The Best American Short Stories 2015 (53 page)

They reached an intermission of sorts and he got up to use the bathroom. He brought his phone in with him and checked the damage while standing in front of the toilet. A text from Ernie (“kelso a go, bro?”) and, from Sherrill, two missed calls and a voicemail.

He stared at the phone for a long moment. The light in the bathroom was overbright, and a web of mildew snaked up the wall behind the toilet. He'd been married to Sherrill for twenty-six years. He'd never been unfaithful to her, not even after she'd confessed her own affair with that thug from the PTA, that snarky single dad working the middle school parents' scene like it was a nightclub. Still—he'd never cheated on her, had never even wanted to. How on earth had this happened? He looked up and saw himself in the bathroom mirror, naked, pale and paunchy. He heard Stacey flick on the TV in the bedroom. He wasn't sure what any of this meant.

A toilet flushed on the other side of the wall. It was the middle of the afternoon! My God, this Ramada was doing some business. He took another long look at himself in the mirror and shook his head. All right. He'd get dressed. He'd call Sherrill. He'd text Ernie. He'd get his goddamn act together, get this girl delivered to Lakeland, get back on the road. He'd forget the Corvair—a penance to Sherrill. He shifted position to flush the toilet, and as he did, his elbow knocked the ceramic towel holder and he watched in slow motion as his phone was jolted from his hand and jumped into a beautiful clear arc toward the toilet bowl, where it plunged into the water and urine in one single, horrifying blip.

Theo stood naked, staring at the phone in the toilet. Then he flushed the toilet once, twice, three times. The phone was lodged in the bottom of the bowl, stubborn.

“You OK, Theo?” Stacey called from the bedroom.

He fished the phone from the bowl; it now featured a strangely beautiful silver bloom across the screen. He punched the on/off button but nothing happened. He wrapped the phone in a towel and threw it in the wastebasket. Then he washed up and walked out of the bathroom and back to the bed. She turned the TV off and opened her arms.

Things were different now. Everything was different.

They took showers and dressed, but the refreshment of the cool hotel and the hot shower was short-lived when they stepped out of the room into the white hot light of afternoon again. Theo looked at his watch: 3:15. Could it be only 3:15? He felt as though a lifetime had elapsed in the space of this one day.

“Hold on,” he said to Stacey. He walked thirty yards to the front office, entered, and dropped the room cards on the reception counter, avoiding the clerk's gaze. When he arrived back at the van and approached the driver's door he realized Stacey was bent over near the rear hatch. She straightened as he approached.

“Everything OK?” he said.

“Peachy,” she said.

They climbed into the van and headed back to the highway.

“Here,” she said. She fished in her bag and pulled out two bottles of water she'd pinched from the room and a packet of ibuprofen. “I think we might need some of this. You front-load, see, and then the hangover is not so bad when the vodka wears off.”

“I'm learning all kinds of things from you, Stacey.”

“That's right,” she said. “And I bet you thought I was just a dumb girl.”

He swallowed an ibuprofen and turned on the radio, punching the buttons and then settling on a rock station. AC/DC promised dirty deeds done dirt cheap. God, he'd forgotten about these guys. His heart swelled with love for Angus Young. Stacey tapped her foot on the dash, keeping time. Theo pulled out of the hotel lot and into traffic. He sped forward to stay ahead of the crush, and then he merged cleanly onto the interstate and headed south.

All right, so he'd bag the sales call with Kelso. That was a no-brainer at this point. The loss of the phone had rendered him untethered from reality, it seemed. Plus, he was still a little drunk from the appletinis and the sex, and the result was a welcome bonhomie that was keeping all impending consequences nicely at bay, at least for the moment. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel and calculated distances again. Take the I-4 south through Orlando, pray they'd beat rush hour, head straight into Lakeland. Straight to the Corvair. Hour and a half, tops, if all went well. He glanced to his right. Stacey had put her hair back up, but she was sweating again.

“I'm sorry there's no air conditioning,” he said.

“Air conditioning is overrated,” she said. “I like the heat.”

They drove for nearly an hour, and she fell asleep for a while and then woke and announced she needed a bathroom.

“We're almost to Lakeland,” he said, glancing at his watch. “You can't wait?”

