Thanks for the Memories (34 page)
I press send and switch the phone off.
“You really selling the house yourself ?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, confidently now.
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“Well, I didn’t know that, did I? I didn’t know what to tell him.”
Score one to me.
“That’s okay, Dad, you don’t have to feel you’re in the middle of all this.”
“Well, I am.”
Score one to him.
“Well, you wouldn’t have been if you hadn’t answered my phone.”
Two–one.
“You were missing all morning—what was I supposed to do, ignore it?”
Two–all.
“He was concerned about you, you know. He thought you should see someone. A professional person.”
Off the charts.
“Did he, now?” I fold my arms, wanting to call him and rant about all the things I hate about him and that have always annoyed me. The cutting of his toenails in bed, the nose-blowing that rattled the house every morning, his inability to let people finish their sentences, his stupid party coin trick that I fake-laughed at from the first time he did it, his inability to sit down and have an adult conversation about our problems, his constant walking away during our fights . . . Dad interrupts my silent torture of Conor.
“He said you called him in the middle of the night, spurting Latin.”
“Really?” I feel anger surge. “And what did you say?”
He looks out the window as we pick up speed down the runway.
“I told him you made a fine fluent Italian-speaking Viking too.” I see his cheeks lift, and I throw my head back and laugh. All even.
He suddenly grabs my hand. “Thanks for all this, love. I had a
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great time.” He gives my hand a squeeze and goes back to looking out the window as the green of the fields surrounding the runway goes racing by.
He doesn’t let go of my hand, so I rest my head on his shoulder and close my eyes.
u s t i n wa l k s t h r o u g h a r r i va l s at Dublin Airport on J Tuesday morning with his cell phone glued to his ear, listening once again to the sound of Bea’s outgoing message. He sighs when he hears the beep, beyond bored now with her childish behavior.
“Hi, honey, it’s me. Dad. Again. Listen, I know you’re angry with me, and at your age everything is oh-so-very-dramatic, but if you’d just listen to what I have to say, the odds are you’ll agree with me and thank me for it when you’re old and gray. I only want the best for you, and I will not hang up this phone until I have convinced you—” He immediately hangs up. Behind the barricade at arrivals is a man in a dark suit holding a large white placard with Justin’s surname written in large capital letters. Underneath are those two magical words: thank you. Those words have been capturing his attention on billboards, in the newspaper, on the radio, and on television all day and every day, ever since the first note arrived. Whenever the words drift from the lips of a passerby, he does a double take, following them as though hypnotized, as though they contain a special encrypted code just for him. Those words float in the air like the scent of
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freshly cut grass on a summer’s day; more than a smell, they carry with them a feeling, a place, a time, a happiness. They transport him just like a special song from youth, when nostalgia, like the ocean’s tide, sweeps in and catches you on the sand, pulling you in and under when you least expect it, and often when you least want it.
Those words are now constantly in his head. Thank you, thank you, thank you. The more he hears them and rereads the short notes, the more alien they become, as though he is seeing the sequence of those particular letters for the first time in his life—
like how music notes, so familiar, so simple, arranged in a different way become pure masterpieces.
This transformation of everyday common things into something magical, this growing understanding that what he once perceived to be was not at all, reminds him of the times he spent as a child staring at his face in the mirror. As he stood on a footstool so that he could reach, the more intensely he stared, the more his face began to morph into one he was wholly unfamiliar with. In those moments he wondered if he was seeing the real him: eyes farther apart than he’d thought, one eyelid lower than the other, one nostril also ever so slightly lower, the corner of one side of his mouth turning downward, as though there was a line going through one side of his face and dragging everything south, like a knife through sticky chocolate cake. The surface, once smooth, drooped and hung down. A quick glimpse, and it was unnoticeable. Careful analysis, though, before brushing his teeth at night, revealed he wore the face of a stranger.
