Part 17 (1/2)

And Mouse nodded to herself, and washed her hands, and after last bell she went home and told her mother she'd signed up for the letter-writing program. And a surprisingly short time after that the first of many envelopes from the English Society of International Correspondents appeared in the Drivers'

mailbox. Mouse, who found it there, shook her head in disbelief at the return address, and also at the stamp: a colorful twopence stamp, with a portrait of Queen Elizabeth and a smudged cancellation mark that did not extend onto the envelope itself. The stamp looked as though it had been glued in place with rubber cement.

Two pence, Mouse thought. Two pennies. Was that enough to mail a letter all the way from England to America? She very much doubted it, and her doubt churned up a memory of being in Bartleby's on Third Street with her mother not long ago. Bartleby's sold fine stationery, and also had a small section devoted to stamp and coin collecting. You could buy canceled foreign stamps there. . . or steal them, Mouse supposed.

The envelope was a prank, like the circular before it. Mouse would have destroyed it if she dared, but she didn't dare, and anyway by now her mother had seen it and grabbed it from her and was cooing over it, with none of Mouse's skepticism.

”Let's see what we've got here,” Mouse's mother said. Too impatient to get a letter opener, she attacked the envelope like a grizzly bear ripping into a honeycomb. The simile was apt: having torn open the flap, she actually stuck her nose inside -- and jerked back, as if stung. She tried again, reaching in more carefully with a pawlike hand -- and jerked that back too. ”d.a.m.n it!” she swore. ”d.a.m.n it! d.a.m.n it! d.a.m.n it! f.u.c.k!” The fit of fury vanished as quickly as it had come, and was replaced by a sullen petulance. ”Here,” she said, shoving the envelope at Mouse. ”You do it.”

When Mouse carefully spread the top of the envelope and peeped inside, she found neither honey nor stinging bees, but a second, smaller envelope, addressed simply ”From Miss Penelope Ariadne Jones, To Miss Penny Driver.” Mouse saw at once what had upset her mother: the inside envelope was purple.

Purple, her mother's unlucky color -- a color that, like garlic to a vampire, produced an almost allergic reaction in Verna Driver. Mouse's head rocked back and forth on her neck, not-quite nodding.

Her mother couldn't read the letter; the letter was for her eyes only.

”Well go on!” her mother snapped, raising a threatening hand. ”Open it!”

Mouse opened the purple envelope. The two sheets of stationery inside were also purple, and covered in longhand, a longhand she knew. ”My Dear Miss Driver,” she read, ”it is with the greatest pleasure that I begin what I hope will be a long correspondence with you. . .”

The letter's brief overview of life in ”Century Village, Dorset” was as transparently fake as the return address on the outer envelope. Large portions of it appeared to have been plagiarized from a Jane Austen novel, or possibly a Harlequin romance. But it acted like a balm on Mouse's mother, the grizzly bear getting her honey at last; she ate it up, giving no sign that she suspected it was anything other than what it purported to be. Meanwhile Mouse had to fight to stay focused on what she was reading -- she kept glancing ahead, looking for a hidden message, a letter-within-the-letter, meant only for her.

Eventually she found it: at the very end, beneath ”Penelope Jones”'s signature, there was a line that said, ”DO NOT READ THIS PART ALOUD,” and beneath that, a postscript that turned out to be a memorandum, warning her about something that Cindy Wheaton was planning to do to her in gym cla.s.s.

After she'd gotten over her initial surprise, Mouse decided she was angry with the memorandum-writer for choosing such a complicated and potentially risky subterfuge. What if her mother's enthusiasm for things British had overcome her phobia for purple? Then she would have read the letter herself, including the memorandum, and realized it was all a trick -- and who knew what she might have done to Mouse then? Even if the trick were never exposed, this method of delivering memoranda created extra work for Mouse, because of course the first thing her mother did after Mouse finished reading was tell her that she must write back, immediately. She insisted on supervising, too: hanging over Mouse's shoulder as she crafted her reply, criticizing every sentence, every turn of phrase.

