbal supplements. They’re not necessarily approved by the FDA, but we all know the FDA is holding back the American public when it comes to valid, non-traditional antidotes to some of the more common ailments from which the public suffers these days. In our fast-paced modern world.” He had taken a community college public speaking course, and the instructor had advised everyone to use “fast-paced modern world” whenever possible.

Berta Parks said, “I’m just saying. I’ve been taking notes, and I’m about to start tape-recording some of the things that your momma’s saying. I tried to call your brother, but he got all choked up and said he couldn’t deal with it. He also said he had enough going on what with the field rat infestation we got going all over here.”

Harold tried to imagine a plague of rats overtaking the Calloustown Community Center, or Tiers of Joy Bakery, or Worm’s Bar, or the clapboard house where he grew up. He could imagine the fear that must have consumed a dwindling population on its way to attaining ghost-town status, and could smell the ammonia of a rat-infested abode, seeing as a teenager he’d been forced to exterminate with his long-deceased father. He envisioned his mother sitting in that La-Z-Boy chair in front of the TV — maybe one of those competitive cooking shows airing, or a Green Acres marathon — with rats flitting back and forth unperturbed.

“What’s she doing that’s so peculiar?” he asked Berta Parks. “I mean, Jesus, old people — sometimes they finally realize they can say anything they want to say. I hope I get to that point. I want to get to the point where I can look a customer in the eye and say, ‘No amount of milk thistle is going to heal that enlarged liver of yours, ma’am.’ You know what I mean?”

“I might as well go ahead and get to the point,” Berta Parks said. “You can do what you will with it. Let me say right off that we appreciate the hours and hours Ms. Lumley’s put in at the community center as a volunteer. She’s done more than anyone else around here. That being said, she’s started using a lot of profanity that we think is unnecessary. Somewhere along the line she became convinced that the little Mexican children should hear Br’er Rabbit stories in order to understand English better — you know those stories by Uncle Remus? — but she keeps adding all these curse words in between that aren’t part of the original stories.”

Harold didn’t hear, exactly, all of Ms. Parks’s complaint. He got stuck on the “that being said” part, which was another thing his community college public speaking instructor advised using whenever possible. Harold wondered if Berta Parks might’ve been in the same class he took. He said to her, “I remember those old Br’er Rabbit stories. We used to have some kind of storyteller woman show up and tell those stories to us back at Calloustown Elementary. Something about Br’er Rabbit living in the briars all his life. Or Br’er Rabbit going down into a well, stuff like that.”

“Uh-huh. But you probably don’t remember Br’er Rabbit saying stuff like, ‘I’mo blank your blank sister if’n you don’t get that blank tar baby outta my blank field of vision, you son of a blank.’ Ms. Lumley’s saying those kinds of things to the little Mexican children. We have come to believe that — illegal immigrants or not — they don’t deserve such lessons.”

Harold said, “Oh come on now. Are you sure? Sometimes my mother has a speech impediment.” He tried to think back to when she ever said a curse word. He said, “Well that doesn’t sound all that great. At least Spanish-speaking muchachos might not understand what she’s saying!”

“Like I said,” Berta Parks said, “it’s what we have before us. We just think it would be good if you could talk some sense into her, or see if there’s a better place for her to be.”

“I understand. Okay,” Harold said. He thought about how he’d not fire anyone today. He thought about how he probably needed to visit his brother, too, if his car could make it through a roadblock of vermin on the outskirts of Calloustown.

Ruth Lumley’s car isn’t in the carport, and she’s not home. The side door’s locked, and Harold finds her extra key hidden in the same spot where his parents kept it when he grew up: in a conch shell sitting atop a clay flowerpot filled with playground sand, previously used as an outdoor ashtray when Mr. Lumley held his annual “I Exterminated You” BBQ for the year’s clients. Harold has thought often about how, in a strange way, he became interested in herbs and vitamins due to these yearly fetes, how in between sneaking drinks from the bar he thought of how all these people would one day suffer from the effects of even the lesser pesticides and insecticides his father sprayed beneath their abodes and how one day they might be in need of something like detoxifying herbs such as burdock and dandelion root.

