by Gwen Florio
‘My son was not a drug dealer. They never found drugs in his car, or in his dorm room or even here in our home. Lucky our lawyer just happened to be here when they showed up with a search warrant; otherwise, I wouldn’t have put it past them to plant something. Robert did not have a mess of burner phones. His one phone, his only phone, was a graduation present from us, one of those iPhones he’d been begging us for. If it’s at the bottom of the Inner Harbor, it’s because some damn crooked cop dropped it there.’
Words not inclined to endear him to the police but maybe it didn’t matter, Nora thought. After her own encounter with them, and given what she’d seen at the Beach, she was inclined to sympathize with Kwame.
She’d awoken early each morning since, watching from her bedroom window as the dark form of Alden’s boat coasted toward her dock, bobbed beside it for long minutes, then continued on its lonely journey toward the bay, a scenario repeated a half-hour later as he rowed back to his home.
Her days stretched long and silent. Penelope had refused to explain her outburst after Satterline and Holiday’s departure, and generally kept to her bedroom during the day, pleading headaches from the heat, emerging to pick at her dinner and talk of inconsequential things and return immediately afterward to her room. Nora’s phone lay lonely on her bedside table. She’d let the battery run down after her interview with Satterline and Holiday so as to avoid an inbox filled with texts and voicemails from Alden and the occasional reporter. There was no need to use her laptop, now that her book deal was dead.
Mornings, she ran, keeping to the back roads; evenings, before it got too dark, she worked at removing the graffiti from Electra, pouring rubbing alcohol on to a sponge and dabbing at the paint, removing a few inches each day. At this rate, she thought, it would only take her about six months to return Electra to her former glory.
Headlights swept Electra’s surface one evening as she was putting away her sponge and rags. She spun around to see Emerson Crothers pulling up in a Porsche Boxster. He cut the engine, unfolded himself from a front seat just inches above the ground and ambled over.
She greeted him without preamble. ‘Em, I have to ask …’
He stopped a few feet away and hooked his fingers in his belt loops. ‘Shoot.’
‘Why’d a big guy like you get himself such a tiny little car?’
He turned and studied the car as though he hadn’t seen it before.
‘When you put it that way, I suppose it wasn’t the best idea. You really want to know?’
Not really. ‘Sure.’ It was the polite thing.
He went back to the car and held open the passenger door. ‘Come on. I’ll show you.’
She hung back. Alden had urged her into his truck and look how that had turned out. On the other hand, her only substantive conversations recently had been with Satterline, Holiday and reporters, and the latter hadn’t been conversations at all, unless you counted as meaningful discussion her clicking off the phone the minute someone announced an affiliation with a news organization. She’d started talking to the dog and the cat. Murph fawned delightedly at the attention but the cat puffed out its fur and hissed at her, apparently annoyed at any interruption to a mission that resulted in a small gray carcass just outside her bedroom door nearly every morning.
She got in the car.
A half-hour later, it was fully dark and they were deep in the county on a back road without so much as the light from a single farmhouse visible.
‘Where are we?’
‘The old nine-foot road. Don’t you remember?’
Heaven help her, she did. The long, straight stretch drew so little traffic that the county had paved only one side of it, leaving the other dirt or, depending on the season, mud. Motorists drove on the paved section, and when approaching one another counted on the town-bound driver to pull off on to the dirt. The set-up invited games of chicken that inevitably resulted in sideswipes and full-on crashes, one of which killed a young mother and her baby, prompting the county to finally – reluctantly – cough up the money to pave the other half. People still called it the nine-foot road, though, and it remained a favored drag-racing spot for high schoolers fueled by hard liquor and testosterone.
The blue glow from the dashboard lit Em’s grin. ‘Ready?’
‘For what?’
‘Hang on!’
And before she could ask what he meant, he jammed the accelerator to the floor. The car leapt forward, her back slamming into the seat as the sedately purring engine came to life with a joyous roar.
