The Best American Short Stories 2012

by Tom Perrotta

  “What’re you so happy about?” Terri opens the metal lid of her cart, letting the steam of mysterious meat and soft bread billow up between them. “You want one? On the house?”

  “I’m in love” is Darlyn’s reply to the hot-dog offer. The first time she has told anyone. It feels like jumping off a cliff in a hang glider, something she actually used to do in her twenties, before she had Lake to be responsible for.

  Gary the Husband isn’t who Darlyn expected. Of course she only has about fifteen minutes for really focused expectation, the minutes since getting a call from Christy, totally flipped out, saying, “I tried to stop him, but—” Darlyn knows Gary runs marathons and so she has formed an image of someone small and thin, like those Kenyan runners, only white and a neurologist. But when he shows up just before midnight, he turns out to be stocky, with a big vein popping in and out along the side of his neck. They stand at the front door. She has told Lake to stay in her room, that she will explain later, but not to be afraid. And Darlyn finds she’s not afraid either, even though right away he gets red and starts shouting. All Darlyn hears is blahblah-fuckingfreak-blahblah-lesbohomewrecker. It doesn’t matter what he says. It’s all just air coming out of a tire going flat. All she can feel is elation. His standing here means Christy didn’t lose her nerve; she told him and hung tough. Their plan is fragile, but it’s Friday, a whole day after they made it, and the plan is still alive.

  Gary has begun poking his index finger into Darlyn’s chest to make his big points. She puts her hand up to stop this, which leaves him poking her palm. Much better. She is only waiting for her brother to show up and apply a little reasonability to the situation. Russ is very good for this purpose. He is actually hopelessly out of shape, but no one tests that fact, given that he could kill you just by falling on you.

  “I’m already there,” he told her on the phone. And now, over Gary’s shoulder she can see Russ getting out of a cab, paying the driver slowly, with coins from his change purse. And then he is behind Gary, tapping him on the shoulder and saying, “I think this conversation has come to an end.” Russ knows some judo tricks from his bouncer days. One of his hands wraps over Gary’s shoulder, the other pinches a nerve at the base of Gary’s thick neck, causing him to wince and lock his teeth. “No more poking or shouting,” Russ tells him, and Gary’s response is something like “Kghhgk.”

  Sunday is the longest day of this year. Russ is nailing a plywood ramp over the steps to Jackie’s side door. Lake is inside making everyone Gruyère omelets. Jackie and Billy’s presence in the kitchen probably can’t be fully counted as supervision, but they are adults, sort of. The omelets have to be eaten sequentially as Jackie has only one usable frying pan; the others, veterans of much inebriated cooking, look as though they’ve been smelted in a forge. When Russ stands up and rubs the small of his back, he’s kind of alarmingly flushed with the effort. “Do you think you could talk to her, you know, about no more quickie marriages? I feel one coming on.”

  Darlyn, who measured and cut the plywood and brought it over, says, “The wheelchair doesn’t seem to be an obstacle. It might even be a feature. She says the best part is being able to park right in front of any store. That’s the best part.” Through the open window she can hear her mother and Billy discussing the almost certain guilt of the latest Tot Mom on Nancy Grace, a show they both keep up with. The rhythms of the conversation have a definite in-the-bag quality.

  “I’m going to have to get Lake out of the cocktail lounge pretty soon.”

  But then any urgency to progress to whatever comes next vanishes, replaced by a delicious stillness. Darlyn sets her omelet plate on the windowsill and picks up an open box of nails and smells inside. Like spring, wet and elemental.

  “You’re not even listening to me, are you?” Russ says after saying something she didn’t listen to. “You’re not receiving outside information at the moment. You think this romance is going to change your life. But it won’t.”

  “Why are you being mean?”

  “I’m not. I’m trying to save you from heartbreak when she misses the Lexus or can’t get custody of her kids, when that pricky little husband starts fighting her with all his money, and she just caves.”

  “Of course she will. You think I don’t know that?” Darlyn says, then lowers her voice. “It’s just about—even for a day—being this purely happy. Like, happy to be a carbon-based life form.”

