Going for Kona (3 page)

My fists balled. And then I thought, Just screw it
.
Screw white cars. Screw Little Miss Boob Job and Adrian’s secrets with new old friends. Screw unsettling bloody memories of dead bicyclists I couldn’t make myself unremember. Screw paranoia. Screw all of it. The only thing truly wrong was the noise in my head, and I could quiet that with work. This, this was what separated me from the rest of the pack, the ones at home on the couch with a remote control in one hand and a doughnut in the other: mental toughness. I was the one in control of me.
Yeah.

I marched down the hall, ready to kick butt. The vivid covers of magazines-past kaleidoscoped through my peripheral vision on the walls. I imagined it was an encouraging crowd doing the wave for me. I wouldn’t let them down.

My boss interrupted me mid mental pep talk, right as I reached my office. “Good news.” He stuck his head out the doorway of the office catty-corner from mine.

I stopped. Hopefully he hadn’t seen me cheering myself on with my imaginary crowd. “Yeah? I could use some.”

He gestured me ahead and followed me into my office, then lowered himself into the chair in front of my desk. “You and Adrian really hit a home run last night.” Brian had come for the first hour, so he saw the crowd.

“Thanks.” I sat, too.

“I think your book is going to be the best thing that’s happened to
Multisport
in ages. To Juniper, really. Thank you for that.” I nodded and Brian steepled his fingers over the knee of his crossed leg. He cleared his throat. “You know we ran lean on money last year. I held back on raises and I didn’t do bonuses.”

I remembered, of course. The advent of online publications and news-by-blogger had gouged a hunk out of our print periodicals. We’d rebounded with new e-offerings like subscription downloads for e-readers, and we had high hopes for this book experiment. “I understood. I agreed with your decision.”

“Yes, well, that’s one of the things I appreciate about you. Not everyone did. Anyway, we seem to be out of foul trouble.”

Brian, like many of my coworkers, speaks in mixed sports analogies all the time. It’s an occupational hazard of working with fanatics that took some getting used to. I struggled not to roll my eyes.

He went on. “I’m bumping you by five percent this year. And you’ll get a five thousand dollar bonus in your next direct deposit.”

“Oh, Brian, I don’t know if you should do that.” I reached into my handbag and retrieved a can of the still-cold Dr. Zevia organic-stevia-sweetened soda Adrian bought me the week before. He was determined to help me kick a lifelong Diet Dr Pepper habit. It wasn’t the same, but I was having fewer headaches.

“Don’t tell me you’re asking for your waivers, Michele.” His face whitened under his thinning red hair.

“Oh, no! Not that. But I need a lot of flexibility for the next three months. I’m doing the Kona Ironman with Adrian.” I took a gulp of my drink, afraid of his reaction.

Brian’s saggy face puckered up like a Sharpei: his version of a smile. “Did you qualify?” His voice jumped half an octave on the last word.

I spit my Dr. Zevia across the desk, laughing. “Sorry.” I ripped a paper towel from the emergency roll I kept hidden in my desk drawer—my coworkers tended to overreact to sports news the second they brought drinks to my office—and started blotting. “Dear God, no. I won a lottery spot. Truly, if I just finish, it will be a miracle.”

“To hell with finishing. If you survive.”

“Brian!”

“Kidding. Don’t worry about it. Adrian, this race, and your book are the trifecta for us. Just see to it that I get thirty-five hundred words a week from Adrian from now until you get to Kona and thirty-five hundred a day while you’re there.” His request made sense. We sold more subscriptions, ads, and issues of
Multisport
from September through November than any other time of year because of Kona. “Words, I need words. And pictures. Can you be his photographer?”

“Of course. Thank you.”

“You’re a great investment and my most valuable player.” He ran the backs of his fingers under his jowls. “I remember when you came to work for me. You were still on the ropes with that putz. Sam was in elementary school, and exercise for you was running back and forth to the car, driving him around. Now look at you. Sam’s doing great, you’re happy, you have Adrian and Annabelle, you’ve co-authored a book, and you’re doing an Ironman. You’re batting a thousand, kiddo.”

