The Little Old Lady, Part 5

Chapter Five.

The little old lady said nothing as she followed her son to the elevators. She said nothing when the doors closed and she felt all her organs drop an inch as the elevator jolted upwards. And she said nothing when she reached the door of her apartment.

She fished in her pocket for her keys like a person in a dream. She blinked slowly, her lashes rising and falling as if in slow motion, as she turned the knob and pushed the door in on its hinges. Tommy pushed it shut again behind them once they were inside. The little old lady looked around at her apartment. Her jaw was still tightly clenched, and she made no move to begin collecting her things.

“You just need the stuff for one night. We'll come back tomorrow,” Tommy said over the little old lady's shoulder. She nodded, and started for her bedroom. Her son let her go, and went to sit on the white couch in front of the old TV.

He crossed one leg over the other and laid both hands on his calf. His hair was brown and wavy, combed back but still showing signs of rebellion. His eyes were a brown so light it was almost hazel. He'd been a lacrosse player in high school and in college, and he still hulked with muscle under his khakis and blazer. He wore a striped Oxford shirt, tucked into his khakis and unbuttoned at the collar. He'd always been an All-American kind of boy, and he'd turned into an All-American kind of man. His two children, a son and a daughter, and his job at the app-development firm kept him busy nearly every day. It had never been from lack of care that he failed to call or visit his mother much. He just had a lot on his plate, these days, he thought to himself. But he still felt bad, sitting there waiting for his mother to collect her things before the lawyers from some property development company kicked her out of the place she'd called home for more than a decade. How had all this come to pass, and so quickly? He didn't have much of the story. All he knew was that a man from Mistview had called to say that his mother was going to be evicted from her apartment, and that he had better come down, because rumor had it that the old lady was not going to take the news well. He'd left work early to make it here on time.

His mother emerged from her bedroom with a leather travel case slung over her shoulder. She still said nothing.

“Ready to go?” Tommy said. The little old lady just stared at him. He could see the muscles in her jaw pulled tight. So instead of pressing her for an answer, he just stood up from the couch. He looked at her a momennt, to make sure that there was nothing else she wanted to get before she left, and then he started for the door. When he glanced back, she was following a few paces behind him. He opened the door to the apartment, and stood beside it, letting his mother go first. She stood unmoving for a long moment, then stepped over the threshold without looking back. Tommy followed, pulling the door closed behind him.

“Want to lock up?” he said. His mother just stared at him. Finally, he shrugged and started for the elevator, and she followed him.

He took her down the stone steps and one block over, the closest he'd been able to park. He opened the passenger door to his Range Rover for his mother, and took the bag from her. She let it fall from her shoulder when he took the strap in his hand. It was light—lighter than he'd expected. He wondered what she'd decided to bring. Apparently she'd taken seriously his promise that they'd return the next day. Hefting her travel case, he thought they'd probably have to.

Feels like maybe a toothbrush and not much else, Tommy thought as he opened the back door to set the travel case on the floor. He glanced up and down the street to check for traffic, then ventured out into the street to climb in the driver's seat and start the car.

The little old lady didn't speak all the way to Tommy's house, all the way down Colorado Boulevard at the far end of town. At the back of an upper-middle-class subdivision, this was the less-developed end of Pasadena. Trees grew beside the road instead of bus stops. Middle-aged men in t-shirts mowed their lawns and drank beer on their porches on the weekends, and waved to each other in the heat of the day.

Houses passed out either window of the Range Rover as Tommy made his careful way towards the back of the neighborhood. He raised a hand in greeting a few times, first to a man walking two dalmatians, then to a teenager on a bike. Both waved back, glancing smiles towards the familiar Range Rover.

The little old lady stared at the dashboard in front of her, paying her son's smiles and waves no mind.

Tommy pulled the Range Rover into the driveway of his house. It was a low, long thing, done in a ranch style. A low stucco wall came halfway down one side of the driveway, enclosing the half of the front yard that sat closest to the house. A sidewalk ran from the driveway along the wall, then turned in towards the house, where it passed through a wrought-iron gate on its way to Tommy's front door.

There was a silver Ford sedan parked in the driveway.

“Looks like Tommy Jr.'s home,” Tommy said. The little old lady still said nothing. She just stared at the dashboard, as she had the entire ride. There was a moment, as Tommy sat in the driver's seat of his Range Rover, looking over at his mother. She didn't even seem to have noticed that the ride had come to an end, and that it was time to get out of the car and head inside.

