The Best American Short Stories 2015

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

My father has been gone four months the night my mother wakes up to a band of pain like a vise tightening around the swell of her belly. She shifts onto her side and lies still as long as she can stand it. It is dark when she wakes, and as she turns onto one side, then the other, she watches the light begin to seep in around the edges of the curtains. She watches, in particular, one bar the width of her ankle, makes herself guess the length it creeps along the floor. When the pain gets worse, she stands and paces the small living room. It takes ten steps to go from one wall to another. ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR. She counts out loud. In between contractions, she puts wood into the stove, manages to get a few pots of water boiling. She can’t imagine what she will do with the water but she remembers this from her own mother, the pots bubbling on the stove, remembers the births of each of her four younger sisters, the hot, salty smell that filled their small house, the dampness hanging in the air. She remembers the look on her mother’s face, after, the blunt incredulousness of it. The broken veins beneath her eyes strange and beautiful, like crushed flowers. She remembers her sisters, each blonder than the last, and she, my mother, dark as an owl. How terrible that love should contain such contradictions. How utterly insane, she thinks, biting down on the pillow, that her body should think it can contain another human being. She ought to have known all along it is madness, this business of belonging. It is lunacy.

  As the contractions get stronger, my mother stares out the window at the water, bright with the last of the moonlight, and counts off the seconds until they are done. She says the two names to herself, over and over again, like a spell. John. Dorothy. John. Dorothy. If she says them enough times, she reasons, eventually someone will appear to claim one of them, a stranger she will make her own.

  Of course she will know me the instant I come howling into the world. She will know exactly who I am.

  I am born at noon the next day. My mother tells me this is the first thing she did: she checked the clock. I am still attached to her when she looks. We are not yet two when she begins to keep track of me, the seconds I have been alive and then, after she cuts through the cord herself, cleaving my body from hers with a kitchen knife, the seconds I have been on my own.

  This is what women do, she says.

  By which she means she understands that one day I will leave her too. Lift off the ground, think myself beyond gravity.

  Let go.

  LAURA LEE SMITH

  Unsafe at Any Speed

  FROM New England Review

  THE DAY AFTER his forty-eighth birthday was the same day Theo Bitner’s seventy-five-year-old mother friended him on Facebook. It was also the same day his wife told him he needed to see a doctor. Or a therapist. “It’s your mood,” she said. “It sucks.” Counting his mother, Theo now had eight Facebook friends. Sherrill, his wife, had 609. It was just past dawn, in the perfidious part of the day that implied anything was possible when, really, nothing was very likely. He regarded his Facebook profile, the faceless blue bust of a man staring from the margin of the screen where he should, by now, have uploaded a photo of himself. “Theo Bitner is new to Facebook,” the caption read. “Suggest a friend for Theo!” Sherrill finished dressing and left the room, and Theo leaned back in his chair. He stared at the ceiling in the corner of the bedroom, where he’d propped his computer, a hulking dinosaur of a tower, on a tiny table made of pressboard. By contrast, Sherrill had a Mac laptop the size of a place mat. She carried it around in a zippered rhinestone bag and took it with her to Starbucks and Crispers.

  The estrogen levels at the house, a smallish Tuscan number in an uninspired neighborhood south of St. Augustine, were through the roof, in Theo’s opinion. With his daughter Ashley, unemployed and fresh from FSU with a degree in Women’s Studies (what the hell?), ensconced back in her childhood bedroom, with his mother, Bette, now living in the spare room he’d once fancied his office (the “bonus room,” Sherrill called it), and with Sherrill herself generally holding court over the rest of the house, Theo had begun to feel increasingly scuttled, shunted, reduced. There was a conspiracy, he reckoned. He didn’t like it.

  He turned off the computer and picked up the Craigslist ad he’d printed out. “Corvair!” the ad read. “$5,000. Two models. Call for details.” The photo showed a pristine ermine-white Corvair coupe, ’66 he was guessing, just sharp as Jesus it was, shot against a lush green backdrop of palmettos. He studied the photo and mentally ran down the specs: 95 hp in a rear-engine design, voluptuous Coke-bottle styling, and a seductive glimpse of red upholstery. The car looked like salvation. Beneath the photo was the address for a car auction in Lakeland.