He was right. Things were as great now as they were bad then. I had come to him with no editing experience, begging for a refuge from my life as an attorney, convinced I’d missed my path when I took a sharp left turn into law school after getting my degree in English from Trinity. Only no one could understand why I wanted to “go backwards” in my career. No one except Brian. He brought me on as an editing assistant, at a seventy-five percent drop in my pay, despite my over- and under-qualification.

“And none of it would have happened if you hadn’t taken a chance on me. Thank you, Brian.” It was true. He and his wife, Evelyn, had treated me like family, inviting Sam and me to the lake with them, trying to set me up with the sons of their friends, buying the overpriced cookies Sam’s baseball team sold as fundraisers.

Brian nodded, crinkling his face again, then stood up. “I’ll let you get back to work. It’s almost game time on that one.” He gestured toward a colorful pile of speedboat photographs.

“Yes, it is. Thanks for the raise and bonus, Brian.” And for distracting me from the shitstorm in my head, I added to myself.

Three hours later, the graphics guy and I finished pulling together the cover for
SBRQ
. I ran my fingers across the mock-up. It was beautiful—a Hustler Rockit with red and yellow flames slicing through aquamarine water, with the beaches of Destin, Florida, in the background. It was looking like we would make our deadline before the end of the day—important to all of us on a Friday.

A text dinged in from Adrian.
“I finished errands & got good start on writing. I miss you. Lunch at Beaver’s/noon?”

Warmth flooded me. I could squeeze it in if I hurried.
“See you there!”

***

I watched for Adrian through the window of Beaver’s at twelve fifteen. They had a patio, but no one set foot on it between June and September. We only have a few weeks of bearable outdoor dining temperatures each spring and fall in Houston between the wet heat and the wet cold. I’d arrived at the restaurant earlyish and ordered two iced teas, Adrian’s usual Beaver’s Cobb, and some baby back ribs and jalapeño poppers for me, then changed my order to a Cobb five minutes later.

Adrian’s red 4Runner pulled into the parking lot and eased along the first row of cars until it reached an empty space and parked. I loved watching Adrian from a distance, imagining myself seeing him for the first time again. The thrill was always there. He got out of the SUV and started walking along the row of cars toward the entrance, his steps in rhythm with my heartbeat. A goofy grin snuck over my lips. Then he stopped. He turned and walked to the driver’s side of a white car. Surely it wasn’t another Taurus? I craned my neck for a better view, but I couldn’t see it well enough to be sure.

When he got there, he leaned on the roof, talking to someone inside. My smile drooped. Sweat dripped between my breasts. Was the damn AC broken in here? I grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled it in rapid poofs away from my chest. Adrian’s hands gripped the frame of the door and the rolled-down window. He kept talking. I kept sweating.

Finally—
finally
—Adrian stood up and walked away. The car backed out and threw gravel up behind it as it left the lot. I stood up to see who it was but never got a good look.Damn it
.
Adrian turned and watched it go. I tried one last time to catch a glimpse of the driver as the car turned out of the lot, but it was too far away.

I bit my lip. I wasn’t going to have a snit fit on our lunch date. Really, Adrian had done nothing wrong. He had asked me to lunch, and he was here, nearly on time. All he had done was talk to someone in the parking lot, right in front of me. Nothing suspicious there. I needed to get a grip.

He sauntered up to the table. “Hi, babe.” He leaned down and kissed me on the lips, then pulled out a chair and sat.

“Hi. I ordered our usual.” My voice sounded tight and thin. I swallowed. You can do better, I told myself, but it was my mother’s voice I heard.

“Thanks. Perfect.” He slid into our booth, then locked his fingers and stretched his arms over his head, palms up. “Well, that was a weird morning. I ran into that woman, the one from the book release party yesterday.”

What a relief. “Really? Where?” I tried to sound casual.

“At the GNC store. I went by there on my way here for some Triflex and vitamins. She came in a couple minutes after me.”

Not the Beaver’s parking lot? I was confused. “Did you talk to her?”

“Briefly. And then I ran like a scared little boy. She’s intense.”

This didn’t make sense. But then everything about Rhonda so far defied reason. “I ran into her, too.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I wish. She came in to apply for a job at Juniper.”

“What?”

“Yeah. She thought you worked there.” He raised his eyebrows. I paused, then blurted out, “And there was a white Taurus there, too. Adrian, I’m seeing those damn white cars everywhere. I feel like I’m going crazy.”

