Mick Glendalough drove his grandfather Peter to the Marina Green Safeway every day at five-thirty to get the afternoon San Francisco Examiner. Occasionally they’d shop for other things too if his grandfather had the need…a box of Lipton’s teabags, a loaf of Wonder bread (the only bread that Peter would allow his housekeeper Mary to purchase when she went to the market), or a dozen eggs. Peter’s dinner was always the same: toast and two eggs fried sunny-side-up, with three slices of bacon.
On Christmas day he had pot roast and potatoes.
He had always been a man of strict habit. Born in Ireland and raised in Chicago, he had left school at the age of thirteen to go to work for Marshall Field and Company as a stock boy. He was the eldest of six brothers and sisters whose father had just died. Their mother had already passed away giving birth to Monnie, the youngest of Peter’s sisters.
Peter had realized early in life that the way to advancement in business was through close observance of the rules. At the time, Marshall Field had regulations regarding personal behavior, including one’s behavior at home. So in his first year with the company, Peter was visited twice by Mr. Bloomington, the assistant store manager, to make sure that the stock boy was living a life of proper comportment and values. Mr. Bloomington had checked Peter’s closet and the one in the living room as well, where his brothers and sisters slept, to make sure that all the clothes were kept in order. He’d gone through all the kitchen cupboards, made sure the sink was scrubbed, and made doubly sure that Peter had a proper iron and ironing-board.
Peter had been happy to comply because, in 1902, such care was shown only to those employees who were expected to advance themselves in the company. And to be sure, Peter had advanced himself, despite the fact that he had had to lie about his being Irish the day he had applied for the job.
Now, in 1980, he was an example of how such care for grooming could be the mark of success. At ninety-one years of age, Peter Glendalough was a former senior vice-president of Marshall Field and Company, wealthy from lifelong investments, well connected in the Catholic Church, and retired to a house in the Marina in San Francisco (to be close to Mick, his grandson who sold advertising for an FM rock and roll station and who, at thirty-two years old, had written three novels, none published.)
Mick Glendalough was the essence of indiscipline, and loved his grandfather because, of all the people in his family, Peter was the most supportive of Mick’s desire to write about the Irish in San Francisco. English professors, literary agents, and publishers alike had told Mick—for years—that his characters were very colorful but needed a bit of fleshing out, that a particular story was of great interest but just wasn’t for us at this time, that the market wasn’t ready for such finely wrought stories as these. Blah, blah. But his grandfather had told him to keep at it, that there was a need to write about these people. Mick was the vessel from which the memory of his Irish ancestors would be poured.
“You’re doing this also for the memory of your grandmother, Mick,” he had once said, “may she rest in peace.”
So Mick had decided to listen to him, and not to them.
“And it’s important that people keep reading, you know,” Peter had continued. “Look at me, for example. A man with a sixth grade education.”
Peter took up that day’s edition of the Examiner and brandished it before his grandson. Whole pages had been cut apart where Peter had taken the coupons from it, as he did every day. Coupons for soap, cleaning products, shampoos, meats.
“Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned from the pages of the newspaper. So those fine nuns who taught me at Saint Boniface parish in Chicago…God help them, so long gone now…they taught me about life itself. Because they taught me how to read. And this is where life resides, you know. In the newspaper.”
—
Peter saved the coupons he cut out of the paper every day, and put them with the other ones that came packed in particular products or that arrived in the mail for him every Wednesday. Wednesday was a big day for Peter, actually, because so many coupons came then. He would spend the rest of the afternoon cutting them out of the bulk mailers and sorting them into categories. He had a card file for them, with dividers in alphabetical order.
Peter said that coupons were the smart man’s way to shop.
“Why pay retail?” he often asked, a sentiment that Mick shared from long experience in his family. When they went to the Safeway, Mick waited in his car, a red 1968 Volkswagen convertible that he had owned since it was new. It was almost the only thing Mick had ever bought retail, something he could not bear doing, the heir to such a grandfather and such a father.
