The Joyce Maynard Collection by Joyce Maynard Page B

down her back. Also, he smelled like furnaces. And in spite of how clear she made it, that she wasn’t interested, he had still tried to kiss her before she got out of the car.
    I didn’t think this was my type of thing, but I thought it was only fair to give it a try, she said. Now I know, I have no interest in dating.
    What interested my mother was romance. The kind of person for my mother—if such a person existed—would be unlikely to show up at the Loyal Order of the Moose.
    T HIS BEING L ABOR D AY WEEKEND , Frank said he thought we should barbecue. The problem was, we had no meat in the freezer besides Meal in Minutes dinners and Cap’n Andy fish.
    I want to buy you dinner, he said. Only I’ve got this cash flow problem.
    We had a lot of ten-dollar bills in the Ritz crackers box my mother kept on top of the refrigerator, from my last run to the bank. She took down three of them. It was unusual for my mother to take the car out more than once every few weeks, but now she said we could drive to the store.
    I guess you would want to come along, she told Frank. To make sure we don’t try a getaway.
    Nobody laughed when she said this. Part of the odd, slightly uncomfortable feeling I had with the situation here was the way I could never be 100 percent sure who Frank was to us. He seemed like a guest we had invited over, like company that comes from out of town, but there was this other part, too, that all three of us knew, which was how he came to be with us in the first place.
    That morning, when she’d come down in her flowered blouse, with her hair all fluffy, he had told her—after setting the coffee at her place, and the biscuits—not to try anything funny here.
    I don’t want to have to do anything we’d both regret, he said. You know what I’m talking about, Adele.
    His words sounded almost like something from an old movie, a western, like what you’d see on TV on a Sunday afternoon. Still, my mother had nodded then, lowered her eyes to the table, like a kid at my school when the teacher tells them to get rid of their gum.
    After he’d made the pie, he had slipped the paring knife in his pocket. Our sharpest one. The silk scarves were still out, draped over a dishtowel next to the sink. He hadn’t tied her up again since that first time, but now he gestured with his head in their direction, as if no further explanation was necessary, which it wasn’t, evidently, for the two of them. Only for me.
    I lived here. She was my mother. Still I felt like an interloper. Something was happening here that I wasn’t sure I should be seeing.
    He drove. She sat next to him. I sat in the backseat, that we’d never used as long as I could remember. This is how it is in a regular family, I thought. The mom, the dad, the kid. This was how my father liked to think we were, when he and Marjorie and his new kids came to pick me up, except on those nights all I wanted was to have it be over, where now having it be over was what I dreaded. I could only see the back of her head, but I knew if I could see my mother’s face, she’d have that expression I was so unfamiliar with. Like she was happy.
    As we headed into town, nobody referred to the fact that the police were looking for Frank, but I was nervous. He was wearing his baseball cap, and it seemed to me he’d taken the extra precaution of pushing the brim lower than normal over his forehead. But I also knew that his main disguise was just having us with him. Nobody on the lookout for Frank was expecting a woman and a kid to be with him. And anyway, he would stay in the car. His limp was still pretty noticeable.
    When we got to the supermarket parking lot, my mother handed me the bills. Frank ran over the list of things he needed: ground beef, chips, ice cream for the pie. An onion and some potatoes, for soup, Frank said.
    I need a razor, he said. He preferred a straight razor, but no way were they