He opened his mouth, as if to say something, then closed it again and got out of the car. He came around behind it to open the back door and get his mother's travel case from the back seat. The little old lady still sat in the passenger's seat, apparently unmoving.

Shouldering the travel case, he swung the back door closed and came up to open the passenger door. His mother finally looked up when he did, and slid down onto the driveway. She headed up the walk toward the front door in a slow, shuffling step. Tommy closed her door and came up the walk after her. She pushed the wrought-iron gate open when she reached it, and it swung open with a squeal of hinges. It was spring-loaded, so Tommy had to put out a hand when he reached it, to stop it closing on him.

His mother was standing by the front door, still staring at nothing, when Tommy reached it.

"It's open," he said, and she reached for the handle. She twisted the knob and pushed inside. Tommy followed.

The front door opened onto a generous foyer, beyond which the living room was visible; a few couches, a large TV, and windows that looked out over the pool in the back yard. Off to the right was the kitchen. That was where Tommy headed with the travel bag. As in so many houses for so many hundreds of years, the kitchen served as the beating heart of the household.

Tommy put the travel bag down on the kitchen table, and turned to face his mother, who stood a few paces away, near the entrance to the kitchen. She had stopped staring at the nothingness of empty space, and now stared at him, instead.

"Look, Mom, I know you've had a rough day; but try and look up, okay? What happened happened. There's nothing we can do about it now. Let's get you something to eat, then I'll get you set up in the guest room, and we'll get started collecting your stuff and finding you a new place tomorrow, 'kay?"

He saw his mother sigh. He thought he saw tears begin to well up in her eyes again. To stave off another spate of crying, he tried to ply her with food.

"C'mon," he said. "I'll make you anything you want. If we don't have it, I'll even go to the store. How could you say no to an offer like that, huh?"

The little old lady stared at a place somewhere to the left of his knees, and for a moment said nothing at all. Finally, she looked up, her eyes seeming to brighten for the first time since Bradley Knowles and Thornton Hayweather had pushed their fateful documents across Mr. Barnes' desk.

"Pancakes," she said. "With real syrup and a square of butter right in the middle."

"Oh… kay," Tommy said. It was clearly not the kind of answer he'd expected, but he went over to the refrigerator, a big stainless steel thing three times the size of his mother's, and opened it to rummage around for ingredients.

"Real pancakes," he heard his mother say behind him. "Not any of that stuff out of a box."

"Alright, alright," Tommy said consolingly. "Real pancakes, coming right up. You can go sit in the living room and watch TV if you want. Or, whatever. Tommy Jr. is around somewhere, too." He had closed the refrigerator after realizing that he did not, off the top of his head at least, know how to make real pancakes. He snatched a little wicker basket from the counter. It held a whole book's worth of wrinkled slips of paper. He rifled through them, hoping against hope that his wife had at some point put a pancake recipe in it. "You want me to tell him to come down? I know you haven't seem him in quite a while."

He looked up when he heard no answer. Turning around, he saw no sign of his mother. Still carrying the wicker basket, he peeked into the living room. His mother was sitting on the couch, her legs drawn together and her hands folded on her knees. She was watching TV, alright--but she had neglected to turn it on. She stared at the big black screen, breathing silently.

Tommy bit his lip. But he supposed he couldn't force her to feel better; all he could do was try and take care of her. So he went wandering back into the kitchen, rifling all the while through the recipes in the wicker basket. He was increasingly sure that he was not going to find a pancake recipe. And he was just a few years too old to consider searching the Internet for a recipe--at least at first.

It wasn't until he had searched nearly every recipe in the basket that the idea finally hit him. He grabbed the tablet computer that sat on the breakfast bar--for once, it was where it was supposed to be, dutifully charging on the outlet set into the kitchen side of the bar--and went looking for a good recipe.

Half an hour later, the smell of cooking pancakes rose through the kitchen. The smell brought Tommy Jr. down from his bedroom, sniffing the air and frowning.

"... Dad?" he said, standing in the kitchen doorway. "Why does it smell like breakfast in here?"

"Because, Tommy, we're having pancakes for dinner tonight."

"Oh… kay," Tommy Jr. said. "It's weird enough that you're cooking. Even weirder that it's pancakes. Where's Mom?"

