Lunch at the Piccadilly: A Novel - Couverture rigide

Older People in Cars

Carl Turnage takes slow, short steps so he won’t get ahead of his aunt Lil. They move along toward her maroon 1989 Oldsmobile sitting in the shade. It’s easy to spot because of the luggage rack on the trunk lid. They are headed to the Piccadilly for lunch, and after that he’ll let her practice-drive in the mall parking lot. Carl has mixed feelings about the driving part. Today will probably be the last time his aunt will ever drive a car—and it’s his job to break that news.

“Is that my car?” she asks. Humped over and thin, she holds to the arms of her walker. She wears gold slippers, tan slacks, Hawaiian shirt, striped jacket, and makeup that stops along her jaw like the border of a country.

“Yes ma’am. I washed it.”

“Well, it looks good.”

“I’ll let you drive it a little bit after we eat.”

He helps her into the passenger seat. Her head seems about as high as the button on the glove compartment. In her three months at Rosehaven Convalescence Center, she seems to have steadily shrunk—from osteoporosis—and has fallen twice but somehow not broken a bone. He folds her walker, and as he lays it in the backseat, her sunglasses drop out of her saddlebag and slide under the passenger seat. He retrieves them.

Back when Carl started driving, Aunt Lil owned a used 1968 Ford Mustang convertible, white with red interior. She let Carl drive it at least one Saturday night a month, as well as to his senior prom.

At the mall they park in their normal spot on top of the big two-deck parking lot.

In the cafeteria line, with tray rails to hold to, Aunt Lil doesn’t need her walker. Carl folds it and takes it on his arm.

This is a long lunch break for Carl. He’s a contractor at Richardson’s Superior Awning and Tile, and sometimes, on simple, straightforward jobs, he leaves his second- in-command, Juan, in charge of the other four or five workers.

Aunt Lil chooses chicken chow mein without rice. He gets it with rice.

Carl’s aunt Sarah, who died last year, once said that stopping driving was the worst thing she’d ever been through, including (1) her husband’s death, (2) her daughter’s divorce—it was a bad one—and (3) watching her dog Skippy get run over. Aunt Sarah was the last living of all his aunts and uncles besides Aunt Lil. She was the one who said that if she’d known she was going to live as long as she did, she’d have bought a new mattress.

Aunt Lil told that story when she bought her new mattress. That was about a month before she fell in her tub, twice on the same night. She managed, after the second fall, to get out of the tub and call Carl on the phone, and that night was the beginning of her downward drift, her gradual failing of mind and body, a decline less abrupt than his mother’s or Aunt Sarah’s.

On Aunt Lil’s tray is a plate of chow mein, a biscuit, a little dish of broccoli with cheese sauce, and iced tea. On Carl’s, chow mein over rice, fried okra, string beans, fries, cucumber salad, pecan pie, and a Diet Coke. At the cash register, Aunt Lil reaches for his little white ticket slip and puts it with hers. She’ll insist that he pay with her MasterCard.

A cafeteria worker carries Aunt Lil’s tray to one of her two favorite tables. Aunt Lil and Carl sit, Carl says the blessing, and they begin eating. He is never quite sure if he should say the blessing when he’s with her. Unlike his mother and Aunt Sarah, Aunt Lil has more or less given up on church. They don’t talk about it. Carl figures that’s one of the things they can talk about sometime, though now that they are the only two left—and now that he too has drifted away from the shore, as that old gospel song says.

He watches her look around for old friends. They talk about normal things. He checks his watch.

“Have you met Mr. Flowers?” she asks. “With that fancy white hair?” She pictures him, the new resident, rolling in his wheelchair out onto the porch—his leg stuck out straight ahead, a big smile on his reddish face. He’s a dandy.

“The one with the knee operation?” asks Carl.

“Yes. The preacher.”

“We talked a little bit the other day.”

“Where did you see him?”

“On the porch. You were with me.”

“On . . . ?” Why doesn’t he speak up?

“On the porch. When you were smoking a cigarette. You know, if you’d let me take you up to the hearing-aid place, I think we could get you fixed up.”

“I can hear okay. People’s talking has just fell off some.”

“I think it’s your hearing that’s fell off some.”

Sometimes, she thinks, he’s almost as bad as his mama used to be—pressing a point. “My hearing’s fine.” She takes a drink of tea. “Somebody said Mr. Flowers is a Baptist, and somebody else said a Pentecostal. He seems to have a little personality—I guess that means he’s a Pentecostal.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know how Baptists are.”

“I know Baptists with personality.”

“You know what I mean.”

“What?”

Aunt Lil laughs. “I don’t know exactly.” She isn’t sure how to talk to Carl about religion. His mama was so devout. Sarah too.

“Mama had personality,” says Carl.

