When Moira puts Ollie in the car, she just drives north. There’s no destination she has in mind. The breeze is warm and the sunshine’s warmer, and that’s all she wants at the moment, something to take the chill of the Estate out of her bones.
"Mom," Ollie says after they’re fifteen minutes out of Star City limits and she’s just starting to feel like she’s getting her breath back. He’s holding one of the toy cars that Robert brings back after business trips, holding it carefully cradled on his knee. Ollie’s getting too old for these cars, Moira can see it in the way that he’s a little more puzzled every time Robert hands him one. But he never rejects them. He even carries them around, still, just never plays with the things. "What is it, Olliefur?" she asks, and he grins and shifts behind his seatbelt.
"Why didn’t we take one of our cars?" is what her son wants to know. "What if Mrs. Stoklossa needs to use her car and we have it and she can’t use it?"
Moira rearranges her hands on the steering wheel of the big beige sedan to ten and two, wrapping her fingers around the knitted wheel cover. “I didn’t want to use one of your father’s cars,” she says. “And Cristina offered to let us use hers.” She can see from the way Ollie’s pouching his eyes — “Honeybunch, don’t do that, you’ll wreck your eyesight,” — that something about this deal is still bothering him, so Moira assures her fretful progeny, “If she needs to go anywhere, I told her to use my car.”
That does the trick. Ollie’s eyes go clear and bright again as he nods, relocating the toy car to the other knee, and Moira rumples his blond hair. “There’s sunscreen in my purse,” she instructs, pointing with her chin to the purse sitting between them on the front seat. “Put some on your face or your freckles are gonna peel right off.”
"Like /that/ would be so tragic," Ollie mutters, but he’s already obediently digging through her purse to find the sunblock. "Mom," he says (and if Moira had a penny for every sentence that Oliver began with ‘Mom’, she’d have turned copper herself), "howcome Dad calls Mrs. Stoklossa ‘Mrs. PhonyFrau’?"
"Because your father likes to have things exactly the way he thinks they should be," Moira says shortly, then winds down her window some more so she can stick her elbow out as she drives. Robert had thought they were getting a good sturdy German hausfrau, is the more accurate answer, and then found out that Cristina was from Guadalajara. "People should be what their names sound like," Robert had decided, and been forever annoyed at Moira for not telling him about Cristina’s ethnicity and married name up-front.
Don’t blame yourself, Martha had written in one of her letters. It has nothing to do with you. He needs to find a higher purpose, and until then all you can do is live for yourself and little Ollie. I love Thomas more than any man there’s ever been, but he knows that Bruce is my centre of gravity. And I know it’s the same for you, Ms. Swann.
The decal of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the back windshield catches Moira’s eye, and she lets her gaze follow the contours of the figure as she thinks about Martha’s words, written in her forthright spiky hand, signed “Ms. Kane”. A private joke between the two of them, but one that both women appreciate the opportunity for. When you marry into empires, it can be hard to remain your own person.
But for all that Moira adores Martha and wants to take her advice, they haven’t married the same man. Thomas straightened up and got barbered and respectable for Martha, for their son, for the life they were building together. Robert … well, Robert’s charm has always been his boundless interest in people as a whole. He just hasn’t been good at curbing his boundless interest in willing young women in specific. And he’s thoughtless enough about it to cycle through secretaries, accidentally bring home other women’s jewelry.
There’s an abandoned little market at the junction they’re coming to, so Moira pulls up there and stops the car, turning in the seat. “Do you need to go to the bathroom?” she asks, and when Ollie shakes his head, she says, “Well, I do. I’m gonna go behind that building.” The dubious pouchy-eyes are threatening again, so Moira says firmly, “There’s nobody around for ages, and I’ll be fast. Just like camping.”
She doesn’t give him any time to object, getting out of the car and going around the stucco building, just out of Ollie’s line of sight. He gets anxious about this kind of thing so she doesn’t have long. Sighing, Moira leans against the wall, letting the sunlight beat down, turn the insides of her eyelids peachy-warm, threaded with red. “Ollie?” she calls.
"Yeah, Mom?"
"How would you feel about taking a trip? An adventure, just you and me?" The thought of it, driving around with Ollie, showing him the country that way, makes her smile. Up further north, to see her cousin in Portland. All the way out east, to stay with Martha and Bruce and Thomas. "We could buy our clothes as we go, and stop wherever we think is interesting, and go swimming and hiking and camp out…"
There’s a long silence. And then Ollie asks, “What about Daddy?”
When Moira comes back to the car, she doesn’t bring it up again, and Ollie puts his toy car down on the seat next to her purse and the sunscreen. He smells like artificial coconut and cocoa butter, and Moira lets that scent sink into her, fleshy-deep, white and yellow and sunshiney. “My good, thoughtful little boy,” she says, and Ollie interprets this as an opportunity to ask, “Can we get tacos?”
When they get back, there’s a message from Robert that he’ll be missing dinner, and not to wait up for him. His newest secretary is the one who leaves the message. Ollie’s idly playing with his toy car while his mother listens to the answering machine, that young perky voice on the other line, and he pushes the toy too hard. The machine beeps its completion, and the two of them watch the toy car roll under Robert’s home office desk and disappear into the darkness.
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bossymarmalade
