Chapter 14

"Have I been an insufferable prick for the last ten years?" Will asked his mother as they drove across the Memorial Bridge into New Hampshire. It was well before dawn—they had left Augusta at four in the morning—and he had sipped an entire twenty-ounce cup of cappuccino to infuse himself with some caffeine.

"Not exactly," Kate answered after a moment of consideration. She gave him a guarded look, but there was the faintest hint of a smile playing in the corners of her mouth.

"But kind of, sort of?" he pressed.

"Well, sometimes. Especially towards your brother, but you know that just as well as I do. You don't need me to tell you that, do you?"

"Not exactly," he conceded, using her exact tone of voice, and she laughed softly.

"You give a guy a bag of money and tell him he's the cream of the crop in his profession, and it'll go to his head," Will continued. "I was a complete shithead when I was in my twenties, and the stupid medal made it ten times worse."

"I didn't really get to see you all that much back then," Kate said. "You were always on the road on one of your research trips. Don't tell me you really went to Ireland and New Zealand and all those other places to get ideas for another book."

"Hardly," Will chuckled. "I was mainly researching booze and women, to tell you the truth. Never did have to look far for either."

"I figured as much," Kate said. "For a while there, I thought you'd take after your father, you know."

Will's dad had won fifty thousand dollars on a lottery ticket he'd bought at a gas station on the way home from work three days before Will's twelfth birthday. Ed Liebkind had decided on the spot that a wife and two sons were too much of a weight around his neck, filled up the family's Dodge Dart, and then headed south to Key West. At the time, nobody had known where he'd gone, of course, and it was only after his dad contacted Will after reading about the Nobel prize and its attendant monetary component almost two decades later that Will learned where his father had steered the Dodge on that September night in 1982. Ed Liebkind was a smooth enough talker to convince Will to meet him at the Howard Johnson's at the Bangor airport, but the meeting had been less than productive. Will had been aghast at the deteriorated appearance of his father, who by then had looked nothing like the picture Will had kept in his memory. Whatever Ed had spent his winnings on in Key West, dental care and hygiene had not been a priority for him. During their strained conversation over dinner, Ed had told his son matter-of-factly that he had lung cancer, which may have had something to do with the two packs he'd been smoking daily since his Army service. He'd wasted no time hitting Will up for a loan—actually, more of a grant, since the word 'loan' implied some sort of payback schedule—and Will had made it clear that the only money his father would see out of him was the balance for the dinner tab that evening. Ed Liebkind had shrugged in a noncommittal and un-offended sort of shrug that said 'no harm done', and that was the last Will had seen of his father before hearing of his death less than two years later. He was buried in a welfare plot in some coastal town near Fort Myers, and Will would have had no desire to visit the grave even if it hadn't been an unmarked plot.

"That's pretty harsh, mom," Will said. "I didn't leave my family to drink Coronas on the beach at Key West for ten years."

"No," Kate conceded. "But I think I got to see you three times a year at the most for the last ten years, so it was all the same in the end, don't you think?"

"I wasn't that bad," he protested weakly. "I was on the road a lot, you know."

"You just admitted that it was more by choice, Will. Besides, I didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday. I had a pretty good idea that you were banging everything in a skirt."

Will almost choked on his cappuccino at his mother's statement. He coughed as he placed the paper cup back in the cup holder, and gave Kate an accusing glance.

"Hell, mom. What's gotten into you today? You've never showed any sort of interest in my love life."

Kate merely shrugged, and pointedly studied the exit signs for downtown Portsmouth.

"I'm really not a prude, Will," she said after a while. "I used to think you'd get it out of your system after a few years. But you know how I could tell you've never been serious about any of the women you've bedded?"

"Do tell."

"You've never brought any of them home to meet the family. Until this Christmas, that is."

The thought of Claire made him feel warm in a way the twenty-ounce cup of gas station cappuccino could not hope to achieve, and he only realized he was smiling when he caught his own reflection in the passenger side window.

They drove through New Hampshire and Massachusetts, circumventing Boston to avoid the rush hour traffic there. Will stopped for gas and snacks in Rhode Island, and at noon, they were already past New York City, driving south on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Later that afternoon, Kate scanned through the radio frequencies for some music, and Will cracked up when she found a station broadcasting in some strange-sounding language that was only barely recognizable as German. Kate had learned German from her husband, but she pronounced the station announcer's German as almost incomprehensible.

"It's a Pennsylvania Dutch radio station," Will said. "They speak some sort of regional dialect that's hard to understand even for a native German speaker."

"And how would you know this?" Kate asked. "You quit German in college because you'd forgotten all the stuff your dad tried to teach you, remember?"

