“You’ll want to check with the department.”
“There’s a small fortune in photographic paper, chemicals, the time it took to—”
“I just wanted to give you a heads-up,” she said in her monotone.
“Your head’s up your ass,” I said and dropped the phone into its charger.
A few days later, when Mom asked for my password to get on the site to see where things stood, I said I was taking a gap year. She pushed back hard, but when I said I wouldn’t budge, that I wanted to work at Geary’s full time and save up money, I don’t know, maybe she began to accept the logic in it.
In the letter I wrote to the department I said I would be traveling during my delayed year in order to photograph national monuments that were sinking into the earth along with the reputations of our best educational institutions. Later, I regretted dropping this into the mail slot and then I had to call and ask them not to open the letter, a second would follow, and so on.
From the glossy postcards that continued to arrive every two or three weeks from Dad to Lola, I began to believe that if everything else was going to hell, our father had plenty of beaches where he roamed and that the skies were always blue.
You should see the ocean, he wrote on one card.
You should see how broke we are, I almost wrote back. How Mom doesn’t sleep anymore, how she worries about things you can’t imagine.
Mom held up a copy of The Secrets of Car Flipping. I didn’t realize at first that she was saying she had to sell the station wagon.
“When I went to that retraining session at the newspaper,” she said, “I met a new hire named David, and during the break we talked cars. He just called to say he has to sell his father’s van to help pay for his dad’s home health care. David had his mechanic check it out, and he says it will run until Armageddon.”
That’s one of those statements you have to think about, but I’m not sure my mother did, given her worries. David drove over to our place the next day so she could give the van a spin. He had hair popping out of the edges of his long-sleeved shirt, cuffs and collar, like a physical manifestation of the energy exploding from his psyche. His father, he said, had babied the thing.
“He’ll only sell it to someone who loves it as much as his father did,” Mom told me after he was gone.
“And?” I asked.
“Well. I could haul an awful lot around in something like that. He said he’d give me an exceptional deal and he offered to pitch in over the next year, change the oil, replace the belts, that kind of thing.”
“Was he hitting on you?” I asked.
She reddened, and I felt certain some flattery had been involved. “He showed me a picture of his wife and kids. He has a son your age and …” She stopped and said, “He’s going to list it next Saturday.”
Over the week, she hesitated and worried that the van would be sold out from under her while she hesitated. She read something in Consumer Reports and talked to her bank and her brother, Hal, who wasn’t all that encouraging but didn’t have any other ideas. He wasn’t a car man by nature.
“What do you think?” she said, circling back to me.
It’s not like I knew what she should do. We were both in shock about having to sell our wagon because it had felt so safe driving Lola around in a Volvo. But it was time to get over it and stop asking people. I told her this and she went for that van as if she were leaping from a high-rise, convinced someone would bring out a net if the sidewalk got close.
Fourteen days after we got it, the van sprang an oil leak, and that hairy guy no longer answered his phone. Was it possible he wasn’t actually employed by the paper? Was he just there at the training session to sell someone a bad vehicle? Was this a business venture or a lark? Did he sell other goods as well? Broken radios, busted dishwashers, books with their front covers ripped off?
Mom was too exhausted to puzzle this out or to track him down, and it probably wouldn’t have done much good if she had. She began to use cans of this additive to patch the leak. By then we had two leaks, maybe three. When she fired the engine up it smelled like something was burning or dead. The undercarriage dripped and black oil pooled everywhere we parked. Before, when she picked up Lola from a play date, Mom used to pull into her friends’ driveways, but now she made a point of parking on the street—sometimes on the other side of the street or down the block.
Another letter arrived.
Dear Mona,
So I said I’d tell you a story about my Uncle Sorohan, my mother’s brother. I knew him during his carny years, but before that he was a roustabout with a circus, when he was even younger than you are now. Uncle Sor had an old fedora he never took off, even in the tub and even when he went to bed. His face was deeply lined from all the cigarettes he smoked and years of being outdoors, and he was a hardworking man but also a true romantic.
He often stayed for a night or two if he was on his way through town, and one time, I must have been five or six, he drove a flatbed to our house with a tall wooden cabinet painted red and roped in the back so it stood straight up and down. The cabinet had a few crude paintings with oriental dragons on one side and a woman in a kimono with a strange stare painted on the other. In the front was a door. I guess it was inevitable that a boy of five or six would get curious, and so after dinner Sor found me in the flatbed, trying to peek inside the box.
You know my father drank rashly, and he had worked himself up and warned my uncle at dinner that he better get that thing out of the drive early so he could move his patrol car sitting in the garage.
When Sor found me up in the flatbed, he climbed up and opened the door to the cabinet and asked if I’d like to disappear. There was a makeshift seat inside, like a phone booth without a phone.
“Where would I go?” I said.
“That’s the question. Where do we go when we disappear? I believe I disappeared into the circus, but you might disappear into the police force where your father hides out if you aren’t careful.”
“No, where do I go if I disappear in the box, Uncle Sor?”
“Oh, the box. You go somewhere else. I’m not really sure. I hear it’s quite pleasant, but I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone. The last man who tried it stayed away for years until a magician came along with the right spell. When he tumbled back into the box finally, and his wife asked where he had been, he seemed too happy to speak. Here, help me with these ropes.”
Soon we had the magic disappearing box out of its anchors and I was helping him bring it into the house. It was surprisingly light. As soon as my father saw it, he blew up at my uncle for being a bad influence and stirring up one kind of trouble or another. My mother did what she could to calm him. But Uncle Sor just ignored my father the way he always did. He directed me to turn to the left and then the right and watch the top stair so we would clear the bannister. We put the box at the foot of my bed.
“I’m going to leave this with you for a while,” he said. “Now, you need the spell so you’ll be able to come back if you try it out and there are no magicians around.” And so he gave me this: “Upon the brimming water among the stones are nine-and-fifty swans.”
I heard the basement door slam, and I knew my father had gone down to the family room, where he had built a saloon and where he would drink, mumbling to himself, and fall asleep with his head on the bar, hating the world. My uncle went down to the living room to sit with my mother and talk in whispers—I imagine trying to convince her again that she should leave my father.
The next day my uncle was gone before dawn and my father went off to work and my mother made me lunch and I was off to school. It was the following weekend my father went out with his buddies and came home stinking drunk and went after my mother and me as if he were invading an enemy camp.
After