‘Did you go to the water ever?’
‘Sure,’ his father says. ‘The lakes. In summer.’
‘All of you?’
‘Me, my brother and my mother. And some cousins. We rented a house on the water.’
‘Not your father?’
‘He was working.’
A tradition that Spencer’s father’s father had probably inherited from his own father—pack off the family to the lakes for the summer, while he stayed in the city to swelter and work and pursue whatever recreations grass-widowed men find to occupy themselves. Spencer’s father had followed the same tradition—in the time that Spencer had lived with both his parents, all his holidays were taken with his mother, flying back to England to join the company of her married, unchilded, older sister in dusty guest houses on the South Coast, Hastings, Bournemouth, Weston-super-Mare. And Spencer followed it too: he had never understood the notion of a family holiday; even in the happiest times with Mary and her mother, he had always resisted summers in Walberswick and Tuscany.
Exit 11 offers them the Amboys, Shore Point and the Garden State Parkway, North and South.
‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, that’s where he lived, Perth Amboy,’ Spencer says.
‘Left!’ says his father.
‘You remember? Danny Kaye was in it.’
‘Left! Left!’ wails his father.
‘You used to like Danny Kaye. You remember him?’ ‘For crying out loud!’
And his father grinds his dentures and reaches to grab for the wheel, and Spencer accepts the situation is an urgent one.
‘Oh. I get it. The Parkway? Which direction?’
‘North, sure. Why not? The same way we came,’ his father says, gaining articulacy through derision.
Spencer twists the wheel to the right, a triumph of bravado and fear, forces the Cadillac across the bows of an aged Toyota pick-up, and steers-veers the car into the exit lane.
He quietens his heart as he pays the toll to get on to the Garden State Parkway.
‘I need a leak,’ his father says.
All the rest stops, or at least the two that Spencer misses, timid again at the wheel of his father’s car, unwilling or unable to force a way through the traffic to get to the exit lane, are named for US presidents. He drives past, to his father’s woe, the Jefferson rest stop and then the Reagan.
‘I need a fucking leak! Why are you so dawdle?!’
Spencer eases the car into the slow lane, hunkers over the wheel; he is not going to miss the next exit.
Pulling, finally, into the car park of the pleasingly named Cheesequake Service Area rest stop, Spencer has hardly brought the car to a halt when his father has opened the passenger door and is already setting off for the journey across the tarmac past pick-up trucks and sedans, dragging his oxygen cylinder behind him. Spencer hurriedly secures the car and catches up with his father, who is walking at an impressive pace, arms behind his back, his right hand clutching his withered left wrist, his head down, chin to chest, his eyes glancing up from time to time to check on his direction. Spencer takes hold of the cylinder, opens the door to the rest stop.
‘Do you think there was a President Cheesequake? I don’t remember him.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Just trying to take your mind off your bladder.’
His father moves faster and shakes him off at the men’s-room door. Spencer hooks the oxygen cylinder over his father’s arm and waits for him in the corridor outside.
He looks at the cheque for the first time. The figure matches the correctly spelled words, which doesn’t always happen in the accounting system of his father’s decline. Except: his father has made the amount out for six thousand dollars instead of six hundred.
‘It’s too much,’ he says, showing the cheque to his father upon his unsteady return from the men’s room.
Spencer tries to return the cheque but his father waves it away. He rests for a moment, to gather strength, on the plastic saddle of a mechanical horse that would cost fifty cents to gently rock a child into amusement, before he dourly gets on with the business of wavering towards the café area.
‘Very generous, thank you,’ Spencer says.
He quickly folds the cheque away, as if there were something shameful about it, into the breast pocket of his jacket. Maybe he will keep it as a souvenir, the ironic symbol of the near-possibility of parental help.
Jimmy Ludwig ignores the woman who offers to steer him towards a table. He finds one himself, lowers himself bumpily into a chair and rests his arms expectantly on the Formica tabletop.
‘OK. Let’s go to work.’
‘The backgammon? I left it in the car.’
His father purses his lips. His son has disappointed him, again.
Spencer goes back to the car, retrieves the backgammon set and hesitates for a moment, because he has left the cellphones inside, clearly displayed on the shelf above the glove compartment, then hesitates for a second moment because he has parked the Cadillac, inexpertly, across two bays that are reserved for buses; but there are three stretch limousines parked there too, and a police car, New Jersey State Trooper, beside an Academy bus that announces cheerily that it is an Atlantic City Casino Special!
‘No,’ he says out loud, alarming the line of passengers descending from the bus, most of whom are old, most of whom look poor, all of whom snake away from him.
A few still slumber in the rear seats, faces uncomfortable against the window. He says NO! again, louder this time. He will take this at least from his father, that this is his world and he shall do what he likes.
His father is waiting impatiently in the centre of the eating area. Spencer wonders whether he would pick him out even if he didn’t know him. His father’s pastel-yellow short-sleeved shirt, white windcheater, beige chinos, the large nose and small eyes that can barely contain so much impatience and quiet fury; and Spencer’s burdened heart lifts with love and tenderness for the old man who used, once, to terrify him into tears and a sense of the difficulty, perhaps futility, of accomplishing anything meaningful in the world.
‘Well what do you want? They have burgers, pizzas and, uh, yogurt, by the looks of things.’
His father shrugs. He’s not listening, and he doesn’t care. Even if President Cheesequake himself offered him a pickled cucumber dripping brine and a buttered bagel from the Warsaw streets circa 1939, Spencer’s father would not care. Food is a burden, forced upon him by his wife and now his son.
‘Let’s get to work,’ his father says, and opens up the backgammon set.
‘I’m going to have a burger. Do you want a burger?’
‘Whatever you like, I’m not tired,’ his father says.
Spencer orders cheeseburgers for them both, medium rare, and cups of coffee. When the waitress returns with the coffees, his father, ungraciously, grabs his cup off her tray.
‘Where’s the…?’
‘That’s mine. Yours has got milk.’
‘That’ll put hairs on your chest,’ Spencer’s father says. ‘From the inside.’
He holds out three pink packets of Sweet ‘n’ Lo, which has become an unspoken ritual between them. Spencer’s father has hardly any strength left in his hands. He is unable to tie his shoelaces or button up his shirts or behead the packets of sweetener he laces his coffee with. Spencer twists off the tops of the packets, and Spencer’s father nods, both in gratitude and as a kind of statement of the