  Russ doesn’t say anything. Then Darlyn doesn’t say anything. They just stand in the light haze of thirdhand cigarette smoke drifting out through the window screen until the silence is suddenly cut with the sparky flap of cards being shuffled and Billy telling Lake, “The idea is to go higher than the dealer without going over twenty-one.”

  TAYLOR ANTRIM

  Pilgrim Life

  FROM American Short Fiction

  BY THURSDAY I STILL hadn’t said word one about the accident. My roommate Rand would be the guy, and this would be the moment: he and I sitting on our narrow balcony, legs shot through the railings, nighttime, glittery San Francisco laid out below us. September 22, 1999. “Know what Hardar Jumpiche says about giving away good feelings?” he asked.

  Took me a second to realize who he meant: the author of Today’s the Day. That and Buddhism for Dummies had appeared on the back of the toilet after Rand sold his startup to WestLab. The incubator’s stock had since been on a tear—up 6 percent this month—which had left Rand worth, more or less, $12 million. Twelve mill-ion. Twelve million. It was like trying to speak French. Rand of the Quiksilver backpack, the weed habit, the SAE beer-opener key chain.

  “Shed the ego and feel what’s left,” Rand said.

  Tell him.

  But I’d just burned my mouth on a molten marijuana brownie, so I didn’t—and maybe, I suddenly thought, don’t. The rudiments of a different plan came together as I stood to collect that backpack from where it lay on the floor of the apartment.

  “Breathe out the ego and breathe in, what is it . . . ?” Rand asked when I returned to the balcony. He sat bolt upright, a palm open on each knee—a fair approximation of Jumpiche’s author photo.

  I’d read a few pages of Today’s the Day in the bathroom. “Charity,” I said, tonguing the stinging roof of my mouth, building out my idea. A loan was too humiliating; Rand had been carrying the rent since July. But what about an investment? “You said 3rdBase is sitting on some dough? Research and development?”

  “Charity,” Rand repeated, pondering the word.

  Rand had run down the problem for me a few nights before: Two million in a Wells Fargo money market doing no one any good. WestLab had delivered the funding, earmarked for R&D, just as Rand’s ideas guy, Stanford summa cum laude, went missing on what was supposed to be a weeklong sex vacation to the Philippines. Rand needed to phone somebody—the embassy?—but just as pressing, in his view, was spending that two million. WestLab wanted new ideas by the week. Baby startups like 3rdBase had to shovel money out the door. “Shows people you’re serious,” Rand had told me.

  “What’s the latest with your mom?” he asked me now. “Home from the hospital?”

  I didn’t want to talk about it. “Listen.” I conjured a pitch: the Wine Gazette could create a subscription site. “Wholesalers, restaurant and retail buyers. Chomping at the bit to get access to our wine ratings. Nothing to get it started. A few hundred thousand.” What I was looking for in his backpack was his laptop, to which we could connect the DSL cable and perform some online banking transactions. What I found, quaintly, was a company checkbook and a pen.

  “You don’t want to talk about it. Totally understand. Let the thoughts go and feel what’s left,” Rand said.

  I meditated with him a moment, both of us sitting there inhaling and exhaling like monks. The colors in our two-bedroom soaked and bleared. I’d eaten two brownies. I would spend the night huddled under the covers, wondering if I’d ever see Claire again, recalling the man she’d hit, his puppet legs, his body jackknifed around a
boulder. The accident.

  Tell him.

  Below us the J Church shrieked along its rails, following its oxbow turn. The apartment’s air tasted lightly of cocoa and sugar—brownie mix. The plastic checkbook cover felt like buttery calfskin. “Mom’s depressed,” I said, because this was the latest, via voicemail, from my brother.

  “She’ll make it.”

  “Could be big,” I said. “The Wine Gazette dot-com. And what do you say about money?”

  “Speaking of—you never told me how you and Claire made out at Stateline.”

  His startup’s logo appeared in the check’s upper-left corner, a miniature Louisville Slugger knocking the leather off a baseball. I was going to drop his shovel-it-out-the-door line, but at the last minute changed course: “Like a shark, you said. You said this to me during Shark Week.”

  Sort of heartless, mentioning Shark Week: his sister was that pro surfer who’d lost her arm to a tiger shark in Maui two years before. She was an inspiration, still competing, still winning, but Rand had taken the incident hard. Whenever the Discovery Channel rolled out the great whites for a ratings boost, he logged sick days in front of the TV, stoned and weeping.

