by Shane Lusher
My eyes widened. “Nothing but the best,” I said. Donovan’s was an expensive place, on the north side of Peoria, on the bluff overlooking the water. “I’m interested,” I whispered. “I want to make sure she’s alright. She wouldn’t talk to me-”
She stopped typing on her telephone and looked up at me.
“Remember fourth grade?” she said. “Remember when they separate out the girls and they go and watch a movie while the boys are locked out?”
“She’s only nine years old,” I said.
“And?” Kelly asked. “I started when I was ten.” She pushed dial on her phone.
“Um, okay,” I said. “What should I do?”
“Hi, this is Kelly Davos, fourteen-twenty-one Lake Windsor Road. Two medium pizzas, one pepperoni, one anchovy and olives.” She looked at her watch. “Forty-five minutes?”
I was reminded again that, in spite of a few wrinkles around her eyes and a thinness she hadn’t had when we were younger, Kelly hadn’t really aged. She had the kind of smooth, copper skin mainly blonde women have, her arms covered in a kind of down that was noticeable only when the light struck it a certain way.
I swallowed and looked over at the coffee maker, which was just finishing its cycle. There were certain things I wasn’t ready to go into yet, even if I wanted to.
She hung up the phone and looked at me.
“What should I do?” I asked again.
“About?”
“Erin,” I whispered.
“Why should you do anything?” she asked. “What did you do when they locked you out of the cafeteria when you were nine years old?”
I shrugged. “Played football.”
“Then go do that,” she said. She patted me on the arm.
Kelly went to change, and I sat at the dining room table watching the girls and drinking my coffee. I’d written everything down on a sheet of paper. I needed to get over to Tad’s house, and my personal computer.
If walking around talking to people wasn’t working, then I needed to do what I did best. I was wasting time. People misled, deceived; the public record did not. I hadn’t helped the Chicago PD catch Wallace by talking to people.
Where was Rassi? I took out my phone and dialed his number, but voice mail picked up after two rings and I hung out without leaving a message. He’d said he was lying low. Most likely he was asleep in his hotel room by now.
I folded the sheet of paper and stuck it in my pocket. Quality time. That’s what I needed to do now. The girls were on the couch. When I sat down next to them, I saw that they were dressing up paper screen models in various clothing and hair styles on their tablet.
“You guys play Space Invaders?” I asked.
The question dated me. I was young enough so that I should have been in on the big wave of video game consoles that flooded the market in the nineties, but I had never been able to graduate from a one-button, one-stick controller to the more versatile versions that had you operating two or more buttons and two cross-shaped directional thingies whose names I’d never bothered to learn.
Casey looked up at my question and then back down to her screen, where she was painting blue lipstick onto an Asian model with bright pink hair. “What’s Space Invaders?” she asked.
“They’ve got to have Space Invaders on there,” I said. “They’re making all the old games again. Like Donkey Kong, Pac-Man?”
Erin glanced up at me, and then back down.
“Let me see,” I said. Erin sighed and Casey rolled her eyes, but they passed the tablet over to me.
I went into the application store and searched for it. When it popped up, I noticed that the same company that had made the old refrigerator-sized coin games had apparently designed the application. I clicked on it, enlarged it and then opened up the section with ‘Screenshots’.
“See?” I said. “Space Invaders.”
Casey looked at the screen and then back at me while Erin took the iPad back.
“Why in the hell would anybody play that?” Casey asked. “That looks like something a first-grader drew.”
“Casey!” Kelly called out from the bathroom. “The language.”
“Sorr-y.” Casey went back to primping her model.
The whine of a hairdryer echoed down the hall from the bathroom.
I had left the living room to get another cup of coffee from the kitchen when the doorbell rang.
The delivery boy was tall, sixteen-ish, and extremely polite. I paid him for the pizza and gave him a tip, for which he thanked me profusely and left.
“Why in the hell would anybody eat pizza with anchovies?” I asked as I came into the dining room and set down the boxes.
The girls laughed.
“Erin,” Casey said.
“I like fish,” she said, and opened up her box.
“It’s disgusting,” Casey said. “And it stinks.”
Erin took a big bite of her pizza and then breathed out into Casey’s face. Casey smacked her on the shoulder.
“Keep it clean, guys,” I said.
When Kelly came out of the bathroom in khaki shorts and a spaghetti top, she looked almost seventeen years old. It was at that time that I realized I was still wearing my sweated-through suit.
“I should have changed,” I said.
“I think you look great,” Kelly said. “But yeah, you should change. Suits don’t fare well where we’re going.”
“I thought we were going to Donovan’s,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Afterwards.”
“After what?”
“It’s a surprise,” she said. She pulled on my tie.
I looked at my watch. It was six-o’clock. The babysitter was returning in a half hour.
“You don’t have any man clothes around here, do you?”
It turned out she did: a pair of beige shorts and a polo shirt. I knew that they had probably been Tad’s, but Kelly didn’t mention where they came from, and I didn’t ask.
