The Best American Short Stories 2015 (54 page)

He gestured to the lot, and Theo approached the fence. The rain had stopped and the sun was back, brutal, heating the puddles into vapor. Stacey followed him to the yard, where not one but two Corvairs sat sweltering among a crowd of decrepit, rust-eaten Mustangs and Camaros. Rick unlocked the gate and they walked into the yard. Theo pulled the crumpled ad out of his pocket and showed it to Rick.

“Right here,” Rick said. He led them to one of the cars. It was a 1963 Corvair, blue, and it was one of the most depressing things Theo had ever seen. It was a convertible, and the ragtop was tattered beyond repair. The interior was a catastrophe—a cheap velour redo now dirty and damp-looking, with burnt orange foam bulging out from between ripped seams. The dashboard was cracked, the floorboards were rusted, and a hefty dent across two quarter panels kept the passenger door from even opening. The whole car smelled like cat.

“Oh, gawd,” Stacey said. “I don't know, Theo. This is
it?
”

“No,” Theo said. “That's not the one.” He turned to the white Corvair behind him. “This one here.”

“That's a good 'un,” Rick said. “Better car, all around. After the redesign, you know. This here '66 is a sweet little car.” Theo nodded. Indeed it was. Neat as a pin, a clean dry hardtop with a beautiful creamy finish and a red interior. It was the car from the photo. It was even better in person. Stacey opened the passenger door and climbed in, smiled up at him.

Theo stared at the ad in his hand, which was written, he now saw, as ambiguously as possible. “Corvair!” it said. “Two models. $5,000. Call for details.”

“So which one is five thousand dollars?” he asked, feeling his heart sink, already knowing the answer.

Rick laughed, a wet jagged chuckle. “The ragtop I can let you have for five,” he said. “This little coupe here is almost fully restored. She goes for nine.”

“Christ,” Theo said. He showed Rick the ad again. “This here is bait and switch.”

Rick gazed at him levelly. “You saying I don't have a Corvair here for five thousand dollars?”

Stacey got out of the car.

“It's for your daughter here?” Rick said. “Maybe we can negotiate a little bit. She looks pretty as a picture in that coupe.”

This was a lie, of course. Stacey was wet, bedraggled, and road-worn, and she looked worse than she had when she'd slid open the frosted glass window at Wainwright's earlier this morning. All of it was a lie, and Theo was sick and disgusted, suddenly, with everything. He didn't have nine thousand dollars to spend on the white Corvair. He didn't even have five thousand for the blue one, come to think of it; he'd debited ninety-five dollars for the room at the Ramada and seventy-nine dollars for chicken fingers and appletinis at TGI Friday. He'd have to do some negotiating just to win the '63, which was a wanked-out proposition to begin with, the damn thing not even drivable, no way to get it home without a tow. A lemon. A '63—the year
before
the redesign. The idiot year. What a bust. What a goddamn bust.

He turned and strode back to the Caravan.

“You want to take my card, think it over?” Rick said, but Theo didn't turn around. “I'm staying open late. I'm here till six, you change your mind,” Rick called. Theo barely waited for Stacey to get back into the van before he lurched into reverse and turned around in the gravel parking lot. He pulled out onto the highway again, drove north into downtown Lakeland, with no particular destination in mind.

“I'm sorry, Theo,” she said, after a minute. She bit her lip. “You want me to help you make up the difference?”

He shook his head.

“I'm not buying a car with stolen money,” he said. He stopped at a red light and looked at her hard. “Now where the hell do I let you out?”

She turned away, blinking. He'd stung her. He didn't care. Between the appletinis and the heat and the leftover adrenaline, he was beginning to think he might really be sick, so when he saw a Books-a-Million hulking on the corner of a busy intersection, he pulled in.

“We gotta cool off,” he said.

They walked into the bookstore, but the café area was too crowded, so they moved to the back of the store and sat on low benches in the children's department. A young father was parked on one of the benches across from them, supervising three tiny kids, all outfitted in some sort of denim camouflage. He was reading the little girl a book, and his voice had the reading monotone of a second grader. He stopped when the two little boys started wrestling over an oversized book shaped like a truck.

