The Best American Short Stories 2012

by Tom Perrotta

  So—some of those brave, fair-minded, and industrious Pilgrims were messed-up cowards like me. I didn’t drift into the shoulder and hit the guy, but I talked Claire into the shotgun seat, and I slid behind the wheel, and I got us racing downhill on Route 50 again. I told her I loved her and that not one car had passed—as if either of those facts mattered. I wasn’t that drunk, but negotiating the downhill grade and S-curves took all of my concentration. By the time I finally hit a straightaway, I had more happy-ending nonsense prepped and ready. But when I turned my head, Claire was nodding toward a Shell station, saying she had to throw up. I pulled in. She entered the mini-mart, spoke to the clerk, and pointed back up the dark mountain.

  “Son, did you know leaving the scene’s a category B felony?” Detective Sanchez asked in his rich, movie-actor voice.

  “I was hoping you were someone else,” I said, back at my Gazette desk, cell phone warm on my ear. September sunlight angled through our small-paned windows and pooled around wine bottles I’d unboxed yesterday, now waiting to be logged in. Why bother? It was Central Valley cabernet, cheap stuff the New York editor would never consent to taste.

  “Talking about in-car-ceration.”

  I touched Rand’s check with my finger, feeling hopeful, wistful—and then seriously foolish.

  “Who were you hoping I was, son?”

  I told him. “But she didn’t leave the scene. Or only to use a pay phone.”

  “You were there?”

  “Nope,” I said, and then helplessly, plaintively: “Claire won’t return my calls.”

  A faint thunk, and then a crackle on the line. Was Sanchez recording the conversation? Passenger seat: I might say those words to him as easily as I’d said them to Marv. But if I put myself in the car, I might expose Claire as a liar. Unless she’d already told Sanchez that I’d been with her and that it had been my idea to drive away. Impossible to know without talking to her first.

  In-car-ceration.

  I hadn’t seriously weighed jail time, for either of us. In fact, I still routinely heard the animal thud-thud along the door and thought deer. In the darkest corner of my brain, well away from wherever my conscience lived, I still believed Claire had hit a deer, and the man around the rock had been sleeping or passed out drunk. I hadn’t investigated very carefully. I’d simply opened the door, stood, got a glimpse of his bearded chin, his unlaced boots, and shards of a bottle glinting in the gravel, saw his chest rise and fall with breath, and thought, back in the car.

  “Son, let me ask you something.”

  “Call me Lewis,” I said.

  “You want to see your pretty girlfriend do five to twenty?”

  My desktop monitor’s screen saver became a scarlet funnel opening in the center. “She couldn’t get cell coverage. She went to the nearest—”

  “Were you there? Yes or no,” Sanchez asked.

  “No,” I said, knowing how unconvincing I sounded.

  And full of guilt. Because I’d gone along with Claire’s plan. It’s cleaner if I leave you here and go back up alone. She said this to me after dialing 911 from the pay phone attached to the side of the Shell station.

  “Has he died?” I asked Detective Sanchez. Tuesday’s Sacramento Bee (I bought it at the newsstand near the courthouse) reported an unidentified hitchhiker, fifty-four, in a coma at a local hospital after a collision on U.S. 50. One sentence, in the police blotter. And nothing on Wednesday or Thursday.

  “Better hope he don’t. You have yourselves a disagreement that night?”

  I clamped my lips shut. Sanchez was doing his detective thing, shaking me down a little.

  His laugh had tinny menace, like a handful of gravel flung against a screen.

  I wanted to tell him yes. I wanted to tell him that I’d kept my mother’s cancer from Claire because I loved her and because I was afraid she didn’t love me and would force me to go to Florida. Sanchez wouldn’t care about any of that, would focus on the one thing—my driving away—and call that a criminal act. Which I suppose it was. But here’s my perspective: I’m twenty-three, stalled out, stuck between the middling student I’ve been and the adult I’m meant to become. That night I was on a mad comet of feeling. I wanted to sling us off that mountain and into the innocent, waiting dark.