His father Harry had owned his own store on Sacramento Street near Presidio, and had forever complained that a store like his was the antithesis of the very reason for being in business, which was to make money. Mick had grown up being a stock boy for his father, later a salesman in his father’s store while a student at the university in Berkeley. The odd thing was that his father had been a successful man. But he had been a worrier, and his worries had eventually killed him. Harry’s Haberdashery was now owned by a very cultured homosexual from Teheran who made Mick a joltingly strong cup of coffee laced with sugar whenever he came for a visit.
Buying retail, Mick thought, was a betrayal of his heritage. He walked around all the stores downtown looking at what they had, and wondered how it was that the public could accept paying such remarkable prices for the clothes they wore. It was preposterous. That much for a suit, just because some Italian had sewn it? That much for socks? These days, Mick worked the outlet shops south of Market Street, and even perused the collections of the second-hand stores on Fillmore Street, the Sacred Heart School charity store, the Symphony charity store, the Junior League charity store…dumping-grounds for the Pacific Heights rich. He had found hand-made suits for ten dollars in such stores. Dress-shirts for five. This was shopping as it was meant to be. So what, if there were a few spots on the sleeve of a shirt? Or that the suit, so marvelously made, fit him like a drop cloth? So what? The sleeves could be washed. The suit could be tailored. It would still end up being dirt cheap.
But Mick could not imagine taking his grandfather to such places. He thought about the photo of Peter on the dresser in his apartment. His grandfather looked—as he often liked to say himself—like a million bucks. But the term wasn’t accurate, Mick thought. The term had a kind of showbiz razz that didn’t really fit his grandfather. The fact was that Peter Glendalough was made of reserve and humorous dignity. In the photo, he stood on the steps of Old Saint Mary’s in San Francisco, the day his son, Mick’s father Harry, had returned from the army, mustered out at Christmastime 1945 in England. Peter was dressed in a heavy dark blue wool suit made for him by a New York tailor he had known since the twenties, a white dress-shirt of Egyptian cotton, a blue-black silk tie, silk handkerchief, and trilby hat from Marshal Field. The wool overcoat folded over his arm was a gift from a grateful Savile Row tailor, that Harry had brought back for him from the war. No. “A million bucks” wasn’t right. In this photo, Mick thought, his grandfather looked like the King of England or, at the very least, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
—
They were driving back from the Safeway one summer afternoon when Peter looked out at the Marina Green, at the emerald-glazed bay and Alcatraz in the distance.
“Mick, I want to ask you a favor,” he said. Mick had just put the Volkswagen in second gear and was worrying, as usual, that the car would begin to shake once it got above thirty miles an hour. His grandfather had frequently complained about that, especially when the top was down.
“What kind of favor?” Mick asked as the car began to vibrate all around him.
“I need some hats.” Peter’s hand grasped the beret on his head. The beret was being buffeted beneath his fingers by the wind.
Mick was surprised by the request. He knew that his grandfather’s closet contained more than a dozen hats…beautifully made wool ones from the fifties with labels from Gimbel’s and Macy’s in New York, or more recently from Nieman-Marcus. He remembered as a child when his grandparents would visit from Chicago and he’d ask his grandfather, during the ride back home from the railroad station, if he could wear the hat Peter had worn from the train. As a five year-old, Mick had loved the elegant printing—sometimes in gold—on the satin lining inside the crowns of those hats.
He owned only one hat himself, and it wasn’t even a hat. It was a baseball cap that his father had bought in 1953 at Ebbetts Field in Brooklyn. It was imprinted with a large letter B. It no longer had any distinct color of any kind, and little shape. Its brim resembled a badly dented trowel.
“What kinds of hats?” he asked now.
“Anything.” Peter rolled the newspaper up into a tube. His hands were pale-white and covered with blue smudges, the marks of his age. His voice rumbled brokenly with age. He gestured toward Mick’s head. “A baseball cap, maybe.”
“You!”