  He took a shower and got dressed. He chose a yellow button-down shirt and a pair of dark blue chinos. No tie. Independent sales representatives for dental equipment did not wear ties. He’d learned this. He picked up the Corvair ad and put it in his pocket. In the kitchen, Sherrill and Ashley were eating bagels, and they stopped talking when he entered the room. Sherrill looked at Ashley knowingly and raised her eyebrows.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “Tell him,” Sherrill said.

  Ashley sighed.

  “Tell him,” Sherrill said. “It’s the only way he’ll learn.”

  “Tell me what?” Theo said.

  Ashley put her bagel down on her plate and turned to regard him. Her eyes were rimmed with a pasty blue sparkly substance, and Theo looked at her, blinking, having lost sight many years ago of the plump, pliant little girl who liked to sit on his foot as he clomped around the house, her arms wrapped tightly around his calf.

  “My laundry,” Ashley said. She looked at him sadly, enunciated her words clearly, as if he had a hearing impairment. “My laundry is in a separate basket. It’s not to be touched.”

  “Did I touch it?” he said.

  “Yes, you touched it,” she said. “You mixed it in with all the other laundry—the towels? The sheets? Your underwear? I mean, gross.”

  “Well,” he said.

  “She doesn’t want you to touch her laundry,” Sherrill said. She gave him a smile that was not really a smile at all. “I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”

  “Well, maybe I just won’t do any laundry at all,” he said. “That way there won’t be any confusion.”

  “Of course,” Sherrill said. “He’s defensive. Didn’t I tell you?” She looked at Ashley, rolled her eyes. “Didn’t I tell you he would freak out?”

  “I’m not freaking out,” he said. He poured a cup of coffee, then stood back and looked at them.

  “You’re freaking,” Sherrill said. “You’re always freaking.”

  Bette entered the kitchen and plodded toward the refrigerator.

  “I sent you a friend request,” she said.

  “I saw that,” he said.

  “You didn’t accept it?”

  “I didn’t have time.”

  “Didn’t have time? How long does it take to click ‘accept’?” She leaned in to pull the butter dish from the refrigerator, and a tiny muffled fart flapped through her dress. “You don’t want me in your secret Facebook life, is that it?” She stood up and looked at him. Her face was powdery. Tiny white hairs stood up along her forearms.

  “Oof.” He shrugged. “I got no secrets,” he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Sherrill said.

  “Look,” Ashley said. “All I’m saying is, don’t touch my stuff. You can’t afford to replace it.”

  Theo took his coffee out to the back patio, where he squatted on a resin footstool and read the paper. Then he sat still for a few minutes, watching a frog that had gotten caught in the return at the edge of the swimming pool. The frog was pale, exhausted. It flexed its legs and butted its head up against the wall again, again, again, looking for an escape. It had probably been there all night.

  “Hooo, buddy,” Theo said. “Sucks, don’t it?”

  He put the coffee down on the pool deck and cupped his hands under the frog to flip it out onto the concrete. The frog crouched, fr
ozen, astonished.

  “Go on,” Theo said. “You’re back in the game.” He smiled. “Congratulations, little man.”

  He found the checkbook in Sherrill’s purse, which was hanging on a hook in the laundry room. The washing machine chugged. Two plastic baskets sat on the floor, one marked with a black Sharpie along the rim. DO. NOT. TOUCH., it said. He left the house without another word. He climbed into his minivan, a late model Dodge Caravan, and swatted angrily at the felt headliner dangling across the top of his head.

  At the office, Ernie was already waiting for him.

  “Bro,” Ernie said. “Where you been, bro?” Ernie was fifteen years younger than Theo, though he’d outpaced him long ago in terms of income and ambition. Ernie owned a distributorship for dental equipment, drove a BMW, wore a Rolex. His eyelashes were blacker and longer than any Theo had ever seen on a man. His chest was thick beneath a golfy turtleneck. Theo hated almost everything about him, except for the car.

  The fact that Theo worked for Ernie, and not the other way around, was sickening sometimes, when he let himself think about it. He consoled himself with the idea that he was still an “independent” rep, clinging to the concept of autonomy and freedom that the word promised and turning a blind eye to the reality of the relationship, which meant that Theo was free to help line Ernie’s pockets with sales without the complications of health benefits or a profit-sharing plan. But the territory—the territory was primo, according to Ernie. The top half of the state, west to Pensacola and south all the way to Tampa. “The sky’s the limit on commissions, bro,” Ernie said regularly. “Get out there and sell that shit. You whore it, you score it.”