The odometer quivered past 160 kilometers per hour, Nora screaming with the exhilaration of speed, of being with someone who asked nothing of her, heading nowhere that mattered.
The wind whipped the sound away and tugged tears from her eyes. Her hair lashed her face, everything but Em beside her and the road ahead a blur.
It was over too soon, her hair settling slowly back around her shoulders as Em eased up on the accelerator and the car coasted toward a normal speed, then nearly to a stop as he swung the wheel in a U-turn and headed back toward Chateau.
He glanced toward her. ‘Fun?’
‘So much fun!’
‘I read the papers, you know. Figured you could use some fun. Ever gone that fast before?’
She nodded, enjoying his startled look. ‘Once. In Wyoming. A road as empty as this one. In the daytime, though. And in my truck. It took a little longer – a lot longer – to get up to speed.’
She waited for him to ask her about Wyoming, but he didn’t; at least, not in the way she expected.
‘You sorry about your husband?’
She combed the tangles from her hair with her fingers.
‘Yes and no. I’ll never again say I wish somebody dead. It’s such a lighthearted saying, until it happens. But do I miss him?’
Something about the darkness, the deserted road, led her to say the impermissible aloud.
‘No, not really. I found out our marriage had been over for a lot longer than I’d realized. Pretty embarrassing. Pretty infuriating. It sure shortens the grieving process, though.’ She waited for more questions. None came. Em hummed a little, tuneless but relaxed.
‘What about you? Ever marry?’ He didn’t wear a ring.
‘Came close a couple of times. Played the field for a long while first. You’d be surprised how many women want to sleep with someone they think will sell their house without taking a commission. At night I’d hear how great I was, and the minute I opened my eyes in the morning they’d be telling me how great their house was. I learned to mention, when things looked as though they were about to take a certain turn, that it’s unethical to sleep with a client.’ He laughed. ‘For a nerd like me, it was fun for a while, though.’
Nora offered the obligatory demurral. ‘You were never a nerd.’
‘I was totally a nerd. Took me a while to realize there was more to life than basketball. By the time I was done fooling around and ready to settle down, I’d missed all my good chances. Serves me right, I guess.’
‘And you stayed here. Ever tempted to leave?’
The lights of Chateau glimmered in the distance. The ribbon of river unspooled beside the road. Lightning bugs winked in the fields, a mirror image of the stars.
‘I love it here,’ he said simply and unembarrassed. ‘I guess I don’t have your adventurous spirit.’
Nora didn’t tell him she’d had enough adventure to last a lifetime; that boredom dangled before her, maddeningly just out of reach, as the most desirable of states.
They rode in silence until he pulled up at Quail House. His headlights shone on the graffiti defiling Electra, most of it still there, despite her efforts.
‘Burris’s body shop could take care of that.’
‘I know. But the thought of towing it through town the way it is now – everybody seeing it – I just can’t bring myself to do it.’
They sat and contemplated the trailer.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ Em said. ‘Yo
u around tomorrow morning?’
‘Tomorrow and every morning.’ Which sounded like an invitation. Too late, though.
He went through the maneuvers required to extricate himself from the car and came around to her door. Nora wondered if he’d try to kiss her, or ask himself in. Their encounter hadn’t had that vibe, but with men, you never knew. But he merely held open her door with a bit of a flourish.
‘I’ll be by around nine. See you then.’
He showed up the next morning with a tarp rolled up and belted like a companion into the passenger seat, and a small ladder sticking out of the narrow space behind the two seats.
‘I looked up the measurements for your trailer last night. This should do the trick. It’ll cover the graffiti so no one will see it when you tow it in.’
She hurried to help him unroll it. ‘This looks brand-new. You have to let me pay you for it.’
‘Not a chance. I’m forever working on my house. Just bring it by when you’re done with it. I can always use another tarp. I’m going to climb up on the ladder and pull it over the top. Would you please hang on to your end so it doesn’t slide all the way over?’