  I had to get off the phone. I had to talk to Claire, find out what she’d told him. Claire lived in a Mission District three-bedroom with two other girls. She rode the BART to and from work. She said she didn’t care about money—but she was lying. Everybody cares about money. So if I told her voicemail I had a half-a-million-dollar check and that I wanted to give her the money for legal fees, or whatever, just give it to her, surely that would win me a callback.

  I apologized to Sanchez: I was at work and had an important meeting. Could we talk later? No, he started to say, but I hit the red button and set the phone down.

  Out on Brannan, veils of fog had moved in, spoiling an otherwise perfect blue-sky September day. I shivered through the hanging wet, walking west, past an empty conference hall, past a bail bonds storefront, past a no-sign restaurant with blacked-out windows that Marv told me was a leather bar. It was still early; if Claire was working at Grief today, she wouldn’t have left yet. I tried her cell.

  “Hey, it’s me.” Voicemail. “Look, I—” Traffic stacked up beside the sidewalk, in the right-hand lane that led to the U.S. 101 ramp. I increased my pace, letting my gaze trip past one stuck, solo driver after another. “Just received some distressing news. My mom’s got—well, she’s sick, and I need to go see her in Florida, but I’m not leaving, obviously, before I know what’s going on with our situation.”

  I held my phone away from me and instructed myself: No, Lewis. No. How low can a person sink? I thought: Re-record that sucker. Just say you love her and you want to take your share of the blame. I forced my thumb to the pound key.

  Then I walked into this no-coverage pocket, Brannan at Eighth—the city was full of them—and my phone dropped the call.

  Here’s the story: Back in July my mom’s breast cancer returned after a fifteen-year remission, and my brother Brian called to put in this request I couldn’t quite deal with—come home and help him take care of her.

  “I just don’t think I can this minute,” I told him.

  “Why not?”

  “Did you even actually sprain your stupid ankle?” I asked. That was his story: he had injured his ankle scrimmaging in his lawyer soccer league and couldn’t drive, and Mom needed rides to and from her chemo appointments; she needed someone to pitch in with the shopping and cooking.

  “Mr. California would prefer we hire a nurse?” Brian said on the phone.

  “I can’t just leave. I have a job.”

  “Allegedly.”

  I didn’t take the bait; I suspected Brian, single, living in a carriage apartment above Mom’s garage, envied my life out here and wanted to spoil it, even though he’d never admit that.

  “Guarantee my firm lets you paralegal for double whatever you’re making now,” he said. “Dude, look.” He softened his voice. “Mom’s depressed. She took three sick days in a row last week. Gully had to scramble for subs. She won’t tell him what’s up.” Mom taught fourth grade at the elementary school we’d both gone to. Principal Guthrie, “Gully,” smoked brown cigarillos and wore a ruby pinkie ring and those glasses that tinted automatically when he walked outside.

  Brian and I were less than two years apart and had never gotten along. We’d been opposites in school: me—zitty, introverted, painfully self-conscious; Brian—jockish, confident, varsity soccer captain. In high school I went along with Mom to all his soccer games, sat in the buggy heat on folding camp chairs and helped her count his assists and goals. When I made cross country, she did drag Brian to one of my meets, but I cramped and finished tenth, and Brian proclaimed it a loser sport, and she never made him come again. I’d gotten better grades, but he’d gone to law school—FSU—and taken a job at a small law firm in Pensacola. He was constantly
tan, drove a jacked-up Blazer with a dancing bear sticker on the bumper, and walked around with a Deke baseball cap carabinered to his belt loop. And he was telling me to grow up.

  Actually, I should feel sorry for the guy. On my last visit to Pensacola, over the holidays, we spent most of Christmas Day sitting on Mom’s back stoop, watching carpenter ants munch away at the rotting picnic table in the palm-shaded yard. It was as close to a fraternal moment as we got: I asked him how things were going, even though I could pretty much tell. He’d gained at least twenty pounds and was maybe some kind of alcoholic. All morning he’d been taking nips from a Sheetz to-go mug filled with Wild Turkey. “I can tell you this,” he said. “Twenty-five and living in Mom’s garage ain’t the end of the fucking rainbow.” He dropped his chin, dug a fat knuckle into his eye socket, and spat into the crabgrass.