"She'll be home any minute. I'm sure she'll be pleased to learn that she's off the hook for dinner tonight."

"Yeah, but she's gonna think it's weird that dinner is pancakes."

"Your grandmother is here, by the way."

"Ohhh…" Tommy Jr. said, understanding beginning to dawn. "This is why you're cooking pancakes?"

"Yeah. That's what she said she wanted. She's had a really bad day, they sold her apartment building and now she has to find a new place to live. She's sitting in the living room; why don't you go say hi? I know she's missed you, and it's been a long time since you've seen her."

"Okay, sure," Tommy Jr. said, still regarding his father and the frying pancakes with suspicion.

"How many pancakes you want?" he called after his vanishing son.

"Uhh… however many. Just throw some on the grill. I'll eat whatever," Tommy Jr. called back. Tommy didn't hear from his son or his mother until the pancakes were steaming on a plate and headed for the table. His wife arrived about the time the pancakes came off the grill. She, too, came into the kitchen sniffing and frowning. She held shopping bags in each hand, but she set them down when she saw her husband standing in front of the range, flipping golden pancakes onto a plate.

"Tom?" she said. "Why… what…? What are you doing?"

"I'm cookin' up some pancakes," Tommy said, trying to sound chipper. But he came on too strong, and his wife immediately knew something was awry.

"What's wrong? What did you do?" she said, instantly suspicious. Not that Tommy was a bad guy; she was just a naturally suspicious lady.

"Nothing's wrong… all I did was go pick up my mother from her apartment complex."

"What? Why?" Suspicion morphed into alarm.

"It's a long story. The pancakes are done, though. I made you four. Is that gonna be enough?"

"I don't really want any pancakes. I was going to make steaks, actually. But I guess you decided to take… to take matters into your own hands, huh?"

"Grace… my mother is completely despondent in there. I told her to go watch TV; she went in there and stared at the blank screen. I promise I'll explain later; can you please just go tell her and Tommy that dinner is ready?"

Grace, shaking her head, whirled on her heels and tapped into the living room.

"Hey, Eunice!" she said, suddenly living up to her name. "How are you?"

Tommy heard the non-response he expected from his mother.

"Tommy told me you had a real rough day today. Anyway, guys, dinner's ready. I guess we're… having pancakes."

"C'mon, Grandma," he heard Tommy Jr. saying. A moment later, all three reappeared in the kitchen.

"You probably want to set the table, huh?" Grace said. "Tom Jr., can you take care of that, please? You can sit right here, Mom."

'Mom' apparently did as she was bid; behind him, Tommy heard the scrape of a chair on the hardwood, heard Grace pretending to fuss over his mother.

By the time Tommy made it to the table with the steaming pile of pancakes, Tommy Jr. had gotten the table ready. His mother sat in the seat normally occupied by Tommy's daughter, Sara, whenever she was home from school--which was less and less these days, sadly.

He flipped pancakes onto each plate in turn, starting with his mother, who was holding her fork and knife, but seemed only to stare at her pancakes when they were put in front of her.

"Oh yeah," Tommy said, setting the plate down and leaping back towards the kitchen. "Syrup."

He pulled the syrup out of the microwave, but almost burned himself and spilled the syrup everywhere when he went to grab the glass with his bare hand. It took two dish towels and all the strength he had to get it down onto the counter. He was hoo-hahing and waving his hand back and forth by the time he got it down.

"You left it in there way too long," Grace said from her place at the table. "You want me to get the butter?"

"No, no--I've got it," Tommy said. He'd completely forgotten about the butter. A moment of panic rose in him as he wondered if there was any butter in the fridge.

There was. He thanked his lucky stars as he slipped it out of the fridge and set it down in the middle of the table. Then he went back for the syrup, which had cooled quickly on the counter.

"I really hope we never get divorced," Grace said as she drizzled syrup onto her pancakes. "Because you'd be completely lost."

"Hey, I got the pancakes made, didn't I? Right, Mom?"

The little old lady was still holding her fork and knife, and staring down at her plate. Tommy had poured syrup over the pancakes, then set a perfect tablespoon-sized square of butter on top. It rested there happily, a testament to the symmetry and beauty of breakfast food. Had it been any other day, the little old lady would have jumped for joy at having her old problem solved, then felt frustrated with herself for not having thought of that a long time ago.

As it was, she just stared. And said nothing. It wasn't long before things started to get awkward.

