by Devan Sipher
She read the e-mail twice to make sure she didn’t imagine what she read the first time. Her heart was beating fast. All the feelings she had pushed aside came rushing back. She could see his slim wrists as he sat typing the e-mail. She could see his eyes squinting at his computer screen as he tried to come up with the right words. He said he liked her. She felt like she was twelve, when her best friend told her that Jimmy Barkin liked her. Except that was only a rumor, and Jimmy had denied it when she saw him at his locker. But Tad Emerson liked her. Tad Emerson with the sensitive face and the silly sideburns. Tad Emerson who played “Kokomo” on his trumpet for her. Tad Emerson wanted more than booty calls. And it terrified her how much it meant to her.
CHAPTER TEN
Naomi gripped the handrest as the FASTEN SEAT BELT sign was illuminated. No matter how many times she flew, she never had acclimated to turbulence.
“Please return to your seats and prepare for landing,” the doe-eyed flight attendant instructed in a tense voice that implied the landing might be an immediate and fiery event.
The plane dipped and dropped. “Please, God, not before I have my own restaurant,” Naomi whispered under her breath.
It was a ritual thing she said to herself on planes. But she wondered if it was really what she wanted most in the world. And what it said about her if it was. She claimed to be looking for a long-term relationship, yet it didn’t seem to be her priority.
She supposed she could have said, “Please, God, not before I’m married.” But there was something desperate and demeaning about thinking that way. Thinking that marriage was some kind of brass ring and that her life had value only once she attained it. She bridled at the notion. She had slaved for too many hours in front of too many hot stoves. She had been tongue-lashed by too many sadistic egomaniacs.
Yet it turned out she could take the girl out of the OC, but she couldn’t take the OC out of the girl. She still wanted the old-fashioned hearth and home, though preferably in a renovated London flat rather than the suburban sprawl of Southern California. She wanted the hubby and the kids in footie pajamas. She was jealous of Steffi. Steffi! Who practically had a countdown clock going to her thirtieth birthday and, when the alarm went off, grabbed the first single man in sight. Okay, maybe not the first one. But Stu was the kind of man-child Steffi had always steered clear of in the past. Naomi wished she could have said the same for herself.
But she was making better choices now. Or she was making less frequent bad choices. She wasn’t sure which of the two categories Austin belonged in. Until twelve hours ago, she would have simply categorized him as MIA. Sure, he had diligently followed up after their night together. But he had never told her he wanted to see her again. He implied it. Or he allowed her to think he implied it. But he never came out and said it. While Carlos was picking her up when her shift ended at midnight and wining and dining her at South Beach hotspots, all she was getting from Austin were laconic voice mails saying “Hope you’re having a great day. Call me if you have time.”
She supposed she could have called him, but she didn’t see the point. If he had something to say, he should have said it. And one thing he most definitely didn’t say was “I’m coming to Miami, and I’d love to see you.” Or even “I’m going to be in Miami on business this week. How about a drink?” Instead, he showed up with no advance warning and seemingly little interest in whether or not he saw her.
But he did see her. And she saw him. She saw his eyes light up like a five-year-old’s when the Metromover zipped through the inside of the Knight Center. She saw him share her goofy enthusiasm and match it with his own.
And then there was that kiss. It had caught her by surprise. She hadn’t necessarily expected him to kiss her. And definitely not like that. She tingled when she thought of it, and she’d been thinking of it a lot. She had thought she was over him. She had certainly tried to be. If you can’t get over a schoolgirl crush by the time you’re thirty, well, what does that say about a person?
But she hadn’t told him about Carlos, and she couldn’t pretend it was unintentional. Not that there was much to tell. Other than she was flying halfway around the globe for a guy. No, for a job. For a job interview. She was going for the job interview. She was almost sure of it.
The plane pitched to the left, and she braced herself for a tempestuous descent. Another quick prayer. A simpler one. Let Austin kiss her again. That was even worse than the first. Damn, Austin. He was messing with her mind. Again. One of the reasons she was going to Madrid was to get over him. But there was nothing to get over. They weren’t in a relationship. They weren’t even dating. Carlos was the one who was pursuing her. Carlos was the one who’d begged her to come visit. Carlos was the reason she was going to Madrid. Well, Carlos and the job interview. And the adventure. Though she was getting a little old for adventures. No, one was never too old for adventures.
Naomi joined the applause when the plane’s wheels made abrupt but steady contact with the ground. She followed the crowd into Terminal Four of the Madrid-Barajas Airport, flowing down ramp after ramp along the glass-sheathed building, past candy-colored steel beams that called to mind the vertebrae of gargantuan exotic birds.
