asked in wonder. “I mean, there was just…acres of him!”
I gave Brian a look. “Did you think I was exaggerating?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, no one’s as huge as you were saying.”
“Except Derek.”
“Yeah, except him. Jeez, the size of him!”
Something about having seen Derek gave us something else to concentrate on. There had been a detectable pall created by my fears about the flowers and Tony Markham—and Brian’s steadfast refusal to believe the package had anything to do with him. The pall was lifting, especially when our wine came.
“I told you the one about the first time he was brought home by the police?” Stan’s glasses were sitting on his forehead, and his cheeks were flushed with a half glass of Chardonnay.
Stan was presenting his traditional gift to me, on this last night of our visit: another story about Brian’s childhood. Even after close to ten years, he still seemed to have an untapped supply.
“Was that the time the homecoming prank with the goat went horribly awry?” I said.
Betty shook her head. “No, the very first time was when he was twelve and decided that he could drive and took the station wagon full of kids down to the beach.”
“Right, I forgot: because he was tired of lugging his surf-board down the street. Yep, I’ve got both of those, now that you mention it.”
Brian looked at his mother and me, thought about protesting, and then gave up, hiding himself behind his menu.
Betty put her hand on mine. “What about the botanical project that I found growing in a sunny corner of the garden when he was seventeen? The one he tried to tell me was bamboo?”
“Ah, clever, trying to fool a gardener. At least he didn’t try to tell you it was a tomato plant. Yep, I heard that one, too.”
“What about the fire that wrecked most of one side of the garage? About age fourteen?” Stan put down the menu, getting to serious work again.
I cocked my head. “Ah, I’ve heard Brian’s version of that, but I would give quite a lot for a corroborative version.”
“Well, if you slide the wine bottle over this way…”
Brian, not yet resigned to his fate, tried to distract us by signaling the waitress so we could place our orders. We did, but Stan, who had just poured an inch of wine into his glass, started up again.
“It was Saturday morning and I smelled something funny coming out of the garage. Well, that was nothing unusual, because every Saturday morning something smelled bad in the garage. That was the deal: Brian got to use his chemistry stuff—I think he had about six sets put together over the years—in the garage, when we were home, so we could deal with whatever emergency might occur. Nothing too bad had happened in the past, so it was a good arrangement, and I wasn’t too worried at first. But then I noticed that the smell was getting worse and there was a…how can I say it?”
“A lot of furtive scurrying around,” Betty supplied. “With too much quiet and not enough eye contact.”
“That’ll do. There was scurrying and there was furtiveness, and suddenly I saw flames. The garage is under the house, so I draw the line at flames. We called the fire department, and I got the fire extinguisher out and got to work. Asked the boy whether there was anything explosive, anything that wouldn’t do well with the fire extinguisher. I knew the drill. And he was sweating bullets, which was strange because this wasn’t the first fire—hence the rules about when and where Dr. Frankenstein over there could play with his stuff.”
Brian was resigned now, chewing his bottom lip, letting his dad tell his version of the story.
“So I was kinda curious, and the fire department showed up, and said, Hey Stan, what’s Einstein getting into now, and the usual. And we got the fire out pretty quick, and it was a real mess—god-awful sooty smoke everywhere, but not too bad in the house because we put the fan in; boys will be boys, so you do the best you can, right? And they did a little poking around, which got Bri even more furtive and agitated, even though the worst of it was over and he knew I wasn’t going to do anything more than yell at him for being a dope and make him help me do the repairs on the garage. Standard operating procedure, the boy knew that. So when he was getting more