“Maybe an old panama or something. A porkpie.” Peter tapped his knee with the rolled-up newspaper. “It doesn’t matter.”
“But what for?”
Peter grumbled a moment. He was unhappy having to explain himself to his grandson.
“What for, Grandpa?”
“Just…. Listen, will you take me to some of those stores you go to?”
“You mean Goodwill? Saint Vincent de Paul?”
“Yeah.”
They went the next day to the Goodwill store on Clement. It was filled with women. The sound of the hangers being removed from the racks was almost the same as that of the hangers being replaced on the racks. It was a sound both men had grown up with and loved.
Peter wore a three-piece wool suit, dark brown, with a white shirt, a burgundy-red tie, and a pair of well-shined black dress shoes. His cufflinks had been given to him in 1928 by the manager of Marshall Field’s Chicago operations, for surpassing his sales goal that year by thirty-one percent. They were cherished by Peter.
Mick was a little embarrassed. The clientele of the Goodwill had little money, and there was a good deal of feeling the cloth, checking it for wrinkles, sweat stains, and so on, before tossing it back on the pile. So it wasn’t much like Bergdorf Goodman, a company his grandfather had always praised as the goal to be sought by anyone in retail.
“Grandpa, are you sure. . .”
“Where are the hats?” Peter headed up an aisle.
Mick looked around until he spotted a large hatrack in the middle of the store, between a rack of secondhand levis and a display of threadbare jackets. “This way. This way,” he muttered, taking his grandfather’s thin arm. Through the elegant wool of the suit coat, he could feel how bony his grandfather’s elbow had become.
There was every kind of hat. Mostly they were from some special donation of beach hats, many with hanging tendrils of straw around the outer rim, intended to give them a look of hilarious Hawaiian abandon. But there were others. A miner’s hardhat—painted in scuffed, scratched yellow, with a light in front—that to Mick’s astonishment his grandfather took from the rack right away. It had a Pittsburg Steelers sticker on it.
There was a water-stained boater. A jungle safari hat made of khaki, turned up on the side in the Australian manner. A Shriners’ fez. A Mickey Mouse Club cap.
“No, the only one I like is this UMW thing,” Peter said. He placed the miner’s helmet on his head and surveyed himself in a full-length mirror. “It makes me feel like John L. Lewis.”
“You want some help, then?” A man approached them, a selection of coats draped over one arm. He wore a name tag marked with “Goodwill Industries.” There was, however, no name on it. He spoke in an accent that Mick recognized, although there was a kind of colorful trill to it that he had not heard before.
After a pause, Peter addressed him. “You’re from the West, aren’t you?”
The salesman, himself an elderly man, very short, with age spots everywhere on his large forehead, looked up at Peter. The miner’s helmet looked like an old Volkswagen parked on Peter’s head.
“The West of what?” the salesman asked.
“Of Ireland! What do you think?”
“I am!”
“But where?”
The salesman rubbed his chin. His hands were large and thick-fingered. “Connemara.” The word issued from him with humorous self-importance.
“What part of Connemara?”
“One question after another, eh?” He had white hair and white false teeth. His eyes shifted about.
“Well, I have an interest in these things,” Peter replied.
Mick was surprised by the sudden appearance of a similar accent in his grandfather’s voice. He’d never heard such a thing.
“Cashel,” the salesman said.
“I thought so,” Peter replied. “No, I’m from Dublin meself.”
“But you were speaking American.”
“Sure I was young when we came across.”
“That’s it.”
The two men broke into laughter and shook each other’s hand.
“What is it you want?” the salesman asked.
“I’d like to know your name, for one,” Peter replied.
“Owen Griffith,” the salesman said. “And proud of it.”
“Well, Owen, I’m Peter Glendalough, and sure I need some hats.”
Owen shrugged as he surveyed the hatrack. The sleeves of his grey workingman’s shirt were rolled up to his elbows.
“For business!” Peter continued.
Mick turned toward his grandfather. The surprise of this admission, that Peter was involved in some new commercial venture, caused him to put aside the mold-smudged sombrero he had himself been looking at.
