The Cursed Canoe

by Frankie Bow

  “And my classes didn’t even transfer,” she added.

  “So which school was this?”

  She told me. It took me a moment to figure out why the name sounded familiar. It was one of the group of for-profit institutions that were being sued—the case that had inspired Bob Wilson from the history department to write his indignant letter to the editor. Maybe their graduation rate was in the single digits and their classes didn’t transfer, but they did one thing remarkably well: They took federal student loan money and transferred it quickly and efficiently to the pockets of their executives. Any actual education that happened to take place along the way was incidental.

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” I said.

  “Yeah, not as sorry as me. Anyhow, Kathy didn’t make me feel stupid for getting myself into this situation. She went out of her way for me, whatever she could do. She was real understanding.”

  “She was understanding?” I repeated. “Kathy Banks?” Was she talking about the same Kathy Banks who, the first time I turned in our departmental student satisfaction report, sent the whole thing back and made me start over because I’d turned in the canary copy instead of the goldenrod one? And then, because she had bounced it back after the deadline, wrote me up for turning it in late?

  “We found out we’re both type 1,” Sherry was saying. “I think that’s when we bonded for real.”

  “Type 1?”

  “Yeah, cause you know how it seems like everyone around here is type two?”

  I nodded as if I knew what Sherry was talking about. It probably had something to do with the way people used to get their colors analyzed, to find out whether they were a “winter” or whatever. My mother had taken me to the cosmetics counter of a local department store to get my colors done when I was a teenager. I was an autumn, the Color Consultant informed us, and should wear warm hues like oranges and yellows.

  “Oh, nonsense,” my mother had rebuked the Color Consultant, whose suggestion had instantly demoted her in my mother’s eyes from expert to incompetent fraud. “Molly can’t wear yellow. She’d look like a corpse.” Mom swept out of the department store, bristling with indignation, as I trailed sheepishly behind her.

  “Type 1 diabetes,” Sherry said. “Insulin-dependent. You’re not diabetic, are you?”

  “Type 1 diabetes. Right. What else would it mean? No. I’m not diabetic. So you can’t eat sweets?” I tried to imagine not ever eating sweets. Now that sounded worse than Purgatory.

  “Nah. You just gotta make sure to cover whatever you eat with the right amount of insulin. I mean, don’t go crazy with the cheesecake or anything. It’s kind of a pain, but you get used to it. You know, when Kathy—oh hey doll! You’re back!”

  Sherry turned her attention to Glenn, effectively ending our conversation. He was certainly dressed to attract attention. He wore a red leather bomber jacket with no shirt underneath, and formfitting, low-rise skinny jeans.

  The chair I was sitting in was the one Glenn had vacated a few minutes earlier, but he apparently didn’t need it back. He and Sherry seemed happy to share Sherry’s single chair.

  Freed from the obligation of making small talk, I sat quietly and watched the sunset. Davison was already at the airport and would be flying out in a couple of hours, so there was at least one disaster averted. Maybe I’d be able to enjoy part of this weekend after all.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  EMMA’S HUSBAND WANTED to stay downstairs and socialize after dinner, so Emma invited me back up to her room to keep her company. It was only after we reached her room and she closed the door that I realized my ears were ringing from the raucous conversation.

  “So were you okay sitting next to Sherry?” she asked.

  “M-hm. It was fine. And now I’m having second thoughts about her being Donnie’s ex-wife. I mean, I can’t picture Sherry and Donnie together at all, much less married.”

  “Did you ask her about him?”

  “There was no way to do it tactfully. And after Glenn came back, I gave up trying to make conversation.”

  “So what did you do then? Sat there and didn’t say anything?

  “More or less.”

  “Really?”

  “There were enough talkers around the table. If anything, I’d say there weren’t enough listeners. So I was able to fill that important role.”

