Commonwealth(26)

“I can break in,” Caroline said. “If it’s something you really need.”

“Liar,” Cal said, not bothering to look at her.

“I can,” she said and then she pointed at Jeanette. “Go get me a coat hanger out of the closet.”

It was true. Their father had shown them how that very summer. Their uncle Joe Mike had locked his keys in Aunt Bonnie’s car when they were all at their grandparents’ house that last weekend, and their father had unlocked the door with a coat hanger to save Joe Mike the twelve dollars it would have cost to call a locksmith. After that Fix had both girls practice because they were interested. He said it was a good thing to know.

“The mistake people make is that they think they’re supposed to pull up on something and you’re not, you push down,” he’d told them.

Caroline set about untwisting the wire hanger. That was the hardest part.

“You’re wasting time,” Cal said.

“Whose time?” Holly said. “If you’re in such a hurry then go.” She was curious, and it was plain to all of them that Cal was curious too.

Albie walked in wide circles around the car, swinging his hips from side to side and doing the boom-boom thing.

“Pipe down,” Cal said to him. “If you wake Dad up he’ll take your head off.” That was when the rest of them remembered whose room the car was parked in front of and made a point to be quiet.

Caroline picked back the rubber seal at the bottom of the window with her pointer finger and stuck the coat hanger in while the other children pressed close to watch. Caroline was a little worried that locks might be different from one car to another. The station wagon was an Oldsmobile and Aunt Bonnie’s car was something else, a Dodge maybe. The tip of her tongue pushed up at the corner of her mouth while she guided the coat hanger blindly towards what her father called the sweet spot about ten inches down from the button lock. Then she felt it, the wire against the mechanism of the lock. She didn’t try to hook it though the temptation was there. It was just a little bump and she pushed straight down the way she’d been taught.

The lock popped up.

It was a victory for all the girls that they remembered not to scream. Caroline pulled the coat hanger out and opened the door like it was some sort of natural act. Even Albie put his arms around her waist. “You broke the car!” he said, his loud whisper making him sound like a movie gangster.

“That’s right,” she said and gave him the hanger as the morning’s souvenir. Albie immediately went to the car next to theirs and began jamming the hanger down against the window. Oh, what Caroline wouldn’t have given to call her father from the motel phone! She wanted him to know what a good job she’d done.

Cal took the coat hanger from his brother and studied it in light of this new potential. “You can teach me how to do this?” he said, either to Caroline or the coat hanger.

“Only police officers are allowed to do it,” Franny said. “And their children. Otherwise you’re a criminal.”

“I’d be a criminal,” Cal said. He slid into the front seat of the station wagon, opened the glove compartment. He took out a gun and a fifth of gin, the seal still on.

No one was surprised that there was a gun in the car, even though Cal was the only one who’d known it was there, and he only knew about it because he’d been nosing around in the glove compartment a few days before while Beverly was in the grocery store and he’d found it, proving yet again that sometimes a person just has to look. What surprised all of them though, Cal included, was that Bert had left it in the car. It made them think he must have another gun in his motel room. Bert liked a gun in his briefcase, in the nightstand, in the drawer of his office desk. He liked to talk about the criminals he had put away, and how a person never knew, and how he had to protect his family, and how he wasn’t going to let the other guy make the first move, but really it was just that Bert liked guns.

The mesmerizing item was the gin. The parents might enjoy a drink every now and then but it wasn’t like they had to take it with them. They had never seen gin in the car before. That was something special.

“You know you can’t take it,” Holly said, looking back to the door of the parents’ room. She was talking about both the gun and the gin.

“Just in case something happens,” Cal said. He put the gun in the brown paper sack along with the candy bars and Cokes. Jeanette had taken her Coke and two candy bars out of the bag already and put them in her purse. She took the bottle from her brother and started working on the seal, teasing it loose so gently that it finally gave itself up to her little fingernails in a single, replaceable piece. She put the seal in her coin purse and gave the bottle back to her brother. Then they set out for the lake, Caroline carrying the map.

It was hotter than they expected it to be, though no hotter than it had been the day before or the day before that. The sky was already turning white, clamping a pervasive dullness onto the landscape. Holly scratched at her arms and complained about the mosquitoes. Like her stepmother, she was particularly sensitive to mosquitoes. The grass in the field across from the motel, the field that the waitress had told them to cut through, came up to their waists and was as high as Albie’s chest, but being right up in it they could see the tiny flecks of yellow flowers blooming on the stalks. “Can you see the lake?” Albie asked. He had ketchup smeared across the blue-and-yellow-striped shirt that Beverly had bought for him. His hands were sticky.