“And you don’t care for any of the things we have here,” Owen said.
“I’m afraid not.”
Owen gathered himself. He looked toward the rear, into a storeroom behind the cash register.
“I’ve a lot of hats back there,” he said. “And I can tell that a man of your calibre, Mr. Glendalough.” He offered his hand. “Glendalough! County Wicklow. I’ve been there a thousand times.”
“You have, have you?” Peter took the hand into his own.
“That’s right.” Owen turned toward Mick and grinned. “They hung me father there, you know.” He winked.
The fact was, Owen Griffith had hundreds of hats. There were snap-brims and Irish wool caps, gaucho hats, top hats, slouch hats, cloches. Cartons full of them. Berets of every description. Shade hats. Nor’easters. Rubber fishing caps from L. L. Bean. World War II helmets from Germany. Leather pilot’s caps, also from World War II. Goggles too, a pair of which Peter tried on and rejected. There was even a helmet from the Kaiser’s army, circa 1915, with a brass point on top of it. Handmade wool-knitted caps. A black straw sunhat, the sort worn by the Queen of England in places like New Guinea. A very shopworn college beanie from the forties, from Cornell.
“I’ll take the beanie,” Peter said.
He took a cloth slouch hat from one of the cartons, a black one, that when he put it on made him look like a frail, elderly Oscar Wilde. He surveyed himself in the mirror.
“This one,” he said. “And this one.” He handed Mick a cowboy hat.
Altogether, Peter bought six. Mick’s favorite was the last one his grandfather chose, a Palestinian kafiyeh made of white cotton imprinted with a zig-zag red pattern. He looked only a little like Yassir Arafat, being much more elegantly dressed than the terrorist. Mick thought that surely his grandfather, in his kafiyeh, would be the most well-turned-out man in all of Mecca.
—
“So what’s this business thing, Grandpa?” Mick asked.
The hats were piled up in the back of his Volkswagen, in two plastic sacks. They had arrived at Peter’s house, a white stucco two-story building on Cervantes Street with a rose garden in front.
“Nothing that would interest you, Mick.” The kafiyeh rustled as he shook his head. He had liked it so much that he had insisted on wearing it from the store.
This explanation, offered with a kind of resigned shrug as Peter opened the car door, was not very satisfactory. Mick got out of the car to help bring the sacks from the backseat.
“But if you come over next Saturday, I’ll let you in on it.”
Peter took the two bags, one into each hand, and Mick opened the gate for him into the rose garden. Peter’s shoulders were stooped as he approached the stairs to his front door, as though the Palestinian headgear could do nothing to protect him from the desert’s exhausting heat. He was of course an elderly man. But now, for a brief moment, for the first time in his grandson’s experience, he appeared elderly. With a rush of anxious worry, Mick wondered whether his grandfather’s mysterious shopping was a sign that he had become senile. Had he, in his kafiyeh, lost his marbles?
“Grandpa, do you feel OK?” he asked.
Peter looked back over his shoulder. “OK?” He shrugged once more, the bags hanging to either side of him like puffy church bells. “Sure I feel like a million bucks.”
__
Mick waited in the Volkswagen. Peter had ordered him to drive around the Safeway parking lot despite the fact that someone had vacated a single space right in front of the store.
“No, we need one as far away from the store as we can get,” Peter had said. The hats were once again in the backseat, organized in a row. Mick grumbled to himself, and they circulated the lot for ten minutes, fighting traffic, until a space showed up at the far corner. The view was of Marina Boulevard, the yacht harbor across the way, Fort Mason, and Alcatraz Island.
“You stay here,” Peter said. He put on the UMW, then pulled his wallet from his coat pocket. Opening it, he removed a coupon, folded it in two, and opened the car door.
“What are you going to do?” Mick asked.
“A little shopping, Mick.”
“For what?”
“Dinner.”
“Can I come with you?”
