Election (16 page)

“How was lunch?” he asked, gazing intently at the luminous screen, clicking away at his mouse.

“Not bad. We ordered subs from Nino's. What about you?”

“Tuna salad. Nothing special.” He rolled his chair away from the computer and swiveled to face me, a stocky bear of a guy with a neatly trimmed reddish beard. “So how'd it go last night?”

“Not bad. He slept from midnight until close to five.”

“Hey.” Ray saluted me with a clenched fist and a grin. “All
right.
How's his appetite?”

“Good. Maybe a little too good. Diane's nipples are still pretty sore. She's thinking about switching to formula.”

Ray tugged thoughtfully on the short hairs of his beard. “That's okay. There's no law that says you have to breast-feed.”

“She wants to, though. She says she loves it, even when it hurts like hell.”

He ran a hand down the wrinkled front of his shirt, pausing to caress his belly.

“It must be amazing, Jim. Feeding someone with your own body.”

This is what we talked about every day, Ray and I. How much Jason ate and how often. Cloth diapers vs. disposables. Did we put him to sleep on his back or stomach? Everyone at the lot knew about the birth of my son, of course, but only Ray treated it as a subject of enduring interest. Stan and Rudy just wanted to know if I was getting any nooky yet.

“Oh, by the way,” he said, “I was wondering if you had a picture.”

“Yeah,” I laughed. “I showed it to you yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that.”

“Not that one,” he said. “One I can keep.”

“Oh,” I replied, not quite able to conceal my surprise.

“I have pictures of all my friends’ kids,” he explained, a bit defensively. “I put them up on the fridge with magnets.”

All at once, I felt like a fool. Ray was right—we
were
friends; the least I could do was bring him a picture. It seemed crazy that he'd never met my wife and child—people we discussed in detail every day—and equally crazy that I knew next to nothing about his personal life, except that he lived alone and read a lot of
mysteries. I had no idea if he had a girlfriend, or was gay, or someday wanted to have children himself.

“Sure,” I said. “I'll bring you one tomorrow.”

Just then the door burst open behind me, flooding the cubbyhole with light. My colleague Rudy stood grinning in the doorway, a hatchet-faced man in an iridescent blue suit. He cleared his throat and sculpted a sweet pair of hips in the air.

“Mr. McAllister,” he said, “there's a customer here to see you.”

“Isn't it Stan's turn?”

“She requested you by name,” he told me, his voice dripping with insinuation. “If you're busy I'll be happy to attend to her … automotive needs.”

“It must be the woman who looked at the Camaro last week. She was supposed to get back to me yesterday.”

I glanced at Ray on my way out the door. He'd already rolled his chair back up to the computer and resumed his life's work, assigning inventory numbers to air filters and side-view mirrors. Stepping into the showroom, I made a mental note to remember the baby picture.

She was standing with her back to me, admiring a pale green Metro convertible, so I saw the dress before I saw her face. The red of it jolted me like an electric shock. I reached up to straighten my tie, and she turned
around in the same instant, smiling in a puzzled sort of way, as if a stranger had spoken her name.

WE MADE
an aimless circuit of the lot, stopping every now and then to admire another car—the unreal shine of the paint, the glossy tires, the computer printouts attached to the back windows, each one cluttered with gibberish and a picture of a gas pump.

“This is a Cavalier,” he'd say, as if he thought I might secretly be interested in making a purchase. “Basic transportation at a basic price. But a little sportier than you might expect.”

I'd nod solemnly, doing my best imitation of a serious customer, my mind suddenly empty of the insults and accusations I'd been hoarding so long for just this occasion. It all seemed irrelevant now—the election, Mr. M.'s treachery, all those nights I'd spent wide awake, dreaming of revenge. I was about to graduate. He sold Chevrolets. High school was over for both of us.

“This is the Lumina,” he told me. “It's a midsized family sedan. We sell a van in the same model line.”

Mr. M. swept his arm in a wide arc over the hood of the car, like Vanna White drawing your attention to more fabulous prizes. He looked older than I remembered,
grayer around the temples, more tired in the eyes. I liked his suit, though. It was gray and fashionably cut, and it made him seem like a more serious person than he'd been as a teacher, someone with weight and stature in the adult world.