“Theo,” she said. “My back teeth are floating.”

He pulled over at a Citgo just off the highway.

“Doesn't look too clean,” he said. “You want me to find something better?”

“Well, aren't you the gentleman,” she said. She bounced up and down on the seat and grimaced. “I gotta pee. I don't care what it looks like.”

She left her handbag on the seat and ran inside. He started to reach for his phone to check messages, then remembered. A shadow fell across the interior of the van and he glanced up to see the beginnings of a thunderhead building in the distant sky. His gaze drifted around the car and fell on the handbag on the seat next to him, where a thick envelope protruded from the open zipper. He glanced up at the Citgo and then slipped the envelope out of the purse and opened it. Inside were several fat bricks of cash, stacks of hundreds in rubber-banded piles two inches thick. He stared at the money, tried a quick calculation. Thousands? At least thousands. Tens of thousands?

The passenger door of the Caravan was yanked open, and Stacey plopped down in the seat and snatched her handbag out of his hands.

“Mind your
own
,” she said. A note of fear had crept into her voice.

“How much money is that?” he said.

She hesitated a moment, then turned and looked at him. “Seventy thousand,” she said. “It took me eight years.”

She held his gaze for a long moment, then pulled at the rearview mirror and leaned forward to apply her orange lipstick. Her hand shook.

“We going?” she said.

“You're scaring the shit out of me, Stacey,” he said. He started the van.

“I'm scaring the shit out of myself too,” she said.

As he merged back onto the highway she told him how she did it.

“When the patients pay cash, that's easy,” she said. “But other times you can record it as a no-charge, or you can give them a discount and pocket the difference. You have to be creative. Not every case is the same.”

“And Wainwright had no idea?” he said.

“Pfftt,” she said. “He doesn't know his asshole from his elbow.” She paused, squinted at the road. “Although now that I'm gone,” she said thoughtfully, “he'll probably catch on.”

Theo felt a coolness run through his veins, and he processed the implications of the current situation. So far today, he'd initiated (though admittedly had not yet executed) an unapproved expenditure of five thousand dollars from the joint checking account he shared with Sherrill; he'd very likely lost his biggest commission of the month, if not his entire
job
, by blowing off the sales call with Kelso; and he'd committed tawdry and outrageously athletic adultery with a woman half his age. And now, it seemed, he'd also aided and abetted a confessed embezzler. He watched the road. He felt in his pocket again for his phone. He gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white.

“You're wanted,” he said.

She rolled her eyes. “Well, how nice of you to say, Theo,” she said. “I guess there's a first time for everything.”

He adjusted the rearview mirror and drove on.

It was nearly four-thirty. The heat had been dialed back a smidge and Theo watched the thunderheads build in earnest now to the west, the lightning lacing like fingers through the distant clouds. It was hard to tell if they'd drive into the storm or not, but he appreciated the gray cast the sky had taken on and the damp air, merely tepid now, rushing into the Caravan.

He wondered about Sherrill's voicemails, unchecked on the ruined phone, which was probably still sitting on the bottom of the waste pail at the Ramada Inn, steeped in urine. It wasn't like Sherrill to leave voicemails. She was more of a texter. A vague feeling of nausea crept into his abdomen, and he felt the first twinge of regret for the appletinis, for the affair, for the entire afternoon. A fat lovebug hit the windshield and burst, leaving a creamy blob of entrails just at eye level. He turned on the windshield washer, but it was out of fluid, so the wipers simply smeared the bug into an opaque rainbow of whites and yellows, and he had to slouch in his seat in order to see below it. The movement strained his back, and he straightened out and then hunched over the steering wheel. He glanced sidelong at Stacey and tried to muster a bit of the arousal that had so consumed him just a couple of hours ago, but got nothing. Ah, God! Had he ruined everything? He had a vision of himself behaving this way for the rest of his days: a bent, beaten old man, neutered by remorse, driving toward disaster, unable to see.

“No,” Stacey said. He looked over at her. “No, no, no, no, no.” Her eyes were wide and her gaze was fixed, frightened, on the wing mirror outside her window. He looked in the rearview and saw the blue flashing lights, and his stomach clenched. He glanced at the speedometer and saw he'd inched above eighty.

