He stopped at the bottom of the porch steps, listening for Bowser around on Colony Street. There was nothing. Bowser had gone to sleep. It was a miracle. Smiling wanly, Bobby got moving again. His mother must have heard the creak of the second porch step—it was pretty loud—because she cried out his name and then there was the sound of her running footsteps. He was on the porch when the door flew open and she ran out, still dressed in the clothes she had been wearing when she came home from Providence. Her hair hung around her face in wild curls and tangles.
“Bobby!” she cried. “Bobby, oh Bobby! Thank God! Thank God!”
She swept him up, turning him around and around in a kind of dance, her tears wetting one side of his face.
“I wouldn’t take their money,” she babbled. “They called me back and asked for the address so they could send a check and I said never mind, it was a mistake, I was hurt and upset, I said no, Bobby, I said no, I said I didn’t want their money.”
Bobby saw she was lying. Someone had pushed an envelope with her name on it under the foyer door. Not a check, three hundred dol-lars in cash. Three hundred dollars for the return of their best Breaker; three hundred lousy rocks. They were even bigger cheap-skates than she was.
“I said I didn’t want it, did you hear me?”
Carrying him into the apartment now. He weighed almost a hun-dred pounds and was too heavy for her but she carried him anyway. As she babbled on, Bobby realized they wouldn’t have the police to con-tend with, at least; she hadn’t called them. Mostly she had just been sitting here, plucking at her wrinkled skirt and praying incoherently that he would come home. She loved him. That beat in her mind like the wings of a bird trapped in a barn. She loved him. It didn’t help much . . . but it helped a little. Even if it was a trap, it helped a little.
“I said I didn’t want it, we didn’t need it, they could keep their money. I said . . . I told them . . .”
“That’s good, Mom,” he said. “That’s good. Put me down.”
“Where have you been? Are you all right? Are you hungry?”
He answered her questions back to front. “I’m hungry, yeah, but I’m fine. I went to Bridgeport. I got this.”
He reached into his pants pocket and brought out the remains of the Bike Fund money. His ones and change were mixed into a messy green wad of tens and twenties and fifties. His mother stared at the money as it rained down on the endtable by the sofa, her good eye growing big-ger and bigger until Bobby was afraid it might tumble right out of her face. The other eye remained squinched down in its thundercloud of blue-black flesh. She looked like a battered old pirate gloating over freshly unburied treasure, an image Bobby could have done without . . . and one which never entirely left him during the fifteen years between that night and the night of her death. Yet some new and not particu-larly pleasant part of him
“Bobby,” she whispered in a trembly voice. She looked like a pirate and sounded like a winning contestant on that Bill Cullen show,
“Ted’s bet,” Bobby said. “T his is the payout.”
“But Ted . . . won’t he—”
“He won’t need it anymore.”
Liz winced as if one of her bruises had suddenly twinged. Then she began sweeping the money together, sorting the bills even as she did so. “I’m going to get you that bike,” she said. Her fingers moved with the speed of an experienced three-card monte dealer.
“I don’t want a bike,” he said. “Not from that. And not from you.”
She froze with her hands full of money and he felt her rage bloom at once, something red and electrical. “No thanks from you, are there? I was a fool to ever expect any. God damn you if you’re not the spitting image of your father!” She drew back her hand again with the fingers open. The difference this time was that he knew it was coming. She had blindsided him for the last time.
“How would you know?” Bobby asked. “You’ve told so many lies about him you don’t remember the truth.”
And this was so. He had looked into her and there was almost no Randall Garfield there, only a box with his name on it . . . his name and a faded image that could have been almost anyone. This was the box where she kept the things that hurt her. She didn’t remember about how he liked that Jo Stafford song; didn’t remember (if she had ever known) that Randy Garfield had been a real sweetie who’d give you the shirt right off his back. There was no room for things like that in the box she kept. Bobby thought it must be awful to need a box like that.
“He wouldn’t buy a drunk a drink,” he said. “Did you know that?”
“What are you
“You can’t make me hate him . . . and you can’t make me into him.” He turned his right hand into a fist and cocked it by the side of his head. “I won’t be his ghost. Tell yourself as many lies as you want to about the bills he didn’t pay and the insurance policy he lost out on and all the inside straights he tried to fill, but don’t tell them to me. Not anymore.”
“Don’t raise your hand to me, Bobby-O. Don’t you ever raise your hand to me.”
In answer he held up his other hand, also fisted. “Come on. You want to hit me? I’ll hit you back. You can have some more. Only this time you’ll deserve it. Come on.”
She faltered. He could feel her rage dissipating as fast as it had come, and what replaced it was a terrible blackness. In it, he saw, was fear. Fear of her son, fear that he might hurt her. Not tonight, no— not with those grimy little-boy fists. But little boys grew up.
And was he so much better than her that he could look down his nose and give her the old la-de-dah? Was he
