They May Not Mean To, But They Do(49)

“No, Grandma, no. It’s not money. And you gave me a really generous Christmas present. Really.”

She’d had to be creative at Christmas. So much had been going on. There was no way she could have gotten out to go Christmas shopping. A card with nice crisp bills for Ben had done nicely, five twenty-dollar bills. She thought of the two beautiful teacups (they’d been her mother’s, just a small chip on one, and she had three more) she’d given Molly and Freddie, plus an opal and silver ring she’d found that Molly had liked as a child, she told them they could share it, there had to be some advantage to having your daughter marry another woman. But money had been fine for Ben.

“Then what can I do for you, Bennie?”

He blushed and reached into the breast pocket of his shirt. It was a nice shirt. Had she given it to him for his birthday last year?

“Did I give you that shirt?”

“Yeah, I think so.” He handed her a crumpled wad of pink paper.

“Ben! A traffic ticket? You don’t even have a car.”

“Don’t tell Mom, okay? It’s kind of embarrassing.”

He did look embarrassed, that was certain. His cheeks were as rosy as a little English choirboy’s. It made him even more appealing. He was such a handsome boy. He was such a good boy, staying with her like this. She felt sick at the thought of him leaving. Maybe it would have been better if he had not come at all, then she wouldn’t have minded his departure.

“And the problem is, there’s a court date,” he was saying. “And I won’t be here because I’ll be back in New Orleans, and so I was wondering…”

Joy nodded and smiled. Ben needed her. This strong young man needed her, and it made her feel a bit strong and a bit young herself. A bit manipulated, too, but that was a grandson’s god-given right, to manipulate his grandmother.

“I’ll pay you back the money for the fine,” he said with the generous confidence that his offer would not be accepted.

“But how did you get a parking ticket without a car, Ben?”

“Oh,” and he said something in that soft, barely comprehensible mumble young people so often employed.

“What? I hate it when you people mumble. Even your mother does it sometimes.”

“You know, um, public urination.”

Joy looked down at the piece of pink paper in her hand, then gingerly dropped it onto a paper napkin she pulled out of her pocketbook. “What?” she said. “That is disgusting, Ben. What is the matter with you? Is this what people do in New Orleans? Are you insane?…”

She went on and on, making her way to the bathroom sink to wash her hands, Ben following like a shamed dog, which is just what he had behaved like, a dog. On the street. Public urination? There was a ticket for that, that specifically? How much urine was on the public street if they had to maintain a special traffic violation category for it? “Why on earth did you pee in the street? In public?”

“It was really late at night. Everything was closed. And, you know, New York has no public bathrooms. In Paris they have public toilets.”

She paused. She said, “Ah.” She said, “Well.”

He knew the word “Paris” would do it. She had taken him to Paris once, when he was quite young. Just the two of them. She had gone to do some research for the museum, and she brought him along. She made him go to a ridiculous number of museums, but mostly they ate and walked.

“Oh, Ben,” she said. “What is to become of us?”

“I didn’t pee on the ticket, Grandma.”

She picked it up and folded it neatly and zipped it up somewhere in her bag. “Our secret,” she said.





34

Molly’s department had gotten a request to excavate a racehorse that had been buried in the 1960s at a racecourse that was closing. The owners of the horse wanted him and his memorial moved to another racecourse intact. Molly had never heard of the horse, but Freddie told her he was quite famous in California. Her father had been a fan.

Molly called Ruby in New York and said, “I don’t know why, I thought it would interest you.”

“Do you think I’m morbid, Aunt Molly?”

“A little.”

“Yes, it does interest me. Is the horse in a casket?”

“No. Afraid not. A canvas sack. We may not find much. But the shoes should be intact.”

“Can I have one?”

“No.”

“Can I come?”

The excavation of the racehorse happened to coincide with Ruby’s vacation, and after a relentless campaign of whining, Ruby convinced her parents to allow her to go to Los Angeles to stay with her aunts.

Joy was horrified. “We just buried Daddy,” she said when Molly phoned to tell her. “Don’t you think it’s too upsetting for a little girl to dig up a dead body so soon? It’s too upsetting for me, that I can tell you. I’m sorry, Molly, but I do not want to hear any more about horse corpses. Goodbye.”

“I didn’t even think of my father,” Molly told Freddie. “My mother said it’s a lack of imagination.”

“Well, good. You remember him as he was. I remember my mother as she was. It’s more realistic, in a way. We don’t live in a horror movie, after all.”