The Best American Short Stories 2015

by T. C. Boyle

  As he put the Caravan into reverse, a quick movement caught his eye, and he looked toward Wainwright’s office to see the dark-haired receptionist walking toward him, an enormous black purse hanging from the crook of her elbow. He paused. Her heels were too high, and she had to put her weight on the balls of her feet in order to move quickly. She short-stepped up to the Caravan’s open passenger window.

  “Mr. Bitner,” she said. “Can you give me a ride?” Without waiting for an answer she pulled the door open and dropped into the seat beside him.

  “Well,” he said.

  “Please,” she said. “Just a little ways. I’ve got a family emergency.”

  She was breathing hard, and her chest heaved upward with each breath. Her skirt had caught under her thighs when she sat down, and he felt a flicker of electricity in his veins. She closed the door.

  “Please,” she said again. She turned and looked straight at him, mouth open slightly, eyes wide. The Caravan’s engine hiccuped, then regrouped.

  “Okay,” he said finally. He pulled his shirt out from behind her and leaned over to lay it on the back seat. “Sure. Where do you need to go?”

  “Take a right here,” she said. As he pulled out of the parking lot and turned right, she twisted around in her seat and looked out the back window at the receding office building.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. Then she looked at him again and all traces of her earlier tears were gone, replaced with such elation that he was, once again, astounded.

  “What?” he said.

  “I just walked out on my job.”

  “Oh, my,” he said. He slowed down.

  “Don’t stop,” she said. “Keep going.”

  “Was that a good idea?” he said. “I mean, to quit your job just like that?”

  She started to laugh, a short giggle at first, then swelling into a guffaw. “I just quit my damn job!” She put her fists out in front of her, dragged them in a rhythmic, sideways square, bounced in her seat. Her skirt rode up higher on her thighs.

  He stared at her, then jerked his eyes back to the road.

  “All right, there, you’re making me a bit nervous,” he said. “Are you sure you’re OK?”

  “Mr. Bitner,” she said. “I’m fantastic.” He looked over again, and she smiled at him, a huge, dangerous smile. She was not pretty, he thought again, but there was something. Something. He turned away.

  “I’m Stacey,” she said.

  “Where do I turn?” he said.

  “Anywhere you want to,” she said. “It’s totally up to you, Mr. Bitner.”

  He hesitated, then accelerated slightly, and the wind rushed through the windows, hot and damp.

  “It’s Theo,” he said.

  He didn’t know what to do with her. She was evasive, confusing in her directions, telling him to turn here, not turn there, go straight, go right, go left, just keep going, and he gathered, eventually, that she had no particular destination at all. She clutched her purse on her lap and jittered crazily in her seat, fussing with the radio, rolling the window up, then, realizing the air conditioner didn’t work, back down again.

  “Look, Stacey,” he said finally. “I need to let you out somewhere. I’m trying to get to Lakeland.”

  “What for?”

  “I have a sales call,” he said. And then, “And I’m buying a car there.” It was the first time he’d said it out loud.

  “Really? What kind of car?”

  “A Corvair. An antique.”

  “A Corvette?” she said. “Cool.”

  “Not a Corvette. A Corvair,” he said. “Different.”

  “Better?”

  “Well, no,” he admitted. He thought of the checkbook in his pocket. “I only have five thousand dollars. Corvettes are a lot more.”

  “Too bad,” she said.

  He pulled into a parking lot at a dry cleaner’s.

  “Don’t stop,” she said.

  “I gotta stop,” he said. “I need to know where to take you.”

  She looked at him. “Take me to Lakeland with you,” she said.

  “Stacey.”

  “No, really, Mr. Bitner. Theo . . . please. Truth is I really need to get to Tampa, but if you get me to Lakeland that’s almost there. My mother lives in Tampa. She could come to Lakeland to pick me up.”

  He hesitated.

