The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [73]
“Things are as good as they were when you were little,” Tim says. “It’s only that all memories get better the further you get away from them.”
“Really?”
“Really,” he says. “Good memories get better and bad memories just disappear.”
“Really?” Go-Go’s voice scales up, awed, as if this has never occurred to him.
“Really.” One day you won’t think about it. I promise, I promise, I promise.
“I wish we could go to the ocean this summer.”
“Me, too. Maybe we will for a day.”
“Can we have saltwater taffy?”
“Sure.”
“And Grotto Pizza?”
“Definitely.”
“Thrasher’s fries?”
“And funnel cake. I bet you’re tall enough to go on the bumper cars this year.”
He is. It’s mid-August before they make it to Ocean City for a day trip and the drive is miserable, even though it’s a weekday. But the traffic and the sticky hot car are worth the headache to see Go-Go in a bumper car. His smile is tight but real, jamming his car into his brothers’ less-fleet vehicles. He’s nimble behind the wheel, eluding them when they try to exact their revenge. He does get in a little trouble for going against the flow and creating a few head-on collisions, but hell, that’s Go-Go.
That night, driving home, boys and mother dozing as Tim listens to the final inning of the Orioles game, Go-Go suddenly says from the backseat, almost as if talking to himself: “Today is a good memory already.”
It takes all Tim’s strength to keep his car heading straight in the westward-bound lane on the Bay Bridge. Oh, if only he could, he would make the old Buick rise in the sky, truly Shitty Shitty Bang Bang, farting black smoke all the way home. Anything—anything—to make Go-Go laugh again.
Chapter Twenty-two
Autumn 1980
Tally is surprised how hard the news hits her, although she supposes one is never prepared for this. Her mother, after all, had to cope with the same situation when she was much younger. Implacable time, the one thing that never stops, that’s the real certainty behind death, if not taxes. Time is relentless in its forward drive. She grips the phone, the cherry red wall unit in the kitchen, one of the few notes of color allowed in her all-white oasis, seeing details she stopped noticing long ago—the paper disk in the center of the dial, the tendons in her hand, the large squash blossom ring she wears on her right hand, scuff marks on the wall. Most rings like this are turquoise, but Tally’s stone is coral. It clashes terribly with the red of the phone—
“April,” Miller says. “I hope you don’t mind that we waited.”
“Of course not,” she says. She thinks of an old phrase—butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. To her, it has never connoted anything but coldness, and she has never understood why others think it indicates charm and good manners. But she gets it now. Her mouth is like a covered butter dish, cool and contained and proper, presenting what is expected of her. She calls over her shoulder. “Clem? Clem?” The acoustics in the house are so odd. He could be steps away and oblivious. He could be upstairs and hear every word.
“What?” he calls back. It sounds as if he’s on the second floor.
“Pick up the extension. Miller has news.”
She stays on the line while Miller repeats his big announcement, makes the proper happy noises, then excuses herself, insisting that father and son should have a father-to-father talk. In hanging up the phone, she misses the hook and the receiver clatters to the floor on its long curlicue of a cord. She stoops to pick it up and slides it onto the cherry red base. She’s going to be a grandmother. This is what happens to women who have children at nineteen. They become grandmothers at forty-three.