  “Yeah, sounds like our crew,” Emma said. “They probably liked having an audience. But wait, about Sherry and Donnie. You were so sure on the drive over she was his ex-wife. You almost had me convinced. Like you said, how many Sherrines can there be? So what made you change your mind?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it’s because it’s so hard for me to imagine those two together. I mean, Donnie thinks it’s inappropriate when people hold hands in public. Did you see what Sherry and Glenn were doing?”

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you. Now can you help me with this? I have to post today’s results on our club website and put some kind of memorial for Kathy Banks. I shoulda done it already. My crew was bugging me about it today.”

  Emma went over to the desk and started up her laptop. I took my place in the chair beside her.

  “What are you going to write about her?” I sure didn’t have any ideas.

  “I don’t know. I guess I’ll put, in memory of Kathy Banks. I have to put the dates. Birth and death.”

  “Sounds great,” I said.

  “But I don’t know her birth year.”

  “Wouldn’t she have put it on her club application?”

  “Yeah. Too bad I don’t have the applications with me.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Probably in a file drawer somewhere in my lab.”

  “Can you wait until we get back to Mahina to finish the web page?”

  “No, they’re all expecting me to get it done tonight.”

  “So then forget about the dates. Why not just In memory of Kathy Banks?”

  “Shouldn’t there be more than five words? Doesn’t hardly seem like enough.”

  “How about, In Memory of Kathy Banks. She sure could tell the difference between canary and goldenrod.”

  “I know,” Emma exclaimed. “I’ll put something inspired by today’s race.”

  “No, don’t put anything corny like ‘May you frolic with dolphins forever.’ You’ll just regret it later.”

  “I need a picture of her too.”

  “What about one of your team photos? Crop it down so you only have her in the picture.”

  Emma browsed the club website for a few moments, her frown becoming more pronounced.

  “Something wrong?” I asked.

  “Kathy’s not in any of our team photos. I never noticed before.”

  I leaned in to look over her shoulder.

  “I’m friends with Kathy,” I said. “Online, I mean. Maybe she has—I mean, had something in her photo albums. You’re friends with her too, right?”

  “Oh, good idea.” Emma pulled up the social networking website and went to Kathy’s pictures.

  “It feels creepy to poke around in a dead woman’s photos,” Emma said.

  “It’s just ones and zeros,” I reassured her, not feeling particularly good about it myself. Emma paged through the scenic photos. We saw Kuewa’s shabby, brightly painted boardwalk; a few shots of snowy mountaintops; the Bayfront on a day so clear you could see past the breakwall, clear up the coast. There were no people anywhere in the pictures.

  “How about Sherry’s account?” I suggested.

  Emma clicked a few times.

  “Jackpot!” she yelled, so loud it made me jump.

  “Oh, looks nice,” I said. “Kind of an action shot. What are you guys doing there?”

  “We’re rigging the canoe. Kathy’s hair’s kind of falling into her face, but you can tell it’s her. I dunno. What do you think?”

  Emma downloaded Sherry’s photo and opened it in her editing software. She selected a square around Kathy’s face and enlarged it. />
  “I could crop it here,” she said.

  “Looks fine. The resolution’s kind of grainy when you enlarge it, but you can tell it’s her.”

  “Yeah, it’s not the best.” Emma sighed, disappointed.

  “Hey, you know what you should try? The facial recognition software. Maybe Kathy had another online photo album somewhere. You might be able to find a better picture.”

  “Facial recognition software? The thing your crazy student was ranting about? Is it hard to use?”

  “I doubt it. Anyway, we have a picture of Kathy right here. Why don’t we try it out?”

  We found the site with little difficulty. Emma uploaded the photo, indicated the location of facial features with a few clicks, and chose the option to search for visual matches. It wasn’t quite as easy as Davison had made it sound when he was talking about it at dinner, but it worked. A page popped up right away.

  “Boo,” I said. “False positive.”

  “No, it looks like her,” Emma said.

  “It’s not her,” I insisted. “This lady? The brunette? Click through.”