  “It’s only a few hours, right?” she said. “Please, Theo. I’m desperate. I don’t have a job. And my boyfriend is an asshole. I don’t want to go back. Please? I’ll give you some gas money.”

  “You don’t even know me,” he said. “How do you know I’m not a rapist? A murderer?”

  She laughed. “Oh, I can tell,” she said.

  “Well, I could be,” he said, stubborn.

  She clasped her hands under her chin, looked up at him from under her glasses, pursed her lips. “Please?” she said. “Please, please, please?”

  It was too hot to idle at the dry cleaner’s. The air was stagnant in the van. A bead of sweat appeared on her upper lip, and he stared at her for a moment, then pulled out of the dry cleaner’s and headed south. When the phone buzzed in his pocket and he saw the message was from Ernie, he turned the damn thing off and put it in the glove box.

  They made it back to I-95 in record time and merged with the southbound traffic. On the interstate, he took the van up to seventy and felt the sweat cooling on his neck. She raised her voice over the rushing wind and told him about her boyfriend.

  “He’s a lot older than me,” she said. Her hair was blowing crazily around the front seat. “Probably your age.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “But he’s a waste,” she said. “I hate him.”

  “Then why are you with him?”

  “That’s what I’ve been asking myself, Theo.” She rolled her eyes. She rummaged in her purse, found a hair tie, and pulled her hair into a raffish bun atop her head. Then she swapped out her glasses for an enormous pair of sunglasses, and the result was, surprisingly, quite fetching. “He’s a day trader, right? So he spends all day on the computer, looking at the stocks, making decisions. Or so he says. But I look at his Google history. I know what he’s doing.”

  A semi truck passed on the right at an alarming speed, and Theo swerved slightly.

  “He’s looking at porn. It’s disgusting,” she said.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” Theo said. He wasn’t sure how else he should respond.

  “Why do men look at porn, Theo?” she said. He glanced over, and she was looking at him accusingly over the top of the sunglasses.

  “I don’t know,” he said, feeling guilty. “Not all men do.”

  “You do,” she said. “Don’t you?”

  He shrugged, defeated.

  “I thought so,” she said. She sighed. “Well, what about you and this car, then? It’s, like, old?” she said.

  “1966,” he said.

  “And it’s a Corv-what?”

  “Corvair,” he said. “It’s a beautiful car.” He paused, then changed lanes to maneuver around a sluggish Civic. “It got a bad safety rap once, though,” he said. Ralph Nader, God bless him. Theo often thought that if it hadn’t been for Nader, he’d never be able to afford the Corvair, which had been eviscerated in the media in 1965 after Nader penned a damning account of the car’s rear-engine instability and wonky suspension. “Unsafe at any speed,” Nader had proclaimed. General Motors protested mightily and launched an aggressive redesign and accompanying PR campaign, but the damage was done, and by 1967 the Corvair was out of production.

  “Wow. So you’re buying a dangerous car,” Stacey said.

  “Nah,” he replied. “It’s fine. They fixed the problem in the later models. It was just those early years that were bad.” He shifted position to reach into his pocket and pull out the ad, which he unfolded and handed to Stacey. He caught a glimpse of the photo as he handed her the paper, and his heart caught slightly when he realized that every mile on the road
was a mile closer to the little car, its power, its grace, its tenacious, ballsy, bantam presence. Corvair! The name made him want to shout.

  “Well,” she said. She took her sunglasses off and squinted at the photo, then put the glasses back on and sighed. “Safety’s not all it’s cracked up to be, anyway,” she said. She folded the paper and slid it back into Theo’s pocket, letting her fingers linger beneath the fabric for a beat, it seemed.

  He stared at her until she pointed back to the road, and then he jerked his eyes back to the front. “You are one hundred percent correct about that,” he said.

  She flipped open the center console and started flipping through CDs, and he was embarrassed by the selection.

  “Susan Boyle?” she said. “Oh, Theo, really?”

  “It’s my wife’s,” he said.

  She raised an eyebrow.