"Oh, I dated a German exchange student once," he replied. Anja from Kassel, he remembered, smiling at the fond memories of a booze-fueled road trip from New York to Los Angeles. Six days of debauchery.

"So what's going on with you and Claire?" his mother asked, disrupting the thought.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, are you two an item? You sure spend an awful lot of time with her, don't you?"

"'An item'," he repeated with a chuckle. "Mom, we're long out of high school. We like having each other around, I suppose."

"Oh, I think it's a bit more serious than that," Kate said. "After all, you've spent the last month and a half in Knoxville with her—and don't tell me you've only stayed around for your brother to get better."

"She may have had something to do with that, too," he admitted.

"No shit," Kate said, and Will had to stifle a grin at his mother's uncharacteristic vulgarity.

"Alright, alright." He shook his head at his mother with a resigned sigh. "I'm nuts about her. She's absolutely everything I ever wanted in a woman. She's sharp as a tack, she's a knockout, and she knows what she wants out of life."

"And you don't think you'll get bored with her sooner or later?"

He considered the question, and then shook his head firmly in response. Kate smiled at him, but it was her maternal smile, the one she reserved for occasions when she observed her sons doing something that she knew to bring them grief before too long.

"I really hope so," she said. "We all like Claire, you know."

"Not nearly as much as I do, mom."

Under normal circumstances, Will would have made the eighteen-hour drive from Maine to Tennessee non-stop, and the prospect of getting back to Claire did weigh his foot down on the BMW's accelerator. Kate, however, was intent on enjoying the trip. She asked Will to take detours through places she had never seen, so instead of a relatively straight trajectory from Augusta to Knoxville, their travel route had as many bends in it as a strainer of cooked spaghetti. They stopped in Pennsylvania to see Gettysburg, a sight that was still fresh in Will's memory from the Christmas trip home with Claire. Then, when his mother mentioned that she'd never seen the White House, he took her into Washington, D.C., even though it was a detour of two hundred miles. They parked the car near the Vietnam Memorial and spent the early evening walking around to see the sights for three hours. When they finally left D.C. with the tail end of rush hour traffic, it was too late to even consider pressing on to Knoxville, so Will took the first Virginia exit that had a decent-looking motel in sight of the Interstate. They found a clean-looking Hampton Inn with an adjacent Outback, so Will treated his mother to a steak dinner, during which they polished off two bottles of red wine along with their ribeye steaks.

They shared a room with two double beds, Kate adamantly protesting the unnecessary waste of money when Will proposed separate rooms, and the combination of the wine and the day's driving had Will fall asleep not ten minutes after his head hit the pillow.

In the morning, they had breakfast at a nearby Cracker Barrel. Kate, who had spent a great deal more time in the south than Will, and whose stomach's tolerance for southern cooking was superior to that of his own, ordered up some sort of country breakfast whose overarching theme seemed to be gravy. The menu called it "sawmill gravy", and it was so thick that Will could have stuck a spoon into a bowl of the stuff and have it remain upright for a while.

"Yuck," he said as he watched his mother ladle a spoonful of the gravy onto her breakfast biscuit. "Look, mom, it has sausage bits in it, as if there's not enough fat and grease in the gravy itself. For the love of all that's holy, don't even think about eating that."

Kate cut a piece of biscuit with the edge of her fork, speared it, and then brought the bite to her mouth, smiling sweetly in response.

"You should try it. With the way things are going, you're going to have to become a Southerner eventually, you know."

"Like your daughter-in-law will be happy to tell you, Southerners are born, not made. You can't move to Knoxville and become one just by getting a Tennessee driver's license. Not that I have a terrific desire to claim that title, anyway."

"So what are you going to do about Claire? She seems quite happy where she is, don't you think?"

"She likes what she has built," Will replied. "I don't think it matters to her whether that bookstore is in Knoxville or Bangor."

"So you're going to ask her to move north for you?"

The waitress arrived and brought Will his continental breakfast—or at least the closest facsimile the place offered.

"Yeah, I guess," he said. "Otherwise I'd have to get used to stuff like country ham and grits for breakfast, and eighty-degree weather in October, and I don't see that happening. I'm more of a hot tea, English muffins with jelly, Indian Summers sort of guy."

Kate accepted his response without a comment, studying him impassively as she took another bite of her gravy biscuit.

"Don't tell me you are ready to sell the condo in Augusta and move to Knoxville," Will said with a grin.

"No, of course not," she said, waving off his remark. "I quite like it right where I am, and Bob and Christa won't need as much help anymore once he's back home."