  Kathy Banks’ dark-haired doppelganger, someone named Karolyn Beckenbauer, was the subject of a story on the website of a Midwestern news station.

  Emma peered at the screen. “Why does the name of that college sound familiar?”

  “That’s the for-profit that’s getting sued. Sherry was telling me she attended for a while. Remember Bob Wilson sent out the letter to the editor about how we’re barely better than a for-profit? This is the institution he used as the example.”

  “Bob Wilson is the one who wrote that letter? That explains how come I just got an invitation to his going-away party.”

  “Sherry told me she enrolled at that for-profit after she saw their ads on TV. I’m amazed she fell for that. Who would go to a university that advertises on TV?”

  “Our school has a TV ad now,” Emma said.

  “That’s right. I forgot about that.”

  “Look, Molly, you were right. This isn’t Kathy Banks.”

  “I know. This story is about someone who’s brave and selfless.”

  “I meant because...c’mon, Molly, let it go.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Besides, Kathy was supposedly a natural blonde, remember?”

  “Oh, I’m not letting things go? Look, you can click there to search for more matches.”

  We found several more photos of Karolyn Beckenbauer, including a cached portrait on the website of the embattled for-profit university. She had worked in their admissions office.

  “No pictures at all of Kathy Banks,” Emma exclaimed, frustrated. “What was she, some kind of spy?”

  “Why would anyone put a spy in the Student Retention Office?”

  “She doesn’t have any online presence. How weird is that?”

  “It’s not that weird,” I said. “The only reason you and I have any online presence is because of our jobs. If you search for me, all of my results are related to the university, or they’re papers I’ve written, or, of course, the online ratings. If I weren’t an academic, you wouldn’t find anything for me either.”

  “How do you know? Molly, do you search for yourself?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Maybe. So what now? I still don’t have a good picture of Kathy.”

  “Use the one you downloaded from Sherry’s page. It’s not bad.”

  “So you don’t think that other woman is her?” Emma asked.

  “No. I think it’s someone who happens to have the same distance between her pupils or something.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right. I mean, look at you and Sherry. You two actually do look the same. And you aren’t related, right?”

  “Probably not, since she’s Italian and I’m Albanian.”

  “Hey, Molly, let’s do a facial recognition search for you, and see what comes up.”

  “No, let’s not. It’s getting late, and I’m tired. Do you honestly think Sherry and I look that much alike?”

  Emma shrugged. “You Italians all look alike to me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  I CAME TO CAMPUS EARLY, hoping to get a head start on whatever had been piling up in my in-box over the three-day weekend. Unfortunately, many of my colleagues seemed to have had the same thought, and the close parking lot was already full. I parked at the outer edge of the far lot and had just managed to lock up my car and get my coffee cup balanced when Sherry rushed up to me. She was out of breath, as if she had been sprinting. I invited her to accompany me to my office, reluctantly putting my mental to-do list aside and shifting to small-talk mode.

  “Well, that was a fun weekend,” I said. “Do you think you’ll do the race again next year?”

  “I dunno. I don’t usually plan that far ahead.”

  Something in Sherry’s tone didn’t sound right. She wasn’t her usual lively self.

  “Sherry, are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be fine. I had some kinda week.”

  “I can imagine. I mean, paddling for eighteen miles. And you went iron!”

  “Glenn came back early from his trip.”

  “Yes, I saw him at dinner—”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot. I wasn’t planning on him coming back so quick. I thought he was gonna be gone for another couple weeks. I gotta tell you, I hadda do some quick thinking.”

  “It’s okay, Sherry, you don’t have to—”

  “Dave didn’t take it too well. I guess I can’t really blame him.”

  Who was Dave now? Oh, right. Davison.

  “Hey, Dave said he used to be your student. Is that true?”

  “Yes, he was enrolled in one of my classes.”

  “And you’re going out with his dad now.”

  I nodded. “Small world.”

