joking about what a flibbertigibbet his wife had been when he first met her—“diarrhea of the mouth,” he once had said, and both James and Connie had winced—but Connie had never known that girl, only the woman who sometimes watched her family with bright, apprehensive eyes as she passed around the cocktail franks.
Finally Mary Frances said again, “Tom was a good boy.”
“He still is,” Connie replied, her empathy evaporating.
“Of course, dear,” Mary Frances said, her voice a little firmer, more like her old self. “I’ll call him now.”
When she hung up Connie put her hands back down on the spread and stroked it again, up and down. Joseph was beginning to breathe regularly; his black eyes were only slits in his chubby pink face. From below the window came the honk of a horn, then another. The baby’s eyes opened slowly.
“Oh, good,” Connie said to herself, jumping up and brushing her hair. “Want to go for a ride, Jojo?”
“Ride,” Joseph said as she scooped him up.
“Go bye bye,” said Connie.
“Bye bye,” said Joseph, waving at the bed.
Joey Martinelli was sitting in the car in the driveway, and as she came out he moved over to give her the driver’s seat. She put Joseph in the back, where he curled up and began to suck his thumb. “I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life,” Connie said, and they drove in silence until they reached the empty parking lot of the public high school, a squat building tinted aquamarine after the misguided architectural style of public buildings of the 1950s. Connie felt that by now she knew the big rectangle of asphalt by heart. She’d done sixty miles an hour on it, stomping on the brakes just short of the grass; she’d learned to accelerate coming out of a curve and had practiced doing a K-turn over and over again. The skid marks in one corner were hers from two weeks before. Now she was working on parallel parking.
Joey got out of the car, took two sawhorses from the trunk and placed them a good distance apart at the end of the lot, just in from the grass. Getting back in, he said quietly, “I’m glad to see you, too.” Connie thought his voice sounded strange, but when she looked at him his face was turned away, toward the athletic field and the stand of trees at its edge.
“Could you go and direct me, like the other times?” Connie said.
He looked at her and smiled. “Nope. Your test is next week. Today you do it yourself.”
“What if I scratch your car?”
“You won’t scratch my car,” he said.
The only sound was the breathy snoring of the baby in the back seat. Connie pulled forward, backed up, cut the wheel, pulled in, straightened the car. Then she did it again. Each time she imagined the crunchy sound of the back wheels running over a sawhorse, like the sound a Fifth Avenue candy bar made when you bit into it. She was sure parallel parking was like algebra; she knew she would never need it, but she had to do it to pass the test. After half an hour her arms hurt. “I need a break,” she said, opening her door, looking down, and seeing with pleasure that she was only six inches from the grass and that the car was perfectly parallel with the edge of the blacktop. She let her head fall back against the seat, and lifted her hair up off the sides of her face. She could feel her thighs sticking to the leatherette upholstery.
“My niece calls to say she’s getting married in a hurry, which means she’s pregnant,” she said. “Then my mother-in-law calls and starts talking about what she’s read in Dear Abby. What an afternoon.” She did not add that Mary Frances had suggested that Tommy was taking a new job, a job Connie knew nothing about, a job that filled her with fear and rage. She somehow felt that discussing Tommy with Joey would be disloyal.
Joey laughed. “That doesn’t sound like the Scanlan family to me,” he said.
“I know. But who knows what really goes on with other people? My father-in-law, who’s Superman, is in the hospital. My mother-in-law, Emily Post, is reading Dear Abby. Tommy’s brother’s daughter, who has never been seen in public with a spot on her dress or her hair uncurled, turns up pregnant. And my own daughter, who seemed as if she’d stay a kid forever, has two