How To Steal a Car (7 page)

And guess what. She found her elf boots. In the one-of-a-kind clearance racks. They were pearl gray, her third-favorite color. Marked down 70 percent to $38.99.

They fit her perfectly.

“It’s a miracle,” she said.

I was raging jealous, especially when she paid for them with her mom’s credit card. I might have said something nasty if I could have thought of anything, but I was rendered speechless by the unfairness of it all. Then Jen took me out to Sammy Wong’s for spring rolls and firecracker shrimp—also on her mom’s card. I couldn’t stay mad at her.

I am such a total bitch inside for some reason, even though mostly I don’t show it. But the things I think—
sometimes I’m surprised they don’t just claw their way out through my skin.

Walking home from the bus stop, I saw Jim Vail. He was running down the sidewalk—running as in exercising—but he stopped when he saw it was me.

“Hey. Kelleigh Monahan,” he said, dripping sweat and trying to control his breathing.

“Hi,” I said. “How was Taylors Falls?”

“Fun!” He dragged a sweaty hand across his sweaty brow. “Only we lost Jen.” He laughed weakly. “I suppose you heard about that?”

“Yeah, I had to go pick her up.”

“Oh. So she’s okay and everything?” I couldn’t tell if he was embarrassed or not because he was already red in the face from running.

I was thinking,
Why didn’t you call her to find out?
But I didn’t say that. I didn’t really want him to call her, because if he was a nasty drunken almost-rapist I didn’t want him anywhere near my best friend…unless it had just been a misunderstanding and he was really a nice guy like I’d thought before. Then maybe I wanted him for myself. Someday.

“She’s fine,” I said.

“We’re selling the puppies this week,” he said. “You still want one?”

“You mean
buy
one?”

“Sure—what did you think? They’re worth four hundred bucks each.”

“I don’t think I can afford it,” I said. Not that it made any difference, since there was no way I could bring a dog home, but it bugged me that he didn’t offer to give me one for free, especially since I distinctly remembered him offering me one. At least I thought at the time that was what he meant. Maybe if his mom hadn’t yelled down the stairs the dog would have been for free. Even though there was no way I could have taken it.

“I think my dad would sell you Limpy for less.”

Limpy was the one with the crooked foot.

“No thank you,” I said.

I had been looking at the photo of my grandma Kate a lot. I tried to imagine Grandpa John holding the camera and saying “Smile!” But the girl in the photo had only a sleepy half smile. You could see a little of her teeth, bright white against her dark lips and tanned skin.

Her cutoff jeans were tight and frayed, and she had a pale L-shaped scar on her right thigh. Or it might have been a birthmark. Her halter top looked like a T-shirt that she had taken scissors to. Kate—her name had been Kate Unger back then—had probably left her home in Michigan wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and maybe a jacket, but by the time
she met Grandpa John in Monterey she’d cut off and thrown away half her clothes. She had been just seventeen—I looked up her birth date and figured it out—seventeen years old on May 10, 1967. She’d taken off for California the summer after her junior year.

In the photo she looked much older than seventeen and very erotic, like maybe right after Grandpa John snapped the picture they’d had sex right there in the middle of the day on the beach.

The Volkswagen in the picture was faded green—or maybe pink, or pinkish green, if there is such a color—with a yellow hood. I wasn’t sure if the two-tone effect was intentional, or if it was a junkyard patch job, or even if it was their car. The words in the margin of the photo—
Kate—Venice Beach—1967
—were maddening in that they did not give the month. The photo could have been taken anytime after the Monterey Pop Festival, which was in June—I looked that up too. My dad was born April 17, 1968, so Kate must have gotten pregnant in July. But when
exactly
had the photo been taken?

It was driving me crazy.

I realized as I was dialing that I had never called Grandpa John on the phone before. I think that was because I was afraid Grandma Kate would answer and I’d have to listen to
her raspy, whispery whining. I know that makes me a bad grandkid. I was so bad I was even a little bit glad she was gone. But I would have loved to have met the girl in the photo.

“Hello?” Grandpa John sounded angry.

“Grandpa? It’s me, Kelleigh.”

“Kelleigh!” His voice changed. “Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine. How are you?”