Peter opened and refolded the coupon. “No, this one I’ve got to do alone.” He smiled. The yellow helmet was scuffed and dented. “If I don’t come back in half an hour, call the cops.”
Peter was back in ten minutes. There were two pounds of bacon in the paper sack he carried. He flung the bag into the back of the car with the UMW, then put on the college beanie.
Mick got out of the car and followed him at a distance back to the store. Mick had always marveled at the splendid looks of the clientele in the Marina Safeway. Just now the supermarket was crowded with the usual assortment of Scandinavian au peres (very tall, very beautiful blonde women with long tanned legs and shorts, speaking guttural languages and flirting, it seemed to Mick, with everyone in the place except for him), sports-minded young businesspeople in Spandex and sweatshirts, and the generally wealthy.
Mick snuck up a side aisle, pulling his Brooklyn Dodgers cap down over his eyes. He peeked around a display of canned corn, and saw Peter placing two more pounds of bacon in the cart.
At the cash register, Peter rolled the collar of his suit jacket up to cover his neck, and he held the jacket tightly closed with one hand. The checker, a woman named Luz Morales whom both men had known for some years, took the coupon from Peter, who said nothing. She processed it, and rang Peter up for the price of a pound of bacon.
“Paper or plastic?” she asked.
“Paper,” Peter replied, his voice suddenly an antique falsetto, that of an elderly soprano.
Luz bagged the merchandise. Peter kept his eyes averted, avoiding Luz’s intent, smiling search of his face, and Mick hurried from the market to get back to his Volkswagon.
__
It went on like this for an hour, until there were twelve pounds of bacon in the backseat of the Volkswagen.
“Are you trying to rip them off, Grandpa?”
“Rip them off? What is that?”
“It means, to get more than you’re entitled to?”
“Me?” Peter stared at his grandson, a look of innocent ineptitude in his eyes. He revolved the cowboy hat between his hands as he looked out the car window at Alcatraz. “Of course not.”
“Do they know you’re trying to rip them off?”
“They haven’t any idea what I’m trying to do.”
“What are you trying to do?”
Sighing, Peter reached into his wallet and took out one more coupon.
“It’s a promotion they’ve got going,” he whispered.
“What kind?”
“I’ve been collecting these, see, during the last week or so. You get two pounds of bacon for the price of, of—”
“For the price of one. Right. I figured that out.” Mick took the coupon from his grandfather. There was a caveat at the bottom, that the offer was limited to two pounds of bacon per customer.
“I wear the hats so no one’ll recognize me.”
Mick placed a hand before his mouth. He pondered his grandfather’s plan. “Why don’t you just buy the bacon, Grandpa?” He handed the coupon back.
Peter lay the cowboy hat on his knee. He turned it about, studying it’s shopworn stylishness. “You mean, retail?” He kept his eyes averted. There was a long silence. When he did speak, disappointment filled his voice. “I never thought, Mick, that a grandson of mine would suggest...would suggest letting a deal like this get away.”
“But, Grandpa.”
Peter appeared hurt. He placed the cowboy hat on his head once more. “I’m a regular customer of this place.” He wrung his hands together between his knees. “I’ve bought tons of bacon in the last fifty years, tons of it, and besides I have bought it retail!”
“I know that.”
Peter gestured with great respectfulness toward the large Safeway logo that hung from the front of the store. “I’m the kind of customer these people want to have.”
“Grandpa.”
“And now, Mick, you won’t let me celebrate what I’ve done for them.” Peter removed the cowboy hat.
“Me!” Mick said.
Peter straightened his hair. “Yes!” His voice grew even more gravelly with distress. “I still have one more coupon, and now I’m out of hats.”
In the silence that followed, Mick contemplated his knuckles, wrapped about the steering wheel before him. “Grandpa—”
“No hat of any kind.”
Mick grimaced. “You’re only supposed to get two pounds per coupon.”
“That’s right.”
“One coupon per customer.”
“Yes.”