  This morning Theo settled himself into a metal chair across from Ernie’s desk, wishing he’d had more coffee. He flipped through a stack of leads and looked forlornly at his latest commission check.

  “Don’t get comfy there,” Ernie said. “What’s on deck today? You got that endodontist in Lakeland? Kelso?”

  “Yeah,” Theo said. “Kelso. Maybe get him to close on the exam chairs.”

  “The Premiers?”

  “The Basics.”

  “Shit, Theo,” Ernie said. “Upsell that son of a bitch. He needs the Premiers.”

  “He wants the Basics.”

  “Upsell him.”

  Ernie unclipped his cell phone from a belt attachment and peered at the screen. He started texting a message, still talking to Theo. “You gotta get some balls, man. What’s the matter with you? Your sales are crap. You gotta upsell this shit. These are dentists, man. They’re not businessmen. This isn’t Steve Jobs. This isn’t goddamn Jack Welch.”

  “I don’t even know who Jack Welch is,” Theo said.

  Ernie stopped texting and stared at him. “And that right there is the problem,” he said.

  Theo looked away.

  “Upsell this shit, man,” Ernie said.

  “Right,” Theo said, but his tone was unconvincing, even to himself. He jiggled his knee, looked at his watch.

  “All right, now listen,” Ernie said. “Before you go to Lakeland I got this new guy I want you to see. Wainwright. He’s got a practice in Palatka.” Ernie wrote an address on a piece of paper and slid it across the desk.

  “Jesus, Palatka?” Theo said.

  “It’s on your way,” Ernie said. “Sort of. And you need the sales.” He raised one eyebrow and looked at Theo pointedly.

  Theo pictured the route—Palatka was at least an hour’s detour from the beeline he’d been planning to make to Lakeland. And what kind of dentist could be in Palatka, anyway? Theo sighed and picked up the paper from Ernie’s desk. “That all?” he said.

  “You tell me, bro.”

  Theo walked out of Ernie’s office and looked across the parking lot to where the Caravan sat broiling in the sun. The light was white and fuzzy, and everything was damp with humidity. He did a few quick calculations. It was only nine o’clock. He could make it to Palatka in under an hour, see Wainwright, then be back on the road and make it to Lakeland by early afternoon. If he rushed the second sales call, he could still leave plenty of time to get to the car auction. He slipped his hand into his pocket to make sure the ad was still there.

  He pulled into traffic and made for McDonald’s, where he ordered a large coffee and a McGriddle to go. He headed south on US-1 and cranked up the van’s air conditioning, but the air from the vents was damp and warm. Dead compressor, he thought. Fabulous. He lowered the windows and let the morning’s hot air rush in.

  This goddamn van. This goddamn Caravan. Why did it have to be a Caravan? Sherrill’s castoff relic, bestowed upon Theo against his wishes when she bought herself a Volvo three years ago. A Caravan. She’d insisted on it ten years ago, when Ashley was a preteen and Sherrill had been driving kids all over town and making eyes at that imbecile PTA president. But now Ashley herself drove a Beetle, and Sherrill had the Volvo, and Theo was stuck driving all over Florida in this fat porker of a van. Putty beige exterior and a gray velour interior. Crap-tastic instrument panel. The whole thing smelled like old socks. Oh, God, the vehicle wrung almost all the joy out of driving. Almost all.

  He took a deep breath and willed himself to relax. The traffic was sparse, and the road opened up past Moultrie, so he inched up the speed and felt the wind increase. After a few minutes, he unbuckled his seat belt and steered with his knees while he removed his shirt and draped it over the passenger seat. Stripped down to a T-shirt, he felt liberated, younger somehow. The McGriddle went down easy, and he chased it with the coffee.