  Move out, I’d thought. But all his life he’d stuck by her, and she by him. In high school, for instance, he told the soccer team I was gay, wrote poetry, and had tried to kill myself. When I complained, Mom helpfully pointed out that the poetry part was true. That was why I’d gone to college so far away—to shake this feeling that they were arrayed against me, that I was the family’s third wheel.

  I hung up on Brian, and called Mom. Nothing to worry about, she said. They’d caught it early, and the chemo would be mild. She’d be absolutely fine. Mom was using her authoritative voice, the one that could silence a room of hyperactive nine-year-olds. Visit at Thanksgiving, she said, not sounding the least bit depressed. The Florida Mayflower Society was doing a dinner; we’d go.

  And then a couple days later, I met Claire Baldessari at that potluck and got her to write her phone number on my wrist. We went out, and she wore this clingy, long-sleeved yellow top and her hair in a pair of girlish braids, and after dinner in a dark corner of a bar on Mission, I moved to kiss her, and she let me but also said, into my teeth, that she had to take things slow. “I’m in a weird place,” she said. I nodded as if I understood and snaked my hands up underneath that tight top. We had sex back at my place on our second date, and afterward she told me that she’d been dumped by a forty-something Venezuelan restaurant owner who’d been busted by the cops for a cinder-block-sized brick of cocaine in the trunk of his Porsche. He’d posted bail and taken off for Mexico, but not before knocking Claire up. After the abortion she’d checked into a clinic in Marin with serious depression: “a bad time,” her words. Abortion, depression. Four months before. She said all of this with her back to me, sitting on the edge of my bed, hunting on the floor for her bra. She was trying to warn me off, but I was a late bloomer, girl-wise, finally losing my virginity during junior year in college, and at twenty-three I thought about sex all the time. And Claire had this way of seeming detached and unattainable—she didn’t look at me, even as she let me pull her back into bed for another round.

  I forced myself not to call her as much as I wanted to. We went out again, and then again, and like that, we were maybe dating, and I was happier than I’d ever been in my life—I couldn’t read, watch TV; I couldn’t focus on my work. I’d be logging wines into the database and close my eyes for a moment and see Claire on my balcony tip her head back to exhale a column of smoke straight up. I’d imagine biting that smooth, vulnerable length of her neck. She smoked, she said, to keep from eating, to lose the weight she’d gained on lithium. What weight? I wondered. And what softness there was—around her hips, the back of her thighs, her breasts—that was where I loved to grip and squeeze and suck.

  We hadn’t had a talk about being exclusive or anything, but when she went over to the house of the guy she worked with, the guy who’d taught her about golf—Chad—to watch Tiger Woods edge Sergio García for the PGA tournament, I was insanely jealous. And, plus, she sort of seemed to be holding herself back in bed. The Prozac blunted her libido, she said, but her libido seemed fine to me. There was something else getting in the way. I’d go down on her—I loved doing that—and she’d start breathing heavy and strain against me. But then she’d hoist me up like she didn’t want to come. “Makes me dizzy,” she’d say, by way of apology. Dizzy good? Dizzy bad? With Claire I felt the opposite—the still center of a turning world, the frictionless bearing inside a rotating axle. As far away as I could be from some impetuous act. I wanted the rest of my life to be like that.

  Brian kept calling, but I didn’t want to talk to him. By this point I was trying to get Claire to go away for a weekend—a big step for us. Rand’s friend owned a house near South Lake Tahoe, not far from the casinos over the border in Stateline. Claire liked blackjack, and she said a trip up there sounded like fun, but we hadn’t set a date, and I feared it would never happen. One thing was for sure: this young, knock-kneed relationship wouldn’t survive my leaving for Florida.

  I didn’t tell Claire about Mom. She adored her mother, an ex-hippie who ran a couple of baby-wear boutiques in Portland—no-bleach-cotton jammy pants, seven brands of African-style slings. They spoke every day. And when I let drop at a taqueria one night that I’d moved out to the West Coast to sort of get away from my mother and brother, she gave me a look of disappointment that made me wish I hadn’t said anything at all. Claire had been a total terror to her mom for years—but guess who’d come through for her when she’d needed help getting an abortion and some time at a psychiatric clinic? “Mom pretty much saved my life,” Claire told me, gravely, reaching across the bowl of pickled carrots and peppers and taking my hands. It was the first time I noticed the jagged, arrow-shaped scars pointing up her forearms. “That’s what mothers do,” Claire said.

