Saying Grace (4 page)

She’s only fifty-nine.”

They all three looked at each other.

“Could she get another teaching job?”

“I doubt it. At her age, she’s too expensive. And no matter what reference I give her, any other head is going to know I wouldn’t have fired her except for really good cause.”

“What if she quit?” Henry asked.

“She’ll never do that. All her friends are here. The school is her life.”

“I assume you’ve let her know that things are serious,” said Henry.

Saying Grace / 21

“Of course. I’ve said everything short of ‘You’re fired.’ But she doesn’t hear it. The only part she hears is ‘You’ve worked hard on improving such and such.’ The minute I say ‘But,’ she turns off her receiver. It’s as if she thinks we’re all family, and you may be annoyed with your sister, but you’re stuck with her.”

“Well—it
is
the real world. If she can’t do the job, you’re not running a charity ward.”

“She can do the job…”

“But someone else could do it better.”

“A lot better, I’m afraid. I lost three families last year on her account, and I’m about to lose more. But the Lord provides. We’ve taken four new kids in the last week. One of the moms is an old girl of yours, Henry.”

“How exciting, which one?”

“Her name is Emily Dahl. She’s a slim blond, pageboy hair, Georgia’s height. About two years younger than I am.”

“I’m not placing her.”

The doorbell rang. Georgia jumped up.

“Honey…” said Rue. “If that’s your friends, could you…”

“I’ll tell them we’re eating. They can sit in the living room.”

“Tell them to sit outside in the driveway,” said Henry. But they all knew that no matter what they did, Georgia’s last supper at home as a child of this house was bound to end.

C
handler Kip was annoyed when he left the house. For the fourth time since he bought it, his Jaguar wouldn’t start, for no reason that he could see. There was plenty of juice in the battery, it wasn’t cold, it wasn’t flooded, and it had been running fine last night. He had had to wait for Bobbi to get back from taking Missy to school, so he could borrow her car. She drove a huge Suburban that got about twelve miles to the gallon. It was like driving a tank, but that was what Bobbi liked about it. City traffic scared her, so she needed something heavy that put her high above the road, like a turret gunner, in case she went shopping in LA.

As he hefted the Suburban into the Seven Springs Service on Union Street, he checked himself out in the rearview mirror. He brushed what little was left of his hair back with one hand, and bared his teeth in the mirror to be sure there was nothing caught in them.

He pulled up to the first row of pumps and killed the ignition.

The station seemed deserted. A slanted rectangle of sun burned through the windshield across his thigh. He honked the horn and looked around the apparently empty bays of the garage, then around the front seat of the van at Bobbi’s detritus, while he waited. There was a gum wrapper wedged between the seat and the back, there were hair pins on the dashboard, there were loose cassettes. Bobbi was listening to an abridged version of
The Joy Luck Club
, he gathered, as she ferried Missy and her little friends to dancing class, to riding lessons, to Campfire Girls.

He got out of the car, walked around to open the gas cap, went to the pump, and started to fill the tank. After three gallons, a voice behind him said, “I’m sorry sir, this is a full-serve island. If you want to do that yourself, you’ll have to move your vehicle to the self-serve, see over there. We have big signs.”

“Randy,” Chandler turned and smiled. “I didn’t know where Saying Grace / 23

you were.” Randy was twenty and lean, with long arms, big hands, and such big shoulders that he looked as if he’d left the hanger inside his clothes. He took the pump hose from his father.

“I was in the can. Sorry.”

“You know, in the last gas rationing crisis, there was a man who closed his station and went home for the night but he left one pump unlocked. When he came back in the morning his whole tank was dry, two thousand gallons. Someone had stood there all night selling his gas and pocketing the money.”

Randy bristled slightly. “Thanks, Dad. Next time I go to the can, I’ll lock the pumps.”

“I didn’t mean that. It was just a story. I just was thinking of it, I could have stood here and sold your gas to whoever came in, if you hadn’t come back.”

“Phil’s gas. Don’t you think people would wonder a little bit about your suit?” Randy had always been the master of the deadpan. He stood there in his blue overalls, looking at his father’s handmade Glen plaid. “They might suspect it wasn’t your regular gig. Or, hey, maybe not. It’s a recession. Who knows. Maybe they’d think you got laid off and couldn’t afford a pair of overalls.”