  His phone buzzed and he looked at it and saw a text from Sherrill. “You have ckbk?” it said. He dropped the phone into the cup holder and turned on the radio, but it was all static, so he clicked it off and listened to the wind. He followed US-1 south for a stretch, then cut over and pushed through Hastings and Spuds, imagining the aquifer under the blacktop, all these roads cutting through Florida like veins. Like veins in a penis, it occurred to him, and he smiled at the thought of it, the bawdiness, the state of Florida nothing but a big penis hanging down off the bottom of the country, pointing out across the Keys and into the south Atlantic. He laughed out loud. He’d been driving all over the state for years, but he’d never thought of that before today.

  In Palatka, Wainwright was a bust. Wouldn’t see him. The receptionist slid open a frosted glass window and shook her head when he told her his name.

  “He’s got patients,” she said. “He said maybe tomorrow.” She looked up at Theo, and his first sensation was one of pity. The girl was not pretty; she had coarse black hair cut in a chunky arrangement of bangs that fell heavily across her face. Her lips were overlarge, her glasses were smudged with an oily film. She’d clearly been crying recently; her eyes were puffy and her nostrils were raw, damp.

  “He told my boss we could meet for ten minutes,” Theo said. “I just drove all the way down from St. Auggie.”

  “He’s got patients,” she repeated. She sniffed, then offered him a star mint from a bowl on the counter.

  “Those good for people’s teeth?” he said.

  She shrugged. “Try tomorrow,” she said. She left the mints on the counter and slid the frosted window closed again, but he could see her shape behind the glass, and he watched her roll her chair across a vinyl mat and start tapping at a keyboard. He took three star mints from the bowl and put them in his pocket. He looked around the waiting room, where only one old man slouched, sleeping, in an uncomfortable-looking chair.

  He tapped on the glass again, and the girl rolled across the floor, slid the window open, and looked at him over the top of her glasses. “You sure he won’t see me?” he said. “I mean, I totally detoured to come here. I’m trying to get to Lakeland. I could have gotten there a lot faster if I hadn’t come here first.”

  She pursed her lips then and regarded him carefully, holding his gaze a beat longer than he would have expected. The old man in the waiting room gurgled suddenly, waking himself with a small snore, and then nodded off aga
in. Theo glanced at him, but then looked back at the girl, who still regarded him in that odd, unaffected manner.

  “Is everything OK?” he asked quietly. She blinked.

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  He hesitated. “I mean, I know it’s none of my business, but you seem upset,” he said. His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he ignored it. What was he doing? He had no idea why he was inserting himself into this young woman’s drama, whatever it was. He was, generally speaking, not that sort of person. In times of public strife—a husband and wife arguing in a restaurant, a mother spanking her child in a grocery store, a customer bawling out a cashier—he generally looked away. It was just how he was wired.

  But now—she blinked again. “I’m fine,” she said stiffly. “It’s boyfriend stuff.” Boyfriend stuff! He could not imagine. She pushed her bangs back off her forehead and he felt an unexpected stirring in his groin. She was young, probably in her late twenties, he guessed, and her body was smooth under her rayon blouse. He could see the small bulge at the top of her bra where her breasts overflowed.

  She saw him looking at her, and he caught a flicker in her eyes, a sudden light. She wiped at her nose with a tissue.

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, and he almost said more, almost said, “Well, his loss!” but he stopped himself, bit his lip. A flicker of a smile crossed her lips.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” he said finally. “Thank you, anyway.” He walked out of Wainwright’s office feeling jolted, somehow, more awake. He heard the frosted glass sliding shut behind him as he passed through the front door.

  Outside, the heat was ridiculous. He got into the Caravan and took his shirt off again, draping it over the passenger seat. Then he started the van and checked the time—10:35. He calculated his route: county roads for the next hour to backtrack to I-95, then he could head south to Daytona, pick up I-4, and cover the two hours left to Lakeland. Shit! Wainwright! This little detour to Palatka had just cost him most of the morning. He fished his cell phone out of his pocket and called the number on the Craigslist ad. He reached a recorded message saying the car auction closed at five. All right, then. He’d make it, though it would be tight, depending on how long the Lakeland call took. He could blow off the call, he thought, and he paused for a moment, entertaining the notion. Kelso? What would Kelso care? And Ernie would be none the wiser, but the proof would be in the empty commission sheet at the end of the month. He sighed. Fine. Kelso. Upsell to the Premiers. Whatever. But he’d make it quick, still get to the auction before it closed.