  She was a talker, it turned out. She took off her shoes and propped her bare feet up on the Caravan’s dashboard and chattered on about all number of topics: Lady Gaga, Extreme Home Makeover, even NASCAR when they passed the Speedway in Daytona, and Theo was impressed with her range. “That Dale Junior is something else,” she said. “I’d fry chicken for him any night of the week.”

  “Would you, now,” he said. He glanced over at her, tried to imagine what this meant, exactly. But then she caught sight of a WANTED billboard featuring a row of convicts, and she sat up straight.

  “Look at them, there,” she said. “Bad guys. On the loose.” She pointed at the billboard and squinted at it until they went past. “They’ll never catch those sons of bitches. They’re to hell and gone.”

  “How do you know that?” he said.

  “I watch Nancy Grace,” she said. “It’s only those high-profile types that they really go after. The ones that make a good story. The Casey Anthonys and what have you. Those scrappy old nobodies like up there?” She gestured back at the billboard, now fading into the distance. “Nobody cares.” She studied Theo. “And you know what else I’ve learned from Nancy Grace?” she demanded. “Here’s the thing: you want to commit a crime, you’d best commit it alone. It’s always the accomplice that gets these people in trouble. Go solo, that’s what I say.”

  Her bare foot twitched on the dashboard. She took her sunglasses off and cleaned them on the hem of her skirt, and when she put them back on she was quiet for a few moments.

  “You have kids?” she said suddenly.

  “A daughter,” he said. He didn’t offer Ashley’s age. “And my mother lives with us,” he added. “I got a lot of women in my house.”

  “Well, maybe that explains it,” she said.

  “Explains what?”

  “You’re very kind,” she said, “giving a girl a ride.”

  He shrugged.

  “Does your wife know you’re buying the Corvair?” she said.

  He hesitated. “Now why would you ask that?” he said.

  “Just wondering,” she said. She rearranged the bun on top of her head and squirmed a bit in the seat, like a child. Then she dug in her handbag for lipstick and painted her lips a bright orange.

  “Let me buy you lunch,” she said abruptly. “I’m starving.” He glanced at her, and her gaze was so openly sexual he almost swerved. “Aren’t you?” she said.

  He hesitated. “I’m on a timeline,” he said.

  “Well, that’s no fun,” she said. She pouted, looked up at him under hooded eyes.

  “But I could eat,” he said.

  They found a TGI Friday’s north of Orlando. The inside was forcedly cheerful and smelled like bleach and onions. The waitress showed them to a two-top in the corner, under a fake Tiffany pendant lamp, and they were so grateful for the cool darkness that for a moment neither of them spoke.

  “Order up,” Stacey said finally. “My treat. The chicken fingers are divine. And they got them appletinis here. You’ve got to try one. They taste just like Jolly Ranchers.”

  He tried two. She tried three. Halfway through the second drink he had an out-of-body experience, where he saw himself at the edge of an enormous cavern, a steep precipice before him, beckoning, offering a coolness and a respite he’d never known possible. He tipped his head back and let himself fall.

  He wouldn’t let her pay for lunch. There was a Ramada Inn next door to the TGI Friday’s. He paid for the room too.

  When they first got started at it he found himself apologizing quite a bit, but eventually he stopped that and just surrendered to the pure grotty pleasure of it all, the jiggling sticky abandon. With Sherrill sex was always so controlled, procedural. He felt sometimes they could have used a checklist. But this business with Stacey. My God! She was ravenous, greedy, downright riotous. He had no idea such behavior even existed, and he was both appalled and awestruck. He felt a deep recalibration of values.

  They reached an intermission of sorts and he got up to use the bathroom. He brought his phone in with him and checked the damage while standing in front of the toilet. A text from Ernie (“kelso a go, bro?”) and, from Sherrill, two missed calls and a voicemail.