"They'll need a bunch of stuff done to that house, you know. Hard to get a wheelchair up those stairs."

Kate's expression turned pained very briefly, undoubtedly at the thought of her son being confined to a wheelchair, the muscles in his legs withering from disuse.

"He'll walk again," she said with determination.

"Sure he will," he agreed. "But until then, he needs a way to get up to the bedroom, you know. Unless you just want to dump him on the living room couch at night until he's able to walk up the stairs again." He chuckled at the thought of such an unsympathetic treatment. "Come to think of it, that might be one hell of a motivator."

"Oh, come on, now," Kate said, but her smile told him that she knew he was merely kidding.

Was there ever a time when I would have said something like that, and meant it? he thought.

"He'll need one of those elevator thingies for the stairs, and maybe an electric wheelchair to get around. I don't have a fortune saved, but I think I can help them manage."

"Don't even worry about that," Will said, shaking his head. "The insurance will pay up whatever they have to, and then I'll cover the stuff they won't. You keep your money."

"What else am I going to do with it?" she asked. "I don't go on cruises, I'm not interested in time shares, and I have no expensive hobbies. The way things are going, I'll be leaving a bunch of money to you kids when I die."

"Don't leave any to me," Will replied. "I'm doing okay. Leave it to Bob and Christa, and Erica. Better yet, spend some of it while you can. Maybe you should take up an expensive hobby, just for the hell of it. Or go on a trip to Europe, or Asia."

Kate shook her head dismissively.

"That's not me, Will. I'm too old for skydiving or flying airplanes, and I hate going on trips. The only reason I even come down to Knoxville is because I hate not seeing my son and granddaughter even worse than I hate flying."

"Well," he grinned. "I guess between the two of us, Erica is going to have one hell of a college fund waiting for her when she gets out of high school. She'll be able to pay for four years of Harvard for herself and three of her closest friends."

They made it to Knoxville in the early evening of the second day of their trip. There had been no sites of interest for Kate in Virginia, and Will was thoroughly grateful for that. The long drive south with his mother had been mostly enjoyable, but the last stretch of the trip through southern Virginia and northeast Tennessee was the most boring one, and he was eager to see Claire again.

"So I got my schedule from Megan for the first ten or so lectures and book signings," Will said to Claire at the dinner table. She had cooked a "quick dinner" of Shepherd Pie prepared with ground lamb and fresh garlic mashed potatoes, and Will had helped himself to seconds despite his resolution to watch his intake and lose the ten pounds he had gained since coming to Knoxville.

"Oh, yeah? Where at?"

"The first two are in Manhattan and Boston, respectively. For New York, it's a book signing at one of those trendy Greenwich Village bookstores, and in Boston it's a lecture at Boston College. Interested in coming along for either one of those?"

"Oh, hell yes," Claire said with conviction. "I haven't been to either in ages." She bit her lower lip in thought briefly.

"New York, huh?"

Will nodded.

"We could hook up with my sister, you know. I'm sure she'd love to meet you. Are we going to have time for that kind of thing?"

"We'll have as much time as you want," he said. "The book signing's on Saturday, but we don't have to fly back right that Sunday. We can stay an extra day or two, if you'd like."

"Ooh, that's tempting," Claire smiled. "We could do some Big City stuff. Go see a play, take a walk in Central Park, have one of those gargantuan New York style pizzas..."

Will laughed at her sudden burst of enthusiasm.

"You're actually craving junk food for a change? Wow. Now I want to take you along just for the chance of seeing you try to eat one of those things without getting grease all over your face."

"I've done it before, silly," she replied. "You just fold the slices down the middle, and then eat them from the pointy end."

They went to the airport together once more, but instead of seeing him off, as Claire had done twice already in as many months, they checked in together. They had arrived early, and the run through the security gauntlet had taken no time at all, so they killed an hour of waiting time having an early lunch at the Ruby Tuesday restaurant in the gate area. Will allowed himself a tall Guinness with his crabcake burger, and Claire followed suit.

The flight itself was tolerable. Claire had never flown in first class before, and Will was amused at her continued amazement at all the extra amenities available to the folks on the expensive side of the privacy curtain.

"It does have its perks, your job," she declared as she was sipping on her beverage, comfortably reclined on her armchair-like leather seat.

"Just wait until we get to the hotel," Will smiled. "They don't put their Nobel laureates up at the Holiday Inn, you know. Last time I did a signing for them, they booked me a room at the Waldorf."

"I could get used to this," Claire proclaimed with a satisfied sigh. "It's nice to be able to finally go with you, instead of having to say good-bye at the airport, you know."

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A Bettered Life

Michael Lindgren

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