“You know what I mean. Sometimes they seem kind of dead. Baptists. I don’t mean your mama, for goodness’ sakes. And I’m sure there are some lively ones around. Well, I know there are.” Now that Carl’s mama has died, a kind of torch has been handed to her, Lil, though she’d never say that out loud. It’s all connected to her wanting a child and never having had one. Now that only she and Carl are left, maybe she can tell him about that lost boy from Tad’s former marriage, about how Tad tricked her, about how . . . but what good will it do to tell him all that? It’s old stuff, over the dam, spilt milk. It doesn’t matter.

Carl glances at his aunt’s hand to see how steady it is. Within the last year, she’s begun to shake noticeably. The Taylor sisters—his mother, Aunt Sarah, Aunt Lil—practically raised him, the only child among the three of them, and now that he is caring for the last living one, he carries a vague fear that he’s on the brink of a great silence. He can’t quite name his fear, a fear somehow related to the coming loss, probably not too far away, of Aunt Lil, the last person of the generation before him—both sides of his family, aunts and uncles. And he can’t decide how that fear is related, though he feels it is, to the fact that he’s only five feet six and speaks in a relatively high voice. Up into his twenties, he’d been expecting to—had been told that he would—grow taller and speak more deeply, and he had always imagined that when that happened, he would be fully grown up. But it didn’t happen. He stayed relatively short and high-voiced, and now here’s Aunt Lil, perhaps in her last year or two, maybe three. When she dies, his family—all the main ones—will be gone, will be no more. And he’s still not as tall and deep-voiced as he ought to be, had hoped to be.

But maybe—to make things easier when she does die —there’ll be a little money to cushion the blow. His few distant cousins have moved away, he is Aunt Lil’s favorite by far, and she is the only one of the three sisters with money in the bank at the end of her life. But then again, Rosehaven will quickly eat up whatever she has.

The top deck of the two-decker parking lot is about the size of a football field, with a couple of ramps leading down to the ground-level deck below it.

Carl drives—with Aunt Lil in the passenger seat—to the far end of the almost empty lot, away from the mall. He stops, gets out, helps her out of the passenger side, gets the walker from the backseat, then follows along as she pushes it around the back of the car to the driver’s door. He helps her in, opens the back door, folds her walker, and places it inside so nothing will slide out of the saddlebag. From the passenger seat, he hands her the key. She puts it in the ignition, turns it, starts the car right up— it idles fast—and looks around.

That is probably the last time she’ll turn that key, he thinks.

“Where’s the exit?” she says. She seems determined, almost angry.

“We’re just going to drive around up here on top for a few minutes and let you get the feel of things.”

“What?”

“We’re just going to—the brake’s already released—we’re just going to drive around up here on top for a few minutes and let you get the feel of things.”

“I got the feel of things.” She trusts the memory in her hands and feet to do right. It’s been a while, she thinks, but all this is the same as riding a bicycle. Once you get it, you’ve always got it. Carl shouldn’t have waited so long to let her do this. But he was a good boy, all in all—never gave Margaret and Jacob any trouble. And now she doesn’t know what she’d do without him. She’ll show him she can drive as good as he can, as good as anybody can.

She pulls the gear thing into drive, and they’re off—in a big circle. You just steer it, she thinks, and everything falls into place.

“Where’s the exit?” She wants to get out on the highway. Get on with it.

“We’re going to stay up here on top, Aunt Lil. You can drive over toward those other cars if you want to. Maybe a little slower.”

“I want to drive back. I need to get out on the highway.”

“No ma’am, just—”

“There’s a exit!” She swings the car to the left, and whoops!—they’re going down a ramp. And it’s dark. Good gracious.

Carl strains to see straight ahead, right hand on the dash, left reaching to touch the hand brake. Thank goodness the ramp is straight down, not curved. He thinks about pulling up the hand brake but decides against it: she needs to see, to prove to herself, what she cannot do.

The front left tire scrapes the curb. The car stops.

“What’s that?” asks Aunt Lil.

“We drifted left. Let’s pull on straight ahead, on down there beside that column, and I’ll take her back over.” He’ll let her drive down there by herself. And that will be it—the end.

She starts out slowly, drifts right, and runs against the curb again. “What’s wrong?” she asks.

“You keep running up against the curb.”

“Oh.” She looks over at Carl. “Am I driving?”

“Yes, yes. You’re driving. Pull straight down to the bottom and I’ll take back over.”

“I need a little more padding under me. I’m too low in this seat.”

“I don’t think that’s the basic problem, Aunt Lil.”

At the bottom, just off the ramp, she stops the car.

Carl takes a deep breath. This is the time to tell her, he thinks, but . . . “Okay. Put it in park.”

He gets out, opens the back door on the passenger side, gets out her walker. He’s sort of preparing his speech. He wants to make it as easy as possible on her, to kind of set it up so she might make the suggestion herself, set it up in such a way that if she doesn’t take the bait, then he’ll say, Aunt Lil, I think you’re just going to have to give up driving. Simple and straightforward. And then he’ll say something like, I’ll be able to get good money for your car, and then you won’t have to pay for all that insurance and repairs and all that.

