shit, I completely forgot to call Joe Camber about your Pinto.”
“You bad a few other things on your mind,” she said. There was faint irony in her voice. “That’s all right. I’m not going to send Tad to the playground today. He has the sniffles. I may keep him home the rest of the summer, if that suits you. I get into trouble when he’s gone.”
There were tears choking her voice, squeezing it and blurring it, and he didn’t know what to say or how to respond. He watched helplessly as she found a Kleenex, blew her nose, wiped her eyes.
“Whatever,” he said, shaken. “Whatever seems best.” He rushed on: “Just give Camber a call. He’s always there, and I don’t think it would take him twenty minutes to fix it. Even if he has to put in another carb—”
“Will you think about it while you’re gone?” she asked. “About what we’re going to do? The two of us?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Good. I will too. Another waffle?”
“No. Thanks.” The whole conversation was turning surreal Suddenly he wanted to be out and gone. Suddenly the trip felt very necessary and very attractive. The idea of getting away from the whole mess. Putting miles between him and it. He felt a sudden jab of anticipation. In his mind he could see the Delta jet cutting through the unraveling fog and into the blue.
“Can I have a waffle?”
They both looked around, startled. It was Tad, standing in the hallway in his yellow footy pajamas, his stuffed coyote grasped by one ear, his red blanket wrapped around his shoulders. He looked like a small, sleepy Indian.
“I guess I could rustle one up,” Donna, said, surprised. Tad was not a notably early riser.
“Was it the phone, Tad?” Vic asked.
Tad shook his head. “I made myself wake up early so I could say good-bye to you, Daddy. Do you really have to go?”
“It’s just for a while.”
“It’s too long,” Tad said blackly. “I put a circle around the day you’re coming home on my calendar. Mom showed me which one. I’m going to mark off every day, and the said she’d tell me the Monster Words every night.”
“Well, that’s okay, isn’t it?”
“Will you call?”
“Every other night,” Vic said.
“Every night,” Tad insisted. He crawled up into Vic’s lap and set his coyote next to Vic’s plate. Tad began to crunch up a piece of toast. “Every night, Daddy.”
“I can’t every night,” Vic said, thinking of the backbreaking schedule Roger had laid out on Friday, before the letter had come.
“Why not?”
“Because—”
“Because your Uncle Roger is a hard taskmaster,” Donna said, putting Tad’s waffle on the table. “Come on over here and eat. Bring your coyote. Daddy will call us tomorrow night from Boston and tell us everything that happened to him.”
Tad took his place at the end of the table. He had a large plastic placemat that said TAD. “Will you bring me a toy?”
“Maybe. If you’re good. And maybe I’ll call tonight so you’ll know I got to Boston in one piece.”
“Good deal.” Vic watched, fascinated, as Tad poured a small ocean of syrup over his waffle. “What kind of toy?”
“We’ll see,” Vic said. He watched Tad eat his waffle. It suddenly occurred to him that Tad liked eggs. Scrambled, fried, poached, or hard-boiled, Tad gobbled them up. “Tad?”
“What, Daddy?”
“If you wanted people to buy eggs, what would you tell them?”
Tad considered. “I’d tell em eggs taste good,” he said.
Vic met his wife’s eyes again, and they had a second moment like the one that had occurred when the phone rang. This time they laughed telepathically.
Their good-byes were light. Only Tad, with his imperfect grasp of how short the future really was, cried.
“You’ll think about it?” Donna asked him again as he climbed into the Jag.
“Yes.”
But driving into Bridgton to get Roger, what he thought about were those two moments of near-perfect communication. Two in one morning, not bad. All it took was eight or nine years together, roughly a quarter of all the years so far spent on the face of the earth. He got thinking about how ridiculous the whole concept of human communication was—what monstrous, absurd overkill was necessary to achieve even a little. When you’d invested the time and made it good, you had to be careful. Yes, he’d think about it. It had been good between them, and although some of the channels were now closed, filled with God knew how much muck (and some of that muck might still be squirming), plenty