  Meanwhile, my brother’s messages were these mini-lectures about family responsibility, about time to grow up. I laid it all out to Rand, who had family trouble of his own—a dad in Phoenix constantly asking him for money, a born-again mom who called only to beg him to get saved. We were in the apartment, watching the Giants get roughed up by the Dodgers, 5–0, bottom of the fourth, middle of August.

  “Is your mother going to die?” he asked flatly.

  I passed my hand through the air—as if the question was a bug or a bad smell. When I was in fifth grade, a few rounds of chemo had wiped her cancer out; she’d said there was nothing to worry about. I told him I didn’t actually know.

  With two on and a full count, Jeff Kent struck out looking. Rand grimaced, hit mute, and said we should sit on the floor and meditate on the question. So we sat Indian style, and I closed my eyes and breathed deep and slow. My first thought was about all those reassuring miles between San Francisco and Pensacola. Then I thought of the scars I’d seen on Claire’s arms. Then I asked myself a question: apart from college tuition and a hard-on for table manners, what had my family ever given me?

  “Dude,” Rand said. His back was rigid, his hands splayed open on his knees, and his face had turned white. He whistled air through his teeth.

  “What? Are you okay?”

  He shook both hands as if trying to dry them in the air. “Some powerful energy, amigo.”

  “You look really freaked out.”

  Rand snapped the TV off and stood on shaky legs to go into his bedroom. He came back rolling a joint, eyes wide. “Like, this solid wave of premonition.” Twice previous he’d experienced the same—right before his sister got her arm bitten off and days before WestLab had made an offer on 3rdBase. “So it could be a positive or a negative thing.”

  “Could be Mom dying?”

  He shrugged, exhaling smoke. “So totally out of your control. The forces of the universe, my man. You and I? Mice. Plankton.”

  Rand was a good guy, but he smoked a lot of pot. And the Giants rung up the Dodgers for eight in the bottom of the ninth that night—a crazy-unlikely come-from-behind victory that Rand wouldn’t shut up about for days. A couple of nights later over takeout sushi (his treat), I asked him if that could have been what his premonition was about. He stared at me, apparently stunned by the idea.

  He said he’d put $5,000 on the Giants through his bookie.


  “You have a bookie?”

  “I have a problem,” he said, stuffing his mouth with ahi.

  A squad car passed by on my walk between work and Claire’s apartment. And then another. And then another. Later I’d realize—of course—it was the same one, circling around, but I didn’t look closely because I couldn’t have imagined at the time that I was, in fact, being tailed. I’d discover later that Sanchez had interviewed the Shell station attendant who’d told him that Claire had been with a young man that night, and that they’d split up, and the guy had set off down Route 50 on foot. SFPD tipped him that Claire Baldessari’s boyfriend was a wanted money-laundering Venezuelan drug dealer, thought to be residing in Rosarito, Mexico. Possible fatal hit-and-run was already a big case for Sanchez, but nabbing an international fugitive could get him serious press attention. He’d put a couple of SFPD street cops on me Tuesday morning, received word that I didn’t match the Venezuelan’s description, but Sanchez stubbornly decided I was the man in question, or if not, Claire had a taste for bad guys, and I was some other brand of criminal. Bottom line: I’d hit the guy; I’d sped off the mountain; she was protecting me by claiming she was responsible. In-car-ceration.

  It would be a mess my lawyer (well, Rand’s lawyer) would have to sort out. At that time, 11:15 A.M. or so on a Friday, I blamed my repeated sightings of slow, sharking cop cars on the neighborhood—the pastel-painted South Van Ness housing projects and the Muni Plaza at Mission and Eighteenth, with its encamped homeless and open-air drug deals. I gripped my phone, expecting it to ring any second, expecting Claire to speak sympathetic words into my ear about my mother, even as I was ashamed of having told her. The fog banked away, and the blue bowl of sky came into view, the sun, hot and huge, shining down on me like a spotlight. The warmth felt so good and calming that I stood there with my face turned up, blocking sidewalk traffic.