“Going crazy? You’ve been crazy. For a long time.” He looked at me, but I didn’t give him the arm punch I normally would. He put his hand over mine. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

It wasn’t, though. “So, who were you talking to in that one in the parking lot?”

“That one what?”

“The white Taurus?”

His face skwunched into a thinking look, then he nodded. “Some woman who recognized me and asked me to sign our book, but then she couldn’t find it, so she left. Was she in a white Taurus?”

God, I wanted to chomp my thumbnail. “I think so. I have an idea. Since we’re together now, alone, you can tell me about that car in front of our house this morning.”

“Adrian? Michele? Hi!” a voice bubbled just to my right.

I pasted on a smile. “Hello.”

Adrian pointed to a chair. “Join us.”

She wouldn’t, of course. She was probably here with a client.

“Don’t mind if I do. I got stood up by a client I like a lot less than you two.”

Mierda
,
I said to myself, cussing in my head in Spanglish instead of saying
shit,
because that’s all my mother ever permitted. No impolite “shit,” no offensive f-bomb. “Mierda” or “chinga”
—
and even those better be whispered under one’s breath. Well, mierda, mierda, mierda.

Forty-five minutes later and after we’d committed to a TV interview the next week, Adrian and I walked out of Beaver’s, with Scarlett hanging back to pay the check with her credit card, something I’m sure she would include on an invoice to Juniper later. Adrian walked behind me with one hand resting lightly on the back of my neck. His casual touch steadied my emotions. Really, I was like a hippo lurching along a balance beam today. We reached my car and I wheeled and threw my arms around him. He kissed the top of my head, and I burrowed my face in his chest.

“We’re going to have such a good night.” My hair muffled his words.

I leaned back and looked at him. He looked relaxed, so I tried to match. “Yes, we will.” I nodded, realizing that no matter what else was true, this was. “We will.”

“Goodbye, Mrs. Hanson.”

“Goodbye, Mr. Hanson.”

Adrian walked to his car. I waved to him one more time and he made a smooching face and blew me a kiss. I hadn’t locked the Jetta, so I didn’t have to go through my electronic comedy routine. I got in the hot car, turned on the air, and drove away. As the wheels of my little car turned over the uneven pavement and old bricks of the streets of the Heights, a powerful urge to return and throw myself back into my husband’s arms gripped me. I shucked it off and grabbed my stress ball from the console and started squeezing and releasing it in slow one-counts.

***

The hands on the clock read two p.m. I was making great progress on
SBRQ.
I had enough time left to beat our six o’clock press deadline and still get home for our “family surprise date,” but my goal was to put the project to bed by five fifty. My parents had made sure I knew that on time is good and ahead of schedule is better. I live by it.

“How’re we doing?” Brian called from his office.

“We’re looking good. Carlissa sold some more ad space, so we’re making room for it. Jerry is working on revisions now. We’ll all be here until we put it to bed.” The staff hated when a deadline fell at the end of the day on a Friday, so I knew they were all working as fast as they could.

“Excellent.”

I put my head down and my red pen back to work on the hard-copy proof in front of me. It slashed across the page, a rapier in my hands. Extra space. Alignment error. Typo in title. Was it wrong that I got so much pleasure out of the blood on the page? I tried to hide it, just in case.

At about four o’clock, a wave of nausea swept over me and I was momentarily confused. Images flashed in freeze frames in my mind. Adrian bent over the fallen cyclist in Cleburne. The white car speeding away. The lifeless and bloody body on the ground. The smears of blood on Adrian’s shirt that didn’t come out after three washes with bleach. These are just memories, I reminded myself, but a vague sense of unease remained that I couldn’t reconcile. Maybe I needed a snack. I snagged a handful of macadamia nuts from a jar in my desk drawer and texted Sam:
“Remember Adrian will pick you up after practice. Please confirm.”

I didn’t get a response. Typical. Although I supposedly required Sam to keep his phone with him, he carried it about one day out of fifty, and on that day it would have no charge. Ah, nature (his father) or nurture (his stepfather)? With Sam, probably both. I hadn’t heard from Adrian since lunch, either; he had a knack for leaving himself stranded without his phone, too. I hated not hearing from Adrian or being able to reach Sam, and my nerves were jangling. I had to focus, though. I had to finish
SBRQ
.