Commonwealth(24)

The children blinked, vaguely stirred to think of a day that wasn’t going to be like all the other days, and Beverly blinked because Bert hadn’t mentioned any of this to her. The children could see Beverly trying to catch Bert’s eye but Bert’s eye could not be caught. A motel, a lake, meals in restaurants, a visit to Bert’s extremely unwelcoming parents who had horses and a pond and a fabulous black cook named Ernestine who had taught the girls how to make pies the summer before. If the children had been inclined to speak to the parents they might have said it sounded like fun, but they weren’t inclined, so they didn’t.

The next morning it was hot as a swamp. The birds stayed quiet in an effort to conserve their energy. Bert told the children to go and get in the car, though everyone knew it wasn’t as simple as that. First there would have to be an ugly fight over who had to sit with Albie and they all stood around in the driveway waiting for it. The front seat, which was restricted to parents, was never an option, even though Caroline and Franny rode there with their mother all the time in the regular parts of the year. That left the backseat, the way-back, and the way-way-back of the wagon. In the end, the children were always arranged in pairs by gender or age, which meant that either Cal or Jeanette got stuck with Albie, occasionally Franny, never Caroline or Holly. Albie would sing an impassioned version of “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” in which the numbers did not diminish sequentially—fifty-seven bottles, seventy-eight bottles, four, a hundred and four. He would talk about how he was going to be carsick and make convincing gagging noises that forced Bert to the shoulder of the interstate for no reason, although Jeanette inevitably threw up, never having said anything about it. At every exit sign Albie would ask if that was the exit they were supposed to take.

“Are we there yet?” he would say, then burst out laughing at the pleasure of it all. No one wanted to sit with Albie.

Just as they were starting to shove one another around the driveway, Bert came out carrying a canvas bag the size of a shoe box. Bert was a very light packer. “Cal,” he said. “You ride with your brother.”

“I rode with him last time,” Cal said. Whether or not this was true no one could say, and what constituted “last time” anyway? The last time in the car? The last time on a trip? They never took trips.

“So you’ll ride with him this time too.” Bert threw his bag in the back and swung the door shut.

Cal looked around. Albie was darting towards the girls, poking them lightly with his index finger and making them scream. All four of the girls blurred together in Cal’s mind: his own sisters, his stepsisters, it was hard to single out one of them to take the fall. Then Cal looked at Beverly, her purple striped T-shirt, her long yellow hair curled and brushed into stylish order, her sunglasses big as a movie star’s. “Make her,” he said to his father.

Bert looked at his oldest child and then his wife. “Make her what?”

“Make her ride with him. Make her sit in the way-back.”

Bert smacked Cal with his open hand. It made a sound but it was hardly a serious blow, it only glanced off the side of his head. Cal stumbled back to make it look worse than it was. He’d taken harder hits at school, and this one was worth it just to see what little color Beverly had drain out of her face. Cal could tell that for a split second she hadn’t known whose side Bert would be on, and she had seen herself riding all the way to Lake Anna in the backseat with Albie, and she had died. Bert said he was sick of all the horseshit. He told them to get in the car. And they did it, even Beverly, silently, and with grave bitterness.

On the road Bert kept the window down, his elbow pointing out towards the rolling hills, and said nothing. Three hours later when they got to the Arrowhead Diner he had everyone line up and count off, Cal being one, Caroline being two, Holly being three.

“We’re not the goddamn Trapp Family Singers,” Cal said under his breath.

Franny looked up at him with a mixture of fear and disbelief. He had taken the name of God in vain. That was a big one. “You can’t swear,” she said. Bert could swear, even though it was a bad idea, but children could never swear. She was sure of that. Even in the summer she was a Sacred Heart girl.

Cal, both the oldest and the tallest of all the children, put his right hand on the top of her head, and, curling his fingers down towards her ears, squeezed. It wasn’t as hard as he would have squeezed the head of one of his real sisters, but still, he maintained control.

Caroline, being the oldest of the girls, got to decide who would share beds at the Pinecone, and at dinner made the pronouncement that she would sleep with Holly. That meant Franny got Jeanette. Franny liked Jeanette. She liked Holly too as far as that was concerned, she just didn’t want to sleep with Caroline, who was not above trying to smother her with a pillow in the middle of the night. The boys got their own room, and each his own bed. At seven o’clock that night the parents began to fidget and yawn, and then announced that they were exhausted, it was bedtime, and there would be fun in the morning.

But what the children got in the morning was a note slipped under the door of the girls’ room. Have breakfast in the coffee shop. You can charge it. We’re sleeping late. Do not knock. It was their mother’s handwriting but the note was not signed Love or even Mommy. It wasn’t signed at all. One more document in the ever-growing mountain of evidence that they were on their own.