She liked the way he asked, even though her task was obvious, not barking orders the way Joe would have. Together they tugged at the tarp until it covered the damning letters.
‘Now for the fun part.’ He climbed down the ladder and retrieved a bundle of bungee cords from the car. Once again, she held one end as he slithered beneath the trailer and fastened the other, and then repeated the exercise until a veritable spiderweb of elastic cords wrapped Electra’s underside.
Em emerged and stood, dusting his pants. ‘You could drive that thing through a hurricane and that tarp wouldn’t come off. Need any help hitching it up?’
She did but hadn’t wanted to ask. ‘If you could just direct me while I back it up …’
She’d become adept at hitching and unhitching, but without a second person to guide her as she edged truck toward trailer, she was apt to waste time with near misses. With Em’s help, she maneuvered the truck into place on the first try.
‘Anything else?’ He reached for the safety chains. She waved him away.
‘Thanks, but I’ve got my own system. I’m not comfortable unless I’ve gone through everything on my checklist and then gone over it again.’
‘Like a pilot. Speaking of which, what’s with the airplane decal?’
‘It’s a Lockheed Electra. Amelia Earhart’s airplane. The whole idea was that we – Joe and I – would have great adventures in this thing. I know, I know.’ She held up a hand to forestall the obvious. ‘Things didn’t end well for her and they sure didn’t for me, either. But at least I’ve still got Electra. That’s what I call her.’ She patted the trailer’s tarp-wrapped side and sought a way to change the subject.
‘Hey, Em.’
‘What?’
‘All those things that happened back in the day. Bobby Evans getting shot. The riot. Did you know anything about it?’
He shook his head. ‘Nothing. Or almost nothing. Maybe bits and pieces, but never enough to really catch my attention. When I look back on growing up here, it seems idyllic. But I guess for a lot of people, it wasn’t.’
She thought of her conversation with Kwame, his memories of summers in Chateau, fishing and shooting varmints. That part, at least, had been idyllic for him, too. Things didn’t turn sour until black people and white came into one another’s orbits, apparently.
Nora remembered her manners. ‘You want coffee? Or tea? Mother always has a pot on, but I can make coffee.’
‘Thanks, but I’ve got a full day.’
He turned and surveyed Quail House, the gardens and outbuildings, the sweep of lawn to the river, and she could almost see the dollar signs blinking in his brain. She’d seen men look at women with less obvious lust. ‘You sure you and your mother don’t want to sell? I know she drew up that trust for you, but we could always change it. Place needs work, but it’s still mostly cosmetic. That’s not always the case in these old houses. The upkeep is so expensive and people let it go until things are past the point of no return.’
Nora thought Penelope would rather lose a limb than see Quail House pass out of the family and said as much.
Disappointment leaked from his words. ‘And you’re happy to take it over?’
‘That was the plan. Until all of this happened. Now, I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ She hoped he hadn’t heard the wobble in her voice.
‘Give it a while,’ he said. ‘You know this place. Everything gets swept under the rug eventually. Look how neither of us ever heard about what had happened before. Six months from now, it’ll be like none of this ever happened. And you’ll still be here and so will I.’
Nora shook her head as he drove away. If that had been Em’s idea of a come-on, no wonder he’d done so poorly with women for so long.
She surveyed the checklist she’d printed up back when she and Joe had first bought the trailer, when their plan had been to travel around the country with the goal of a book about midlife marital bliss. At least the trailer had survived the wreckage of that particular dream. She was no longer so sure about herself.
She laid the list on the ground beside her as she lowered the trailer hitch on to the truck’s ball, attached the safety chains and the breakaway cord, raised the stabilizers and kicked the chocks from beneath the wheels. She tucked the steps under the trailer bed, then she made a slow circuit of Electra, double-checking everything she’d already done, tugging at the safety chains and breakaway cord, peering beneath it to make sure she hadn’t left anything there, or that nothing had rolled under it. The grass was bare, except for a snoozing ball of orange fur.
