That Old Cape Magic

running like a whip-poor-will’s ass, I have strong, serious feelings for her.”
    “Go put the suitcase in the trunk, Harold, so we can say our goodbyes. Now, there’s a good man.”
    He consulted his watch. “Will these goodbyes be concluded in a timely manner?”
    “Are we on a schedule?”
    “Yeah, after here, we’re driving down to Westerly,” he told her, forgetting Griffin entirely. “I’ve invested in a condo on the waterthere.
Practically
on the water. I thought you might like to see. There’s a couple of spots we could skinny-dip and nobody would mind. Take some dirty pictures with our cell phones. Plus they got good fried calamari with hot peppers.”
    “Okay, fine, but go away for a minute.”
    Harold reluctantly did as he was told, but, remembering Griffin, he stopped halfway to his car. “Did I mention I better not hear you were mean to her?”
    “Ignore him,” Marguerite advised when Harold’s car door shut behind him. “It’s just how he is.” After she scrunched up her shoulders, they embraced one last time. “Write a movie with a girl like me in it sometime,” she suggested when they separated. “With Susan Sarandon. She’d make a good me.”
    In Falmouth he gassed up at a 7-Eleven and he bought himself a sticky bun and a coffee for the road. He’d had no appetite back at the B and B, but after saying goodbye to Marguerite he was suddenly hungry and ate the pastry right there in the parking lot. It was ten-thirty, and normally it would’ve made the most sense to head straight up Route 28, cross the canal at the Bourne Bridge, then shoot across 195 to 95, but if he left now he’d almost certainly get home before Joy. The last of her family was flying out of Portland this morning, and there was no way she’d head back to Connecticut before they all were airborne. If he arrived before she did, he’d have an unpleasant decision to make: sit in his own driveway and wait for her or just use his key and go inside. The former would make him feel like the fool he was, but having walked away from that house last June he really had no right to enter it now without invitation.
    He needed to kill an hour or two and was too antsy to just sit around. If he got going now and crossed the canal at the Sagamore instead of the Bourne, he could head up Route 3 toward Boston fora while, then loop back down I-95. The idea of crossing the bridge of his unhappy childhood one last time was appealing. Now that he’d finally scattered his parents’ ashes, he doubted he’d be returning to the Cape again. He felt finished with both the place and its false promises. Also, on the Sagamore he’d likely find out if his mother was really through haunting him or was just waiting for Marguerite, his guardian angel, to depart. When he knew for certain that she was at rest, he’d be able to think about what he’d say when he arrived home without fear of her sarcastic comments.
    Wiping his fingers on a napkin, he adjusted the mirror, turned the key in the ignition and shifted into reverse. He’d have to apologize, of course, for everything he’d allowed to happen, but he knew it wasn’t really apologies Joy cared about. She’d been right all along that his parents, not hers, had intruded on their marriage with such disastrous consequences, which meant that he had to figure out how to convince her that all that was finally over, that they could begin again with a clean slate.
    Clean slate
. Those were the exact words in his head at the moment of impact. The sound was explosive: the initial boom, then the shattering of glass and the shriek of metal on metal, as the back of Griffin’s head hit the padded rest. “Ow!” he said, rubbing his neck, just as he’d always done as a kid after one of his father’s rear-enders, all of which had occurred just like this one, completely without warning.
Ow
. A child’s word, and he’d spoken it in a child’s voice, full of grievance and resentment. He half expected to see a child’s startled, betrayed eyes, not his father’s knowing, sad ones, staring back at him from the rearview.
    The driver of the other car, a teenaged boy with an acne-ravaged face, appeared at his window. “You okay?” he said.
    Griffin couldn’t tell whether the boy was asking if he was hurt or why on earth he was laughing. Griffin rolled down his window and told him he was fine, just surprised.
    “I don’t see what’s so funny,” the kid said tentatively, as if, given the