Mother was pushing the woman in the red uniform to hurry up. “We’re just about at the end of our rope. My son has been on the go for twenty-nine hours straight. He can’t keep up like this – don’t you understand? Just take one good look at him and you can tell. We’ve been waiting in this line for fifteen minutes. There’s only three of you even though you’re besieged by customers. I’d like to speak with your supervisor. No, I can’t calm down and I won’t calm down. I told you we should take a taxi, Gustav. No, he didn’t have to spend the whole twenty-nine hours in the plane, not that, thank God, right Gustav?”

Gustav nodded. Or did he shake his head?

“...but he doesn’t have as much stamina as other men his age. He’s had a heart operation and he was often sick as a child. You found it finally? A Pontiac? Gustav? Why not. What color is it? You don’t know? Rubin. With an R, that’s right. No, not with a B. Bubin --- come on, what kind of a name would that be? Sounds ridiculous. No wonder you couldn’t find the reservation. Pardon me?”

The clerk at the rental car agency repeated her question very loudly, as if mother and son were hard of hearing.

“One of the engines broke down over the Atlantic,” Gustav answered quietly. “They replaced it overnight.”

“You don’t have to apologize for being tired! They put him up in the only airport hotel in Reykjavik.”

“They put us up in the airport hotel...” Gustav echoed.

“What do you mean ‘us’? I thought you were flying alone. Who were you with?”

“I meant... the other passengers... and me...”

“He hardly slept at all. It doesn’t get dark there all night long and he left his sleep mask at home,” Mother explained to the young woman. “The airline gives all the passengers sleep masks, but if he doesn’t have his own mask --- a marvellously soft one, from Hermès, a present from me for his fortieth birthday --- then it’s just plain awful for him. He’s so used to his own things, he can’t sleep with a brand new mask that still has that factory stink.”

The lady from the rental car agency was rolling a ballpoint pen back and forth on the surface of the tall counter with the tip of her index finger. Her curved fingernail with purple nail polish scraped along the Formica.

“Please stop that,” said Mother. “It gives me the shivers. It goes right to the center of my nerves.”

Gustav had been fearful when the female pilot of the wide-bodied jet announced she had to land in Reykjavik because of a technical problem. They were half-way between the coasts of Ireland and Iceland and she preferred not to turn around. He’d been afraid of flying for years and suffered acute trepidation days before each departure. Still, sitting in the middle of row 17, he took the announcement more calmly than the majority of his neighbors. Some turned pale, shaky. They held on to their companions or hugged their children tight. Solitary travellers looked at each other with frightened faces; others started up conversations. More than once he heard the remark, “No wonder, a woman driver!” Two corpulent men in business class had fainted. He peered through the gap in the curtain and saw them stretched out on the cabin floor, surrounded by a steward and three stewardesses.

“Credit card and driver’s license?” said the employee of the rental car company.

He asked for her ballpoint pen, put his signature in one little box and his initials, GRR, into the others. The young woman handed the key to his mother, described how to get to the eighth level of the parking garage located two terminals away. Easy to find, she emphasized. For someone who makes the trip from the rental car office to the parking garage several times a day, the eighth level of the parking garage at John F. Kennedy International Airport is undoubtedly easy to find. Gustav and Mother, on the other hand, got lost. Pulling the two heavy, oversized suitcases behind them, they had to retrace their steps, ask again, and when they were finally in the right terminal, they couldn’t find the elevator that was supposed to go to level eight.

They were standing by their car at last, a blood-red Pontiac Grand Am that looked like the pimp cars in Vienna parked every three or four hundred yards along the street. No, not parked, but left standing at a tilt, with their right front and rear wheels up on the sidewalk.

“Out of the question, Gustav. What a hideous car! I can’t stand it. Get a different one,” Mother exclaimed.

He didn’t have the strength to go back to the rental office and get a more acceptable model. Or, if it had to be a Grand Am, then at least in another color. He wanted to get to Carmel as quickly as possible, where his anxious family had been waiting for him since the day before. Mother had come to the airport twice for nothing. Each time, they told her that her son’s plane would be landing very much behind schedule. If she had been told the whole truth at that point, she probably would have had a breakdown. She insisted on picking him up instead of waiting for him in her apartment on Central Park West. “If you’re really so tired,” she now declared, “I’m not going to let you drive. Absolutely not.”

The trip to the lake house would take two, perhaps two and a half hours at most, he figured. On Friday afternoons there was heavy traffic on New York roads, the divided highways fanning out toward the Hamptons, upstate, to Connecticut and Massachusetts. He had often covered the stretch from the airport to their vacation house on Lake Gilead in ninety minutes, but never on a Friday. He’d booked the flight so he would arrive on Thursday. On principle, he never took an international flight on a Friday.

With some difficulty he stowed the luggage away in the much too cramped trunk and got in behind the wheel, feeling like an astronaut in a space capsule. Mother sat rigidly beside him. He felt sorry for her, so squeezed in, her face grimly set, justifiably indignant that he hadn’t given in to her wish that he ask for a different car.

He drove down eight levels of the spiral ramp to the ground floor, enjoying the automatic transmission, and had no trouble finding the correct exit from the airport. He turned on the radio “where the newswatch never stops. Give us twenty-two minutes and we’ll give you the world.”

“Do we have to? I’ve been listening to the news all day,” Mother remarked. “You almost crashed. That’s enough news for one day.”

He turned off the radio, discovered a CD-player in the dashboard. He’d been annoyed since take-off at his own forgetfulness: when he opened up his carry-on bag in the plane, he discovered he’d left his music at home. He was late and in a hurry --- the taxi was already honking outside --- and Gustav had forgotten his prayer book and his CDs in their transparent plastic sleeves on his bureau in the bedroom.

He was fiddling with his cell phone, confident he could use it without affecting his driving.

Mother jumped on him. “You can’t do two things at once. Please stop that, it’s terribly dangerous.”

“We’re already in the car, Madeleine. You’re right, my one and only love, ‘already’ is a laugh. A whole day late. A gruesome trip. You better believe it. Mother’s fine, I think. Right, Mom?” She didn’t respond. “No, my angel, I’m not especially tired. Don’t worry. No police in sight for miles around. Mad, please Schatz, it’s only a short call. Of course I know how much a ticket costs. You’re right, I should have called from the parking garage. But who knows if I could have gotten a signal there. So, I’ll be there by four, four-thirty at the latest. When does Shabbat begin? When? And lighting the candles? 8:03? All right, 8:03. Wait a sec, Mama wants to talk to you.” He handed her the phone.

“You and your Shabbat. My son an orthodox Jew, I still can’t believe it. Sorry, what? I already told him he shouldn’t use the phone while he’s driving. What? He looks awful. Like someone spit him out. And he rented the most ghastly car you can imagine. A pimp’s car. No, I won’t fight with him. How are the children? Amadée’s swimming? And no one’s life guarding him? What’s Julia up to? You’re down by the dock? Well that’s good.”

When the call was over, she looked sideways at her son, reproachfully. “The cell phone stays with me from now on. You’re completely wound up! And what’s ‘lighting the candles’ supposed to mean?”

“You were already at our house once for that, Mother. It’s when we light the candles for Shabbat, the moment that separates the previous week from the day of rest. Madeleine lights the candles, then she spreads out her arms above them and draws them in three times in a circular motion to show that she embraces the sanctity of the Shabbat. Then she puts her hands over her eyes and says the blessing. Do you remember now?”

“My son an orthodox Jew! Unfathomable...”