Drive

Chapter Twenty-five

It came in a box not much larger than one of the encyclopedias lined up on a shelf in the front room behind dusty figurines of fish and angels. How could such a thing fit in there? A table? Accent table, the ad said, crafted by one of America’s premier designers, assembly required.

It arrived around noon. His mother had been so excited. We’ll wait and open it after lunch, she said.

She’d ordered the table by mail. He remembered being amazed at this. Would the postman ring the bell and, when she opened the door, hand it through? Your table’s here, ma’am. You draw a circle, write a number on a piece of paper and enclose a check, a table shows up at your door. That’s magic enough. But it also comes in this tiny box?

Further memories of his mother, of his early life, drift up occasionally in pre-dawn hours. He wakes with them lodged in his head, but the moment he tries consciously to remember, or to express them, they’re gone.

He was, what?, nine or ten years old? Sitting at the kitchen table dawdling over a peanut butter sandwich while his mother drummed fingers on the counter.

Through? she said.

He wasn’t, there was still almost half a sandwich on his plate and he was hungry, but he nodded. Always agree. That was the first rule.

She swept his plate away, into a stack of others by the sink.

So let’s have a look. Stabbing a butcher knife into one end of the box to rip it open.

Lovingly she laid out components on the floor. What an impossible puzzle. Lengths of cheap contoured metal and tubing, wedges of rubber, baggies of screws and fittings.

His mother’s eyes kept returning to the instruction sheet as, moment by moment, piece by piece, she assembled the table. By the time feet had been fitted with rubber stoppers and the bottom half of legs were in place, the expression on her face, to which he was ever attentive, had gone from happy to puzzled. As she spliced on upper legs, cross-supports and screws, her expression turned sad. That prospect of sadness spread throughout her body, washed out into the room.

Watch closely: that’s the second rule.

Mother lifted the table top out of the bottom of the box and set it in place.

An ugly, cheap-looking, wobbly thing.

The room, the world, got very quiet. Both stayed that way for a long time.

I just don’t understand, Mother said.

She sat on the floor still, pliers and screwdrivers ranged about her. Tears streamed down her face.

It looked so pretty in the catalog. So pretty. Not at all like this.