There was no remote, another rustic feature of the cottage, and when he stood up to turn on the eleven o’clock news he saw with a twinge of disbelief—followed sharply by annoyance—that they’d forgotten to take the tapes back.
“It’s okay,” Meg said, “I can take them back tomorrow.”
“I can drive,” he said, and it was true, he’d crisscrossed most of the U.S. stoned during his college years, going on road trips with his Deadhead friends just for something to do, the thrill of being out there, moving, spending the shows grooving in the parking lot, driving the whole way back because everyone else was fried. Maxwell Cassidy. It had been a while.
“I’ll come with you,” she said, and after they made sure the back door was open, they hopped in the 4Runner and started off, Freedy Johnston on the CD player.
Meg had never heard of him. It didn’t seem like her, as if she’d changed, lost some precious skill or sense of appreciation, the years and the booze dulling her. Ken remembered how she’d introduced him to music, spinning her 45s for him with her door closed. They played a game where he had to name a song by its first notes, Meg dropping the needle, the record scratching around, then the thump of a bass, a drum beat, and she’d lift it again. “I Think We’re Alone Now!” he’d shout. “Sky Pilot!”
So what was she listening to now?
“Nothing,” she said. “The Stones. Old stuff. Jeff took all of his CDs, so we’re a little short on tunes right now.”
“I guess I know what to get you for your birthday.”
“Yeah,” she said, as if it didn’t matter.
He babied the 4Runner up Manor Drive, obeying the fifteen-mile-an-hour limit. Their neighbors were mostly asleep or away, only a few windows still awake. The feeling of being stoned and the only ones up reminded him of high school, cruising the empty streets, the radio wired into the night. Meg had been gone by then, leaving him to deal with his parents, to take on the unfamiliar role of the favorite.
“You oughta lock that door,” Freedy Johnston sang. “Somebody might get in. Didn’t I teach you that?”
There was no one on the highway, only a light above the cornfield, bugs orbiting the hot bulb. He turned and the neat green rows riffled in his headlights like a deck of cards. The Snug Harbor Lounge was doing a decent business, its neon making a carnival of the parking lot. Then darkness, farms and unlit billboards, the white line stuttering under the tires, a familiar, dreamy feeling. Trees and signs floated by, invisibly suspended. The moon traced a creek through a field.
“Niagara Falls,” Meg said, and it took him a second to process it.
“Slowly I turned …”
“Did you get some pictures of her?”
“Some.”
“Will you do me a favor,” she said, “and take one of me with her before the week’s over?”
“Sure,” he said, but waited for her explanation, let the road occupy his mind.
“She’s not young.”
He thought this was ridiculous but agreed. “So have you talked to her about the house?”
“When have I had time?”
“I’ll have four hours with her tomorrow morning,” he said, and she laughed.
“All I want is a picture, that’s enough for me. Four straight hours. Man.”
“So I guess I’m representing us, is that it?”
“Hey, she’ll listen to you before she’ll listen to me. I know Arlene’s tried to talk to her.”
“I don’t think she can back out now. It’s pretty much a done deal from what I can tell.”
“They’re still doing a septic inspection. How done can it be?”
He’d tried that angle because he wanted it to be done. The money just wasn’t there.
“Who’s going to pay the taxes on it? You know how much they are?”
“Three thousand a year,” she guessed. “Ballpark.”
“Do you have three thousand dollars?”
“She’s got three thousand dollars. She doesn’t need the money, she just doesn’t want to deal with the hassle. I bet if you offered to take care of the place, she’d keep it.”
“I don’t want to take care of the place,” he admitted.
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Right. I’ll tell her that.”
He knew it was a mistake as soon as it escaped, an unfunny joke. But he couldn’t take it back, and he couldn’t blame it on being stoned, though he never would have said it straight.
“Fuck you,” she said, and went quiet on him.
She sat there, a statue in the dark, as they sped past Willow Run and crested the hill by the campgrounds, the shuttered Book Barn.
“Lovers cry,” Freedy sang. “One last kiss by the edge, then hand in hand, two lovers fly.”
The reason it was so hard to talk about money, he thought, was because it revealed how they really felt about each other. Maybe it was the same with the cottage, his willingness to let it drift away an unrealistic wish to rid himself of all the difficulties he associated with his family, the misgivings, both real and imaginary, he felt when he thought of his mother or father or Meg and his own nonsupporting role in their lives.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be. It’s true. That’s why you’re the one who’s got to offer. I don’t count.”
He wanted to contradict her but knew better.
“I thought you liked the cottage,” she said.
“I do.” He searched for a reason that wouldn’t convict him, then resented her for forcing him into a corner. “It’s just the money.”
“She’s got the money,” Meg said, as if he didn’t understand. “You think she wants to sell the place? She just doesn’t think she can take care of it without Dad. All we have to say is we’ll take it over, both of us. That’s what she wants. I’m telling you. What is she going to use the money for? She can’t take it with her.”
“I don’t know,” he said slowly, as if mulling the whole thing over.
He didn’t want to think of his parents’ money, whatever money there was (his father’s insurance on top of the stocks and bonds and mutual funds, the joint accounts and the two houses). At his most desperate he fended off the idea that it alone could save him, her death a windfall not far down the road. No, their money was theirs (was hers now), as separate and secret from him as their love life, and best left that way.
“Talk to her,” Meg said. “See how she feels. What else are you going to talk about for four hours?”