  “I had no idea, Dr. B. Good for you!”

  “Thanks.” Sherry’s apparent surprise at the fact that I had a personal life made me feel vaguely insulted.

  “Dave told me he made a mistake on his first assignment and you let him rewrite it.”

  Davison’s “mistake” was that he had copied his friend’s paper in its entirety and turned it in as his own work. Our former dean believed that busting students for plagiarism was insufficiently “student-centered” so I had been forced to give Davison a do-over.

  “I told him no way, not Barda. I mean I know you’re a hard—a hard grader.”

  “Well, sometimes you have to give people a second chance,” I said.

  “Things were moving a little too fast for me anyhow. Dave wanted to bring me home to meet his father. That’s not what I was looking for—hey, careful! Your coffee!”

  “Oh, shoot.” I tried to brush the scalding coffee from the front of my shirt. “Meet his father. My goodness, what an idea.”

  Fortunately, I was wearing a black blouse. Unfortunately, it was wool crepe, and was puckering where the hot liquid had splashed it.

  “Yeah. I’m not looking for anything serious. And tell ya the truth, I didn’t like how Dave decided I was his woman all of a sudden. He was too pushy. Kinda reminded me of my ex.”

  “Sherry, you don’t need to—your ex? Was this the one you mentioned in class?”

  “It was a lifetime ago, Dr. B. The first time I lived in Mahina, before I moved back to the mainland.”

  I nodded, trying my best to seem casual. I was so eager to hear more that I was sure my ears were vibrating.

  “I was too young,” Sherry said. “You know what I mean? Too young to get married. Too young to be a mother.”

  “A mother? So you have children?”

  “One,” she said.

  “A girl? A boy?”

  “Little boy. It was all too much for me. I couldn’t handle it. And they were better off without me and my problems, to be honest.”

  I did some quick arithmetic in my head. Davison was going to be turning twenty-one. I knew that because Donnie had been talking about surprising him with a birthday trip to Las Vegas.
I couldn’t understand why people who lived in one of the most beautiful places on earth insisted on vacationing in one of the most aesthetically indefensible, but there it was. I had seen on the class roster that Sherry and I had the same birth year. So subtract twenty-one from my age, she would have been—

  “You were so young! I mean, you must’ve been young. Because you’re young now, is what I meant. So have you kept in touch with your son at all?”

  “Nah. Honestly, Dr. B., he was kind of a little snot. Sorry, I guess I’m not very, what’s the word?”

  “Maternal?” I suggested.

  “Yeah. What you said.”

  We entered the dim hallway of my building. It smelled mildewy after the long weekend with the air conditioner off.

  Sherry shrugged. “I gave it all up for Mad Dog. I never looked back.”

  That was an interesting way to spin it. Gave it all up. As if ditching your husband and child were a selfless sacrifice for some greater good.

  “Mad Dog?”

  “Yeah. My second husband.”

  “Oh.”

  “Wait, no, third husband. I keep forgetting about what’s his name.”

  We arrived at my office. “Well,” I said, “here we are.” I didn’t particularly want to hear Sherry run down her inventory of greater and lesser ex-husbands, and if Sherry and Donnie truly had been married, maybe I didn’t want to hear about that either. I fumbled for my keys before I realized my door was already ajar. Emma and Pat had made themselves comfortable in my office and were helping themselves to my coffee.

  “Decision time,” I announced. “You can stand around and listen to us talk about class work, or you can take your coffee and come back later.”

  Emma high-fived Sherry on her way out, and Sherry and I got seated.

  “I wanted to meet with you about some of this stuff I’ve been finding, Dr. B. I kinda got distracted this weekend cause of the race and the other stuff, but now I’m back, there’s some things I thought you should—”

  “Women are drawn to me,” came the voice of Rodge Cowper’s affirmation tape through the thin wall. “I am a self-assured, confident, sexual and dominant male.”

  I ignored the voice, hoping Sherry would follow suit.