Hitchers

strips. I’d given the proceeds—over sixty grand—to Grandma. I felt a little guilty about it now, but when you dispose of dead people’s possessions it’s with the assumption that they’re going to stay dead, so there is no one to hurt, no one who’ll miss those things. Sure, you keep sentimental things, but not ten thousand original comic strips. Besides, he’d only kept them out of spite. He had no use for them, and certainly could have used the cash I could have raised selling them, but when I’d told him they’d bring maybe forty dollars each for the dailies, seventy-five for the Sundays, he’d scowled and asked what I got for a Peanuts original. Peanuts originals sell for twenty thousand and up. He knew that. He’d curled his lip in disgust, said if I couldn’t sell his strips for what they were worth, he’d keep them.

He sat at his drafting table and opened the bottom drawer. It was empty, except for a tattered brown photo album.

“Did you throw everything out?” Grandpa asked. “How long did you wait? A week?” He set the album on the table and flipped it open.

“Hm.” He pinched his nose. “Hello, Mother dear.” His mother was a bland woman who looked like she was sucking on a sourball. He sighed heavily, flipped to the next page, muttering softly to himself. There was a photo of two ruddy boys standing in the mud, each holding a pail. Milking time. One of them must have been Grandpa, the other probably his brother, who died in World War II. He turned the page and grunted. There he was, singing in a pub. My mom once told me Grandpa wanted to become a singer, but once he married Grandma she put an end to that foolishness.

This was a side of him I never got to see, because he’d been angry at me since the day I was born. It was strange that he’d hated me so much, yet loved my twin sister. How many times had I walked past his studio as a child and seen Kayleigh sitting in his lap while he drew? Come here, ya little monkey, ya, he’d say, intercepting Kayleigh as she passed, to comb her hair with a black fifty-cent comb he bought at the barber. That Grandpa was kind to her was one of the few things I’d hated about Kayleigh.

Grandpa rose from the desk, stretched to open the door on a cabinet built above his book shelf. He cursed when he saw it was empty, grabbed the key to the Maserati from the desk and headed for the door.

He’d had a bottle stashed in that cabinet; I remembered coming across it while helping Grandma clean out the room. He was losing his buzz. The life of a closet alcoholic must be tedious—all those trips to procure booze, afraid if you buy a case at a time it will be too obvious.

Grandpa hadn’t checked my watch in a while, but he’d been in control for a long time—it seemed much longer than the last. I was getting anxious. Maybe I wasn’t going to return this time.

My phone rang before he reached the Maserati. He fished it from his pocket and held it up to see who was calling. “It’s your new girlfriend. She’s probably still standing on the street corner where I unloaded her.”

He opened the phone, pressed it to his ear. “What can I do for you, girlie?”

“Finn?” The voice was a swamp creature with no tongue.

“Who’s this?” Grandpa snapped.

“I waited for you. On the bank. But you didn’t come.”

Inside, I wailed. I thrashed and cried.

“Jesus,” Grandpa muttered. “I know that lousy accent, even fresh from the grave.”

“Finn?”

“Welcome to the party, senorita burrito,” Grandpa said. “You’re late, as usual.”

She was here, right here on the phone, and I couldn’t speak to her.

“Grandfather-in-law,” Lorena croaked. Rough and unformed as the words were, the contempt was unmistakable.

“Ahh, I don’t have time for you.” He snapped the phone closed as inside I screamed “no.” She was back. My Lorena.

Instead of returning my phone to his pocket, he examined it in his quavering hands. Poking buttons, he found my phone book and scrolled down the names until he reached Mom.

Again, I was screaming “no,” but I couldn’t reach him as he dialed Mom and brought the phone to his ear.

“Hey,” Mom answered, expecting me.

“Hello, Jenny, me gal.”

Mom laughed tentatively. “That’s not funny.”

“It’s not Finn, Jenny. It’s your father.”

There was a long pause. “Finn, you told me you were better. You’re not, are you?”

Grandpa exhaled into the phone. “Finn doesn’t have no disease, Jenny. He’s got me. I don’t know how it happened, but it did and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”

This was intolerable. I was torn apart by the dual horrors of what he was putting Mom through while simultaneously being kept from Lorena.

I heard computer keys ticking through the phone. “I’m coming up there right now. I’m going to take care of you, sweetie.” She was probably looking up flights. What was he doing? I’d worked so hard to save my mother the agony of witnessing this, now here he was, ruining everything.

“I’ll say it again. This is not Finn. This is your father, who used to sing you ‘Wild Irish Rose’ and ‘Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty’ when you went to bed, who took you to the top of the Empire State Building and put a quarter in the viewer and held you up so you could see.”

“I’m coming, Finn.” She was crying now. “I know you can’t help it.”

“Jenny, don’t you even know your own father? Listen, remember when I used to sing you ‘Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty’?”

“No.”

“Oh yes you do,” Grandpa said. “I know you do. Listen.”

He sang it, carrying a tune like I never could, his resonant Irish brogue coming through despite the graveyard croak, spewing convoluted lyrics I’d never heard from an obscure song that only a man who was Irish and alive seventy-five years ago could possibly know. Mom kept telling him to stop, but he pushed on until she screamed it, prompting Grandpa to pull the phone away from his ear.

“Now Jenny,” Grandpa said in a soothing voice. “Everything’s all right—”

“This isn’t happening. Where is Finn? I want to talk to Finn.”

“He’s safe.”

The connection went dead.

Grandpa cursed, snapped the phone shut. He dragged his hand across his mouth, sighed. “Jenny, Jenny. What are we going to do?”

Finally, finally, I felt tingling in the tips of my fingers, a rush of warmth. I inhaled gratefully. I dialed Lorena while I raced for the car.

She answered on the fourth ring, crying into the phone, unable to speak.

“Lorena?”

“No,” Summer managed.

“Are you all right?”

“No.” She was nearly whispering.

No, she wouldn’t be all right. “I’m on my way. Where are you?”

“At the High Museum. The French Impressionist exhibit.”

I couldn’t stifle a laugh. “You got dumped on a corner by my grandfather and hopped a bus to the High?”

“This is where I go when I feel like I’m drowning.”

I pictured her sitting on one of those incredibly solid wood benches, surrounded by Monets and Gauguins. “I’m going to remember that,” I said. “When everything seems darkest, go to the French Impressionist room at the High.”

“Don’t make fun of me, Finn. I’m hanging by a thread right now.”

“Sorry. I’m on my way.”

As soon as I hung up I called my mother. There were honks and rumbles of traffic in the background

“I’m on my way to the airport.”

“Mom, for God’s sake, don’t come here. This place is a nightmare. They’re all coming out, the voices are coming out. The whole city is going to be filled with dead people.”