“Why even lock the house?” Harold thinks. “Who would break in here?”

He unlocks the door and finds the familiar smell of his childhood: Pine-Sol, boiled cabbage, cigarettes, Pledge, coffee grounds. He would think something like, “My mother hasn’t changed whatsoever,” but he finds himself mesmerized and bombarded with what she’s hung on the kitchen, then the den, walls. Ruth Lumley has, evidently, joined the computer age and — addicted to eBay — bought every available eight-by-ten promotional photo of TV and motion picture animal stars. Harold looks up at the nicely framed pictures of Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Flipper, Gentle Ben the bear, Trigger, the Lone Ranger’s horse Silver, that Jack Russell terrier Eddie from Frasier, Zorro’s black stallion Toronado, Clarence the cross-eyed lion from Daktari, and Festus’s mule. He walks into the den to find some of those same photos, plus ones of Tonto’s horse Scout, Fred the cockatoo from Baretta, the fake shark from Jaws, Willy the Orca, a bundle of rats from Willard, and a snake from one of the snake movies that Harold doesn’t know. She has three photos of Duke the bloodhound.

Then there are the animation cels: Heckle and Jeckle, Dino, Marmaduke, Scooby-Doo, Tom and Jerry, Astro, Tweety Bird, Roadrunner, the Tasmanian Devil, Wile E. Coyote, Pepe Le Pew, Yogi and Boo-Boo. Harold’s mother had gotten rid of a bookcase in order to fill the wall behind it with eight-by-ten framed cels of Deputy Dog, Droopy Dog, Goofy, Hector, Huckleberry Hound, Mr. Peabody, Odie, Pluto, Snoopy, Spike, and Underdog. He feels bad about thinking, “Good God, there goes the goddamn inheritance.” Framed photos of Br’er Fox, Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Terrapin, and Miss Possum line the very top of the wall — all from Song of the South.

He calls Kenny and says, “Hey, man, where are you?”

“I’m on Mr. Reddick’s roof because he has these rats stuck in his gutters running in some kind of race. You ought to see it, man! It’s like a living river of smooth brown hide. It’s like some kind of bizarre stock car race.”

Harold says, “I’m at Mom’s house. You been here lately?”

Kenny says, “If I’d’ve known it was this bad I’d’ve brought a Gatling gun up here with me. You ought to see these things go. Hey, come on over! I ain’t but a mile away.”

“What’s the story with all these photos on the wall? Have you been by here? I don’t know if I can even count as high as how many pictures she has on the wall.”

“Jesus, I’m going to have to go get a flute and see if I can lead these things out of here. Hold on. Let me get down off this roof, which means we’ll probably lose the connection.”

“Did you give her all these pictures? I hope to God that’s the case. Because if it’s not, then we might have a problem.”

“What pictures? Pictures like you look at, or pitchers like you pour tea out of? I might’ve given her one of each. Over time I might’ve given her one of each. I sent her a picture of me and the boys and Dora last Easter in front of that big cave opening.”

Sure enough, they lose their connection.

Harold enters the hallway to find nothing on the walls except finishing nails sticking out a half inch each, apparently in wait for more publicity shots and/or animation cels. He enters his and Kenny’s old bedroom, which appears untouched, then goes to the guest bedroom to find his mother’s laptop turned on and stuck to a page that shows an eBay auction for a Quick Draw McGraw and Baba Looey cel, at the moment going for $99.99 with three hours left.

“A hundred goddamn dollars? Are you kidding me?” Harold says out loud.

He looks down to an old Calloustown Extermination notepad that his father gave to clients thirty years earlier and reads, “Password — ImNotOld81” and “UserID — Im-NotOld81.”

He locks the side door and places the key back in the conch shell. Harold thinks about going over to the community center and sitting down with Ms. Parks but realizes that — in a small town — sometimes people exaggerate the quirks of the elderly.

So he drives over to the Reddicks’ place to talk to his brother first. Harold passes his mother coming toward him, a mile from his house. He waves at her, but she doesn’t seem to see him. She wears oversized sunglasses handed out at the ophthalmologist’s office, her eyes an inch above the steering wheel.

