Barry showed Mom the gun only after they had left us behind in the Gas-Guzzler at a rest stop in Smyrna, Delaware. We were given change for three candies of our choosing, something Jenny and I warmed to while Steph stayed indifferent and defiant. Still mourning her separation from Kent, she used the quarters to call him, disappearing for long enough to give us some time off from her sobs. But anyway, the gun. The spy I was becoming saw Barry pull it out of the glove compartment early in the morning while I was sipping OJ and listening to the snores of the rest of my family. He knew I saw him take it out, part of the bond we were creating. It always helped to have one family member firmly on his side. I’d been waiting for that kind of invitation for twelve years.
While not a Bren Ten, like I’d later acquire, a Beretta Pico at 0.71 inches wide was the best option for concealed carry. The biggest question was how Mom would react. I could only imagine.
Barry didn’t want to rob the convenience store at the rest stop. That would require doing it in front of us, revealing his hand. Too soon. With Steph, even though the elevator didn’t rise all the way to the top, the tricky part would be her very un-Gimmelman-like moral code. Protesting acid rain. Saving the manatees. Striving to give herself a purpose. She’d take longer to coax.
Barry and Mom were walking along the shoulder, cars rubbernecking as they passed by, wondering why two non-crackheads were without a car along a highway when he whipped the gun out. A cute little Beretta to start us on this zigzag journey. She pretended to be offended.
“Oh, Barry. No. No.”
She made him put it back in the elastic of his sweatpants, which caused them to droop. He’d taken to wearing sweatpants now after a lifetime stuck in a suit.
“Listen, it’s only for scaring. We won’t use it.”
“I want to go back.”
She began heading in the other direction. He shouted over cars zooming past. Hugged her from behind. She used to think there was no safer place than in his arms. She tried thinking about that now. How if she didn’t trust him, she might as well walk away for good.
“Give me your bra.”
“What?”
“Judith, we’ll use it as a mask.”
Mom, a pro at slipping her bra off without removing her shirt, a fact I hated that I knew. He ripped it in half and showed her what he meant. A padding over their mouth and nose, the strap holding it in place behind their heads.
“Until we get more sophisticated ones.”
“This is a joke, right?” She said it in disbelief that their lives had devolved in such a cosmically weird fashion. “Our kids clueless while we—”
“Not Aaron.”
“Last night, when you first broached this idea. I don’t know; it was a full moon, and I was feeling witchy, deviant.”
“You’ve always been witchy and deviant.”
The morning sun had picked up the light in her eyes, those green jewels. Sometimes, they changed color depending on what she wore. While Barry’s crazy hair had been one of the first things Mom noticed, he’d been taken by her eyes, so green, reflected by the grass they rolled around in, when he telepathically told her they would marry one day. Later, when they came down from their acid trip, he asked if he took her virginity, and she laughed, not to be cruel, but because she had done it a few times by then, enough to know what she liked and that she very much liked him.
“I’m a mother, first and foremost.”
“And a very good one. One of the best. We don’t have the easiest children. Each one is a handful…in their own way.”
“Okay, we rob this store. We get maybe five hundred bucks from their register. And, if we get caught, we go to jail. Who takes care of our handfuls?”
“We won’t get caught.”
“How can you know that? Even if everything goes off as smoothly as possible, there are variables, Barry.”
“I’ll be fucking damned if I crawl to your mother licking my wounds. Begging for change like a commoner. It’s embarrassing, and I refuse.”
“So why are we going to Florida?”
“We’re not! We’re going on an adventure, and this is where it starts.”
“When you bought the twin Maseratis, I thought, this is Barry’s mid-life crisis, and I’m gonna support him through it.”
“That was the old Barry’s mid-life crisis. There’s a new Barry in crisis now.”
“Does he still clip his toenails in bed, too?”
“I’ll tell you why it will work. We are the most mild-mannered-looking squares on the planet. The kids, the RV, my hair, your fanny pack.”
“You know a purse hurts my back.”
“No one will suspect us.”
“Barry, this is… a lot all at once.”
“Baby, you gotta trust me. We try it once, here in nowhere Delaware, and we talk our way out of it if it doesn’t work. Look, there’s no bullets. I left them back in the glove compartment.”
He showed her proof. She believed him, mostly, a shred of her wondering if one bullet had been lodged in the chamber where she couldn’t see. She fought back against this accusation, already hating herself for not trusting.
“I need you to trust me,” he said, as if reading her mind. An audible gasp left her mouth.
“I think robbery is something I’ll be really good at,” he said.
This she didn’t doubt, his unwavering belief in his abilities. How he promised he’d make a million before the age of thirty, and when he did, with little kids in tow, he took the entire family—Jenny included because Mom was pregnant—to the Four Seasons because Mom had mentioned one time that it was the epitome of class in New York City. How she saw a picture of it in a magazine as a little girl and never imagined she could be eating there. After they finished dinner, the bill was over five hundred dollars with bottles of wine. And she drank even though she was pregnant, because back then, no one thought twice about negative effects, and even if she had, the Château Lafite Rothschild was worth it, according to new budding oenophile Barry.
“I think robbing is something I’d be good at, too,” she said, the taste of that wine hot like acid in the back of her throat.
A sad liquor store in a little strip mall off the highway, the L in the sign about to fall. Barry wanted a liquor store over a convenience store, since there should be more cash in the register. He wanted to scope it out first. See how many people went in and out. A parking lot that housed a few cars, a nail salon, and a restaurant of indeterminate cuisine on each side of the store. A forest of trees to get lost in after they’d burst out with the money.
