“Huh. I guess that’s why they call it a surprise.” He emphasized the last word, widening his eyes and leaning in at me.
I shook my head and laughed as I headed down the hall that led to the driveway. Two sets of footsteps followed behind me. When I got outside, the Taurus wasn’t there.
“You take the 4Runner today.” I waved my hand at Adrian’s SUV, which I’d been driving for the past few weeks while we tried to figure out what was wrong with my Jetta. “Since you have to pick up our bicycles from the shop.”
“Are you sure? I don’t want to be responsible for El Diablo giving you an aneurysm or something.”
“I’m sure.” I clicked to open my Jetta. Nothing happened, as usual. I opened the door the old-fashioned way, cringing at what came next: the car alarm blaring—wonk, wonk, wonk, wonk. I threw open the door and pulled the switch for the headlights to quiet the alarm. Sam was waiting at the back end of the car to catch the trunk when it popped open when the headlights switched on. He slammed it closed and I lowered myself into the seat and pulled the door shut.
“We can take it in to the shop on Monday,” Adrian shouted.
I could barely hear him through the electric windows that wouldn’t roll down. I muttered, “If it makes it until then,” and turned on the ignition. Adrian claimed the car was possessed, and had tried to get me to hang a rosary from the rearview mirror. But much to the horror of my deceased abuelita—my namesake on my father’s side—my mother had raised me Baptist. No rosaries at La Hacienda de Hanson.
Sam stuffed his red backpack into the toe space of the passenger side and dropped into the seat with a mesh bag of baseball gear and a brown paper lunch bag. He shut the door and buckled in, then immediately changed the radio station. I liked The Bull, he liked Young Country, but both played George Strait, so I didn’t fight him over it.
He cut his eyes at me. “You’re not going to make me drive this thing, are you?”
What the Jetta lacked in coolness it made up for in safety, so I hedged. “We’ll see.” I backed out, waving at Adrian, and rolled the Jetta past the hodgepodge of remodeled and enlarged 1960s ranches toward the JCC. My day had officially begun.
***
I reached the open gate of Juniper Media’s lot just before eight and right on time. Juniper officed in a long multicolored brick building on the western edge of the Heights, just north of downtown. The one-story structure was part office and part industrial, like its neighborhood, which blended into the rest of Houston. We are a city infamous for lack of zoning.
I backed the Jetta into my reserved spot and shut down the engine, thankful that my electrical issues didn’t wreak havoc when I turned the car off. Sweat immediately trickled down my neck as I walked toward the office. It was ninety-plus already and wicked humid, typical for August. I dug in my purse for my phone, but something made me stop midstride, hand still in my bag. I looked back toward my car. Parked three down was an old white Taurus. My stomach tightened. I walked back to it and snapped a photo of its Texas plates with my phone. The numbers were completely obscured by a thick coat of dried mud.
On edge now, I entered the lobby, strewn with Houston sports pennants and memorabilia: red, white, and navy for the Texans; red, white, and black for the Rockets; blue and orange for the Astros; orange and white for the Dynamo. I was already on sensory overload after our late night, and the garish colors jarred me. I was irritated that Adrian wouldn’t tell me about the car. I needed coffee.
A familiar voice jolted me from my thoughts and I followed it to the reception desk.
“Hello. I’m here to apply for a job.” The woman was clad in a fitted hot-pink blouse, black pencil skirt, and peep-toe patent-leather heels. Once again, Rhonda Dale did not blend.
I positioned myself beside her. “We meet again.”
She swung her head toward me. Her mouth opened and closed, marionette-like. “What are you doing here?”
“Me? I work here. What are you doing here?”
“I was just applying for a job I saw posted on Craigslist.”
Marsha, our longtime receptionist, piped in. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I don’t show that we have any jobs posted right now.” God bless her.
“Whoopsie.”
And then it hit me why Rhonda was here. This was no coincidence.
“You do know Adrian doesn’t work here, right?” He was a freelancer, as in free to write his column from home, or over the Kona they stocked just for him at Fioza’s Coffee Shop, or wherever his free spirit took him.