Harold turns quickly into an old logging road, backs out, and accelerates to catch up with his mother. She drives twenty-five miles an hour, so he meets up with her in a matter of seconds. He flashes his lights. He blows his horn and waves. She doesn’t notice. He veers left and thinks about pulling up beside her on the straightaway. She has a number of dings and scrapes on the back bumper of the 1988 Lincoln Continental, the last model bought by Mr. Lumley after what he labeled the Great Bee and Bat Scare of 1987.

Harold’s phone rings and he picks it up off the passenger seat without looking down. Kenny says, “I figured we’d get cut off.”

“I’m behind Mom right now,” Harold says. “I’m following behind her. I was calling you earlier about her house. When’s the last time you went inside there?”

“I don’t know,” Kenny says. “It’s been a while, now that I think about it. We meet for supper over at that Ryan’s a couple times a week. She can almost eat for goddamn free if we get there by four thirty.”

Harold watches as his mother sticks her left arm out for a turn signal instead of hitting her blinker. He thinks, “She probably thinks it costs money to use any of the electrical system. She’ll spend ten thousand bucks on weird cartoons, but she won’t use her blinker.”

“You want to come on over and meet me at the house? I believe this might be one of those intervention kinds of things that everyone’s talking about all the time. Is she drinking?”

Harold wonders if he’s lost another phone call. He pulls in behind his mother in the driveway. Then he hears his brother going, “Rat in the truck, rat in the truck!” followed by brakes screeching.

In Ruth Lumley’s mind, Harold should’ve taken over the family business. He was older than Kenny by four years, and he had the education and business acumen to turn Calloustown Extermination into a thriving chain throughout the lower piedmont region of South Carolina. But Harold went two states away in order to get an associate’s degree in hospitality and tourism, received a job immediately at a resort down in Myrtle Beach, then turned his back on the entire industry in order to explore the burgeoning world of non-traditional herbs, roots, and panaceas amply supported by a number of medical personalities that provided free advertising daily on the talk shows — something both his ex-wife and mother always deigned snake oil salesman at best. He’d gotten into a conversation with the man who ended up hiring Harold away from Wild Sea Oats Resort and Spa, an entrepreneur of sorts named Bill Will who’d recently diversified from land development into what he explained to Harold as “making up for ruthlessness.” This was at a tucked-away local hangout called He Just Left. They had an all-you-can-eat Fish Sticks Night on Friday, and before Harold needed more tartar sauce he’d become convinced that his destiny involved echinacea, St. John’s wort, and garlic bulb tincture. It involved horny goat extract known as epimedium, though that word reminded him of “epicedi-um,” a word that had to do with funeral dirges that Harold learned in an English class taught by an overeager instructor who insisted on vocabulary memorization. Bill Will said he had a feeling, and hired Harold immediately, right there at the bar. Within a month Harold learned from his own wife Mollyanna that he’d become irresponsible, that he wasn’t thinking about the kids, that a place called Other Medicine didn’t exactly provide his children with unlimited swimming pool usage or free driving range privileges. He learned, too, that she’d been seeing her chiropractor on the sly for over a year.

Parked in her carport, Ruth checks her rearview mirror and says, “What now?”

Harold gets out and approaches his mother’s Lincoln. He bends down at the waist and counts all the dings — seventeen. After his mother closes her door and walks toward him he says, “You sure you should be driving?”

“Don’t make me drive, don’t make me drive! Law, whateber you do, don’ thow me out into duh got-damn macadam! — Hey, I was born on the highway, Harold. Mind your own business.” She reaches her face upward so he can kiss her. “I have never had a ticket or wreck in my life, for your information.”

She smells like alfalfa extract, Harold thinks. She smells like a combination of baby powder, alfalfa, and chicken livers. “Well something’s going on here. Maybe you’re going so slowly down the road that deer are banging into the back of your car.”

She says, “All right. Who died? Why’re you here?”

“You want to go inside?” Harold asks. “Let’s you and me go inside and talk about the community center.” He knows that if she doesn’t let him inside, then she’s trying to hide all of the photographs and cels. If she appears unconcerned about her latest décor, then he might need to worry.