Scoping for a half hour from far enough away not to be seen, only one person had entered. The guy spent ten minutes there and came out with a paper bag full of liquor. It was still early enough in the morning that a rush wasn’t about to come through.
“Let’s go now.”
Mom got yanked before she could even say no, taking double as many steps as Barry to keep up. Outside of the store, he tucked her hair behind her ears and placed the left side of the bra over her mouth, cinched it behind her head.
“Is it comfortable?”
Her heart beat fast, and she wondered when was the last time it beat like that. Maybe when Jenny was born? She found herself remembering that in Dutch, there was no word for excitement: sad, but also relatable. When you had everything, you lost the importance of goals. The allure of the Four Seasons had worn off long ago.
“Very,” she said, even though it was a weird thing to say.
He put the right side of the bra over his face, snapped it in place.
“Let me do everything. You watch the door.”
“For what?”
“Anything, variables.”
“Okay.”
She was shaking like she got caught in a downpour.
“Don’t be nervous.”
“I’m…”
He kissed her, bra padding to bra padding.
And then he took her hand and pulled her inside. The bell dinged. The clerk looked up, older man, former hippie with wild gray hair like a lion, a mustache and a beard, leather jacket. His eyes perked up, and he went to reach for something.
“Hands, lemme see those hands.”
She didn’t even recognize Barry’s voice. He gave it more of a deep bass rather than the squeaky high pitch that always sounded like he was going through puberty. This Barry held authority, and she could’ve orgasmed right there, turned into a puddle of goo.
The clerk raised his hands.
“Cash, empty the register,” Barry ordered.
She swiveled around, making sure there was no one in the store. Only rows and rows of empty aisles. No one in the parking lot, either. She could breathe. One deep breath at a time. In and then out. She could do that. Because she was getting lightheaded. She couldn’t let that happen.
Barry was yelling at the clerk, ordering him to move faster. The money didn’t seem like a lot.
“Safe, go into the safe!”
Barry moved closer to the clerk, the gun pressed between the clerk’s eyes. The man squeezed them shut, his face beet red.
“I have to turn around,” the clerk replied.
“Then you’re gonna do it nice and slow, easy does it, old-timer.”
“Okay, okay.” Spit flew out the clerk’s mouth, trapped in his beard, and Mom found herself embarrassed for the man. She wondered if he had pissed his pants too.
“I gotta bend down to get to the safe,” the clerk said, blubbering.
“Then do it, quickly. I have the gun on you.”
She looked out in the parking lot, a car pulling in, her heart dangling.
“Bear,” she said, being smart, not saying his real name. “Car.”
“What are they doing?” Barry asked her.
“They’re parking.”
“And?”
“Getting out, it’s a lady. She’s…”
Mom said a prayer to God so the lady would walk into the nail salon or the restaurant. She thought of herself as a little girl in Hebrew school learning about Hashem, who delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and gave them the Law of Moses at biblical Mount Sinai. Would He even listen to her selfish, and frankly, law-breaking pleas?
But the lady fixed her purse against her hip and went in the direction of the nail salon. Mom said a prayer of thank you to Hashem for listening.
“She’s in the salon next door, baby,” she told Barry, grinning through the bra padding.
“Faster,” Barry said, leaning over the counter to poke the clerk in the back.
“I’m trying. I was off one digit with the lock—”
“You think I give a fuck. Go, go!”
The clerk finally opened the safe. Over Barry’s shoulder, Mom could see stacks of cash, the liquor store probably only emptying the safe at the end of every week to transfer to the bank. With trembling hands, the clerk handed over the cash to Barry in a plastic bag that said, Thank You for Shopping.
“Now get in the back room.”
The clerk waddled out of the counter area. Sure enough, he had wet his pants like Mom suspected, a pee trail snaking all the way down his leg. Somehow, that thrilled her more than anything. Barry poked him with the gun toward the back room, then shut the door and propped it closed with a folding chair.
“How will he get out?” Mom asked.
“Someone will come in eventually. He’ll be fine. A story to tell his friends.”
“Okay,” she said, tasting her breath in the bra padding, thick and toothpaste-like since she hadn’t had any breakfast. Then Barry took her hand and whisked her outside. Nothing in the parking lot except for that one lady’s car. They ran into the forest, removed the bra padding from their faces, and made dirty love against a tree, like they did over twenty years ago at Woodstock when they first explored each other’s bodies. She tilted her head to the sky while he lifted her up, and she wrapped her legs around him: the overcast clouds, a formation of birds in a V pattern, calling to one another. It was cold out but she didn’t feel cold at all, her blood hot, this new Barry inside of her, a duplicate she slightly feared but enthralled her in a way that no one else could, even the old Barry, her mensch, her husband, who now, bare-assed to the world with his sweatpants around his ankles, and his gun caressing her cheek, made her chirp in sync with those bird’s calls who headed south for the winter like they always did. Like the Gimmelmans had planned, but she knew wouldn’t be enough of a destination now. Nothing reaching the heights of pleasure she just experienced until the next liquor store would reveal itself along the roadside in all its enticing glory.
“Bear-Bear,” she moaned to the sky, her eyes rolling to the back of her head as the birds became long gone, only phantom images remaining of their flight.