"So, Mom," Grace said, a little too sweetly. "Tom says you've had a pretty rough day. What's been goin' on?"

The little old lady appeared not to have heard.

"She's been pretty quiet the whole time," Tommy Jr. offered helpfully. "She seemed to like hearing about school, though."

"I hope you weren't boring her with a thousand stories about kids she's never met," Grace said, pointing at him with a fork bearing a piece of pancake. "Nobody knows who Wilson is, or why it's so weird that he's going out with Lauren."

"Okay, first of all," Tommy Jr. said around a mouth full of pancakes, "Wilson is going out with Amy. And everybody hates Lauren. Wilson would never, ever date…"

"This is exactly what I'm talking about. Has he been torturing you, Mom?" Grace said, leaning over to put her hand on the little old lady's.

This, too, elicited no response. She just stared into her pancakes, like maybe she'd see a vision of her future if she just stared hard enough.

"She's had a rough time," Tommy said. "Just let her do her thing. She'll feel better soon enough."

Grace and Tommy Jr. cleaned up after dinner, while Tommy Sr. went to get his mother set up in the guest room. He set her travel pack down, turned down the bed--which hadn't been used in over six months--and put a new roll of toilet paper in the guest bathroom--also unused and for almost as long. The little old lady sat down on the bed, sighed again… and remained silent.

"Okay, Mom--the TV remote's on the night stand, and you can just come down and holler at me if you need anything else, okay? We'll get started fixing things up tomorrow." And with that, he went out the door and pulled it shut after him, leaving the little old lady alone for the first time since she lost her apartment.

Tommy was just in the middle of breathing a sigh of relief when he looked up to see Grace, hands on hips, standing in front of him.

"Okay, Tom," she said. "What's going on?" Skinny blonde women don't always look intimidating when they're being nice, but when their claws come out, they can be among the scariest of all. Grace was just such a woman. An interior decorator by trade, she seemed to have only two settings: "ingratiate," and "slaughter."

It was clear which setting she was on tonight.

"Okay, here's the deal. She got evicted from her apartment today. They called me down there to go get her, because she doesn't have anywhere else to go. Pretty much all of her friends are dead; Dad's been gone for years. She just needs a place to stay until I can find her somewhere else she'll agree to live. She's gotten really particular in her old age; you know that."

"She's staying here? I don't know what's gotten into you that you think that's a good idea," Grace said, shaking her head as if Tommy had suggested that they sell their house and become Bedouins.

"Tom, I bring clients here. You know, that thing I do all day that puts half the food on the table and pays for half of Sara's college tuition? I know you have no respect for what I do for a living, but it happens to be very profitable, so…"

"Grace," Tommy said, putting out his hands as if to catch her when she rushed him, "it's just for a few days, maybe a week or two at most."

"And what's wrong with her, anyway? You'd think she just got out of Dachau, the way she stared at her food like that. She demands pancakes; you make her pancakes. And she says 'thank you' by not even touching them? Is that what we have to look forward to while she's here?"

"She's depressed! You should have seen her earlier today. It was the complete opposite; I promise you that."

"And how did she get evicted, anyway? Doesn't she have a pension? Your Dad fought in Vietnam, right? What about the VA or whoever--aren't they supposed to take care of crazy old women whose husbands fought in wars?"

"Hey, now… this is my mother we're talking about, here. She didn't get evicted for not paying rent. She got evicted because her landlord sold the building out from under her."

"How is that legal? This whole story stinks. What about squatters' rights, or tenants' rights, or whatever it's called? I can't have this right now, Tom; I just can't…"

The little old lady listened as the argument went on. She'd let out a sigh every minute or so, then blink slowly, and sigh again.

As the voices downstairs rose in volume and intensity, the little old lady decided to go somewhere quieter. She didn't want to be a bother to anybody, least of all her son's wife. She was a nice girl--most of the time. So the little old lady came creeping out of the guest room, and headed down the stairs, looking for somewhere she could hide.

What she found was the garage door, past the darkened living room. Tom and Grace were shouting at each other by the time she reached the bottom of the stairs, so they never heard her soft, barefoot tread on the hardwood floor. She slipped out into the darkened garage, and closed the door behind her.

