How To Steal a Car (8 page)

“Shopping for what? I don’t have any money.”

“If you promise to keep it under three hundred dollars, you can use my credit card.”

Sold.

I got back to the hotel at three-thirty, wearing a new black leather jacket. It was a ridiculously hot fashion choice for the middle of summer, but wearing it was easier than carrying it. My mom was standing outside the lobby entrance with Becca, who was smoking a cigarette. I had to admit that Becca looked cool, all fashion-model slim, blowing clouds of smoke past bright red lips, totally comfortable in a pair of heels that would have given me acrophobia.

My mom also looked good, but not as good as Becca. I
noticed that she was smoking too. I walked up to her and said, “Got a cigarette?”

She did this drunken-recognition thing that would have been comical if she hadn’t been my mother, and if she hadn’t started coughing violently while dropping her cigarette.

Becca said, “Cool jacket, Kell.”

My mom was about as smashed as I’d ever seen her, talking fast like a meth freak and slurring her words and making hand gestures like a conductor. I was concentrating on getting off the parking ramp and out of downtown Minneapolis, so I hardly heard what she was saying—mostly
Becca said this, Becca said that, blah-blah-blah
—until we were finally on the freeway and I heard her say something about Dad.

“…expect me to have dinner on the table as usual, he’s lucky he didn’t marry Becca—”

“Dad
used to go out with
Becca?”
I said.

“Don’t be silly. I’m just saying, she’d have told him where to put his dinner!” She laughed. “Your dad—” She burped and made a sour face. “Remind me to never
ever
drink another apricot martini.”

“Dad what?”

“Do you know all the time he was in law school, and for the first five years of our marriage, he never once said ‘I love you’? You know what he said? He said ‘I
luff
you.’ And every
time he said it, he’d laugh. A fakey little laugh.
Huh huh.
Like a kid. ‘I
luff
you,
huh huh.’
Can you imagine?”

I tried. I couldn’t. My big hairy dad saying “I
luff
you”? No way.

“He says ‘I love you’ all the time,” I said. “I’ve heard him say it.”

“He says it
now,
but only because now it’s not true. Before, it scared him because it
might
have been true. But then he just decided one day to lie, and once he decided to lie, it was easy for him to say it.” She extended her fingers and stared at her nails. She’d had them done the day before, getting herself all fixed up for Becca.

My head was spinning with what she’d said. I mean, I was trying to understand it, trying to make sense of her words. Dad could only say
I love you
if it wasn’t true? Did that make sense on any level other than the multiple-apricot-martini level?

My mother let her manicured hand fall to her lap.

“He does it for a living, you know,” she said, sounding perfectly sober for the moment. “He tells lies.”

Knowing that her martini lunch would incapacitate her, my mother had made a bean-and-lamb casserole and a salad that morning. When we got home, she put the casserole in the oven, took two Excedrin, and went to bed, asking me to
wake her up at five-thirty. I went to my computer and spent the next hour on the Web.

I did a search for “how to steal a car” and got twenty thousand hits. A lot of them were videos with hot-wiring instructions. I watched a few of those. Every one was different. Some said to cross the green wire with the red; some said the red with the yellow; some said to cross all three. It looked really complicated. I could see why Deke had never learned to do it.

One video showed a guy jamming the tip of a screwdriver into the ignition switch and turning it to start the car. But if it was really that simple, then why would all these other guys bother with the hot-wiring? Another video showed a girl breaking into a locked car using nothing but a tennis ball. She cut a small hole in the tennis ball, put the hole over the lock, and smooshed the ball with her palm. The sudden air pressure made the lock pop up. Cool.

There were a few videos of guys actually stealing cars. Some of them you could tell were real—you could see how pumped they were, yelling and grinning and high-fiving each other.

I heard my mom in the shower just after five. I erased my browsing history and went downstairs to read about Ishmael and his cannibal friend, Queequeg, who is actually the coolest character in the whole book. By the time my dad got home, Mom was acting and looking almost normal, although she was moving a little slow and her eyes were red.

I decided to try an experiment.