“I’m on my way to the community center right now, goddamn it,” Ruth says. “Move your car, you’re blocking my way.”

“Wait a minute — if you’re going to the center, then why’d you come home and park your car in the carport? That doesn’t make much sense, Mom.”

“It’s a habit I have, that’s all. Don’t you have any goddamn habits that people don’t quite understand? Like having a perfectly great job and leaving it in the dust so your wife leaves you and your children now don’t have much of a college fund because you gave up a hundred K a year for thirty?”

Harold wonders about her blood pressure. He can’t quite tell if she’s red in the face, due to the foundation she wears that must’ve come straight out of a local embalmer’s stock overrun sale. He says, “I’ve already been inside. I’ve seen what you have on the walls. I got summoned here to see what’s going on over where you volunteer with the little migrant workers’ kids or whatever. But now I kind of want to know what’s happened to the kitchen and den walls.”

The mail deliverer pulls in behind Harold’s car and, even though it’s obvious that his appearance is known, he honks his horn. Through the open window he yells, “Hey there, Ms. Lumley, I got you another delivery won’t fit in the box without bending it.” He holds out three flat cardboard boxes.

“Just set them down there, Elwin,” Ruth says.

“On the driveway?”

“Oh, son of a bitch,” Ruth says, stomping toward the mailman. “Here. Do I need to sign anything?”

“No, ma’am. That’s it.”

“Well make sure you’re in reverse this time so you don’t bang into my car again. Or I guess my son’s car. Hell, keep it in drive and ram into his back bumper all you want.”

Harold says to Elwin, “Hey, Mr. Patterson.”

Elwin nods twice, grimaces, and backs out onto the road. Ruth Lumley’s at the door, trying to fish keys out of her pocketbook and get inside so — Harold feels certain — she can lock him out. He runs up to her just as she’s closing the door, gets his hand in, and pulls it back right before she slams his fingers in the jamb. “Go see your brother. Go visit your brother. There’s a rat problem all around here and he could probably use some help.”

“Let me in,” Harold says. He bangs on the door, then presses the buzzer and holds it. Harold thinks, “I should let the air out of her tires.” He thinks, “I can take the battery out of her car and that’ll keep her immobile for a while.” He begins laughing. “Come on, Mom, let me in. I’m having flashbacks of growing up and Dad wouldn’t let me in the house until I hosed out the back of his truck.”

Ruth Lumley doesn’t respond at first. Harold says, “Well, fuck it then,” and goes back to his car. She’ll have to come out of there at some point, he thinks, driving down to Worm’s, a place he’d not entered since high school. A couple beers, he thinks, and I’ll come back when she’s outside practicing her baton, or whatever she does.

He doesn’t hear her yell at the closed door, “They make me remember happier times. Is there anything wrong with happier times?” He doesn’t hear her tear open an envelope and exclaim, “Lamb Chop!”

When he enters the bar, Harold finds Kenny sitting on the first stool. The décor’s not changed since about the time beer companies converted from pull-tabs to flip-tops. Half-naked women on auto parts calendars adorn the walls. There’s a bumper pool table wedged uselessly in a corner, a jukebox that might offer the most selections of Conway Twitty, Ferlin Husky, and Jerry Lee Lewis on the entire Eastern seaboard. “I figured you’d be here sooner or later,” Kenny says.

They do not hug. Worm, whose father went by Worm, says, “See no time long.” He points to Kenny and shrugs his shoulders to Harold.

Kenny says, “That’s enough of that. Worm’s trying to break some kind of record for speaking everything backwards. He wants to be in that book.”

Harold says, “Coldest whatever’s me give,” but it takes him a minute to say it in order.

“To get back to your question, yes, I know all about Mom’s little hobby,” Kenny says.

Harold says, “They never have invented a better-smelling cockroach spray? Man, you reek of that stuff. It’s going to get in your pores, and the next thing you know you’ll be happy you got a brother who knows a thing or three about detoxification remedies.” He says, “I wouldn’t call it ‘little’ hobby, by the way. She must have a hundred framed photos on her walls. It’s kind of creepy. It would make a nice veterinarian’s office, though.”