It was almost pitch dark in the garage, so she felt around with her hands to keep from running into anything. She felt the metal of a car hood; she slid around to the far side of it, then sank down to a sitting position with her back against the passenger door of the car. She could still hear the shouting, but it was harder to make out what her son and his wife were saying. She sighed again, staring at the indistinct shapes lurking in the darkness.

All at once, the emotion coagulating in the pit of her stomach roiled, and came spilling out of her. Visions of her old apartment, of Mr. Barnes, of the fateful contract those two boys in suits had passed him, all of these things roved before her eyes in the blackness, and she put her head down into her hands and began to sob. She heaved, every intake of breath catching on a little bit of the ball of emotion down deep inside her, every exhale sending it hurling onto the floor in front of her face.

She stayed like that for a long time. Still she saw her apartment. She saw all the tenants they'd found. She heard again Mr. Barnes tell the story of how the clean-cut girl from the band of hippies had gotten them all into trouble when she used her parents' credit card to get herself a new home. All she felt was sorry for all of them. Even Mr. Barnes, when you really thought about it. The poor guy had never asked for any of this.

But she felt the most sorry for herself, truth be told. Sitting here in the darkness while her son's wife spit poison in his face for giving her a place to stay. She remembered the first time Mr. Barnes had mentioned selling the building--that vision of her, wandering forlorn and alone, with nowhere to go and no one to love her. It came back, now, but this time, it seemed to be coming true.

Then, all at once, she was expended. The tears just suddenly stopped coming. Her breathing relaxed, grew quiet, and then she was sitting silent in the darkness again, feeling as though some of the weight that had been sitting on her chest all day had been lifted. She sniffed one time; a chill took her, and she shivered.

She put her hand on one fist. She had her knees drawn halfway up to her chest, and she put her elbow on a thigh. It was a little chilly in the garage, but she didn't much mind. For the first time since she'd come into Mr. Barnes' office with that terrible feeling that something was wrong, her thoughts seemed to have calmed down.

A frown creased her face, though, when she realized that there was a shape in front of her. Whether she had only now noticed it because her eyes were finally adjusting to the darkness, or because her attention had been freed to wander a bit, she didn't know. But something about the shape made her curious. It was long and low, like many other sedans. But there was something a little unusual about its shape.

She swiveled on one hip until she was on her hands and knees. She crawled towards the shape in front of her until she nearly bumped her face on it. It was hard to judge distance in the low light. She put up a hand to feel it; she felt something soft, that gave when she touched it. But it had a roughness to it, as well, and there was something hard beneath it. She stood up, and feeling her way through the darkness, finally found the light switch by the garage door. She flicked it, and when the single incandescent bulb sputtered to life above her, her frown deepened.

What she saw was the shape of a car under a light brown dust cover. She walked over to it, bent down, and with a single finger lifted the dust cover an inch or two from the ground.

Beneath, she saw a scarlet sparkle that tickled something in the back of her head. Taking a step back, she grabbed two handfuls of dust cover and threw it back over the car's roof. Beneath, she saw something she instantly recognized. It was a shiny red super-stock Dodge, almost as old as she was, but painstakingly restored to all its resplendent glory.

All at once and without warning, memory flooded her. She closed her eyes as the decades fell away, and she was young again. The wind through the windows. The smell of a Lucky Strike. Her breath leaving her as an engine roared and the world out the windows lost all definition. A boy in a leather jacket grinning and laughing as he worked the gearshift. The feeling of being pushed back into her seat as if she were not riding in a car on a highway through Los Angeles County but instead in a spaceship finally cleared to engage its rockets and lift off for the moon. Ice cream. A mountain. The prickle of scraggly whiskers on her cheek. A boy in a Marine uniform, appearing at her front door without warning, standing ramrod-straight and holding his white cap under one arm. A entire lifetime passed in an instant behind her eyelids.

Suddenly, there remained not a trace of the woman who'd sat crying on the cold concrete floor only a moment before.

She opened her eyes, returning to the present. She realized that she was grinning.

She reached up to pull the dust cover down over the car, and headed back through the garage towards the door, stopping only to flick the light switch down when she reached it. Bathed again in darkness, she twisted the knob slowly, pushed the door gently. She tiptoed through the house, now dark and silent, and made her way back upstairs to her room. She opened her travel case, carefully removed the tray of gardenias, and rummage around with one hand until she felt the silk of her nightgown. Tossing her clothes aside, she slid it over her head and crawled into the bed.

She just couldn't stop smiling.