“Shit,” he said. “Holy hell.”

“Don't stop, Theo,” she said.

He took his foot off the accelerator and scanned the road's shoulder for a place to pull over.

“Don't stop,” she said again. Her voice was panicked, desperate.

“I have to stop,” he said.

“No, you don't,” she said. “Keep going.” She reached over and put her hand on the steering wheel, trying to keep the Caravan straight in the lane.

“I have to stop. Are you crazy? It's a cop! I have to stop.”

She was wiggling over the center console now, trying to put her own foot on the accelerator, trying to keep the steering wheel straight. Her weight tipped over the console and she fell into him; the Caravan swerved crazily into the next lane. He shoved her roughly back into her own seat and started to pull to the side of the road. A quarter-mile ahead, an exit ramp yawned down a narrow slope. Stacey clutched at his arm and started to cry, and when he looked at her, her eyes wide and terrified, her lips pulled back in a grimace so fraught it was almost beautiful, something shifted. He'd never seen anyone so alive.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Oh, Jesus, help me now.”

He pulled the Caravan back into the lane, steadied the wheel, and stomped on the accelerator. He pushed it up to ninety, then bulleted down the exit ramp. The cop evidently had a delayed reaction to the pursuit, and Theo imagined him startled, fumbling with the radio, calling for help. But then he obviously floored it and Theo watched in the rearview as the gap dwindled and the police car followed them down the ramp. The light was red at the bottom, and a solid line of traffic rushed across the road perpendicular to the exit. He glanced at the speedometer. They were approaching the intersection and still doing fifty. In the rearview, the reflection of the cop's blue lights ricocheted against the black wall of thunderheads.

“Do it,” Stacey said.

At the crossroads, he took his foot off the accelerator for only the barest instant, tapping the brakes just long enough to dodge a semi, and then another. The two trucks closed behind the Caravan like curtains and the truck drivers immediately slowed from the shock of the near miss, effectively blocking both the cop's trajectory and his vision for a good ten seconds, at least. And then—my God! They were still alive, and Theo was piloting the shaking, rattling Caravan straight back up the next ramp to reenter the interstate. He was Burt stinking
Reynolds
now, and he let out a yelp when he realized they were going to make it. In a Caravan! He pounded the accelerator and pulled straight up the ramp, reentering the same stretch of highway they'd just exited and leaving the dumb cop in the distance sniffing around the exit ramp like a geriatric bloodhound.

He accelerated to a sensible sixty and then hung there, panting. He edged into a clump of traffic, alongside a silver Toyota minivan, and they hawked the rearview, silent and sober, but the cop was gone.

Stacey clapped her hands, gleeful.

“You did it!” she said. “You lost him!”

The adrenaline drained as quickly as it had arrived. Theo felt like he was going to be sick. The first fat drops of rain spattered the windshield.

“He's going to have every cop in Lakeland looking for my tag,” he said.

She laughed and reached down for her handbag, and then she pulled out the Caravan's license tag. “You mean this old thing?” she said.

They pulled off at the next exit, and she sat in the van in the pouring rain while he stole a license tag off a Honda Odyssey parked at a Waffle House. They moved to park behind a BP, where he bolted the stolen tag onto the Caravan. For once, he was glad it was a Caravan, a million others just like it between here and Lakeland. Then he climbed into the van, wiped the water off his face with an old paper towel he found in the back seat, and got back on the road. With the windows up in the rain, the inside of the van was steamy and dank. He put the vents on full blast. They gasped hot air into the front seat. Stacey clutched her handbag to her chest and held his hand while he drove. Theo felt her trembling slow, then stop.

In Lakeland, they exited the interstate and headed north on a county road slick with rain, the steam rising like ghosts in the distance.

The Corvair wasn't at the auction. It was parked in a chain-link yard behind a garage two blocks away.
THE KAR KORRAL
, the sign over the garage said, and the man inside explained: “This here is direct sales. These cars won't sell at auction,” he said. He was terribly thin, cancer-thin, with sunken eyes and yellowed fingers. He sucked on a cigarette. His name, Rick, was stitched above his pocket. “They're not competitive enough,” he said. “Auction is for the cars everybody wants. Not like these here.”