After dinner that night, during which there was no mention of Elwin Carl Dandridge, my dad put on his suburban warrior outfit and went out to attack the bushes with his electric trimmer. I helped my mom clean up the kitchen. She was looking a bit less hollow-eyed.

“Are you hungover?” I asked.

“I’m not twenty-five anymore,” she said, scraping the leftover casserole into a plastic container. “I don’t know how Becca does it.”

“I noticed that Dad didn’t give us his usual update on his free-the-guilty-rapist program.”

She laughed weakly. “I’ll finish up here,” she said.

I went outside and watched my dad squaring off the boxwood hedge that divides our yard from the Hallsteds’, who were still up at their lake cabin.

“Hey, Dad!” I yelled it loud to get through his earmuffs.

He turned off the trimmer and pulled his earmuffs down around his neck.

“What was in that envelope?” I asked.

He looked puzzled.

“The one the police left in the Hallsteds’ door,” I explained. “The one I gave you last week?”

“Oh! That was just…apparently someone got into the Hallsteds’ garage and stole their car. It was found abandoned the next day over on Dakota Avenue. As far as we can tell,
they didn’t break into the house. The police are keeping the car at the impound lot until the Hallsteds get back next week.”

I must have looked worried, because he set his trimmer on the grass and gave me a hug. “I didn’t want you to worry, Kell. It was probably just some kids. They must have used a remote to get into the garage.”

I hugged him back. The hard plastic earmuffs around his neck ground into my cheek. My dad had been doing a lot of hugging the past couple of years, ever since the sensitivity training program his law firm had to go through after one of the lawyers got sued for harassment.

“You haven’t seen any strangers hanging around the neighborhood, have you?” he said into my ear.

“Nope.”

He released me. “Well, let me know if you do, okay?”

“I love you, Daddy.”

That was my experiment.

“Me too, honey. I love you too,” he said as if it was the most natural and true thing in the world.

He lifted his earmuffs onto his ears, picked up the trimmer, smiled at me, and pulled the starter cord.

I had to show Jen my new jacket, but when I called, her dad told me she had gone down to Red Wing with her mom for an overnight antiquing trip. That was Jen’s mom’s thing—
antiquing—and Jen had gotten dragged into it the same way I had gotten into Pilates with
my
mom, though I have to admit that sometimes she came back from these trips with some really cool stuff, like the Scooby Doo thermos she’d bought for two dollars at an estate sale. So with Jen off bonding and scavenging with her mom, I was kind of at a loss. I could show the jacket to Will but he’d be like,
Hey, cool,
which was the way he was all the time, unless his sexual preference was questioned by Alton Wright.

I wondered if Jen had told Will about the Cadillac.

I wondered if Will would think stealing the Cadillac was cool, or just stupid.

I wondered if Will really
was
gay. It would be ironic if he’d had me steal Alton’s Hummer because Alton had told the truth for once. I’m not sure if
ironic
is the right word, but you get what I mean. But just because Will was not constantly trying to get naked with Jen and me did not mean he was gay. He sure didn’t
seem
gay. For example, he dressed really sloppy and his preferred music was of the high-testosterone, head-banging variety. It wasn’t like he was all into fashion and listening to Madonna or Cher or George Michael or something.…I don’t know, maybe those are just stereotypes. My point is that Will did not exactly set off anybody’s gaydar, but then, neither did Abraham Lincoln, and somebody once told me he was gay. It’s probably not true though.

I hung the jacket over one shoulder and walked to Will’s. I figured if he happened to be out in the yard or something
he could tell me how cool my new jacket was or whatever, but when I got there I saw no signs of life. I kept on walking and eventually got to Charlie Bean’s, but nobody I knew was there and I didn’t have any money anyway, so I turned around and walked back. This time when I went by, Will was out on the driveway, shooting baskets.

“Hey,” he said when he saw me. He looked at the jacket hanging on my shoulder and raised his eyebrows like, did I not know it was eighty degrees out?

“It’s new,” I said. “I’m breaking it in.”

“Cool.” He bounced the basketball onto the lawn. “I saw you earlier,” he said.