Worm opens three Tall Boys and sets them on the bar, two in front of Harold and one more for Kenny. He says, “Here.”

Kenny says, “When it first started happening — or when I first learned about it a year or so ago — she said she wanted to start up some kind of museum. She said she wanted to open up the kind of museum people would drive off the highway to go visit. Like those giant balls of string, or giant balls of tinfoil, or giant balls of rubber bands. We was all for it. We could use some visitors, you know.”

Harold shakes his head. He doesn’t smile. He says, “How’s Dora and the kids?”

“Kids’re fine. Dora don’t want me asking Mom much about her museum, seeing as Dora thinks if we bother her too much she’ll evict us from the will. You know what I mean? Dora thinks at least we’ll get a bunch of pictures of Mr. Ed and Lassie when Mom dies, as long as we don’t piss her off none. And Cheetah. Did you know Cheetah just died a month or so ago? He was eighty years old. Mom’s got two signed photos from Cheetah, from the old Tarzan movies.”

Harold stares at his brother but he’s not listening. He wonders if perhaps he should’ve stayed in Calloustown. What if he’d taken over Calloustown Extermination, as was his father’s plan? He’d be living in a regular house somewhere nearby — Kenny made enough money to buy an old farmhouse and a hundred acres he leased out to dove and deer hunters in season — and would’ve probably kept his mother’s dream of an Animal Picture Museum from ever forming.

Worm says, “Back in go to have I,” and waves his right arm out, ending at the cash register, in the international way of letting the brothers know that they’re in charge of retrieving their own cans of beer and putting the money in the cash drawer should they so choose.

Harold says, “I guess there can be worse hobbies. Worse dreams.”

Kenny nods. He finishes his first beer and opens the second. “Sometimes I have to hire out this old boy to help me out, you know. He’s pretty good at cockroaches, fire ants, and termites. Name’s Bobby, but I call him Cool Breeze ’cause I swear to God he comes in and the women around here fall for him so much they got him setting traps for badgers and mongooses in their crawlspaces just so he’ll stick around. His momma ain’t but something like fifty, and she’s already showing signs of crazy, you know? Won’t pay nothing but the minimum on her credit card each month ’cause God told her to be that way. Drives in reverse half the time thinking it’ll turn back her odometer and keep her younger, I guess. Shit like that.”

Harold says, “I miss my kids.” He says, “Sometimes I kick myself for not taking over Dad’s business, so my kids could take over mine. There ain’t no promise they can become an Other Medicine manager just because I’m an Other Medicine manager.”

“It sure makes it easy knowing what to get Mom for birthdays and Christmas and Valentine’s Day. Me and Dora got her one of those publicity shots for that cat that used to do the cat food commercials. I think he’s dead by now. Anyways.”

Harold says, “Has a woman named Berta Parks called you up about her cussing a bunch at little Mexican kids, something about telling off-color jokes about Br’er Rabbit?”

“About Berta Parks cussing a bunch, or Mom cussing a bunch.”

Harold looks at his little brother. He says, “Mom. We’re talking about Mom. Has Berta Parks ever called you?”

“Yeah. She’s called twice. She’s got a bad rat problem too — at the community center, and at home. She called me up twice, and I went out to set out poison and traps both.”

Harold thinks, Now I remember why I got out of my hometown.

Harold leaves his brother at the bar. He puts down money and tells Kenny to hold some cold-pressed sunflower oil under his tongue for thirty minutes, then brush his teeth with baking soda in order to detoxify. Harold says, “I’m going back. I don’t want to leave here feeling bad about Mom.” He doesn’t say, “What if she dies and this is my last memory of her?” though he thinks it.

Kenny says, “I got me a sweat lodge I built. That’s how I sweat out the poison.”

