“Is it O.K. for me to sit here?”
Marty gulped. “Uh, sure,” he replied. But even as he said it, he involuntarily moved as far away from her as he could without falling off the bed. He held the blanket tight around his waist, his eyes apprehensive. Lorraine continued to stare at him, fascinated, apparently oblivious of his nervousness.
“That’s quite a bruise there,” she said finally, reaching out to touch his forehead. Smiling weakly, he submitted, until she began running her fingers through his hair. When she started doing that, Marty found himself inching farther and farther away until—
Whump. Suddenly he was on the floor, stark naked except for his underwear. He reached for the blanket. Lorraine giggled naughtily.
“Lorraine! Are you up there?”
The voice was accompanied by the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs outside the bedroom.
“Yes, mother,” Lorraine said.
Grabbing Marty’s pants off the chair back, she tossed them at him. Lying on his back, he struggled into them as the steps came closer.
“How’s the patient?” Stella Baines asked as she entered the room. Then, looking around, she added: “Where’s the patient?”
Marty looked up over the edge of the bed. Stella Baines, forty, his grandmother-to-be, stared back at him. She was pregnant and looked terribly young. If Marty remembered correctly, she was carrying her last child, the one born after Uncle Joey the jailbird. She had the same pleasant eyes as when she was older, very pale blue and rather sad.
“Marty, this is my mother,” Lorraine said, tossing him his shirt.
He put it on from a sitting position. “How do you do?” he smiled.
“Feel up to having something to eat?”
Marty nodded.
“Then come on downstairs.”
Marty found his shoes, put them on and started out of the room after her. As they walked down the hall, Stella Baines regarded him with a half smile.
“So tell me, Marty, how long have you been with the circus?”
Marty could only stare. Lorraine made a sound that was half sigh, half snort of anger. “Mother,” she said. “How could you?”
“The circus?” Marty murmured. “I’m not with the circus. What do you mean?”
“Your clothes seem so unusual,” Stella remarked. “We thought perhaps you might be with a sideshow.”
Marty smiled and shrugged. The green shoes and shirt with U.S. Patent Office facsimile probably did seem unusual to people of 1955. Rather than explain that these clothes were normal wearing apparel of the ’80s, he said: “I guess I just like strange clothes, ma’am. Sorry.”
“There’s no need to apologize. We were just a little curious, that’s all.”
They entered the living room, where four children and Sam Baines, Marty’s future grandfather, were relaxing. Sam, a gruff man of forty-five, stood next to the black-and-white television set, adjusting the rabbit ears. He didn’t look their way until the picture locked in.
“Sam, here’s the young man you hit with the car,” Stella said matter-of-factly. “Thank God he’s all right.”
“What were you doing in the middle of the street, a kid your age?” Sam asked coldly.
“He’d fallen—” Marty began. Then he decided not to say that his father had fallen out of a tree. That could lead to embarrassing revelations or at the very least, suspicion. “He’d fallen…in the road,” Marty continued. “There was this other kid. I rushed over to shove him out of the way. Didn’t you see him, sir?”
“Pa never sees anything when he’s driving,” Lorraine said.
“What are you talking about?” her father snapped. “I’m a damn good driver. But there’s nothing a good driver can do when kids jump out in front of him.”
“Especially when you’re going around the corner on two wheels,” Lorraine added.
“By the way,” Marty interjected. “What happened to that other boy?”