“Put that book back,” the man said. “And don't get you no more.” He looked at Theo and Stacey and grinned. Theo took Stacey's elbow and scooted her further down the bench.

“Listen, I've got to go home,” he said. “I've got a three-hour drive.”

Stacey clutched her handbag to her chest and watched the little boys, who had turned their attention to a wooden train set spread out on a low table.

“How am I going to get to Tampa?” she said.

He snorted. “You're filthy rich,” he said. “I think you'll figure it out.”

She started to cry, a silent ugly weeping that made him feel small and embarrassed. The camouflaged family looked at them. The young father raised his eyebrows at Theo.

“I'm scared, Theo,” Stacey said. “What's going to happen to me?”

He patted her damp shoulder and smiled grimly at the young father. Then he took a deep breath.

“I'll get you a coffee, OK?” he said. “Just sit tight.”

He left her hunched over her purse on the little wooden bench. He walked toward the café, and his pace quickened as he moved, until he walked out the front door of the bookstore and over to the Caravan. He started the engine, rolled down the windows, and headed for I-4. Northbound.

The traffic on the interstate was heavy, but he'd driven through worse. He glanced at his watch. Five-thirty. The afternoon's thunderstorm was just a lingering dampness now, and he knew that by the time he approached Orlando the usual rush hour should have dissipated. He'd probably be home before nine.

He hunkered down behind a U.S. Mail semi, steadied his speed at fifty-five, and tried to relax. He pushed the play button of the CD player. And before Susan Boyle had even reached the chorus of “Wild Horses,” he was back down the exit ramp, retracing his route and pulling into the still-damp parking lot of the Books-a-Million, where she stood like a statue on a parking island, clutching the handbag.

“I'm sorry,” he said to her. He leaned over the seat and opened the passenger door. “I panicked.”

“It's OK,” she said. “I'm panicking all the time.”

They struck a deal. A thirty-five-mile ride to Tampa for $3,174.00. They left Books-a-Million and made it back to the Kar Korral just as Rick was locking up the chain-link fence. He gave them a salute and ushered them into his sales office. They signed over the Caravan for a thousand bucks and Stacey fished the tag out of her purse. Rick raised an eyebrow but offered no comment. When they pulled out of the parking lot in the white Corvair, Theo felt as though he'd been reborn. The afternoon sky was a deeper blue. The trees were a crisper green. In the seat next to him, Stacey was radiant, and he felt blood rushing everywhere in his body. Everywhere.

“You are so sexy in this car,” he said.

She smiled. “You're full of shit,” she said. “Doesn't this thing go any faster?”

He drove her south to Tampa, and the sun drifted slowly lower until the road was dim, and then dusk. She was quiet, and he rested his hand on her thigh for a little while and then returned it to the steering wheel. In Tampa, he followed her directions and pulled up in front of a neat little cinderblock motel on the south side of the city.

“My mother is staying here,” she said. “But we're leaving tonight. She's got a car. We're going back to Texas, where we're from.” She sighed, then smiled. “Some girls run away with Prince Charming,” she said. “I'm running away with my momma.”

“You going to be OK?” Theo said. He touched her face.

“Hell, yes,” she said. “Peachy.”

She got out of the Corvair and leaned in to look at him through the passenger window.

“The car is beautiful,” she said. “And you're a good man, Theo.”

He stared at her and had no idea what to say. She laughed.

“Now what?” he said.

“Here's where you go home, Theo. And here's where I just walk away,” she said.

“Walk away?”

“Yes,” she said. “Walk. Away.” And she did. He watched her funny gait, short-stepping on the high heels, the way her backside protruded and her skirt stretched tighter than could possibly be comfortable as she walked up to one of the motel rooms and knocked on the door. A tiny woman answered the door and Stacey turned around, waved to him, and then disappeared into the room.