“The people who bought the gas from the guy in the gas crisis must have noticed the station didn’t have any lights on.”

“You have a larcenous soul. Don’t they say you can only con a con?” Randy finished filling the tank of the Suburban, and put the hose back in its cradle.

“So—how’s it going?” Chandler asked.

“Okay,” said Randy. “Your car in the shop again?”

“It wouldn’t start. I don’t know why.”

“You want me and Phil to take a look at it?”

“No, Bobbi called the Triple A. I guess it’s a lemon.”

“It’s not a lemon, it’s a Jaguar. I warned you.”

There was a silence. Chandler took his wallet from his back pocket and took out two twenties and handed them to Randy.

“I’ll get your change,” he said, turning to go to the office.

“Please keep it,” said Chandler. He noticed that Randy’s hair reached to his shoulder blades and could use a shampoo, and that he had a paperback copy of
The Plague
, by Albert Camus, deep in his back pocket. Randy came back, pocketing the money.

24 / Beth Gutcheon

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

There was another silence.

“Hey Dad, guess what Mom sent me.” Randy suddenly smiled.

“You’re in touch with your mom?”

“Of course I’m in touch with Mom. What did you think?”

“You just haven’t mentioned her in a while, I didn’t know. I didn’t know if you still knew where she was.”

“She’s where she’s been for two years, Dad. Did you think she was like some field mouse? Drops the litter of micelets in a field someplace and wanders off and forgets to write? I always know where she is.”

“Sorry. I’m glad to hear it. What did she send you?”

Randy smiled. “Your college yearbook. She said she didn’t have a lot of use for it, and she thought I’d like it. Your senior picture is a gas, man, with your hair curled down over your ears…you looked like H. R. Haldeman.”

Chandler put his hands on his hips and grinned. “Well thank you very much, how do you even know who H. R. Haldeman is? You have my yearbook? I haven’t seen that in
years….
I didn’t know it still existed. Your mother had my yearbook?”

“I’ve got one question, Dad. Tell me about being Tonto Toogood.”

Chandler gave a sharp laughing bark of embarrassment.

“Is that in there?”

“Right under your senior picture.”

“What, do they have a lot of quotes and stuff under your picture?

The same as high school? I’d forgotten that…. I guess they did.”

Chandler turned away and looked into the distance. He looked back. “Tonto Toogood. I feel like that happened to a different person.”

“Apparently.” Another car, a Miata with the top down, pulled up to the full-serve pump in front of the Suburban. “Excuse me,” said Randy.

When he came back, his father had recovered from his surprise.

“So? Tonto?”

“As I remember, it was a fraternity thing. We used to have Saying Grace / 25

Truth or Consequence nights, where you all sit in a circle drinking and people can ask you anything they want and you have to tell the truth.”

Randy nodded. And waited.

“One night someone asked me what was my deepest secret, and I told them my real name was Thomas Toogood.”

His son stared at him, then smiled briefly, then shook his head, as if to clear his ears. “Your real name is what?”

“My real name is Chandler Kip, but Thomas Toogood is what my birth certificate says.”

“Dad—did it ever occur to you to mention this to me?”

“I guess not. To tell you the truth, I think I forgot it.”

“It’s a hell of a thing to forget. What does it mean?”

“Well, Toogood is Grandma’s maiden name….”

“I know. Who’s Thomas?”

“I have no idea,” said Chandler. His son was staring at him. Now that the subject had come up, it occurred to him that it might be mildly odd that he hadn’t thought to tell him before.

“Well didn’t you ever ask Grandma?”

“Of course I did.”

“Well?”

“I asked her what happened to my real father, and she said, ‘Your real father is right in there, go ask him yourself.’ Meaning Elmer, lying in front of the TV on his Barcalounger.”

Randy remembered Elmer, although he had always called him Grandpa, and he didn’t know that that thing he always lay on like a beached whale was called a Barcalounger. Grandpa had wispy patches of steel-gray hair and thick glasses that made his eyes look pink. He was minister emeritus of the Church of Christ. When Randy, aged seven, asked Grandpa what “emeritus” meant, Grandpa said it meant “fired.”