I showered and put on the clothes. Luckily, she also had a pair of old flip-flops, so I wouldn’t be forced to wear my dress shoes to wherever it was we were going.
By the time I was ready, Gabby McMurtry had returned. When I opened the door I wondered if she thought about Colby Trueblood, and what her last moments in life had been like.
I stood in the doorway for a moment with my mouth open, trying to remember what it was you were supposed to talk about when you encountered a teenager. She gave me a strange look as I finally moved back away from the door and she walked into the living room.
We said goodbye to the girls. I was surprised when Erin came up to give me a kiss goodbye. For a brief moment, I rated higher than the iPad.
“Before we do this, I have one condition,” Kelly said when we were outside with the door shut.
“Okay,” I said.
“We don’t talk about the cases,” she said. She’d stepped down onto the front walk and was looking up at me. “Or kids. Can we just be two adults without kids and jobs tonight?”
I stepped down to where she was standing.
“You mean, can we pretend like we’re teenagers again?” I asked.
Kelly smacked me on the arm. “Exactly. Except if we were teenagers, we wouldn’t be able to afford to go to Donovan’s and afterwards there would be no sex.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“I was speaking facetiously,” she said. “You aren’t getting jack tonight, Bozo.”
“So, it’s exactly like high school,” I said. “Shell out a lot of money and then not get lucky.”
“Did we go to the same high school?”
“You're not hungry yet, are you?” Kelly asked as we drove away.
We were in my car, but she’d insisted on driving, and now she was fiddling with the radio. Van Halen was still in the cassette deck, Sammy Hagar singing about Cabo Wabo.
I hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch, but the two beers and the coffee had filled me up considerably. In another life, I realized, I woul
d just walk to a bar and continue drinking, not eating until midnight, if I even bothered to do that.
“No,” I said. “Where are we going?”
“It's a surprise,” she said as she sped up on our way out of town. “Jesus Christ.” She poked at the stereo. “What the hell is this? 1988?”
She popped out the cassette and tossed it into the back seat.
We went up Route 29 and merged onto I-474 in Creve Coeur and crossed the river. By then she’d tuned the radio to a top 40 station.
“How about 106?” I asked.
“Man, you have been gone a long time,” she said.
“Rock 106 is gone?”
“No, the frequency's still there.” She sighed at my ignorance. “Now it's an adult alternative station.”
“What's adult alternative?” I asked and looked over at her. She was wearing a small charm bracelet. It made chiming noises as she raised her hand and pulled her hair back behind her ears.
“Exactly,” Kelly said.
The go kart track. That was the surprise.
Everything was still the same. The white gravel of the parking lot, the dune buggy course, the track itself, paved in cinders, the perpetually fallen-down pine timbers of the clubhouse, and the tiny packages of potato chips hanging from hooks on the pegboard in the back.
“I haven't been here since 1992,” I said. “God, I'm old.”
“Shut up,” Kelly said as she parked. “I'm just as old as you are, and that's not that old.”
“Yeah, but you wear it better than I do.”
“You don't hear that very often.”
She paid for both of us, and we waited in line for a few minutes before the attendant, a sixteen-year-old kid, opened the gate. We flocked in with the others, all teenagers, and raced toward the waiting carts.
“I remember these things being bigger,” I said as I climbed in.
“Maybe you were thinner,” said Kelly and smiled.
“You saying I'm fat?”
“Not at all,” she said. “You've filled out.”
“Thanks.”
We put on our seat belts and took off.
Kelly reached down and fumbled with her engine and then hit the gas, speeding on up away from me.
I had my accelerator pressed to the floor, but couldn't seem to catch up, bouncing along three inches off the ground, feeling every bump crunching my spine, which sent flickers of nerve pain down my left leg. She looked back at me and smiled.
Then she gave me the finger and skidded around the corner.
I was three-quarters around the track, Kelly already coming up behind me off her first lap, when I remembered the governor.
The engines were equipped with governors that limited the amount of fuel the accelerator pumped through them, which in turn put a cap on how fast you could go. But the governor was nothing more than a little catch on top of the engine.
Kelly was just passing me. She tapped me on the shoulder when I leaned forward and pulled up on the catch, and we ran neck-and-neck for a few seconds.
Then she smacked my hand away from the engine, pulled her switch and took off. I came up behind her and held my speed, watching her back, the muscles shaking with the vibrations of the machine.
“Stop looking at my ass!” she shouted over her shoulder, her hair flying around her head and up into her face.
“Can't help it,” I said, knowing that my voice would probably be lost in her backwind. “It's a nice ass.”
She turned around and grinned and then skidded sideways around the corner. I almost ran into her, and when I slowed down to avoid hitting her, she was gone again.
I was still watching her backside vibrating on its tiny vinyl seat when I became aware of a loud beeping sound. My go kart had stopped running, a red light blinking on the top. I couldn’t remember those having been there before. On up ahead, Kelly coasted to a stop.
“Stop your engines!” someone was calling over the PA. “Stop your engines.”