As he passes around the back of the car, he sees her head leaning into the middle of the car, looking down at something. Then he notices one of her feet hanging out the open door. “Be sure it’s in par—”

The car is . . . both gold slippers are now hanging out the door, her head is back up, her hands are on the steering wheel—and the car is moving away, like a ship leaving port, her door and the passenger door wide open.

He lifts his hand, opens his mouth.

The car is moving along in a wide circle at about two miles an hour, missing one of those big columns, then another, circling around. He glances down. He’s standing in the damn walker.

Free at last, she’s thinking. Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last. But where in the world did he go? What is he trying to do? Now she’ll have to go back around and get him. She’ll just drive on around in a big circle here. That would be easiest. She doesn’t seem to need to do anything with her feet. There is no clutch in this one, is there? She clearly remembers her Ford Roadster. What a car! Boy, that one had a clutch! How about that time before she and Tad were married when they went to the state fair and she let Tad drive, and the man directing traffic wouldn’t look at them, and Tad just ran the car up against him, so that he ended up sitting on the hood? And what about that time he almost drove it off the high rock at the old quarry? She’s been through the mill with automobiles. That’s for sure. And Carl sure loved that Mustang.

She’ll steer clear of all those big columns and go back and get him, for goodness’ sakes. But why are her feet outside? Well, there’s no need to bring them back in, it looks like.

Carl watches, his mouth open. She seems to be steering. He decides just to stand and wait, because it looks like she might come on back around. Something tells him if he hollers, she’ll try to get out.

Here she comes. He sees the front left headlight as the car turns toward him. Then there is the full front end. The car looks like it’s smiling. Just over the steering wheel he sees the top of her head. Can she see? He sets the walker behind a column, takes a few steps so he’ll be on the driver’s side when she comes by. There are those gold slippers just under the open door. Now he can see her eyes above the steering wheel. Here she comes. Man, this is something. He starts walking beside the open door—breaks into a slow trot, puts his hand on the door. For a second he visualizes himself in the Secret Service.

“You need to put it in park,” he shouts. She’s looking straight ahead, frozen.

Wham! An explosion—and pain. He has run into a column. He staggers backward and then heads out after the car. He runs to the passenger door, jumps in, grabs the hand brake between them, and pulls it up slowly and firmly.

“Where’d you go?” she asks.

“Where’d I go?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t go anywhere.” He touches his head. A bump is rising. He looks at his hand to see if there is any blood. No.

“Well,” she says, “you just disappeared.”

“You drove off without me, Aunt Lil.”

“Why?”

“I . . . That’s a good question. Here. Let me get the keys.” He reaches over, cuts the engine, and pulls the keys from the ignition. He looks at her. Her back is to him. He feels sorry for her, decides they can talk after he gets her to Rosehaven and they’re settled in her room and he has eaten a couple of Tootsie Rolls. She keeps Tootsie Rolls in her blue bowl for everybody who comes in. He buys them for her, along with bananas, apples, and sugar-free candy.

Through a Glass Eye Darkly

On the drive back to Rosehaven, Carl thinks of Anna Guthrie, the social worker there. Maybe he can stop by her office and talk to her—about Aunt Lil and this driving business. She has experience with this sort of thing.

Anna, ten years or so younger than he, is exactly what—or who—or rather the kind of person he can see himself marrying, when he gets around to that, maybe before too long. He stops in and says a few words to her once in a while, words spoken with relaxed vocal cords, dropping the pitch of his voice a good bit—and the topic is always his aunt, of course. He never stays very long, because then he’d have to think up other things to talk about. That’s one reason he’s not married. He doesn’t like to sit with another person through silences, and he also doesn’t like to talk a lot. He pictures himself stopping in and saying to Anna, Let me ask you something: how do you tell them they can’t drive anymore? And then he’d tell her the whole story about the a...

“Graceful and often painfully funny . . . Among the delights here are the smart dialogue, the pointed satire . .. and most of all, the chorus of idiosyncratic, opinionated characters.”
–The New York Times Book Review

“A DECEPTIVELY SIMPLE TALE THAT BRIMS WITH COMPASSION AND WISDOM, weaving laugh-out-loud set pieces with infinitely tender observations about the human condition. . . . Once again, Edgerton has crafted a little treasure of a novel–funny, wistful, packed with truth and humanity.”
–Charlotte Observer

“[A] Southern tale-spinning master . . . The bonus of the novel is its vintage sense of humor–trademark Edgerton–strewn throughout the story.”
–Rocky Mountain News

“[Edgerton’s] characters’ love of life shines in the joy of their talk, which makes even their sorrows glow with art.”
–The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC)

“A vivid and affecting portrait of the way many of us struggle– and, when possible, take comfort–in the real world.”
–People

“A zany tale about old folks and those who love them . . . Honor and respect abide in this gentle tale of the twilight time.”
–Southern Living