“Staying busy. That’s what they tell me I should be doing. I was just boxing up some of Kate’s clothes. I don’t suppose you’d be interested in going through them?”

“Uh, sure…” I imagined box after box of saggy oldlady clothes. And then I imagined a pair of cutoff denim shorts. She might have saved them. Grandma Kate had been a little pack-rattish. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

“I’ll set ’em aside for you. Anything you don’t want, which I imagine will be most of it, I’ll give to the church ladies for their sale. When are you coming up for a visit?”

“I don’t know. Dad’s been sort of busy trying to get this rapist out of jail.”

Grandpa John bellowed laughter. “Who’da thought a couple of peacenik hippies would end up raising a kid like that!”

For a second I wasn’t sure if he was talking about me or my dad; then I figured out that it was Grandpa John and Kate who were the “peacenik hippies.”

“You going to law school too, Kelleigh?”

“Actually, I’m thinking of becoming a criminal. To give the lawyers something to do.”

He laughed again.

“Hey, thanks for sending me that picture,” I said.

“Your grandmother would’ve wanted you to have it.”

I was holding the picture in my lap.

“What about you? Do you want me to scan it for you?”

“I have lots of other pictures,” he said.

“When was this one taken?” I asked.

“Nineteen sixty-seven.”

“I know, but what month?”

“Um, we were in L.A., so I guess it must have been summer. Maybe July? I think by August we were back in the Bay Area.”

“Was Grandma pregnant then? When you took the picture?”

It took him a few seconds to answer.

“I swear, the world went to hell the day we taught you kids to read a calendar.” He paused for a breath or two, then continued. “My guess is, it was right around that time. But we didn’t know it until later, of course. We were staying with this band up in San Francisco and she realized she was a month late.”

“So you got married?”

“Well, we waited a few months.”

“And lived happily ever after.”

“Yep. Why? You aren’t pregnant, are you?”

“Grandpa! No!” I felt my cheeks get hot.

“Good. You stay that way.”

Desperate for a change of subject, I said, “The Volkswagen in the photo—what color is it?”

“You’re the one looking at the photo, kiddo.”

“I’m color-blind,” I reminded him. Or maybe he never knew.

“Oh! Well, as I recall, it was faded-out red, with a yellow hood. At least that’s what Kate told me. I’m color-blind too, you know.”

“Was it yours or Grandma’s?”

He cleared his throat and chuckled. “Kate had the VW when I met her, but it belonged to this other guy she’d been with…” He trailed off the way adults do when they catch themselves talking to a kid like an adult.

I said, “Like, her boyfriend before you?”

“Something like that.” He chuckled again. “Crazy times. They’d split up just before I met her, and I guess—well, you knew your grandmother. She was feisty.”

I remembered her mostly as whiny. But I didn’t say that.

“I didn’t find out until later that she’d just gone and taken the guy’s car when they broke up. I didn’t know about it until he caught up with us in Santa Rosa and took it back.”

“Grandma was a car thief?”

“Just that one time,” he said.

Most people think of car thieves as squinty-eyed young guys with tattoos and grease under their fingernails, but you never know who will steal a car.

The fact that auto thievery might be as genetic as color blindness was both disturbing and reassuring. I couldn’t resist asking my dad that night at dinner if he’d ever stolen a car.

He almost dropped his fork. “Have I ever
what?”
he said.

“You know, when you were young. During those wild years you never talk about.”

My mother stifled a laugh with her napkin.

“I had no wild years,” said my dad.

I looked at my mom, who shrugged and said, “It’s true.”

“I talked to Grandpa John this afternoon—he sent me that picture? Of Grandma standing in front of a VW?”

My dad nodded. “The one he kept on his desk.”

“Did you know she was pregnant then?”

He blinked. “I guess I never thought about it, but I suppose she was.”

“So Grandma and Grandpa had this wild hippie free-love thing going on, and you never got in trouble the whole time you were growing up?”

“Of course I got in trouble. But I certainly never stole a car!”

“Grandma did.”

“She did?” My mom had this quizzical smile. “Kate stole a car?”

“Just one,” I said. “That Volkswagen.”

My mom looked at my dad. “This is so much more interesting than talking about your rapist again, isn’t it, dear?”