Mick looked at himself in the rearview mirror. He thought for a moment of what he knew about the Brooklyn Dodgers. Sport. Glory.
“What do you want me to do, Grandpa?” he whispered.
Peter ground his teeth together. His hands rested on his knees. He stared across the bay, at Alcatraz where it sparkled above the blue waters. “Give me your hat.” He looked up at the Dodger cap, an article of clothing he usually made fun of. His sudden interest in it disgruntled Mick, who saw only political expediency in his grandfather’s request. A means to an illegal end.
“Grandpa. You want me to sully the reputation of Jackie Robinson?”
“Who?” Peter shook his head. “I never understood your father’s love of baseball, Mick.” He held out his hand. “Give me the cap.”
__
They walked together into the Safeway. By now the shopping had become remarkably intense. It was Saturday afternoon, and every aisle was slow-going, filled with carts, some to overflowing with groceries, others with children, purses, chicken breast, endive, cabernet, everything everywhere, pushed about by every kind of shopper.
Peter led the way, now suddenly a Dodger fan. Mick shuffled along behind him, feeling a little naked. He knew that the cap gave his grandfather a look of boyish foolishness. But it was he, Mick, who felt like a fool. Nonetheless the idea of his grandfather doing something larcenous excited him. So, dressed in his blue sport coat and grey slacks, his white wrinkled shirt, and no tie, Mick followed Peter toward the deli section. He was five inches taller than his grandfather, enormous by comparison, with an unkempt appearance. But he felt like a child.
They got the bacon and threaded their way back through the crowds toward the front of the store. Mick began getting nervous. Peter adjusted the cap, putting it at an angle. Then at another angle. He cleared his throat, grumbled, and paused a moment to practice what he would say. Finally, as they reached the end of the aisle before the cash-registers, he took Mick’s arm and pulled him aside. They hid behind a display of tortillas.
“Mick. You do it.”
“Me!”
“Yeah. Here.” Peter removed the baseball cap. “I look like an idiot in this thing.” He thrust the packages of bacon into Mick’s hands. “And, here.” He took out the coupon and passed it to Mick as well, who dropped it, with the bacon, to the floor.
“But—”
“Just go up and give Luz the bacon. It’ll be OK.” Peter took a look around the edge of the tortillas. “You won’t get in trouble.”
“Of course I won’t, Grandpa.” Mick scurried about the floor to pick up the bacon. “I haven’t done anything to. . .”
“Come on.” Peter headed toward the express line.
To their surprise, Segundo Gomez was there as well, standing next to Luz. He ran the meat and deli sections, and had sold Mick the pot roasts he had bought for his grandfather’s last three Christmases. Dressed in butcher’s white, he was a Spaniard noted among the women shoppers for his dreamy flamenco eyes.
“Hello, Luz,” Peter said. His cheery elderliness brought a smile to Luz’s lips. She was waiting for him, a paper bag at the ready.
Mick handed the bacon over. “I’ve got this coupon, Luz, for the, uh, the bacon.” He gave it to the checker, and Luz put the bacon in the bag.
“Here’s the money.” Peter handed her a five-dollar bill. After getting the change, the two men turned away, Peter offering Luz a large smile. And as they passed him by, Peter reached out to shake Segundo’s hand. “How are you, Mr. Gomez.”
“I’m fine, Mr. Glendalough. Just fine.”
Peter and Mick continued toward the door.
“But what are you going to do with all that bacon?” Segundo said.
Mick’s face felt immediately hot. He turned to look over his shoulder at Segundo, and his grandfather now began hurrying toward the door.
“Mr. Glendalough!” Segundo called out.
Peter stopped up short, confronted by a security guard—Louis Washington was his name—who was waiting at the door. Peter contributed every year to Louis’s Baptist church fund to feed the hungry. Luz remained at the cash register. Her smile had brightened, so that her teeth appeared like white pearls surrounded by dark brown-red lipstick.
“Your grandson put you up to this, did he?” Segundo held a fan of coupons in his hand, like playing cards.
