The Corrections

Down in Alfred’s workshop, he was able to find masonry bits for the electric drill, but the cigar boxes that he remembered as cornucopias of useful hardware seemed mainly to contain corroded, orphaned screws and strike plates and toilet-tank fittings. Certainly no six-inch bolts.

Departing for the hardware store, wearing his I’m-a-jerk smile, he noticed Enid at the dining-room windows, peering out through a sheer curtain.

“Mother,” he said. “I think it’s important not to get your hopes up about Chip.”

“I just thought I heard a car door in the street.”

Fine, go ahead , Gary thought as he left the house, fixate on whoever isn’t here and oppress whoever is.

On the front walk he passed Denise, who was returning from the supermarket with groceries. “I hope you’re letting Mom pay for those,” he said.

His sister laughed in his face. “What difference does it make to you?”

“She’s always trying to get away with things. It burns me up.”

“So redouble your vigilance,” Denise said, proceeding toward the house.

Why, exactly, had he been feeling guilty? He’d never promised to bring Jonah on the trip, and although he was currently ahead by $58,000 on his Axon investment he’d worked hard for those shares and he’d taken all the risk, and Bea Meisner herself had urged him not to give Enid the addictive drug; so why had he felt guilty?

As he drove, he imagined the needle on his cranial-pressure gauge creeping clockwise. He was sorry he’d offered his services to Enid. Given the brevity of his visit, it was stupid to spend the afternoon on a job she should have paid a handyman to do.

At the hardware store, he stood in the checkout line behind the fattest and slowest people in the central tier of states. They’d come to buy marshmallow Santas, packages of tinsel, venetian blinds, eight-dollar blow-dryers, and holiday-theme pot-holders. With their bratwurst fingers they dug for exact change in tiny purses. White cartoon puffs of steam shot out of Gary’s ears. All the fun things he could be doing instead of waiting half an hour to buy six six-inch bolts assumed ravishing form in his imagination. He could be visiting the Collector’s Room at the Museum of Transport gift shop, or sorting out the old bridge and track drawings from his father’s early career at the Midland Pacific, or searching the under-porch storeroom for his long-missing O-gauge model railroad equipment. With the lifting of his “depression,” he’d developed a new interest, hobbylike in its intensity, in framable and collectible railroad memorabilia, and he could happily have spent the whole day—the whole week!—pursuing it. . .

Back at the house, as he was heading up the walk, he saw the sheer curtains part, his mother peering out again. Inside, the air was steamy and dense with the smell of foods that Denise was baking, simmering, and browning. Gary gave Enid the receipt for the bolts, which she regarded as the token of hostility that it was.

“You can’t afford four dollars and ninety-six cents?”

“Mother,” he said. “I’m doing the work like I promised. But this is not my bathroom. This is not my safety bar.”

“I’ll get the money for you later.”

“You might forget.”

“Gary, I will get the money for you later.”

Denise, in an apron, followed this exchange from the kitchen doorway with laughing eyes.

When Gary made his second trip to the basement, Alfred was snoring in the big blue chair. Gary proceeded into the workshop, and here he was stopped in his tracks by a new discovery. A shotgun in a canvas case was leaning against the lab bench. He didn’t remember having seen it here earlier. Could he have somehow failed to notice it? Ordinarily the gun was kept in the under-porch storeroom. He was sorry indeed to see that it had moved.

Do I let him shoot himself?

The question was so clear in his mind that he almost spoke it out loud. And he considered. It was one thing to intervene on behalf of Enid’s safety and confiscate her drugs; there was life and hope and pleasure worth saving in Enid. The old man, however, was kaput.

At the same time, Gary had no wish to hear a gunshot and come down and wade into the gore. He didn’t want his mother to go through this, either.

And yet, horrible though the mess would be, it would be followed by a huge quantum uptick in the quality of his mother’s life.

Gary opened the box of shells on the bench and saw that none were missing. He wished that someone else, not he, had noticed that Alfred had moved the gun. But his decision, when it came, was so clear in his mind that he did speak it out loud. Into the dusty, uric, nonreverberative silence of the laboratory he said: “If that’s what you want, be my guest. I ain’t gonna stop you.”