It was only later that Mouse realized that tricking her mother -- and tricking her in as blatant a manner as possible -- was not just a means to an end but was in fact one of the memorandum-writer's goals. The memorandum-writer was angry, too; this was made abundantly clear by Penelope Ariadne Jones's second letter to Mouse, which began: My Dear Miss Driver, Greetings to you and your family from enchanting Dorset. On behalf of myself and my fellow Englanders, please tell your mother that she is an ugly old c.u.n.t, we woud love to take a big stinking s.h.i.+T on her and stick her f.u.c.king nice things up her motherf.u.c.king a.s.sHOLE. . .

Mouse, reading this aloud, stopped short on ”please tell your mother that,” and gaped in horror at the words that followed.

”Little Mouse?” her mother said, in the abrupt silence. ”What is it? What does she want you to tell me?”

And Mouse looked up, choking on dread, and then she was folding the letter away as her mother said, ”That was so beautiful, what a nice girl, why can't you be more like her?”

As soon as she was alone, Mouse tore that letter into shreds, not even checking it for a memorandum. ”No more,” she said -- half commanding, half pleading -- as she flushed the remnants of the letter down the toilet. ”No more, no more, no more.”

But there were more, of course. The envelopes from the English Society of International Correspondents continued to turn up in the months and years that followed. Mouse's mother never caught on to the trick, though she did destroy a number of the letters herself, during rages of frustration brought on by Penelope Jones's persistent refusal to switch to a more agreeable color of stationery. So some of the memoranda were lost, but most got through; and even after Mouse left home, even after her mother died and was put in the ground, the memorandum-writer continued to send important messages in care of the English Society, as a kind of inside joke.

And now here is another one. Mouse takes a b.u.t.ter knife from the silverware drawer and neatly slits the top of the envelope. She extracts the smaller envelope from inside it, secretly pleased by the rich purple hue, magic ward against her mother. ”From Miss Penelope Ariadne Jones,” she reads, ”To Miss Penny Driver,” and that pleases her too. Though the memoranda within typically refer to her as Mouse, on the outside of the envelope she is always Penny, and she likes that name. She wishes desperately that she could convince people to call her by it, but almost no one ever does.

She slits open the top of the purple envelope, too, and pulls out a single sheet of lavender stationery. On it is written: THINGS TO DO TODAY (Sunday, 4/27/97): 1. SHOWER.

2. DRESS NICE.

3. MEET ANDY GAGE OUTSIDE HARVEST MOON DINER AT NOON.

4. LISTEN TO HIM.

Odd. It's not a memorandum at all, it's a list. For it to be delivered this way must mean it's important, but Mouse is puzzled. Meet Andy Gage? What for? And listen to him about what? What could he possibly have to tell her that would warrant such special notice?

Maybe it's not such a mystery. Maybe she's only pretending to be puzzled, to conceal the fact that she's been expecting something like this. Because the thing that comes immediately to mind, when she asks herself what this could be about, is that strange conversation she overheard at the Reality Factory on Monday. The conversation between Andrew and Julie, that Mouse eavesdropped on from between the tents. The conversation that seemed to be about her.

Yes, that's definitely it -- Mouse is all at once sure, without knowing how she is sure. But she doesn't have time to mull it over further now. It's almost eleven o'clock, and if she is going to get herself cleaned up, dressed, and out to Autumn Creek by noon, she will have to move quickly.

She hobbles back through the apartment to the bathroom, trying not to track too much blood on the floor in the process. As she sits on the edge of the tub and pulls the gla.s.s sliver from the sole of her foot, her hands shake, but not from pain.

Mouse is excited.

Mouse is afraid.

11.

When she first spots Andy Gage in front of the Harvest Moon Diner an hour later, Mouse flashes back on a photograph of her father. Not the solemn honeymoon photograph that brooded over her mother's dining table, but another, more congenial portrait that sat on the fireplace mantel in her grandmother's house.