“Where do they get these names?” I asked. “Who makes them up?”

His eyes crinkled into a squint. “People in Detroit, I guess. Engineers. Marketing types.”

“You'd think they could do a little better than ‘Lumina.’ It's not even a real word.”

He nodded. “Cars used to be named for animals and places, but now they've got these crazy made-up names. The Japanese are the worst. I mean, what the heck's a Camry?”

“I don't know,” I admitted, wishing that I could impress him with the correct answer.

I looked up and something connected between us. I guess we both realized how absurd it was, after everything that had happened, for the two of us to be standing in a parking lot, surrounded by new cars, wondering what a Camry was. But instead of smiling he suddenly turned serious, the way Jack used to right before he kissed me.

“So tell me,” he said. “How was your senior year?”

“Okay.”

“That's it? Just okay?”

“Not that great, actually.”

“Really?” He licked his fingertip and rubbed at a spot on the Lumina's hood. The car was cherry red, a sexy lipstick color. Sunlight flared off the glass and metal. “Why was that?”

“I don't know. I guess I just wanted it to be over. These last couple of months really seemed to drag.”

Mr. M. jingled some change in his pocket and studied the ground. I had a feeling he was going to ask me about Jack.

“Did you go to the prom? ”

I shook my head, a little irritated by the question. It really wasn't any of his business.

“I used to chaperone,” he told me. “I always enjoyed it. Seeing all these kids turning into men and women before your eyes. It's really something.”

Well, thanks a lot
, I thought.
Thanks for letting me know what I missed out on.
I'd really wanted to go, but nobody asked me. I even called Larry DiBono at Lehigh to try and convince him to be my date, but he said his girlfriend would kill him if he went out with someone else, even as a friend.

My mom tried to lift my spirits. She insisted that we get all dressed up on prom night and go out to dinner at a fancy restaurant, but the whole thing turned out to be a disaster. We had a stupid argument and both ended up crying in the car on the way home.

“Do you miss teaching?” I just blurted it out, apropos of nothing, in a voice too loud for the distance between us.

He twisted his head and looked over his shoulder for a couple of seconds. I followed his gaze, but there was nothing behind him except for more new cars, impossibly bright and clean in the afternoon sunshine, and a line of these goofy pennants flapping in the breeze. When he turned around, his face revealed nothing.

“Every day,” he told me.

After that, we didn't say much. On our way back to the showroom we wandered past the Geos, and I couldn't help stopping to admire those little convertibles. I had this vision of myself cruising through town on a summer evening with the top down, giving people something new to remember me by.

“That's the Metro,” he told me. “The most affordable convertible on the market.”

“It's so cute. I just want to hop in and drive away.”

“No problem,” he said. “I'll go get the keys.”

“
WHERE TO?
” she asked.

“Anywhere you want,” I told her. “Just as long as we're back in a half hour.”

She grinned. “I can't believe we're doing this.”

She worked the shifter into first gear, and we lurched out of the lot into the flowing afternoon traffic. It was perfect convertible weather, warm and bright, with just enough breeze to ruffle your hair.

“I wish I'd known,” she said, raising her voice to compete with the noise of the wind and the engine. “I would've brought my sunglasses.”

We cruised all the way down West Plains Boulevard into Win wood, then took the familiar left turn onto Central. Tracy kept glancing at me as she shifted gears, checking my face for signs of alarm.

I knew where she was taking me, of course, and if my expression remained inscrutable, it was only because I was feeling so many different things at once, not all of them simple or unpleasant. We turned off Central onto Monroe.

“I hope you don't mind,” she said. “I have to get something out of my locker.”

We took the back way in, the route I'd driven every school day for nine years. We passed the athletic fields, the bleachers empty, the grass parched and trampled. In the distance the school squatted in all its flat stolidity, a dull, two-story structure with nothing to recommend it except the simple, crucial fact that in spite of everything, learning sometimes occurred beneath its roof.

