Chat - Archer Mayor [1]
“All set,” he said, stepping behind her once more and easing her chair off the sidewalk to where it nestled beside the car’s open door.
She reached out and took hold of the two handles Leo had attached just inside the opening, one high and one low, and nimbly used them to assist herself inside. Her legs were too weak to support her, but they did move, which was a godsend in situations like this. She was already attaching her seat belt by the time Leo opened the car’s rear door to slip in the folded wheelchair.
He joined her moments later, making the car rock as he virtually fell into his seat. An enthusiast by nature, he never did anything by half measures, including the most mundane of actions.
“You want to stop somewhere for ice cream or cocoa or something?” he asked.
Now she was looking at the facade of The Hop, from which they’d just come on their weekly Friday night outing. Designed by the same architect who later did Lincoln Center in New York, it looked like the kind of place that would offer a broad sampling of the arts—modern by one light, slightly worn by another. She and Leo came here frequently, local beneficiaries of the college’s mission to be a generous cultural neighbor.
“No,” she answered him. “Not tonight. Drive me around the Green, though, will you? I love the buildings.”
Leo backed out of their parking space and slipped into the thin traffic, taking his first left to engage the long eastern reach of the Green.
“Feeling touristy?” he asked.
She was watching the buildings go by, but also the students, huddled in their winter clothing, marching determinedly in small groups or singly, intent on their mysterious goals, which could as easily have been the next beer or a rendezvous as some scholarly pursuit. Although she’d been a local her entire life, even if from Vermont, just across the river, she’d never had the envious, resentful view of the college so many other “townies” harbored, nor had she delighted in the supposed depiction made of the place in the movie Animal House. She worshipped education, and while her sons had become a police officer and a butcher and hadn’t benefited from Dartmouth’s offerings, she had made sure they developed an appreciation of music and literature and art, and she’d trained them to be analytical, appreciative, mindful, and kind.
She knew that college students could be self-indulgent, narcissistic, and careless with the gift they’d been offered. Those were the clichés. But as Leo slowly circled the Green, quietly allowing for her meditation, she relished the fantasy she’d held forever, of places like this being the incubators of the mind, where kids learned to think, sometimes despite their best resistance.
“You should’ve gone here, Ma,” Leo finally said.
She turned away from the buildings to look at him. “I came close enough,” she said after a thoughtful pause. “I got access to that library and passed along what you and Joe could bear. It would have been fun to actually sit in class, but I can’t complain—I’ve read what a lot of their professors wrote.”
Leo laughed again. “And you got to fall asleep in class. We were always taking books off your lap after you dozed off.”
She whacked his shoulder. “Once in a blue moon, after spending all day chasing you two around.”
“You did good, Ma,” he said after a pause.
It was a gentle taunt. He delighted in mangling English around her, since she worked so hard not to do so herself. But this time, instead of correcting him, she chuckled and admitted, “I think I done good, too.”
He smiled and hit his right turn indicator at the stoplight, preparing to go down North Wheelock and across the bridge into Vermont, at the bottom of the hill. Of course, much of what they’d just been talking about dated back a few years. His mother had slowed down recently, reading less and watching more television. And since landing in the wheelchair, she’d retired the use of that library card.
Their years together