The mantelpiece photo was taken on the morning after her father's high school prom. Morgan Driver and his friends had gone out cruising after the last dance, and ended up cras.h.i.+ng their car into a ditch. Though no one was seriously hurt, they were far enough out in the countryside that it took them the rest of the night to get back to town. Around dawn, Mouse's father's date had snapped the picture: Morgan Driver, walking backwards along the side of the road, thumb outstretched to flag down a pa.s.sing car. He had his jacket slung over his shoulder; his black tie hung loose around his collar, and his s.h.i.+rt was untucked. An unlit cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth, and he was smiling, despite a nasty-looking gash above his left eye.

This photograph no longer exists. Mouse's mother burned it, along with several sc.r.a.pbooks'

worth of other photographs, shortly after Grandma Driver's death. Those pictures were undignified, she said when Mouse asked her why. By this she meant that the pictures did not fit the image of her husband that she wanted to perpetuate -- like Grandma Driver's stories, they seemed to refer to a different person altogether, a Morgan Driver who smoked, and drank, and told dirty jokes, and, when he was eight, jumped into mud puddles with both feet.

Mouse is sorry that her mother destroyed them all, but the pictures remain sharp in her memory -- it is almost as if she has actual copies of her grandmother's sc.r.a.pbooks in her head, that she can leaf through whenever she wants to. And the after-prom photograph -- that sits on a mantel in Mouse's mind now, as tangible as ever.

It's not immediately clear why Andy Gage should remind her of that photo. Standing on the sidewalk in front of the Harvest Moon, he is not trying to hitch a ride, or even paying attention to the traffic. His dress is casual but neat -- jacket on, collar b.u.t.toned. He isn't bleeding from his forehead.

What it is, she decides, is something in his bearing. Andrew stands at ease, comfortable in the world, in a way that Mouse almost never is, in a way that she imagines her father always was, at least until he got married.

As she drives closer, she sees that Andrew is talking to himself. Telling himself jokes, maybe -- he just burst out laughing. This is crazy behavior, but Andrew seems completely unselfconscious about it.

When he notices Mouse in her Buick, instead of acting caught out -- the way Mouse would, if someone had seen her talking to herself -- he just smiles and waves. Comfortable in the world.

Mouse drives into the lot behind the diner, and parks in the corner farthest from the entrance so that she will have as much time as possible to compose herself. She checks herself in the rearview mirror, then checks her list to see if any new instructions have been added to it. None have; there are still no clues about what Andrew has to tell her, no hints about what might be expected of her beyond listening.

She opens her door and gets out. Andrew is walking towards her across the lot, his hands in his pockets. Now he looks self-conscious. He is not as uneasy as he was last Monday, when they drove here together from the Reality Factory, but he is clearly thinking hard about something.

”Hi,” Mouse says, just to get things rolling, and to make it seem like she knows what she's doing.

Andrew, for his part, is content to appear confused. ”Penny?” he inquires, as if they'd never met in person before. Mouse resists a powerful urge to reply, ”Yes, it's me,” and merely nods.

After that, there is an awkward pause. Mouse's instructions are to listen, not talk; besides, she needs Andrew to talk first, so she can follow his cues. But Andrew acts as if he's working off the same list, waiting for her to say something.

Finally, he breaks the silence: ”You don't know why you're here, do you?”

Mouse blinks. She wonders whether she misheard, but Andrew follows up with an even more startling declaration: ”When you got up this morning, you didn't have any plans to come out to Autumn Creek today. But then you got a message -- a note, or maybe a list -- telling you to meet me here at --”

They're in a park, sitting on opposite ends of a long wooden bench. Mouse's cheeks are flushed, and she's a little out of breath; Andrew's cheeks are flushed, too. He's still got his hands in his pockets, and he's holding his arms close to the side of his body, occupying as little of the bench as possible, as if trying not to crowd her.

They don't appear to be in the middle of a conversation -- Andrew's not even looking at her -- so Mouse swivels her head, takes a quick look around. She doesn't recognize this park, or any of the houses in the adjoining street, but she a.s.sumes they are still in Autumn Creek. The Navigator points out that the sun has not changed position in the sky, so she can't have been gone long.