Sunshine

But the thought of sitting for two hours—even with Mel’s arm around me—and a bottomless supply of excellent popcorn (Charlie couldn’t stop feeding people just because it was his day off) wasn’t enough on that particular Monday. So I said I’d had a headache all day (which was true) and on second thought I would go home to bed, and I was sorry. I was out the door again not five minutes after I’d gone in.

Mel followed me. One of the things we’d had almost from the beginning was an ability not to talk about everything. These people who want to talk about their feelings all the time, and want you to talk about yours, make me nuts. Besides, Mel knows my mother. There’s nothing to discuss. If my mom is the lightning bolt, I’m the tallest tree on the plain. That’s the way it is.

There are two very distinct sides to Mel. There’s the wild-boy side, the motorcycle tough. He’s cleaned up his act, but it’s still there. And then there’s this strange vast serenity that seems to come from the fact that he doesn’t feel he has to prove anything. The blend of anarchic thug and tranquil self-possession makes him curiously restful to be around, like walking proof that oil and water can mix. It’s also great on those days that everyone else in the coffeehouse is screaming. It was Monday, so he smelled of gasoline and paint rather than garlic and onions. He was absentmindedly rubbing the oak tree tattoo on his shoulder. He was a tattoo-rubber when he was thinking about something else, which meant that whatever he was cooking or working on could get pretty liberally dispersed about his person on ruminative days.

“She’ll sheer, day or so,” he said. “I was thinking, maybe I’ll talk to Kenny.”

“Do it,” I said. “It would be nice if he lived long enough to find out he doesn’t want to be a lawyer.” Kenny wanted to get into Other law, which is the dancing-on-the-edge-of-the-muttering-volcano branch of law, but a lawyer is still a lawyer.

Mel grunted. He probably had more reason than me to believe that lawyers are large botulism bacteria in three-piece suits.

“Enjoy the movie,” I said.

“I know the real reason you’re blowing, sweetheart,” Mel said.

“Billy’s turn to rent the movie,” I said. “And I hate westerns.”

Mel laughed, kissed me, and went back indoors, closing the door gently behind him.

I stood restlessly on the sidewalk. I might have tried the library’s new-novels shelf, a dependable recourse in times of trouble, but Monday evening was early closing. Alternatively I could go for a walk. I didn’t feel like reading: I didn’t feel like looking at other people’s imaginary lives in flat black and white from out here in my only too unimaginary life. It was getting a little late for solitary walking, even around Old Town, and besides, I didn’t want a walk either. I just didn’t know what I did want.

I wandered down the block and climbed into my fresh-from-the-mechanics car and turned the key. I listened to the nice healthy purr of the engine and out of nowhere decided it might be fun to go for a drive. I wasn’t a going for a drive sort of person usually. But I thought of the lake.

When my mother had still been married to my father we’d had a summer cabin out there, along with hundreds of other people. After my parents split up I used to take the bus out there occasionally to see my gran. I didn’t know where my gran lived—it wasn’t at the cabin—but I would get a note or a phone call now and then suggesting that she hadn’t seen me for a while, and we could meet at the lake. My mother, who would have loved to forbid these visits—when Mom goes off someone, she goes off comprehensively, and when she went off my dad she went off his entire family, excepting me, whom she equally passionately demanded to keep—didn’t, but the result of her not-very-successfully restrained unease and disapproval made those trips out to the lake more of an adventure than they might otherwise have been, at least in the beginning. In the beginning I had kept hoping that my gran would do something really dramatic, which I was sure she was capable of, but she never did. It wasn’t till after I’d stopped hoping…but that was later, and not at all what I had had in mind. And then when I was ten she disappeared.