  He gathered his hands into his lap; his frame shook with bottled feeling. I felt bad. Rand was nice to me. The rent. The parties he invited me to. He was, face it, the reason I had a social life, the reason I met Claire. He genuinely wanted to know about Mom’s cancer. But Rand’s money would get Claire the best lawyer in San Francisco, get her to return my phone calls, vanquish my recalcitrant guilt. How much? I closed my eyes and let a number take shape in the ether. I made the check out to myself and handed him the pen.

  A check! A $500,000 check! My degree in comp lit told me it was just one more unreliable signifier along a chain of Late Capitalist meanings, but when I folded the slip of paper into a dart-shaped airplane, then an origami swan, then gave myself a nasty cut on its edge the next morning, it felt like the thing itself: as intrinsically precious as buried gold.

  Ten A.M. sharp and I was stepping through the door at the Gazette, where I earned $23,000 a year as an assistant editor with zero health insurance. Just a half-hour earlier, in the shower, I’d doubled down on my plan: the Gazette really did need a pay site, so why not play rainmaker for the magazine, secure a raise, maybe a Kaiser Permanente card, and get Claire the best lawyer in town? Handle this right, I told myself, striding through the railcar space lined with scalloped wine racks, hearing my boss, the associate publisher, at his desk, behind his pair of folding Chinese screens. Handle this right, I told myself, and in three months that guy Claire hit might still be in a coma, and no way would we be together, but my guilt over making a bad situation worse would fade, and I’d be free to achieve dharma, bodhicitta, serenity—one of those versions of paradise in Rand’s books.

  “Big news,” I said, sliding the check out of my wallet and placing it on Marv’s keyboard. My boss gave me an arrowed look. Breakfast for him was three boiled eggs and a chocolate creatine shake—lunch was a bucket of lo mein from the joint down the street—but the retrovirals he popped like breath mints kept the meat off of him. His face was cadaverous; I could pinch his cheekbones between my fingers.

  I pointed at the well-creased check, but he wouldn’t look at it. “Know a Detective Sanchez?” he asked.

  “Who?”

  “South Lake Tahoe Police Department. Wants your phone number. You’re, apparently, unlisted.”

  “Did you give it to him?”

  “I said I wanted to speak to you first.”

  “Go ahead. I’m no lawyer, but how’s the guy in the passenger seat guilty of anything?”

  “You’re no lawyer.”

  The words had just dropped out of my mouth. Passenger seat.

  “Lewis, have you committed a crime?”

  “Marv, do you want the whole sordid story?”

  “Jesus, no.”

  Marv reported so many details about his life, major and minor—how he liked to unwind in the evenings (low-volume porn on his plasma, the Wall Street Journal, a tumbler of pizza wine), his HIV status, what he ate for breakfast every day, his abusive father, the electrician he’d fucked on Saturday night. Were we friends? I wanted us to be—he was the age my father would be if he’d lived past twenty-five (I never knew the man)—but I got the queasy sense he’d tell this stuff to anyone he shared an office with.

  “You remember Claire, right?” I asked him. “The pourer from Grief Vineyards I’ve been seeing?”

  “So I told Sanchez all I had was your cell phone.”

  “I thought you wanted to speak to me first.”

  “Why don’t you take a day or two off? Settle this?”

  The Sheetrock walls were thin. I heard the game developers we shared the floor with clacking away on their keyboards. I heard their coffeemaker gurgling.

  And then I was staring at the copy of the 3rdBase check still lying there on Marv’s keyboard. Up until that moment, I hadn’t noticed the overlong signature, the way it spilled past the line and piled up at the check’s edge. Rand had signed it How stoned do you think I am?

  My cell phone buzzed—a blocked number. I pressed the green button, still feeling hopeful enough to say “Claire.”

  But it wasn’t Claire.

