Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [112]
Just past Washington, he pulled into a service station and woke her up. “Would you like a Coke?” he asked her. P.J. lived on Cokes. And she was a great believer in breaking up trips—for sandwiches, restrooms, Stuckey’s pecan logs, white elephant sales, caged bears and boa constrictors—but now she only looked at him dimly. “A what?” she said.
“A Coke.”
“Oh. Well, I guess so.”
She yawned and reached for the door handle. While the attendant scraped bugs off the windshield Peter watched her cross the concrete apron—a thin, tanned, rubber-boned girl with red plastic rings like chicken-bands dangling from her ears. She swung her purse by its strap and tugged at her shorts, which were brief enough to show where her tan left off. The attendant stopped work for a moment to watch her go.
From the glove compartment Peter took stacks of maps—Georgia, New England, even eastern Canada, and finally Baltimore. He had promised P.J. they would stop over to see his family. It was three years since he had last been there. When he opened the map to check the best route the half-forgotten names of streets—St. Paul and North Charles, criss-crossed now with grimy folds that were beginning to tear—gave him the sudden, depressing feeling that he was a teenager again. He remembered hitchhiking on North Charles, sweating in the damp heavy heat, fully aware that his mother would go to pieces if she ever saw him doing this. He pictured Baltimore in an eternal summer, its trademark the white china cats, looking fearfully over their shoulders, which poor people riveted to their shutters and porch roofs. And then his mother’s house—closed, dim rooms. Gleaming tabletops. What was the point of going back?
P.J. came in sight, picking her way across the cement on narrow bare feet. When she caught the attendant watching she grinned and raised her Coke bottle in a toast. Then she leaned in the window and said, “Come on, Petey, get out and stretch your legs.”
“I’m comfortable here.”
“Out back they have garden statues, and birdbaths and flowerpots. Want to take a look?”
“I’d rather get going,” Peter said.
She climbed into the car, wincing when the backs of her thighs hit the hot vinyl. Down her cheek were the stripes of Peter’s corduroy slacks. Her eyes were still sleepy and rumpled-looking. “They have the cutest little plaster gnomes,” she said. “On spikes. You just stick them into the grass. I bet Mama would love one of those.”
“I bet she would,” said Peter.
She looked at him sideways, and then took a sip of her Coke. “Shall I get her one?” she asked.
“Why not?”
“As a sort of making-up present?”
Peter handed a credit card to the attendant. “You don’t have to make up,” he said.
“I was thinking of sending it in your name.”
“Well, don’t.”
She drank off the last of the Coke, wiped the rim of the bottle, and set off toward the case of empties beside the vending machine. The minute she was gone Peter felt sorry. “P.J.!” he called.
She turned, still cheerful. He slid out of his seat and ran to catch up with her. “Of course we can buy one,” he said. “Put my name all over it, if you like.”
“Oh, good,” P.J. said. “I’ll do the wrapping and mailing and all, you won’t have to lift a finger, Petey.”
She led him around the back of the filling station. toward a field of plaster flamingos and sundials and birdbaths. The gnomes stood in a huddle, their paint already flaking, grinning at a cluster of little black boys who held out hitching-rings. The saleslady wore a straw hat and a huge flowered smock that blazed in the sunlight. “Aren’t they darling?” P.J. said. “Or would she rather have an eentsy wheelbarrow to plant her flowers in. Which do you think?”
“You know her best,” Peter said.
“Or then these deer. They’re nice.” She wandered through the field, unable to make up her mind, patting the heads of little painted animals and returning the smile of any statue that smiled at her. Her bare feet stepped delicately