“Earlier when?”

“When you walked by.”

“I went up to Charlie Bean’s but I didn’t have any money.”

“Come on,” Will said, grabbing my hand. “I’ll buy you a Phrap-o-whatchacallit.”

It was like an electric shock when he touched me. I couldn’t remember Will ever doing anything like that before. He had always been so standoffish.

The hand-holding only lasted about two seconds. As soon as we started walking, he let go and we were like before, moving along in the same direction, but with about twelve inches and my new jacket between us. I shifted the jacket to my other shoulder.

“I wanted to talk to you about something,” Will said. Another shock. Will
never
wanted to talk. Ever.

He said, “I was thinking about what we did. You know, with Alton’s Hummer?”

“I’ve been thinking about that too.”

“Really?” He slowed his pace and peered at me sideways.

“Yeah…” I was about to say,
It was really fun!
Or
Let’s do it again!
But something I saw in the set of his jaw—or maybe it was the wrinkled forehead—made me pause. Instead, I said, “That was really something,” which is one thing you can say about absolutely anything.

“It was really stupid,” said Will.

Ka-thunk.
That wasn’t what I’d been thinking at all.

Keeping my voice light, I said, “So you think the dead rat would have been more effective?”

“Equally stupid. What I wanted to say was…I want to apologize. We could have gotten into a lot of trouble. You could have gotten
killed.
It was like, you took that car with Jen that time? And for some stupid reason I got jealous, like you guys were having this exciting life, and at the same time I was all pissed off at Alton because of him telling everybody I was gay, and then, I don’t know, I guess I wasn’t thinking. We were just really lucky we didn’t get caught is all.”

“Or drownded,” I said.

“Or drownded.”

We walked up to the outside ordering window at Charlie
Bean’s. Will put his hands in his pockets, then looked at me with a funny expression on his face.

“Oops,” he said.

“What?”

“I forgot. I left my wallet in my other pants.”

Will was the kind of guy who, when he did something like that, you didn’t get mad at, even though he never actually said he was sorry. This one other time he took me and Jen out for pizza and did the same thing after we’d eaten the pizza. Jen just paid for it. It was understood that Will didn’t do it because he was cheap or broke; he just wasn’t thinking, and even though he didn’t pay, you still liked him because he had
wanted
to pay. How a guy like that ends up with two girlfriends, I don’t know. So even though I wasn’t mad at him exactly, I was kind of irritated because I’d really wanted that Phrap-o-chino. So on the way back to his house, I decided to make him squirm.

“Do you like me?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“How about Jen?”

“I like Jen too.”

“Did Jen tell you I stole another car?”

Will stopped walking.

“Are you shitting me?”

“It was an emergency.”

He waited for me to explain, but of course I couldn’t, since it involved Jen going off to Taylors Falls with Jim Vail.

To change the subject quick, I said, “So, if you’re not gay, how come you’re not always trying to have sex with us?” I watched his face. It took a few seconds, but I could see a blush creeping up his neck.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“It’s kind of weird. I mean, if we don’t have to fight you off all the time, how do we know you really like us?”

“I don’t know.” He wouldn’t look at me.

Funny thing: If I had thought he might say anything else, I’d never have asked the question.

I called Britt Johnson, who was friends with Deke’s sister Callie, or so I thought.

“Why do you want Callie’s number?” Britt asked. “She’s a total skank.”

“What did she do?”

“You know Aaron? She’s like all over him.”

“I thought you and him broke up like months ago.”

“So?”

I told Britt I’d found a book with Callie’s name in it and I wanted to return it.

“I’d just trash it,” Britt said.

I laughed. “C’mon.”

Britt said, “Whatever,” and gave me Callie’s home number.

Deke wasn’t home but he called me back later that night. I was already in bed but I’d left my cell on just in case.

“Hey, it’s me. What’s up?” he said.

I told him what I wanted.

He said, “I knew you was a freak.”