It was a superfluous thing to say, since apparently they had some kind of remote control to allow them to do just that, whether you wanted to or not. After a moment, the light stopped blinking and I was free to go again. As I pulled up next to the line of people waiting for the next run, the kid in the box flipped a switch and stepped out in front of me.
“You aren't allowed to manipulate the engine, sir,” he said to me and pointed at a sign on the building next to the fence. It read: “Anyone caught adjusting the engines' governors will first be warned then asked to leave!”
Kelly came by, her hands working on a wire dangling to the side of the engine, and just kept on going.
“Stop your engines!” the kid called into his microphone.
Kelly was the only one still running around the track, and she had only one engine. The kid on the PA was frantically working a switchboard, but judging by the wires I could see in her hand, she’d found a way to disable the automatic shutoff.
When she got to the first curve at the opposite end of the starting line, she stopped, stood up on the metal frame, pulled her pants down, and mooned everyone. Then she readjusted her shorts, fumbled with the engine, and took off back around the raceway.
It really was a nice ass. I leaned my head back and laughed toward the darkening sky. It had been a long time since I'd done that.
“We're going to have to ask you to leave, ma’am,” Kelly said in a deep voice as she drove through Peoria toward the river. “I told her, Dean,” she said in a falsetto, imitating the sixteen-year-old.
I laughed. “You haven't changed much,” I said. “In spite of that face you put on every day.”
“Are you going to say I’ve turned into a bitch?” she asked. We were making our way into downtown Peoria.
“I would never dream of saying that,” I said.
“Yeah, well. Sorry.”
She pulled into a parking lot on the riverfront. “This ok?” she asked. She pointed toward a brick building.
“Paddlewheel Brewery,” read a hand-painted sign, black letters on white. A red steamboat paddle sat cockeyed on a rock bed next to the entrance.
“No Donovan’s?” I asked.
“Do you mind?” she asked, fussing with her hair. “It’s not as fancy as Donovan’s, but the beer’s good and the food is edible.”
“Hey,” I said as she parked. “It’s your night out.”
We left the car and walked across the blacktop parking lot, still radiating the heat from the day. The hostess inside, another teenager with three lip rings, escorted us to a table with bar stools on the wooden deck overlooking the dark, fetid river. She took our drink orders and then disappeared back into the safety of the air conditioning.
I watched her go and stifled the urge to ask Kelly about her deposition.
“Tell me about your ex-wife,” Kelly said when the waitress had left. She held her chin down and looked at me from under her eyebrows. All humor had disappeared.
“I was going to ask you about your husband,” I said.
“We were never married,” she said, still giving me the look. “I’m sure you know all about that, anyway.” She fluttered her hands. “And I asked you first.”
I spread my hands.
“Well-“ I began, but then our beers arrived. “Thank God for fast service,” I said, watching a barge creep by on the river.
“Cheers,” Kelly said as we toasted. We both took a drink, and then she fastened me with that look again. No more seventeen. She was a thirty-eight-year-old woman, with a child and two jobs, priorities, and an agenda.
“You don’t know all about it?” I asked. “From Tad, or-”
“You’ve been back for three months,” she said. “How much conversation have we had in that time? And how much conversation are we going to have, like this, with two kids to take care of?”
I hadn’t missed the we part. We were in charge of two kids. Not two separate adults caring for two children. I was silent for a moment, thinking that it was one thing to wax nosta
lgic about what was and what might have been. It was another thing entirely to be starting a — what? Friendship? Relationship?
With a woman I’d just found out had not actually been my brother’s lover.
“I mean, I don’t even really know you, do I?” she asked.
“Fair enough,” I said. “I don't know. We got married. She got pregnant. Then Jake died, and she left. I haven’t spoken to her in six months. The divorce will be final,” I looked at my watch, “In about a month.”
“I don't want to know what's going on now. I figured that out. What happened?” Kelly asked, poking my hand with her index finger.
“Okay,” I said. “Fine. It was like this. We were fighting a lot. She didn't think that I was grieving correctly. But in the end, I figured out that she was right. At least partially. She thought that I should be grieving the same way as she was. Which I wasn’t. I was…”
I let that dangle. I was drunk all the time, when I wasn’t holding her, and listening to her. I watched the water swirling below us, and looked over across the river at the new boardwalk that had just been erected in East Peoria the year before.
“I don’t know what might have happened if Jake had lived,” I said finally, and looked up at her. “But our marriage was over a long time ago.”
“You thinking of patching things up with her?” she asked. She was watching me over her pint glass of beer, measuring me.
“With the divorce already sealed up? Absolutely not,” I said. “That part of my life is over.”
We’d both ordered the burritos, and after we’d eaten, we ordered another round of drinks. It was nine-thirty when we finished, and we got up to leave.
“You going to tell me what happened?” I asked as I put some money down on the table.
“Do I have to?”
“I told you.”
As we walked through the restaurant, I placed my hand, gently, carefully, on the small of her back and then, realizing what I’d done, took it away.