  He stared at the phone for a long moment. The light in the bathroom was overbright, and a web of mildew snaked up the wall behind the toilet. He’d been married to Sherrill for twenty-six years. He’d never been unfaithful to her, not even after she’d confessed her own affair with that thug from the PTA, that snarky single dad working the middle school parents’ scene like it was a nightclub. Still—he’d never cheated on her, had never even wanted to. How on earth had this happened? He looked up and saw himself in the bathroom mirror, naked, pale and paunchy. He heard Stacey flick on the TV in the bedroom. He wasn’t sure what any of this meant.

  A toilet flushed on the other side of the wall. It was the middle of the afternoon! My God, this Ramada was doing some business. He took another long look at himself in the mirror and shook his head. All right. He’d get dressed. He’d call Sherrill. He’d text Ernie. He’d get his goddamn act together, get this girl delivered to Lakeland, get back on the road. He’d forget the Corvair—a penance to Sherrill. He shifted position to flush the toilet, and as he did, his elbow knocked the ceramic towel holder and he watched in slow motion as his phone was jolted from his hand and jumped into a beautiful clear arc toward the toilet bowl, where it plunged into the water and urine in one single, horrifying blip.

  Theo stood naked, staring at the phone in the toilet. Then he flushed the toilet once, twice, three times. The phone was lodged in the bottom of the bowl, stubborn.

  “You OK, Theo?” Stacey called from the bedroom.

  He fished the phone from the bowl; it now featured a strangely beautiful silver bloom across the screen. He punched the on/off button but nothing happened. He wrapped the phone in a towel and threw it in the wastebasket. Then he washed up and walked out of the bathroom and back to the bed. She turned the TV off and opened her arms.

  Things were different now. Everything was different.

  They took showers and dressed, but the refreshment of the cool hotel and the hot shower was short-lived when they stepped out of the room into the white hot light of afternoon again. Theo looked at his watch: 3:15. Could it be only 3:15? He felt as though a lifetime had elapsed in the space of this one day.

  “Hold on,” he said to Stacey. He walked thirty yards to the front office, entered, and dropped the room cards on the reception counter, avoiding the clerk’s gaze. When he arrived back at the van and approached the driver’s door he realized Stacey was bent over near the rear hatch. She straightened as he approached.

  “Everything OK?” he said.

  “Peachy,” she said.

  They climbed into the van and headed back to the highway.

  “Here,” she said. She fished in her bag and pulled out two bottles of water she’d pinched from the room and a packet of ibuprofen. “I think we might need some of this. You front-load, see, and then the hangover is not so bad when the vodka wears off.”

  “I’m learning all kinds of things from you, Stacey.”
>
  “That’s right,” she said. “And I bet you thought I was just a dumb girl.”

  He swallowed an ibuprofen and turned on the radio, punching the buttons and then settling on a rock station. AC/DC promised dirty deeds done dirt cheap. God, he’d forgotten about these guys. His heart swelled with love for Angus Young. Stacey tapped her foot on the dash, keeping time. Theo pulled out of the hotel lot and into traffic. He sped forward to stay ahead of the crush, and then he merged cleanly onto the interstate and headed south.

  All right, so he’d bag the sales call with Kelso. That was a no-brainer at this point. The loss of the phone had rendered him untethered from reality, it seemed. Plus, he was still a little drunk from the appletinis and the sex, and the result was a welcome bonhomie that was keeping all impending consequences nicely at bay, at least for the moment. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel and calculated distances again. Take the I-4 south through Orlando, pray they’d beat rush hour, head straight into Lakeland. Straight to the Corvair. Hour and a half, tops, if all went well. He glanced to his right. Stacey had put her hair back up, but she was sweating again.

  “I’m sorry there’s no air conditioning,” he said.

  “Air conditioning is overrated,” she said. “I like the heat.”

  They drove for nearly an hour, and she fell asleep for a while and then woke and announced she needed a bathroom.

  “We’re almost to Lakeland,” he said, glancing at his watch. “You can’t wait?”

  “Theo,” she said. “My back teeth are floating.”