Now he takes a step back from those two words, circles them a few times, and views them from all angles. Just as with paintings in a gallery, the words themselves dictate the height at which they should be displayed, the position from which they should be best approached and contemplated. He has found the correct angle now. He can now see the weight they hold; they have a sense of t h a n k s f o r t h e m e m o r i e s
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purpose, the strength of beauty and ammunition. Rather than a polite utterance heard a thousand times a day, “Thank you” now has meaning.
Without another thought about Bea, he flips his phone closed and approaches the man holding the sign. “Hello.”
“Mr. Hitchcock?” The six-foot man’s eyebrows are so dark and thick Justin can barely see his eyes.
“Yes,” he says suspiciously. “Is this car for a Justin Hitchcock?”
The man consults a piece of paper in his pocket. “Yes, it is, sir. Is that still you, or does that change things?”
“Ye-es,” he says slowly. “That’s me.”
“You don’t seem so sure,” the driver says, lowering the sign.
“Where are you going this morning?”
“Shouldn’t you know that?”
“I do. But the last time I let somebody in my car as unsure as you, I delivered an animal rights activist directly into an IMFHA meeting.”
Unfamiliar with the initials, Justin asks, “Is that bad?”
“The president of the Irish Masters of Fox Hounds Association thought so. He was stuck at the airport with no car while the lunatic I collected was splashing red paint around the conference room. Let’s just say, in terms of a tip for me, it was what the hounds would call a ‘blank day.’ ”
“Well, I don’t think the hounds would call it anything, necessarily,” Justin jokes, “other than ‘Ooo-ooo.’ ” He lifts his chin and howls into the air, playfully.
The driver stares back blankly, and Justin’s face flushes. “Well, I’m going to the National Gallery.” Pause. “I’m pro-Gallery, by the way. I’m going to talk about painting, not turn people into canvases as a method of venting my frustration. Though if my ex-wife was in the audience, I’d run at her with a paintbrush.” He laughs, and the driver responds with another stony expression.
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“I wasn’t expecting anybody to greet me,” Justin yaps at the driver’s heels as they walk out of the airport into the gray October day. “Nobody at the gallery informed me you’d be here,” he tests him as they hurry across the pedestrian walkway through parachuting raindrops that plummet toward Justin’s head and shoulders.
“I didn’t know about the job until late last night, when I got the call. I was supposed to be going to my wife’s aunt’s funeral today.” They reach the lot, and he roots around his pockets for the car parking ticket and slides it into the machine to validate it.
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” Justin stops wiping away the parachuting raindrop casualties that have landed with a
shplat
on the shoulders of his brown corduroy jacket and looks at the driver grimly, out of respect.
“So was I. I hate funerals.”
“Well, you wouldn’t be alone in thinking that.”
The driver stops walking and turns to face Justin with a look of intensity on his face. “They always give me the giggles,” he says.
“Does that ever happen to you?”
Justin is unsure whether to take him seriously, but the driver doesn’t crack even the slightest smile. Justin thinks back to his father’s funeral, when he was nine years old. The two families huddled together at the graveyard, all dressed head to toe in black like dung beetles around the dirty open hole in the ground where the casket was placed. His dad’s family had flown over from Ireland, bringing with them the rain, which was unconventional for Chicago’s hot summer. They stood beneath umbrellas, he close to his aunt Emelda, who held their umbrella in one hand and the other tightly on his shoulder, Al and his mother beside him under another umbrella. Al had brought along his fire engine, which he played with while the priest talked about their father’s life. This annoyed Justin. In fact, everybody and everything annoyed Justin that day.
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He hated Aunt Emelda’s hand being there, heavy and tight on his shoulder, though he knew she was trying to be helpful. He’d greeted her that morning dressed in his best suit, as his mother had requested in her new quiet voice, which Justin had to lean in closely to hear. Aunt Emelda had pretended to be psychic, just as she always did when they saw each other after long stints apart.
