My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(79)

“You mustn’t let Kent kill it,” pleads Elsa, wide-eyed. “Please, Britt-Marie, it’s my friend. . . .”

Britt-Marie meets her eyes, and for a single fleeting second there’s some humanity in them. Elsa can see that. But then Kent’s voice can be heard, calling to Britt-Marie from the stairwell that she has to bring more poison, and then the normal Britt-Marie is back.

“Kent’s children are coming here tomorrow. They’re afraid of dogs,” she explains firmly.

She straightens out a wrinkle that isn’t there on her skirt, and brushes something invisible off her floral-print jacket.

“We’re having a traditional Christmas dinner here tomorrow. With some normal Christmas food. Like a civilized family. We’re not barbarians, you know.”

Then she slams the door. Elsa stays where she is and realizes that Dad is not going to be able to solve this, because tentativeness is not a very useful superpower in this type of emergency situation. She needs reinforcements.

She has been banging on the door for more than a minute before she hears Alf’s dragging footsteps. He opens it with a cup of coffee in his hand that smells so strong that she’s sure a spoon would get stuck in it.

“I’m sleeping,” he grunts.

“He’s killing Renault!” sobs Elsa.

“Killing? Nothing’s going to be killed around here. It’s only a bloody car,” says Alf, swallows a mouthful of coffee and yawns.

“It’s not just a car! It’s RENAULT!”

“Who the hell has told you he’s going to kill Renault?”

“Kent!”

Elsa hasn’t even had time to explain what’s in Renault’s backseat before Alf has put down the coffee cup, stepped into his shoes, and set off down the stairs. She hears Alf and Kent roaring at each other so terribly that she has to cover her ears. She can’t hear what they’re saying, except that it’s a lot of swearwords, and Kent shouts something about leaseholds and how one can’t have “rust-heaps” parked in the garage because then people will think the house is full of “socialists.” Which is Kent’s way of saying “bloody idiots,” Elsa understands. And then Alf shouts, “Bloody idiot,” which is his way of saying exactly that, because Alf is not big on complicating things.

And then Alf comes stamping up the stairs again, wild-eyed, muttering:

“The bastard got someone to tow the car away. Is your dad here?”

Elsa nods. Alf storms up the stairs without a word, and a few moments later Elsa and Dad are sitting in Taxi, even though Dad doesn’t want to at all.

“I’m not sure I want to do this,” says Dad.

“Someone has to bloody drive the damned Renault home,” grunts Alf.

“How do we find out where Kent sent it, then?” asks Elsa, at the same time that Dad does his best not to look completely tentative.

“I’ve been driving a damned taxi for thirty years,” says Alf.

“And?” hisses Elsa.

“And so I bloody know how to find a Renault that’s been towed away!”

Twenty minutes later they’re standing in a scrapyard outside the city, and Elsa is hugging the hood of Renault in the exact same way you hug a cloud animal: with your whole body. She can see that the TV in the backseat is shuffling about, fairly displeased about not being the first to be hugged, but if you’re almost eight and forget to hug a wurse in a Renault, it’s because you’re less worried about the wurse than the poor scrapyard worker who happens to find it.

Alf and the fairly fat foreman argue for a short while about what it’s going to cost to take Renault away. And then Alf and Elsa argue for a fairly long time about why she never mentioned that she didn’t have a key to Renault. And then the fat man walks around mumbling that he was sure he left his moped here earlier and where the hell was it now? And then Alf and the fat man negotiate about what it’ll cost to tow Renault back to the house. And then Dad has to pay for it all.

It’s the best present he’s ever given Elsa. Even better than the red felt-tip pen.

Alf ensures that Renault is parked in Granny’s slot in the garage, not in Britt-Marie’s. When Elsa introduces them to each other, Dad stares at the wurse with the expression of someone preparing for a root canal. The wurse glares back, a bit cocky. Too cocky, thinks Elsa, so she hauls it over the coals about whether it ate the scrapyard foreman’s moped. Whereupon the wurse stops looking cocky and goes to lie down under the blankets and looks a bit as if it’s thinking that if people don’t want it to eat mopeds, then people should be more generous with the cinnamon buns.

She tells Dad, to his immense relief, that he can go and wait in Audi. Then Elsa and Alf gather all the red food bowls from the stairwell and put them in a big black trash bag. Kent catches them and fumes that the poison bloody cost him six hundred kronor. Britt-Marie just stands there.

And then Elsa goes with Dad to buy a plastic tree. Because Britt-Marie is wrong, Elsa’s family are no barbarians. Anyway the proper term is “baa-baa-rians,” because in Miamas that is what the spruce trees call those dumb sheep in the real world who chop down living trees, then carry them off and sell them into slavery.

“I’ll give you three hundred,” says Elsa to the man in the shop.

“My dear, there’s no bargaining in this shop,” says the man in the shop in exactly the sort of tone one might expect of men in shops. “It costs four hundred and ninety-five.”