There was nothing. Bowser had gone to sleep. It was a miracle. Smiling wanly, Bobby got moving again. His mother must have heard the creak of the second porch step —it was pretty loud — because she cried out his name and then there was the sound of her running footsteps.
He was on the porch when the door flew open and she ran out, still dressed in the clothes she had been wearing when she came home from Providence. Her hair hung around her face in wild curls and tangles.
‘Bobby!’ she cried. ‘Bobby, oh Bobby! Thank God! Thank God!’
She swept him up, turning him around and around in a kind of dance, her tears wetting one side of his face.
‘I wouldn’t take their money,’ she babbled. ‘They called me back and asked for the address so they could send a check and I said never mind, it was a mistake, I was hurt and upset, I said no, Bobby, I said no, I said I didn’t want their money.’
Bobby saw she was lying. Someone had pushed an envelope with her name on it under the foyer door. Not a check, three hundred dollars in cash. Three hundred dollars for the return of their best Breaker; three hundred lousy rocks. They were even bigger cheapskates than she was.
‘I said I didn’t want it, did you hear me?’
Carrying him into the apartment now. He weighed almost a hundred pounds and was too heavy for her but she carried him anyway. As she babbled on, Bobby realized they wouldn’t have the police to contend with, at least; she hadn’t called them. Mostly she had just been sitting here, plucking at her wrinkled skirt and praying incoherently that he would come home. She loved him. That beat in her mind like the wings of a bird trapped in a barn. She loved him. It didn’t help much . . . but it helped a little. Even if it was a trap, it helped a little.
‘I said I didn’t want it, we didn’t need it, they could keep their money. I said . . . I told them
. . . ‘
‘That’s good, Mom,’ he said. ‘That’s good. Put me down.’
‘Where have you been? Are you all right? Are you hungry?’
He answered her questions back to front. ‘I’m hungry, yeah, but I’m fine. I went to Bridgeport. I got this.’
He reached into his pants pocket and brought out the remains of the Bike Fund money. His ones and change were mixed into a messy green wad of tens and twenties and fifties. His mother stared at the money as it rained down on the endtable by the sofa, her good eye growing bigger and bigger until Bobby was afraid it might tumble right out of her face. The other eye remained squinched down in its thundercloud of blue-black flesh. She looked like a battered old pirate gloating over freshly unburied treasure, an image Bobby could have done
without . . . and one which never entirely left him during the fifteen years between that night and the night of her death. Yet some new and not particularly pleasant part of him enjoyed that look — how it rendered her old and ugly and comic, a person who was stupid as well as avaricious. That’s my ma , he thought in a Jimmy Durante voice. That’s my ma. We both gave him up, but I got paid better than you did, Ma, didn’t I? Yeah! Hotcha!
‘Bobby,’ she whispered in a trembly voice. She looked like a pirate and sounded like a winning contestant on that Bill Cullen show, The Price is Right. ‘Oh Bobby, so much money!
Where did it come from?’
‘Ted’s bet,’ Bobby said. ‘This is the payout.’
‘But Ted . . . won’t he — ‘
‘He won’t need it anymore.’
Liz winced as if one of her bruises had suddenly twinged. Then she began sweeping the money together, sorting the bills even as she did so. ‘I’m going to get you that bike,’ she said.
Her fingers moved with the speed of an experienced three-card monte dealer. No one beats that shuffle, Bobby thought. No one has ever beaten that shuffle. ‘First thing in the morning.