He pulled a U-turn in the parking lot and felt the Corvair's engine rumbling behind him, and though he knew it was a flat-6, it felt like a locomotive. He flicked on the radio and found another rock station. Zeppelin. Gorgeous. The sky was full dark now, and the air had cooled. He could smell the thick, tangy air of the Gulf off to the west, and he pointed the Corvair northeast, headed back toward the Atlantic, only the thick floating peninsula of La Florida left to cross. He thought about pulling over at a pay phone to call Sherrill, then decided against it. There would be hell to pay when he got home. But the devil was in the back seat, keeping time to the music, and hell was a long way up the road.

JESS WALTER

FROM
Tin House

M
OTHER WAS A STUNNER
.

She was so beautiful, men would stop midstep on the street to watch her walk by. When I was little, I'd see them out of the corner of my eye and turn, my hand still in hers. Sometimes I'd wonder if the ogling man was my father. But I don't think the men ever saw me. And my mother didn't notice them, or pretended not to notice, or had stopped noticing. She'd simply pull my hand toward the Crescent, or the Bon Marché, or the fountain at Newberry's, wherever we were going then. “Come on, Tanya, no dawdling.”

This could have been my mother's motto in 1974: no dawdling. I was nine then, and Mother thirty-one. She had four or five boyfriends at any given time—she eliminated them like murder suspects. We lived in a small apartment above a jewelry store where Mother worked as a “greeter.” I think the owner's theory was that men wouldn't dicker over carats with my tall, striking, miniskirted mother looking over their shoulders. She seemed to have a date whenever she wanted one, at least three or four a week. I knew them by profession: “I'm seeing the pilot tonight,” she would say amid a cloud of hair spray, or, with a dismissive roll of her eyes, “The lawyer's taking me to Sea Galley.” Mother left me alone in the apartment when she went on these dates and I fed myself and put myself to bed. But she was always there when I woke in the morning, sometimes hurrying the pilot or the lawyer out the door. After one of the men spent the night, I'd wonder if he might stick around for a while, but the next night he was gone and in his place came a fireman or an accountant.

Then, one day, Mother stopped dating entirely. She announced that she was marrying one of the men—a guy she'd been out with only three times by my count—“Mr. Voice.” He was a short, intense man with buggy eyes and graying hair that he wore long and mod, framed by two bushy gray sideburns and a thinning swoop across his big forehead.

“You're marrying
him?
” I was confused. Mother always said that one day my father would return, that what they had was “different than other people,” that these other boyfriends were just “placeholders” until he came back. I didn't remember my father, and she didn't talk about him much—where he lived or who he was—but she'd get this faraway look and say things about him like “We'll always be together” and “He'll come back.” Until then, she was just biding her time—or so I thought—until Mr. Voice came along.

“What about my father?” I asked. We were packing up the apartment into grocery-store boxes.

“Your father?” She smiled gently. “Your father's got nothing to do with it. This is about making a house, and a family for us.” Wait. She was doing this for me? I didn't want her to make a family for us; I wanted to wait for my father.

She set down the dishes she was packing and pushed the hair out of my eyes, bent down close. “Listen to me, Tanya. You're a very pretty girl. You're going to be a beautiful woman. This is something you won't understand for a while, but your looks are like a bank account. You can save up your whole life for something, but at some point, you'll have to spend the money. Do you understand?”

It was the only time I ever heard Mother talk about her looks this way. Something about it made me sick. I said I understood. But I didn't.

Or maybe I did.

Mr. Voice was fifty then, almost twenty years older than my mother. Although his name was Claude Almond, everyone knew him—and I mean,
everyone knew him
—as Mr. Voice. This was the name on his business cards, the name in the phone book, the name on the big sign outside the studio he owned, the name people greeted him with on the street, mimicking his basso profundo:
Hey, Mr. Voice
. By the summer of '74, when my mother married him, Claude was on every radio station on the dial, on TV commercials, at civic events, hosting variety shows. Mr. Voice narrated our daily life in Spokane, Washington.

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