  About six weeks ago I hit on Claire Baldessari while watching her place her plastic knife and fork at the four o’clock position. Table manners! What a turn-on, especially given the setting: a potluck dinner in a Dolores Street apartment of a friend of Rand’s, dim lighting, Chinet plates on laps, Indian-style seating, and three different cannabis-laced casseroles (tuna, zucchini, eggplant) on the menu. I couldn’t place Claire, though I knew I’d seen her before. College friend? I’d gone to a small, extremely expensive private college in Washington State because it was situated in the opposite corner of the country from my hometown, because it had a friendly-sounding name, because it was that or Florida State—everywhere else rejected me—and because I could afford it, thanks to the education trust fund my grandmother left me in her will. I’d even stayed there an extra year to collect my master’s. And now here I was, living three-figure paycheck to paycheck. Whenever I thought of that emptied-out trust, I doubled over in pain.

  “Come here often?”

  “You’re the guy who brought the bad wine?” Claire asked. I nodded. The Gazette received a flood of California, Oregon, and Washington reds and whites; every other month the tweedy, bespectacled Master of Wine editor in chief flew out from New York and convened a panel of local sommeliers to sample and rate the best of it; the bottles he refused to taste went to me. I’d become reasonably popular in Rand’s circle by arriving at every social event clutching four by the neck in each hand.

  “How do you know the wine’s bad?”

  Claire told me she did a bit of marketing and all the appointment tastings for a small winery in the East Bay. Boring job, she said, but check this out: “Nineteen ninety-four Contra Costa Petite, ninety-year-old head-trimmed vines, ultra-low yield, cold-soaked, hand-punched, one hundred percent new French oak.” The assistant winemaker who’d hired her was a scratch golfer, so in addition to all that, he’d tutored her in the names of a good twenty or twenty-five top players on the PGA tour.

  “Grief Vineyards?” I asked. Kind of a niche category, East Bay wineries. Grief had these dourly memorable all-black labels.

  “Wine’s not really my thing,” she said, nodding. “But I’ve tasted enough to know what’s bad.” She had lank brown hair and a beauty mark on the left side of her chin. I asked for her number, and she hesitated for a moment and then wrote it on my wrist. I’d never been over to Grief; I realized where I’d seen her before—at a birthday party for one of Rand’s 3rdBase partners. On a dare, she and another girl had stripped to their bras and done an interpretive dance to some dirge-y Arab Strap song on the kitchen table. I took a chance and told her about it. “You were really sexy,” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess I’m trying to get my life togethe
r now,” she said, not at all embarrassed. She took a small bite of food, put her plastic utensils at four o’clock, and I went hot.

  The question is: what kind of snob gets turned on by table manners? Trust me, I’m not. In a room of blue bloods, I’m so intimidated I can’t speak. I grew up in a Pensacola split-level, my single mom supporting my brother and me on an elementary school teacher’s salary and a bit of grudging assistance from Grandmother. But my mom was raised rich, so she kept us from putting our elbows on the table, reaching for the ketchup, or chewing with our mouth open. You’re Pilgrim stock, she liked to say. She proved it at the public library, with birth records, and one or two times she dragged both of us off to some Mayflower ancestry association lunch in Florida. At the last one, over Christmas, my paunchy lawyer brother played the prince, chitchatting his way around the room, shaking palsied hands, helping the geriatrics into chairs. I slugged five glasses of sherry (all they had) and asked the caterer to give me a hand job in the bathroom.

  I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I make bad decisions. In a tight spot, I lose perspective. All of the sudden I’m behind the wheel of a rented Mazda, flooring the accelerator, a body in my rearview.

  Mom says the Plymouth Colony Pilgrims were brave and fair-minded and industrious and that they were searching for spiritual freedom. The last part feels like me—at least since I started reading my roommate’s books, warming to their foggy, upbeat slogans. Our deepest fear is that we’re powerful beyond measure; the present moment is the only moment that ever is. But brave, fair-minded, et cetera? That’s not me at all. Maybe Mom’s gilding the lily. After her cancer came back, I logged a little library time myself, thinking she might like talking on the phone about our ancestry. (By the way: the San Francisco Public Library? A homeless shelter with bookshelves.) The part about the Plymouth Colony that grabbed me had to do with their justice system. Even before the Puritans in Salem kicked off their famous trials, the goodhearted denizens of Plymouth would tie a girl up, throw her in the water, and if she managed to get herself untied before she drowned, she was a witch. If she drowned, she was innocent. Trials by ordeal, those pretty little travesties of logic were called.