She took her place in a line at passport control and turned on her phone to check the time, but her phone didn’t turn on. She tried again. Nothing. With growing panic, she realized she had forgotten to turn it off before the flight. She’d been distracted, thinking about Austin. No, the problem was she hadn’t been thinking. And now she was out of battery. And the hotel reservation number was on the phone. And the address! It was okay, she told herself. Any decent taxi driver would know the hotel’s location. If she could remember the hotel’s name. But Carlos had made the reservation, and she was blanking.
Though Naomi prided herself on her ability to navigate through airports, she somehow got turned about after customs and couldn’t find the right baggage claim. The arrival hall’s soaring height and rippled bamboo ceiling had given way to brutalist columns and row after row of low-hanging, wok-shaped fluorescent fixtures. The minimalist signage seemed contradictory or her limited Spanish was failing her, and she seemed to be going in circles.
As she raced to and fro, she grew increasingly aware of being a small, solitary figure in a vast, indifferent place. Where was she running? Why was she always running? She stopped and leaned against a column, taking a few deep breaths. Arrivals were the hardest part of traveling. She knew that. If she could just get to her hotel, everything would be fine. But at the moment nothing was fine. And she couldn’t help but think it was a sign.
She spied a flash of red on a distant carousal. There was a reason she traveled with red luggage. She hurried toward the revolving bag, thinking she was more competent than she gave herself credit for being. She needed to remember that. And she needed to remember to never pack her charge cord inside a checked bag again. She retrieved it from the zippered pocket where she had stuffed it, but she couldn’t find an electrical outlet.
She groggily headed for the exit, dragging her wheeled case behind her, not really sure what to do next. She could take a taxi downtown and try to get online at a Starbucks. Did they even have Starbucks in Madrid? The morning light was disorienting. It was four a.m. in Miami, and she was starting to feel the time difference and her lack of sleep. She felt drugged and dreamy, as if she’d been smoking weed and drinking espresso simultaneously.
“Buenos días,” an overeager taxi driver called out to her as she weaved through a line of cars. Everyone seemed a little too loud and too close to her. She kept imagining that she recognized people’s voices, even though they weren’t speaking her language. She even thought that she heard her name. “Naomi!”
She saw his chin first. His cleft chin with salt-and-pepper stubble that matched the disheveled thatch between his ears. He was leaning against a Mercedes limousine.
“You came to pick me up?” she asked, incredulous.
“¡Por supuesto!” he replied with a wide grin, as if it was the most foolish question he’d ever heard. And she was running again. To Carlos. Into his arms.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Someone’s elbow rammed Mandy’s pelvis. And not in a good way.
“Sorry about that,” Gordon called out to everyone from the driver’s seat of the mustard yellow jalopy. “Hit a pothole.”
“Are you okay?” Tad asked.
Mandy didn’t know how to answer that question. She was sharing the cargo compartment of a 1972 Volvo hatchback with two guys and four trumpet cases.
“We’ll be there in less than an hour,” Gordon said.
“We’d be there in less time if you took I-94,” said Drew, who was snaked across Mandy and Tad and the likely possessor of the offending elbow.
“Taking the 96 is a mile shorter,” said Omar, the designated navigator, who occupied the front passenger seat. “I checked on the map.”
“But there’s more traffic on the 96,” Drew said.
“We should have left sooner,” Tad said. “We’re going to be late for the gig.” Tad rarely got nervous, but he sounded nervous.
“We’re not going to be late,” Gordon said, exuding the confidence of a man with more than six inches of personal space.
“Is there a reason we’re not using the backseat?” Mandy asked, wondering why they hadn’t unfolded it and worrying that the question made her sound prissy.
“The floorboards,” Gordon replied.
“They’re bad?” she asked.
“They’re missing,” Tad said.
That didn’t exactly add to Mandy’s sense of security. She was already concerned about the unsettling vibration of the low-riding vehicle, which seemed to be held together with duct tape. She wanted Tad’s friends to like her, but she also wanted to make it to 2008. As she gazed straight ahead out the back window, it felt like she was lying only inches above the roadway, with the headlights of the cars behind them shining directly in her eyes.
“But Betty drives great, doesn’t she?” Gordon enthused. The first half dozen times Gordon had referred to Betty, Mandy had mistakenly believed “Betty” was his girlfriend. “Listen to that baby purr.” To Mandy it sounded more like the coughing of a consumptive patient. But maybe that was a good thing for an engine.
This wasn’t how she’d intended to spend New Year’s. But at least she was with her boyfriend. Well, technically Tad wasn’t her “boyfriend,” since he didn’t like labeling things. But they had been seeing each other almost every weekend except when he was playing gigs or hanging with “the guys.” Since Gordon and Omar rarely dated and Drew’s idea of a relationship was paying for dinner before sex, time with “the guys” was usually an estrogen-free zone.
