Страница 3 из 58
I moved over to Grandma's side of the limousine and told Mom, "Why would I need a key to her apartment?" She could tell that I was zipping up the sleeping bag of myself, and I could tell that she didn't really love me. I knew the truth, which was that if she could have chosen, it would have been my funeral we were driving to. I looked up at the limousine's sunroof, and I imagined the world before there were ceilings, which made me wonder: Does a cave have no ceiling, or is a cave all ceiling? "Maybe you could check with me next time, OK?" "Don't be mad at me," I said, and I reached over Grandma and opened and closed the door's lock a couple of times. "I'm not mad at you," she said. "Not even a little?" "No." "Do you still love me?" It didn't seem like the perfect time to mention that I had already made copies of the key for the deliverer from Pizza Hut, and the UPS person, and also the nice guys from Greenpeace, so they could leave me articles on manatees and other animals that are going extinct when Stan is getting coffee. "I've never loved you more."
"Mom?" "Yes?" "I have a question." "OK." "What are you squeezing in your purse?" She pulled out her hand and opened it, and it was empty. "Just squeezing," she said.
Even though it was an incredibly sad day, she looked so, so beautiful. I kept trying to figure out a way to tell her that, but all of the ways I thought of were weird and wrong. She was wearing the bracelet that I made for her, and that made me feel like one hundred dollars. I love making jewelry for her, because it makes her happy, and making her happy is another one of my raisons d'être.
It isn't anymore, but for a really long time it was my dream to take over the family jewelry business. Dad constantly used to tell me I was too smart for retail. That never made sense to me, because he was smarter than me, so if I was too smart for retail, then he really must have been too smart for retail. I told him that. "First of all," he told me, "I'm not smarter than you, I'm more knowledgeable than you, and that's only because I'm older than you. Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents." "Unless the child is a mental retard," I told him. He didn't have anything to say about that. "You said 'first of all,' so what's second of all?" "Second of all, if I'm so smart, then why am I in retail?" "That's true," I said. And then I thought of something: "But wait a minute, it won't be the family jewelry business if no one in the family is ru
A great game that Dad and I would sometimes play on Sundays was Reco
I spent all day walking around the park, looking for something that might tell me something, but the problem was that I didn't know what I was looking for. I went up to people and asked if they knew anything that I should know, because sometimes Dad would design Reco
That night we ordered General Tso's Gluten for di
Every time the beeps would get close together, I'd tell Grandma to shine the flashlight on the spot. Then I'd put on my white gloves, take the hand shovel from my kit, and dig extremely gently. When I saw something, I used a paintbrush to get rid of the dirt, just like a real archeologist. Even though I only searched a small area of the park that night, I dug up a quarter, and a handful of paper clips, and what I thought was the chain from a lamp that you pull to make the light go on, and a refrigerator magnet for sushi, which I know about, but wish I didn't. I put all of the evidence in a bag and marked on a map where I found it.
When I got home, I examined the evidence in my laboratory under my microscope, one piece at a time: a bent spoon, some screws, a pair of rusty scissors, a toy car, a pen, a key ring, broken glasses for someone with incredibly bad eyes...
I brought them to Dad, who was reading the New York Times at the kitchen table, marking the mistakes with his red pen. "Here's what I've found," I said, pushing my pussy off the table with the tray of evidence. Dad looked at it and nodded. I asked, "So?" He shrugged his shoulders like he had no idea what I was talking about, and he went back to the paper. "Can't you even tell me if I'm on the right track?" Buckminster purred, and Dad shrugged his shoulders again. "But if you don't tell me anything, how can I ever be right?" He circled something in an article and said, "Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?"
He got up to get a drink of water, and I examined what he'd circled on the page, because that's how tricky he could be. It was in an article about the girl who had disappeared, and how everyone thought the congressman who was humping her had killed her. A few months later they found her body in Rock Creek Park, which is in Washington, D.C., but by then everything was different, and no one cared anymore, except for her parents.
It wasn't a mistake! It was a message to me!
I went back to the park every night for the next three nights. I dug up a hair clip, and a roll of pe