“So,” said Randy, “your name isn’t Chandler and it isn’t Kip? And neither is mine?”

“Of course it is. Grandma legally changed it when she married Elmer. She changed hers and mine from Toogood to Kip at the same time.”

“Don’t you think you might have told me?”

“Why?” said Chandler.

26 / Beth Gutcheon

“Because it doesn’t just affect you! You were going to let me go through life waiting to look in the mirror and find I’d turned into Grandpa? Elmer? And now it turns out I should be waiting to turn into some guy whose name I don’t know, who’s head must look like a boiled egg?” He waved his hand at his father’s head.

“You get baldness from the mother’s side,” said Chandler stiffly.

“It seems
you
get everything from the mother’s side,” said Randy.

“Where did Chandler come from?”

There was an embarrassed silence. Chandler glanced at the street, as if willing another car to pull in, but traffic hummed by.

“I think it was a movie star she liked. Maybe a radio actor, from when she was younger. Something Chandler.”

Randy looked at his father, laughed, not very nicely, and abruptly walked in a circle around the pumps, as if stillness might lead to an explosion.

“I don’t know why you’re so aggravated,” said Chandler.

“Irritated,” said Randy coldly. “Aggravated means ‘make worse.’

From the Latin
gravis
, serious, heavy, or bad.”

“Well excuuuuse me,” said Chandler. “What do you want to do, take dueling IQ tests?”

Randy looked at him, angry because hurt, then looked away. His father looked at the sky, as if for answers. He looked at his watch.

He looked at the concrete, glittering with mica in the hot September sun.

“You asked me a question. This is the answer. I told my brothers my name wasn’t my real name. They decided they should rename me, like Indians name each other after exploits or deeds, so they called me Tonto Toogood. I liked it. But in the end I didn’t see what difference it made. My mom gave me a name and then she gave me another name. They both came from the same place. What difference did it make?”

Randy was staring at him as if he couldn’t express how dumb his father looked to him. Finally, he said, “Did Mom know?”

“Of course. She was there.”

“When you were born?”

“She was there, at Grinnell.”

“Why didn’t she tell me?”

“I don’t know. Ask her.”

Saying Grace / 27

“Did you make her not tell?”

Chandler flared. “Of course I didn’t make her not tell! I’d like to see the man who could make your mother do fucking anything she didn’t want! She probably thought all sons should be named for their mothers and men should be left out of the system entirely, I don’t know why she didn’t tell you. Ask her yourself.”

They stared at each other for a long time, Chandler beginning to sweat onto his monogrammed shirt, and his son, burned to brown on his face and neck, the sunburn following the V of his greasy blue overalls that said “Randy” in white stitching over the pocket.

“Have a nice day, Dad,” said Randy, turning away from his father.

As he walked to the office, he took the book from his back pocket and started to read, as if he were shutting a door behind him.

Chandler wheeled and went to the driver’s side of the Suburban and climbed in, slamming his door. He peeled out to the curb, only to have to jam on the brakes as a light changed, and he was stopped by a lane of live traffic and left to sit in the sun, confused and angry at his only son.

T
he campus was looking lush and groomed for the first day of school. The olive and persimmon trees were glossy, and there was a new bed of bright blue campanula mixed with white impatiens outside Rue’s office. By 8:15, the parking lot had been filled with Range Rovers, BMWs, Volvos, and Mercedes. Some were driven by moms on the way to work, more were driven by dads on the way to work. The ones with whom Rue most empathized were the moms who drove the carpool in their bathrobes, wearing moccasins on bare feet and drinking a mug of coffee. The only thing Rue liked about the concept of retiring was the thought of sleeping late.

On the central walkway, where the paths led off in long spurs to the Primary building and to the Middle School, Rue stood to greet her children. As they did every school day, every child from first grade through sixth began the day by shaking her hand and saying,

“Good morning, Mrs. Shaw.” Much as she had dreaded the end of summer and especially Georgia’s going, she was surprised by elation at this moment, seeing the children again, seeing how they’d grown and changed in so short a time as summer, seeing the campus fill up again with noise and motion and shining-faced hopeful proto-plasm.