The Corrections

week had gone by without his seeing Julia or speaking to her directly. In response to the many nervous messages he’d left on her voice mail in the last forty-eight hours, asking her to meet him and his parents and Denise at his apartment at noon on Saturday and also, please, if possible, not to mention to his parents that she was married to someone else, Julia had maintained a total phone and e-mail silence from which even a more stable man than Chip might have drawn disturbing conclusions.
    It was raining so hard in Manhattan that water was streaming down façades and frothing at the mouths of sewers. Outside his building, on East Ninth Street, Chip took money from Enid and handed it through the cab’s partition, and even as the turbaned driver thanked him he realized the tip was too small. From his own wallet he took two singles and dangled them near the driver’s shoulder.
    “That’s enough, that’s enough,” Enid squeaked, reaching for Chip’s wrist. “He already said thank you.”
    But the money was gone. Alfred was trying to open the door by pulling on the window crank. “Here, Dad, it’s this one,” Chip said and leaned across him to pop the door.
    “How big a tip was that?” Enid asked Chip on the sidewalk, under his building’s marquee, as the driver heaved luggage from the trunk.
    “About fifteen percent,” Chip said.
    “More like twenty, I’d say,” Enid said.
    “Let’s have a fight about this, why don’t we.”
    “Twenty percent’s too much, Chip,” Alfred pronounced in a booming voice. “It’s not reasonable.”
    “You all have a good day now,” the taxi driver said with no apparent irony.
    “A tip is for service and comportment,” Enid said. “If the service and comportment are especially good I might give fifteen percent. But if you automatically tip—”
    “I’ve suffered from depression all my life,” Alfred said, or seemed to say.
    “Excuse me?” Chip said.
    “Depression years changed me. They changed the meaning of a dollar.”
    “An economic depression, we’re talking about.”
    “Then when the service really is especially good or especially bad,” Enid pursued, “there’s no way to express it monetarily.”
    “A dollar is still a lot of money,” Alfred said.
    “Fifteen percent if the service is exceptional, really exceptional.”
    “I’m wondering why we’re having this particular conversation,” Chip said to his mother. “Why this conversation and not some other conversation.”
    “We’re both terribly anxious,” Enid replied, “to see where you work.”
    Chip’s doorman, Zoroaster, hurried out to help with the luggage and installed the Lamberts in the building’s balky elevator. Enid said, “I ran into your old friend Dean Driblett at the bank the other day. I never run into Dean but where he doesn’t ask about you. He was impressed with your new writing job.”
    “Dean Driblett was a classmate, not a friend,” Chip said.
    “He and his wife just had their fourth child. I told you, didn’t I, they built that enormous house out in Paradise Valley—Al, didn’t you count eight bedrooms?”
    Alfred gave her a steady, unblinking look. Chip leaned on the Door Close button.
    “Dad and I were at the housewarming in June,” Enid said. “It was spectacular. They’d had it catered, and they had pyramids of shrimp. It was solid shrimp, in pyramids. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
    “Pyramids of shrimp,” Chip said. The elevator door had finally closed.
    “Anyway, it’s a beautiful house,” Enid said. “There are at least six bedrooms, and you know, it looks like they’re going to fill them. Dean’s tremendously successful. He started that lawn care business when he decided the mortuary business wasn’t for him, well, you know, Dale Driblett’s his stepdad, you know, the Driblett Chapel, and now his billboards are everywhere and he’s started an HMO. I saw in the paper where it’s the fastest-growing HMO in St. Jude, it’s called DeeDeeCare, same as the lawn care business, andthere are billboards for the HMO now, too. He’s quite the entrepreneur, I’d say.”
    “Slo-o-o-o-w elevator,” Alfred said.
    “This is a prewar building,” Chip explained in a tight voice. “An extremely desirable building.”
    “But you know what he told me he’s doing for his mother’s birthday? It’s still a surprise for her, but I can tell you. He’s taking her to Paris for eight days. Two first-class tickets, eight nights at