Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [64]
I shook my head.
“Please get in, Charlotte.”
“No,” I said.
“Now listen, there’s people walking up, don’t make me look bad. You want to complicate things just when I’m feeling so down? Climb on in; act natural.”
“Fool! How can she act natural when she’s a what’s-it, hostage?” Mindy asked him.
But actually, it seemed perfectly natural. I slid along the seat to my old, familiar place. Folded my hands across my purse. Jake arrived next to me, Mindy came last and fitted her stomach behind the steering wheel and closed the door. Well. Here we all were. I had never in my life felt so cramped and poverty-stricken.
“Now, let me think,” Jake told us.
“Think about this: I could get arrested for aiding and abetting,” said Mindy.
“Will you just let me figure this out?”
“I could have my baby in jail, and all for something I never had the faintest notion of.”
“Oh, shoot, Mindy,” said Jake, “anybody else would have guessed. Why’d you think I had that chain on the door?”
“For a derby, of course! For a demolition derby! You often chain the doors when you’re driving a derby.”
“Well, this is clearly not no derby,” said Jake. He jerked a thumb at the ignition key. “Start her up, please.”
“Where we going?”
“Find a place to cash Charlotte’s check. Bank that’s open Friday evenings.”
“But—”
“Do you want my company or don’t you?”
Mindy started the car. We pulled out into traffic. Everyone else was driving so wearily and steadily, it was like joining up with a river. “I sure would like to eat,” Mindy said.
“We’ll do that after,” said Jake. He was slumped in his seat, watching passing signs indifferently. “Can you figure it?” he asked me. “Guy like Oliver, used to be so cool, used to read a book in the training school, read! like nothing could ever bother him. Oliver, married. Settled. Expecting. Grown so old I didn’t know him. But he knew me, boy. You don’t see me all changed about.”
“I kind of liked him,” I said.
“You would,” said Jake. “That poor sucker.”
“Well, I didn’t think he was so badly off.”
“You just say that because you have to,” Jake said. He told Mindy, “Charlotte here is married, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” said Mindy.
“Married to a preacher.”
Mindy slowed for a stop sign.
“Isn’t that right?” Jake asked me.
I nodded. I was watching a neon martini glass that kept rapidly emptying and refilling.
“She helps in the Sunday School, teaching ‘Jesus Loves Me.’ Counsels the Youth Fellowship in how to stay out of temptation.”
“I do not,” I said.
“Her and her husband never ever argue, they just take their troubles to the Lord in prayer.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, we argue all the time,” I said.
“You do?”
“Of course we do.”
“What about?”
“None of your business,” I said.
It was silly; I was beginning to cry. I had tears in my eyes for no earthly reason. But of course I didn’t let Jake see them. I kept on looking out the side window. Crying makes me angry and so I started talking, louder than usual. “We disagree on everything,” I said. “He’s always finding fault, he says I’m … he holds the stupidest things against me. Like, one morning he was going off to Bible College and I said, ‘Don’t take any wooden nickels.’ Well, it was just something to say, I didn’t mean anything by it. But he’s never forgotten. Fifteen years ago! He imagines all these undercurrents that I had never intended. He had this revivalist speak last summer, it’s an annual thing; they set up a tent in the kite field. But Saul came back so moody and quiet, said he hadn’t enjoyed it at all, hadn’t been able to take it in; he’d continually heard my comments on every word the preacher said. But I wasn’t even there! And I would never do that, I really try to keep from … but Saul said, ‘I heard your voice. Cool, flat voice. No part of that sermon could come through to me.