In our house my dad was supposedly in charge. He earned most of the money and he was the biggest and hairiest, but in some ways my mother was even more in charge, like a farmer poking an ox with a stick to keep him headed in the right direction. Some days she poked harder than others.

“Don’t worry,” my dad said. “The Dandridge case is almost over. I’m going to plead him out. Turns out his brother is his fraternal twin, not identical, so the DNA evidence is back in play. And that photo of him in the bar with the baseball game? The game was taped. It turns out he was at the bar the night
after
the rape. Elwin Dandridge has been a real disappointment to me. But I think I can get him a deal for three to five, because the DEA needs his testimony in a drug-trafficking case. I might even swing a suspended sentence with probation, if he agrees to go into treatment.”

“For drugs? Or raping girls?” I asked.

“I assume both. The judge is likely to—”

My mother stood up suddenly. She picked up her plate and glass of wine and said, “I’m going to eat in the den.”

We watched her go, surprised. What my mom had just done was, in her version of reality, the height of rudeness.

I thought it was cool. A good hard poke to the ox’s ribs.

Deke Moffet was very regular about taking his meal breaks from Wing’s Wild Wok, only this time instead of pizza he was eating a burger from McDonald’s. He didn’t say anything right away when I sat down. I waited.

He said, “Don’t worry, I haven’t told anybody about the Hummer.”

“Good.”

“Marsh might have, though—he never shuts up. I wouldn’t worry about it. Nobody really listens to him.”

I nodded.

Deke said, “That what you wanted to hear?”

“Yeah, but…can I ask you something?”

He took another bite out of his burger and nodded.

“When you stole all those cars, how did you do it? Break in and hot-wire them? Or what?”

“Or what,” Deke said. He paused to swallow. “I wouldn’t know how to hot-wire a lawn mower. Besides, the kind of
cars we were stealing, you can’t just cross a couple wires. We weren’t looking for stuff to chop. We were after the highbuck stuff—Beamers and Benzes. Cars like that got all this antitheft stuff built in. You pretty much gotta have a key.” He gave me an appraising look. “Why?”

“I was just curious. How did you get the keys?”

“I got my ways.” Deke hunched close over the table and lowered his voice. “I can get a key for just about any car, anywhere.” He sat back and grinned.

“Then what?”

“Then what
what?”

“You sold the cars to somebody?”

Deke took another huge bite of his burger. I waited. One thing my dad told me once is that most people can’t shut up once you get them talking about their work.

He swallowed. “I sure didn’t drive ’em into no pond.”

“How much did you get?”

“Depended on the car. This guy I know—my client, I guess you could say—he swaps out the VINs, replates ’em, and ships ’em out of state.”

“What is ‘swap out the VINs’?”

“Vehicle identification numbers. He gets a new title with a new VIN number.”

“How did you get caught?”

“We got pulled over for speeding.” He rolled his eyes. “That moron Marsh. We weren’t even in a hurry.”

Being arrested for auto theft is no doubt very traumatic, as you can go to jail for it. It is not nearly as bad as rape or murder, however.

I said earlier that the only times my mom drank too much were at Book Club and weddings. I left out this one other time: when Becca Ekman, my mom’s old roommate from college, came into town from New York a couple times a year and took her out for lunch. Martinis were Becca’s thing.

They always went to The Oceanaire in the Hyatt, where they ripped a new one for every guy they’d ever met—which in Becca’s case, I gathered, was a lot of guys. I think my mom’s job was mostly to listen. She had told me a few Becca stories, I think in hopes that I would avoid following in her best friend’s footsteps.

As far as I know, Becca had never stolen a car, but if she had I would not have been surprised.

Becca always stayed at the Hyatt when she came to town, so getting back to her room after multiple martinis was not a problem. But Mom always had to take a cab home and then get a ride downtown with my dad the next morning so she could pick up her car from the hotel garage. She hates cabs.
“Cabs are dirty and you never know who’s going to be driving them,” she says.

Elwin Carl Dandridge was a cabdriver. I don’t remember if I mentioned that before.

Since I had proven to be such an excellent designated driver in the past, Mom decided that I might like to drive her downtown, then do some shopping while she and Becca got wasted, then drive her home. This was only a couple days after my air-shopping experience at DSW. I didn’t know if I was into that kind of retail masochism again.