Several days went by and I didn’t hear from Deke. I was starting to think he was full of crap just like everybody else, so I tried not to think about it. It was around then that Jen and I had a heart-to-heart over a bottle of wine she’d swiped from her parents’ “wine cellar.” That was what her dad called the two or three dozen bottles stacked in a corner of their basement. The wine was white and kind of sour. I don’t remember what it was. It could have been worth a thousand dollars, for all I know.

Jen’s parents were gone on an overnight to Chicago, so we sat in her living room and drank the wine out of their fancy wineglasses. We would have been smoking cigarettes too, except neither of us smoked.

Our heart-to-heart was mostly about Jim Vail. Jen was still messed up over what had happened, and what had
almost
happened at Taylors Falls, and about two-thirds of the way
through the bottle of wine I blurted about me and Jim and the puppies and how I was mad at her for going with him, and she started crying and saying she was sorry and I started crying too, saying I knew it wasn’t her fault ’cause she didn’t know I had been supposed to go and I would have done the same thing except I’d probably have gotten myself raped and so actually she saved me by being the one to go, which was ridiculous, of course, because it was actually my grandmother who saved me by dying.

We also talked about Will. Jen was convinced he was either gay or a eunuch.

“He’s not a eunuch,” I said. “Eunuchs don’t have deep voices.”

“Then he must be gay.”

“I think he’s just shy.”

Jen sipped her wine thoughtfully. “That is so sweet,” she said.

We talked about other things—I don’t remember what. But I never mentioned Deke Moffet.

I stayed at Jen’s overnight to sleep it off. The next morning when I got home from Jen’s with my head pounding and my stomach churning, my mom was all dressed in her Pilates outfit, waiting for me. I had completely forgotten about Pilates. I quick changed and in about five minutes we were out the door, with her driving. She was in a chatty mood,
and I was finding out what a hangover felt like. I thought about her that night after she went out with Becca Ekman, how hard it must have been to sit at the dinner table listening to my dad talk about his day and probably wanting to puke the whole time.

Just to be perfectly clear, I am not this big-time drinker. I had drunk three times in my life and splitting that one bottle of wine with Jen was the most I’d ever had at one time. But even with my limited experience, I can offer some solid advice: Do not get drunk the night before your Pilates class.

After an hour of building my core strength (a Pilates thing) and trying to not throw up (a wine thing), I went with my mom for brunch to Chez Colette in the Sofitel hotel, way out in Bloomington. My mom had this thing for their croissants. Also, the place made her feel all French and classy.

I drank two café au laits and ate a chocolate croissant while my mother chattered on about I-don’t-know-what. I finally got tired of whatever it was she was talking about and asked her how dad was doing with his rapist.

“Your father is very serious about his work, Kelleigh,” she said, putting on her we-are-your-parents-and-we-are-a-team face. “He believes that every person accused of a crime deserves vigorous representation.”

“Vigorous representation?”

“That’s how he puts it.”

“Do you think he’s really going to get that guy off? Do I need to start carrying pepper spray?”

She shook her head, looking thoughtful, and said, “I don’t know. With that break-in at the Hallsteds’, pepper spray might not be a bad idea.”

On the way to the car, my mom handed me her keys, even though all she’d been drinking was coffee. I didn’t really feel like driving because I still had a headache, and driving with a parent watching your every move is not nearly as interesting as driving on your own. But it would have been weird for me not to want to drive, so I drove.

As I was crossing over the freeway to get to the eastbound entrance ramp, I saw my dad. It was just a flash. White Lexus, my dad’s face through the tinted windshield, and then I was turning onto the freeway.

“I just saw Dad,” I said.

My mother looked at me.

“What? Where?”

“He was going the other way.”

She looked around. “Are you sure?”

“I think so.”

“What on earth would he be doing way out here? His office is downtown.”

I shrugged. I was already wishing I hadn’t said anything.

“You must have been mistaken,” she said.

“It might have just been a guy who looked like him.”

“There are a lot of white Lexuses.” She flipped open her cell phone, stared at it for a few seconds, shook her head slightly, closed it, and put it back in her bag.

“Be careful here,” she said, pointing ahead. “The right lane is closed.”

I changed lanes, signaling and checking both mirrors like you’re supposed to.