“I haven't been back,” I told her. “Not since that morning.”

She nodded. “People missed you. Your replacement was a dweeb.”

We coasted to a stop at the corner of Sixteenth. The space between us filled with unspoken questions.

“Aren't you worried?” I asked.

“About what?”

“That someone will see us together?”

Her sidelong glance was rich with contempt. For the first time that afternoon I caught a glimpse of the old Tracy, the girl whose ballots I'd crumpled.

“I'm gone,” she said. “I don't care what anyone around here thinks anymore.”

Gene Sperigno and Adele Massing happened to walk out of main entrance as we drove past. They'd taught math in adjacent classrooms for ten years before falling in love and deciding to get married. I'd sprained my ankle dancing at their wedding. I slouched in the passenger seat, hoping they wouldn't notice me, but it's hard not to be noticed in a lemon-yellow convertible driven by a pretty girl in a blood-red dress. They waved in a puzzled slow motion, and I had no choice but to raise my arm in reply.

Tracy turned into the lot, and we bounced over a series of speed bumps before pulling to a stop in a No Parking zone near the side entrance.

“You can't park here,” I told her.

She gave me another one of her looks. “I'm the school President,” she said, shutting off the engine and yanking on the emergency brake. “Besides, I'll only be a minute. You want to come in with me?”

“No thanks. I'll wait here.”

She disappeared into the building, and I slouched even further in my seat, dreading the possibility that one of my former colleagues would spot me in that wildly conspicuous, illegally parked car, and feel an obligation to say hello. Tracy wasn't the only one who wished she'd brought sunglasses.

To distract me from the all-too-real prospect of a conversation with Walt Hendricks, my mind seized upon a more dramatic and wildly improbable scenario.
A gun
, I told myself.
She's going to get a gun. She's going to close her locker, walk back out to the car, and start shooting
.

I laughed at the thought, but then decided to run with it. Why not? This was America, 1993. All over the country, people were shooting each other for reasons less valid and interesting than the reason Tracy would have for shooting me. It gave me a certain grim satisfaction to imagine the look on her face as she pulled the trigger, to toy with the thought that this was how it might end for me, in a yellow convertible in a high school parking lot, a thirty-three-year-old car salesman dead at
the hands of a girl he'd wronged. Great material for a TV movie.

The fantasy was so compelling I have to admit to being almost disappointed when she returned a couple of minutes later, carrying a white book in her hand instead of a weapon. She climbed back into the driver's seat, her expression hovering somewhere between sheepish and amused.

“It may seem strange,” she said, “but I was wondering if you would sign this for me.”

She held out the yearbook and I took it from her hand, the first
Winwoodian
in a decade that didn't contain my picture. A romanticized pen-and-ink drawing graced the cover, a dreamy vision of Winwood High floating on a bank of clouds, heaven as a school.

“Sure,” I said. “Where should I sign?”

She reached across the gearshift and flipped open the cover. Two blank pages stared back at me, a formidable expanse of white.

“Right here's fine,” she said, dropping a brand-new Rolling Writer into the crease between the pages. “Take as much room as you want.”

I picked up the pen and stared at the emptiness I was supposed to fill with ink, fighting an urge to flip through the book, revisiting the faces of the people who'd vanished from my life, catching up on a year's worth of Winwood history—who had fallen in love and
who had broken up, who was going where for college, who said what crazy thing in the cafeteria.

“I really like yearbooks,” I told her.

She didn't answer. A minute went by, maybe two. I had no idea where to start or how to finish. It seemed to me then that I could cover every page of the yearbook with paragraph after paragraph of explanation and apology, and still not be any closer to saying the things that needed to be said.

“I'm scared,” she whispered. “What if I'm not ready for college?”

“You'll be fine,” I told her.

“You think so?”

“Tracy,” I said. “You were ready for college three years ago.”

More time passed. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. I thought of Stan and Rudy waiting in the showroom, pointing at their watches, snorting with delight at our continued absence. I thought of Ray sitting in front of his computer, and reminded myself again to bring him a picture of Jason. Then I uncapped the pen, took a deep breath to clear my head, and started writing.