Rhonda’s dark eyebrows pulled together under her bleached bangs. “But—” She shook her head in rapid, tiny movements. “Whatever.” She wheeled on the point of one heel and stalked back toward the front door.
The me that first earned my Itzpa nickname in middle school when I punched a girl twice my size for picking on a fifth grader was more controlled as an adult, but still no one to mess with. All five foot two of me. “Hey, Rhonda,” I called after her, “I’ll tell Adrian you came by to see him. But I wouldn’t recommend you do it again.”
The door swung shut behind her.
Marsha looked at me from over her half glasses with their dangling bejeweled strap, chin down. “Well, good morning to you.”
I guffawed to cover my anger. “Yeah. Wow, huh?” I didn’t trust myself to say more. I started toward my office.
“Oh, and congratulations, Ms. Famous Author. There’s a picture of you and your husband on the cover of the Entertainment section of the Chronicle this morning.”
I turned and walked backwards with a finger to my lips as I said, “Shhh, we’re trying to keep a low profile.” I resumed my walk. I heard Marsha laugh behind me. She was a peach, and I owed her one for shutting Rhonda down. I turned and added, “Don’t eat before work Monday. I’m bringing you cinnamon raisin bagels from New York Deli.”
She beamed.
Despite putting up the good front my mother had always required, I was still pissed. I remembered when I didn’t make the volleyball team in high school, I ran home and cried my eyes out. The next morning when I got ready for school, she came into my bathroom and stared at my face in the mirror. “More concealer.”
My fists balled. And then I thought, Just screw it. Screw white cars. Screw Little Miss Boob Job and Adrian’s secrets with new old friends. Screw unsettling bloody memories of dead bicyclists I couldn’t make myself unremember. Screw paranoia. Screw all of it. The only thing truly wrong was the noise in my head, and I could quiet that with work. This, this was what separated me from the rest of the pack, the ones at home on the couch with a remote control in one hand and a doughnut in the other: mental toughness. I was the one in control of me. Yeah.
I marched down the hall, ready to kick butt. The vivid covers of magazines-past kaleidoscoped through my peripheral vision on the walls. I imagined it was an encouraging crowd doing the wave for me. I wouldn’t let them down.
My boss interrupted me mid mental pep talk, right as I reached my office. “Good news.” He stuck his head out the doorway of the office catty-corner from mine.
I stopped. Hopefully he hadn’t seen me cheering myself on with my imaginary crowd. “Yeah? I could use some.”
He gestured me ahead and followed me into my office, then lowered himself into the chair in front of my desk. “You and Adrian really hit a home run last night.” Brian had come for the first hour, so he saw the crowd.
“Thanks.” I sat, too.
“I think your book is going to be the best thing that’s happened to Multisport in ages. To Juniper, really. Thank you for that.” I nodded and Brian steepled his fingers over the knee of his crossed leg. He cleared his throat. “You know we ran lean on money last year. I held back on raises and I didn’t do bonuses.”
I remembered, of course. The advent of online publications and news-by-blogger had gouged a hunk out of our print periodicals. We’d rebounded with new e-offerings like subscription downloads for e-readers, and we had high hopes for this book experiment.
“I understood. I agreed with your decision.”
“Yes, well, that’s one of the things I appreciate about you. Not everyone did. Anyway, we seem to be out of foul trouble.”
Brian, like many of my coworkers, speaks in mixed sports analogies all the time. It’s an occupational hazard of working with fanatics that took some getting used to. I struggled not to roll my eyes.
He went on. “I’m bumping you by five percent this year. And you’ll get a five thousand dollar bonus in your next direct deposit.”
“Oh, Brian, I don’t know if you should do that.” I reached into my handbag and retrieved a can of the still-cold Dr. Zevia organic-stevia-sweetened soda Adrian bought me the week before. He was determined to help me kick a lifelong Diet Dr Pepper habit. It wasn’t the same, but I was having fewer headaches.
“Don’t tell me you’re asking for your waivers, Michele.” His face whitened under his thinning red hair.
“Oh, no! Not that. But I need a lot of flexibility for the next three months. I’m doing the Kona Ironman with Adrian.” I took a gulp of my drink, afraid of his reaction.