‘Mooch!’ She clapped her hands. ‘Get out from there, unless you want to be turned into a flat cat instead of a fat cat.’
The cat opened one disdainful eye, then rose to his feet in slow motion with an extravagant yawn and stretch, ambling away toward the house, where he no doubt hoped to con Penelope into giving him scraps from her breakfast.
Nora followed him with a warning. ‘Don’t even think about it. I’ve got my eye on you.’
Her mother was at the table, a cup of tea steaming beside her. If she’d eaten breakfast at all, she’d long since washed the dishes and put them away. The cat assessed the situation and turned away with a last, baleful look in Nora’s direction.
‘Why don’t you drink iced tea in this weather? I can pick some mint and have it ready in just a few minutes,’ Nora offered. ‘All I did was hitch up the trailer and I’m already sweating. I feel the same way about iced coffee that you do about iced tea, but that’s what I’m having this morning.’
She filled a mug with ice and set it on the counter, next to the trailer-hitching checklist.
‘Iced tea is an abomination,’ Penelope said, as Nora had known she would. ‘But you could do me a favor.’
Nora scooped more ice from the freezer into a glass, filled it with tap water and drank deep while she waited for her coffee to brew. She held up the glass to her mother in a sort of toast. ‘Plain ice water. Not an abomination. What can I do for you?’
‘Could you please run into town and pick up my prescription? The pharmacy just called and said it was finally ready. Just in time. I took my last pill yesterday. I’m sorry to be such a bother.’
‘No bother at all. I’m heading into town anyway to drop the trailer off. I’ll have to spend some time at Burris’s, but I can get it afterward. I should be home in an hour or two.’
‘That long?’ Penelope lifted her cup and directed a dainty breath across the surface of the tea. ‘Oh, dear. I’m afraid that won’t do. You see, I have to take these pills at exactly the same time every day. The doctor was very specific.’
She picked her napkin up and dabbed delicately at the sweat glistening at her hairline, her throat. ‘I know! Why don’t you take my car? It’s air-conditioned.’ Spoken as one who’d never ceased to marvel at the comfort o
f an air-cooled vehicle.
‘Sure. I can bring the trailer in later.’ The thing she’d been trying to avoid, but the concession seemed the least she could do for her mother.
‘I’m so sorry to make you take two trips.’
‘Stop apologizing and give me your keys.’ Nora kissed her mother’s cheek. ‘It’s not as though I’ve got anything else to do, anyway.’
Nora made it in and out of Chateau without seeing anyone she knew. She wondered if her luck would hold on her second trip, to Burris’s.
As she drove up the lane toward the house, she saw her mother moving slowly through the pools of shade beneath the cedars, planting her walker firmly with each step. Nora pulled up beside her and rolled down the window.
‘Ahhh.’ Penelope closed her eyes in pleasure and leaned into the stream of cool air rushing from the car. ‘That’s delicious.’
‘What are you doing out here?’
‘Finally following up on my doctor’s orders to walk every day. I’ve been waiting for this heat to break, but it appears I’ll be old as Methuselah before that happens. If I do well enough, on my next visit I’ll graduate to a cane. Whoever thought I’d look forward to being an old lady with a cane?’
Nora held up the white bag from the pharmacy. ‘Do you want to take this now? I’ve got a water bottle with me.’
Penelope brandished her walker with grim determination. ‘No, thank you. I’ll take them when I get home. It’ll be a good incentive for me to hurry. “Hurry,” of course, being a relative term.’
‘Do you want me to walk with you? I can come back and get the car later.’
Penelope’s chuckle was breathless, forced, her making-the-best-of-it-aren’t-I-brave laugh.
‘Heavens, no. You run along. I’m almost there. We can sit down and have tea when I get back.’
Nora pulled the Lincoln into the shed, setting the parking brake as her mother always directed, even though the ground was perfectly level, and left the bag with the prescription on the kitchen counter along with a note for her mother. ‘Rain check on the tea?’