“Up to what?” Peter said.
Mick fumbled with the bag.
“Mr. Glendalough,” Segundo said, turning his eyes toward Mick. “We value having you as a customer. But the rules are clear on this promotion.” He pointed at the coupons. “One per customer.”
“But, I….” Mick held the bag out before him.
“And your grandfather, he’s a nice man. We like it when he comes to the Safeway here.”
“Yes, but….” Mick looked over his shoulder at Peter.
“I mean, I hate to say it, but shouldn’t you be ashamed of yourself, having him dress up in all those…..” Segundo pointed at the Dodger cap on Mick’s head. “I mean, dressing him up funny like this?”
“Grandpa, tell them what…tell them….”
Suddenly Peter seemed to be suffering from the great age he had achieved. “What is it?” He was slightly bent. His right hand had began to palsy. “What?”
“Tell them about the coupons. Tell them the truth.”
Peter shook his head slowly. An arthritic condition had just that moment appeared in his neck. “I’m an old man, Mick.” He raised a hand into the air and gestured. His mouth hung open as he searched through his bewilderment. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
__
They had the bacon. They were riding through the yellowing light of the late afternoon along the Marina Green. The Volkswagen purred, and Peter sat happily surveying the view.
“Grandpa.”
There was no reply. Mick’s negotiation of the car from the parking lot had been conducted in silence and embarrassment. Segundo Gomez’s chastisement had caused him great befuddlement, so much so that he had stammered throughout his defense of himself. There had been no threat of arrest. But Mick had been so mortified by the looks of the other shoppers watching the confrontation, by their smiles and the clucking of their tongues, all of it under the watchful, red-rimmed, and baleful eyes of Louis Washington, that he had simply felt tricked by his grandfather. By his own grandfather! And then Peter had gone into this act of befuddlement, playing the role of some dotty old geezer unsure of where he even was. That had been the worst.
“If it hadn’t been for you, Mick,” Peter suddenly said, “I would have gotten away with it.”
“Grandpa! You did get away with it!”
“Sure. But I guess I mean that I wouldn’t have gotten caught.”
“You didn’t get caught. I got caught!”
Peter frowned. “I know. But that’s a detail.”
“Grandpa!”
Peter’s eyes appeared watery, bluer and lighter than they had been. The Volkswagen hurried along the Marina Green. Mick, angered by his grandfather’s continuing indifference toward the embarrassment he had caused his grandson, stepped on the gas, and the Volkswagen lurched ahead.
Peter’s clothing was as always groomed and neat. But when Mick looked at him, wishing to continue his aggravated pursuit of justice for himself, of an apology, he noticed a scattered hoariness about Peter’s hair and, suddenly, confusion. Peter looked out at the bay. The waters quivered, diamond-speckled in the wind blowing in from the Golden Gate.
“You know, I’m hungry, Mick.”
“Yeah, but. . .”
Peter pursed his lips, looking out at the water once more. He placed a hand against his cheek. Mick continued glancing at him, worried by how is grandfather, in the last minute or so, had seemed to resume the character of the scattered, non-plussed old man. Peter looked down at his lap. He sighed. He turned toward Mick.
“I…. Mick, I….”
Mick, fearful of the traffic, drove on. “What?”
“Do you have any bacon at your place?”
Copyright ©2012 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
—
Note: No Plagiarism Software, also known as Artificial Intelligence, was used in the composition of this story.
The story is one from my collection Little Bridget and The Flames of Hell. Available on order everywhere.
I loved reading this story again! I never realized that mother’s massive collection of coupons from every supermarket in the region started with her father, our grandfather! If she knew I was coming over from Holland to visit, she would select coupons like ‘two French breads for the price of one’ at some fabulous supermarket 45 minute drive from her home. She would drive me and Jakob to the store and we all went in and got the bread and lingered at all the other fabulous expensive displays of everything beyond delicious! And then we went back home. A day later there was a special on her favorite ice cream, on the other side of town. Love, Kate