Brian’s saggy face puckered up like a Sharpei: his version of a smile. “Did you qualify?” His voice jumped half an octave on the last word.
I spit my Dr. Zevia across the desk, laughing. “Sorry.” I ripped a paper towel from the emergency roll I kept hidden in my desk drawer—my coworkers tended to overreact to sports news the second they brought drinks to my office—and started blotting. “Dear God, no. I won a lottery spot. Truly, if I just finish, it will be a miracle.”
“To hell with finishing. If you survive.”
“Brian!”
“Kidding. Don’t worry about it. Adrian, this race, and your book are the trifecta for us. Just see to it that I get thirty-five hundred words a week from Adrian from now until you get to Kona and thirty-five hundred a day while you’re there.” His request made sense. We sold more subscriptions, ads, and issues of Multisport from September through November than any other time of year because of Kona. “Words, I need words. And pictures. Can you be his photographer?”
“Of course. Thank you.”
“You’re a great investment and my most valuable player.” He ran the backs of his fingers under his jowls. “I remember when you came to work for me. You were still on the ropes with that putz. Sam was in elementary school, and exercise for you was running back and forth to the car, driving him around. Now look at you. Sam’s doing great, you’re happy, you have Adrian and Annabelle, you’ve co-authored a book, and you’re doing an Ironman. You’re batting a thousand, kiddo.”
He was right. Things were as great now as they were bad then. I had come to him with no editing experience, begging for a refuge from my life as an attorney, convinced I’d missed my path when I took a sharp left turn into law school after getting my degree in English from Trinity. Only no one could understand why I wanted to “go backwards” in my career. No one except Brian. He brought me on as an editing assistant, at a seventy-five percent drop in my pay, despite my over- and under-qualification.
“And none of it would have happened if you hadn’t taken a chance on me. Thank you, Brian.” It was true. He and his wife, Evelyn, had treated me like family, inviting Sam and me to the lake with them, trying to set me up with the sons of their friends, buying the overpriced cookies Sam’s baseball team sold as fundraisers.
Brian nodded, crinkling his face again, then stood up. “I’ll let you get back to work. It’s almost game time on that one.” He gestured toward a colorful pile of speedboat photographs.
“Yes, it is. Thanks for the raise and bonus, Brian.” And for distracting me from the shitstorm in my head, I added to myself.
Three hours later, the graphics guy and I finished pulling together the cover for SBRQ. I ran my fingers across the mock-up. It was beautiful—a Hustler Rockit with red and yellow flames slicing through aquamarine water, with the beaches of Destin, Florida, in the background. It was looking like we would make our deadline before the end of the day—important to all of us on a Friday.
A text dinged in from Adrian. “I finished errands & got good start on writing. I miss you. Lunch at Beaver’s/noon?”
Warmth flooded me. I could squeeze it in if I hurried. “See you there!”
***
I watched for Adrian through the window of Beaver’s at twelve fifteen. They had a patio, but no one set foot on it between June and September. We only have a few weeks of bearable outdoor dining temperatures each spring and fall in Houston between the wet heat and the wet cold. I’d arrived at the restaurant earlyish and ordered two iced teas, Adrian’s usual Beaver’s Cobb, and some baby back ribs and jalapeño poppers for me, then changed my order to a Cobb five minutes later.
Adrian’s red 4Runner pulled into the parking lot and eased along the first row of cars until it reached an empty space and parked. I loved watching Adrian from a distance, imagining myself seeing him for the first time again. The thrill was always there. He got out of the SUV and started walking along the row of cars toward the entrance, his steps in rhythm with my heartbeat. A goofy grin snuck over my lips. Then he stopped. He turned and walked to the driver’s side of a white car. Surely it wasn’t another Taurus? I craned my neck for a better view, but I couldn’t see it well enough to be sure.
When he got there, he leaned on the roof, talking to someone inside. My smile drooped. Sweat dripped between my breasts. Was the damn AC broken in here? I grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled it in rapid poofs away from my chest. Adrian’s hands gripped the frame of the door and the rolled-down window. He kept talking. I kept sweating.