Harold wonders what his wife and that chiropractor are doing at the moment. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon, and he imagines that his children are now home, that his ex-wife is succumbing to an adjustment of sorts. He drives a back road to the house of his upbringing and plans to park up the hill in the direction his mother would never take upon leaving for anything Calloustown had to offer, unless she wished to view a swamp, the town dump, or Mr. Reddick’s nursery that he’d surrounded with a five-foot-high fence made up entirely of grout and liquor bottles.

There, hidden halfway behind a live oak a quarter mile away, he calls his wife’s new house, gets the answering machine, and says, “Hey, kids. I’m in Calloustown if y’all need me, but I got my phone. Can’t wait to see you on Friday.” He forgets to say “I love you,” calls back, but it’s busy. He waits five minutes — his eyes focused on the estuary made up of his mother’s driveway and the ancient asphalt — calls again, but it’s still busy.

Ruth Lumley backs out and points her Lincoln away from Harold.

He lights a cigarette — Other Medicine sells packs of additive-free tobacco products with Bible verses on the flip-tops — squints, pulls down his visor. He turns on the radio to find, as in his childhood, Calloustown only receives a gospel channel clearly. Harold hums along to “It Is Well with My Soul” and wonders how he knows the melody. “Wasn’t there something tragic about the man who wrote this song?” he wonders. “Wasn’t there something about a young son dying, and four daughters lost at sea, and some kind of relentless fire?”

He watches his mother weave almost indiscernibly, then reach Old Calloustown Road and turn left, toward what remains of the town. She drives in the direction of Worm’s and the community center. She drives past Tiers of Joy bakery. Harold remains a safe distance behind her, crawling along at twenty miles an hour. He watches as his brother comes from the other direction and notices how Ruth doesn’t seem to notice. Kenny waves at their mother, then blows his horn and swerves toward his brother, a big open-mouthed laugh on his face.

The ember falls off of Harold’s cigarette right onto his lap. He brushes his pants quickly, flicking the ember, somehow, straight into a crease between the sock on his right foot and his loafer. In an attempt to toe the shoe off completely with his left foot, he steps on the accelerator and, not watching the road, rams into his mother’s car. Harold’s two front teeth, capped, break off on the steering wheel. The airbag doesn’t deploy as it does on Ruth’s car — Harold’s father had bragged about the 1988 Lincoln Continental being one of the first vehicles out of Detroit to have driver’s-side bags.

“Son of a bitch,” Harold yells out, throwing his shoe across the road into a ditch. He holds his hand to his mouth, spits two teeth out, and then reaches down to take off his sock. By the time he reaches his mother she’s already out of the car, her eyes shut tight from whatever chemicals or gases had released.

Ruth says, “What the hell are you doing, boy?”

He doesn’t say anything about the cigarette. He doesn’t want his mother to know that while she wasted money on cartoon characters he spent money on what would eventually kill him. He says, “I must’ve blinked. You stopped for no reason, and I must’ve blinked.”

She says, “I didn’t want to hit those rats crossing the road. Did you see those rats? There was a line of them, just like deer but smaller. That’s bad juju to run over the helpless.”

They walk together to view the damage. Harold’s car’s radiator spills antifreeze on the pavement. The Lincoln appears barely damaged, though several of the small dings have now transformed into one large dent. “Is there a dentist left in this town? Damn, damn, damn. I can’t deal with customers if I look like this.”

“Why are you following me?” Ruth asks. “Are you trying to kill me or something? Is that what this is all about? You out of money or something, son? Come down here finally to scare me to death, run me off the road, get you and Kenny what’s left of the estate?” She holds the back of her neck. She opens one eye slightly.

“It’s that song from Dad’s funeral,” Harold says. “That’s how come I knew that song on the radio.”

“Call yourself a wrecker, son,” she says. “I got things to do.” She walks back to her open car door, still holding onto the back of her neck. There are children waiting for her to tell stories, and single mothers who need to learn how to knit. At six o’clock she’s supposed to teach a class on making wind chimes out of bamboo. Plus, she’s promised to help Berta Parks speak in proper Southern dialect, should someone ever need to take over Storytelling Hour. Then there’s the puppet show. Ruth bends down slowly and lifts her eldest son’s compromised sock off the ground. She says, “This will work out just fine for a puppet, I’m betting.”