“You.”
“I figured that.”
“She still hasn’t reamed me out about the job yet.”
“And I’m going to miss it.”
“I’ll give you the highlights.”
He was glad to joke about himself, joining with her to make fun of his mother and the expectations they would never live up to. He could still make her laugh by playing the fool, her goofy little brother.
“Can I smoke in here?”
“Sure,” he said, anticipating Lise’s objections, “just open a window.”
He cracked his as well.
Far off, at the bottom of the hill, high clusters of lights bathed the on-ramps of the Southern Tier like a crime scene. Hogan’s Hut was closed for the night, only the Mobil pumps aglow, reminding him that he needed to buy gas tomorrow, and he found himself thinking of Tracy Ann Caler, somewhere out there, probably dead. He could dedicate his work to her, use it to commemorate her life, the house she grew up in, her family, her room—very Bill Owens, the mystery of the everyday. He could see how much it would require, the time and patience. That was what he wanted to do with the cottage, and he’d barely started. Tomorrow was Thursday, and half of that was golf. He’d take the Holga in his bag. There would be time on the tees and greens, driving the cart—not too much, just what Morgan ordered.
They came down past the Ashville marina and into Busti, where the speed limit changed. The gas and convenience mart there was closed, no surprise, and the Ice Cream Shack, back in its gravel lot. A van passed them coming the other way, then two cars, two more, a steady stream headed north. It wasn’t until they went under the railroad overpass outside Lakewood that they saw the movie complex was letting out. On their left the Dairy Queen was still serving, the entrance and exit of the parking lot marked by lighted cones three feet high, complete with the curl on top.
“How many times a year you think those are stolen?”
“I’d take them. Hell yes.”
Up a rise by the restaurant where they’d been served bloody chicken the one time they went there, and the run-down motel with the derelict trailer in the lot, and then they were into Lakewood with its orangetinted streetlights and extra lanes, traffic in front and back of them, the sprawling strip-mall ugliness of Wal-Mart and Rite Aid replacing the spooky intimacy of night in the countryside. Blockbuster was up ahead, its trademark colors drawing cars in.
“You’ve got the tapes, right?”
“I thought you had them,” she said, and when he turned to her in stoned disbelief she was holding them up. “You are so easy.”
He inched up to the drop box, afraid of scraping the side, and then had to open the door to reach the slot. Above it hung Tracy Ann Caler’s face. PLEASE HELP FIND ME, the flyer read, and gave all the information, and he thought unsteadily that if he were alone he would have taken it for himself, a sick keepsake. He’d have to shoot it with the Holga, a whole series.
“What do you think about some ice cream?” he asked Meg, to deflect any questions, but then at the Dairy Queen there was the same picture on the inside of the drive-thru. Five-five, 110 pounds. He had time to memorize it while the girl in the headset made change, cracking a roll of nickels on the drawer like an egg. He remembered Sam’s tooth and asked if they had any of those gold dollars, but of course not.
“That’s all right,” he said, his all-purpose reply, and she went to get the cones. Lise once told him it sounded phony, like he was trying to come off as a nice guy, and since then he’d been self-conscious about it, often stopping it halfway out of his mouth.
He could do one of every place that had a flyer—the hardware in Mayville, the Golden Dawn—and show her world that way. Her parents, the cops, everyone who was trying to find her—that was what he was doing too. He was part of the project, incorporated organically, as Morgan would say.
“I always think I see you,” Freedy sang with perfect timing. “Across the avenue.”
It was hard to shift with the cone in his hand, and Meg had to hold it until they were into fourth. His buzz was fading, and he felt the day closing around him, the possibilities narrowing down, like the end of a date. For all his dread of her, he liked being with Meg. In some ways she was easier than Lise or his mother. She could take him back further than anyone, the memory of their rooms on Grafton Street a safe space to retreat to, the years ideal, nothing serious intruding on their after-school reruns of Superman and Gilligan’s Island, nothing gone wrong yet. It was as false as the soft ice cream they were eating, and as comforting. Lise regularly told him to grow up, charged him with acting like a little kid. Sometimes he thought it was more than nostalgia, that he would actually be happier if he’d stopped around nine. Or no, later, a teenager, believing the lyrics from the records he taped from his friends, all of them falling for the rock’n’roll dream that if they went far enough fast enough they’d never run out of open road.
Meg had been his only role model, and he’d seen her disregard for convention as heroic. The world seemed very large then, and home very small, a place to get away from, their parents jailers. In college he’d stayed awake for days, read books that told him everything was possible, the systems that held everybody down were an illusion bound to crumble before the truth, but as he aged the world had solidified, become real. It was that excitement he missed, that freedom so closely allied with irresponsibility and nothingness. He had betrayed it or it him, or maybe it was just a stage, as he was tempted to see it now. He wondered if Meg was as baffled at how things had turned out as he was. Maybe that was just life. Their dashed hopes weren’t a tragedy, just something they needed to get used to.
“Good idea,” Meg said, toasting him with her cone as if she’d read his thoughts.
His was dripping over his fingers, a spot dotting his jeans. The stiff little napkins were inadequate. The CD started again—“I know I’ve got a bad reputation”—and Ken stabbed at the eject button with a thumb.
“No,” Meg said, “I like that one.”
And so they listened to it again, and the next song, and the next, riding along through the dark, limitless night.