Finally—finally—Adrian stood up and walked away. The car backed out and threw gravel up behind it as it left the lot. I stood up to see who it was but never got a good look.Damn it. Adrian turned and watched it go. I tried one last time to catch a glimpse of the driver as the car turned out of the lot, but it was too far away.
I bit my lip. I wasn’t going to have a snit fit on our lunch date. Really, Adrian had done nothing wrong. He had asked me to lunch, and he was here, nearly on time. All he had done was talk to someone in the parking lot, right in front of me. Nothing suspicious there. I needed to get a grip.
He sauntered up to the table. “Hi, babe.” He leaned down and kissed me on the lips, then pulled out a chair and sat.
“Hi. I ordered our usual.” My voice sounded tight and thin. I swallowed. You can do better, I told myself, but it was my mother’s voice I heard.
“Thanks. Perfect.” He slid into our booth, then locked his fingers and stretched his arms over his head, palms up. “Well, that was a weird morning. I ran into that woman, the one from the book release party yesterday.”
What a relief. “Really? Where?” I tried to sound casual.
“At the GNC store. I went by there on my way here for some Triflex and vitamins. She came in a couple minutes after me.”
Not the Beaver’s parking lot? I was confused. “Did you talk to her?”
“Briefly. And then I ran like a scared little boy. She’s intense.”
This didn’t make sense. But then everything about Rhonda so far defied reason. “I ran into her, too.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish. She came in to apply for a job at Juniper.”
“What?”
“Yeah. She thought you worked there.” He raised his eyebrows. I paused, then blurted out, “And there was a white Taurus there, too. Adrian, I’m seeing those damn white cars everywhere. I feel like I’m going crazy.”
“Going crazy? You’ve been crazy. For a long time.” He looked at me, but I didn’t give him the arm punch I normally would. He put his hand over mine. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”
It wasn’t, though. “So, who were you talking to in that one in the parking lot?”
“That one what?”
“The white Taurus?”
His face skwunched into a thinking look, then he nodded. “Some woman who recognized me and asked me
to sign our book, but then she couldn’t find it, so she left. Was she in a white Taurus?”
God, I wanted to chomp my thumbnail. “I think so. I have an idea. Since we’re together now, alone, you can tell me about that car in front of our house this morning.”
“Adrian? Michele? Hi!” a voice bubbled just to my right.
I pasted on a smile. “Hello.”
Adrian pointed to a chair. “Join us.”
She wouldn’t, of course. She was probably here with a client.
“Don’t mind if I do. I got stood up by a client I like a lot less than you two.”
Mierda, I said to myself, cussing in my head in Spanglish instead of saying shit, because that’s all my mother ever permitted. No impolite “shit,” no offensive f-bomb. “Mierda” or “chinga”—and even those better be whispered under one’s breath. Well, mierda, mierda, mierda.
Forty-five minutes later and after we’d committed to a TV interview the next week, Adrian and I walked out of Beaver’s, with Scarlett hanging back to pay the check with her credit card, something I’m sure she would include on an invoice to Juniper later. Adrian walked behind me with one hand resting lightly on the back of my neck. His casual touch steadied my emotions. Really, I was like a hippo lurching along a balance beam today. We reached my car and I wheeled and threw my arms around him. He kissed the top of my head, and I burrowed my face in his chest.
“We’re going to have such a good night.” My hair muffled his words.
I leaned back and looked at him. He looked relaxed, so I tried to match. “Yes, we will.” I nodded, realizing that no matter what else was true, this was. “We will.”
“Goodbye, Mrs. Hanson.”
“Goodbye, Mr. Hanson.”
Adrian walked to his car. I waved to him one more time and he made a smooching face and blew me a kiss. I hadn’t locked the Jetta, so I didn’t have to go through my electronic comedy routine. I got in the hot car, turned on the air, and drove away. As the wheels of my little car turned over the uneven pavement and old bricks of the streets of the Heights, a powerful urge to return and throw myself back into my husband’s arms gripped me. I shucked it off and grabbed my stress ball from the console and started squeezing and releasing it in slow one-counts.
Going for Kona Page 3