“I know just what you want, little soldier,” she’d said in her strong Cork accent, which Justin could barely understand and sometimes mistook for her breaking out into song. She’d rummaged in her oversize handbag and dug out a toy soldier with a plastic smile and a plastic salute, quickly peeling off the price tag and, with it, the sticker with the soldier’s name, before handing it to him. Justin stared down at Colonel Blank, who saluted him with one hand and held a plastic gun in the other, and immediately mistrusted him. The plastic gun got lost in the heavy pile of black coats by the front door as soon as he’d pulled the package open. As usual, Aunt Emelda’s psychic powers had been tuned into the desires of the wrong nine-year-old boy, for Justin had not wanted this plastic soldier on this day of all days, and he couldn’t help but imagine a young boy across town waiting for a plastic soldier and instead being handed Justin’s father by the tuft of his jet-black hair. But he accepted her gift with a smile as big and sincere as Colonel Blank’s. Later that day, as he stood with her beside the hole in the ground, he thought maybe for once she could read his mind as her hand gripped him tighter, her nails digging into his bony shoulders as though holding him back. For Justin had thought about jumping into that damp, dark hole.
Justin realizes the driver is now staring at him intently. His head moves in close, as though he’s awaiting the answer to a very personal question.
Justin clears his throat and adjusts his eyes to the world of thirty-five years later. Time travel of the mind; a powerful thing.
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“That’s us over there.” The driver presses the button on his keys, and the lights of an S-class Mercedes light up. Justin’s mouth drops. “Do you know who organized this?”
“No idea.” The driver holds one of the back doors open for him.
“I just take the orders from my boss. Thought it was unusual having to write ‘Thank You’ on the sign. Does that make sense to you?”
“Yes, it does but . . . it’s complicated. Could you find out from your boss who’s paying for this?” Justin settles into the backseat of the car and places his briefcase on the floor beside him.
“I could try.”
“That would be great.” I’ll have gotcha then! Justin relaxes into the leather chair, stretches his legs out fully, and closes his eyes, barely able to hold back his smile.
“I’m Thomas, by the way,” the driver introduces himself. “I’m here for you all day, so wherever you want to go after this, just let me know.”
“For the entire day?” Justin almost chokes while sipping from his free bottle of chilled water, which was waiting for him in the hand rest. He saved a rich person’s life. Yes! He should have mentioned more to Bea than just muffins and daily newspapers. A villa in the south of France.
“Would your company not have organized this for you?”
Thomas asks.
“No.” Justin shakes his head. “Definitely not.”
“Maybe you’ve a fairy godmother you don’t know about,”
Thomas says, deadpan.
“Well, let’s see what this pumpkin’s made of.” Justin laughs.
“Won’t get to test it this morning,” Thomas says, braking as they enter Dublin traffic, worsened by the rainy weather. Justin presses a button on the door to heat his seat and feels his back and behind warming. He kicks off his shoes and relaxes in comfort as he watches the miserable faces in the fogged-up windows of the buses gliding past him. t h a n k s f o r t h e m e m o r i e s
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“After the gallery, do you mind bringing me to D’Olier Street?
I need to visit somebody at the blood donor clinic.”
“No problem, boss.”
The October gust huffs and puffs and attempts to blow the last of the leaves off the nearby trees. They hang on tight like the nannies in Mary Poppins, who cling to the lampposts of Cherry Tree Lane in a desperate attempt to prevent their airborne competition from blowing them away from the big Banks job interview. The leaves, like many people this autumn, are not yet ready to let go. They cling on tight to yesterday, putting up a fight before giving up the place that has been their home for two seasons. I watch as one leaf lets go and dances around in the air before falling to the ground. I pick it up and slowly twirl it around by its stalk in my fingers. I’m not fond of autumn. Not fond of watching things so sturdy wither as they lose against nature, the higher power they can’t control.
“Here comes the car,” I comment to Kate.
We’re standing across the main road from the National Gallery, behind the parked cars shaded by the trees rising above and over the gates of Merrion Square.
“You paid for that?” Kate says. “You really are nuts.”
“Tell me something I don’t know. Actually, I paid half. That’s Frankie’s uncle driving—he runs the company. Pretend you don’t know him if he looks over.”