So Mandy was surprised when Tad asked if she wanted to come along to the New Year’s gig in St. Clair Shores. She had been grateful he wanted to spend the holiday with her. Or to be more accurate, she was grateful after she got over being resentful that the issue had been in doubt. But Tad had left out the part about cramming clown-style into a compact clunker. In fact, he had left out that they’d be spending the entire evening with the guys. But she didn’t want to complain, because Tad didn’t like when she acted needy. Or obsessive. Or crazy. She was working hard at being the new Mandy. The cheerful and emotionally stable Mandy. It was a lot of effort. And more so when her body was folded like an origami crane.
“There’s a lot of traffic,” Tad said, half under his breath.
“That’s because we’re on the 96,” Drew said.
“It’s shorter!” Omar insisted.
“Have I ever missed a gig?” Gordon asked.
“Yes!” Drew responded.
“Let me rephrase that,” Gordon said. “Have I ever missed a gig in the last year?”
“If we had just left on time, we’d be fine,” Tad said. Mandy was feeling guilty for making them go out of their way to pick her up. She should have offered to go to Tad’s place when she found out they were running late. She wondered if Tad was blaming her for the extra delay.
“The problem is we’re hitting all the northwest suburbs during rush hour,” Drew said.
“Did you know the Detroit suburbs have more highway per capita than anywhere in the world?” asked Omar, who had a habit of spouting random factoids. When Mandy first met him, she thought he was autistic.
“Detroit has more highway than Los Angeles?” Gordon sounded skeptical.
“Per capita,” Omar corrected him. “Because the suburbs became like independent cities after the riots, and the car companies pushed zoning laws promoting single-family homes.”
“Why does everyone blame the car companies for everything wrong with Detroit?” Drew asked.
“Because they controlled the city,” Omar replied. “Why do you think Detroit has almost no public transit? They literally tore out streetcar lines.”
“Did the car companies tear out the streetcar lines?” Drew asked. “Did Henry Ford go out with a pickax and start digging up train tracks?”
It was odd to Mandy how much people in Ann Arbor talked about Detroit and how rarely anyone went there. Maybe in the New Year Tad could take her to the MGM casino that had just opened downtown. Maybe they could have a date that involved leaving his apartment and didn’t include enough people for a basketball team. She reminded herself how happy she was that she and Tad were together. And they couldn’t be closer together. She was developing a contusion from where his belt buckle was stabbing her thigh.
“Are you really defending the car companies?” Mandy asked Drew, trying to engage in the conversation and appear to be an easygoing girlfriend (who didn’t need the label of “girlfriend”).
“Not defending them,” Drew said, “but not blaming them for doing what corporations do, which is make money, not make cities work.”
“But they’re not making money,” Omar pointed out.
“Maybe we’re the ones to blame,” Tad said, shifting his weight. She realized that though they were pressed against each other, he hadn’t once intentionally touched her. There was no caressing. No stroking her skin or her ego. Maybe it was because of the guys being around. But that didn’t make her very optimistic about the prospects for the evening.
“What are you talking about?” Drew said.
“I had to call the club to confirm stuff for tonight,” Tad said. “And when I recited the facility director’s name into some automated directory, it hit me that not long ago that was someone’s job. Someone looked up the number for the person you were calling and connected you. You don’t see many telephone operator positions in job listings anymore. And think about the bank teller jobs that vanished once we started getting cash from ATMs. We just take for granted that we get cash from a machine. We take so much for granted. ATMs. Voice mail. E-mail. E-books. Maybe e-cars are next. We keep gobbling up new technology without thinking about the people we’re making obsolete. And what happens to all those people? Do they evolve? Or do they fly planes into buildings? Or do they do something even worse we haven’t seen yet?”
Now Tad was depressing Mandy. If she wanted to be depressed, she would have stayed home and worked on her dissertation.
“That’s a bogus argument from Socialist Economic Theory 101,” Drew said.
“No,” Tad said, “that’s how things look to someone who’s had to actually face the reality of the job market.”
“You mean all two weeks since you got your degree?”
“I’m just saying there’s a lot of people out there who are no longer needed,” Tad said. “It’s not just the car companies having trouble. They’re just the canaries in the mine.”
Mandy was impressed by Tad’s passion, but she couldn’t help wondering why he wasn’t as passionate when it came to his feelings for her. Unless he didn’t have equivalent feelings for her.
&nb
sp; “Those are some big-ass canaries,” Gordon said.
“The car companies suck,” Omar opined. “Michigan is fucked.”
“You don’t think the same thing could happen to the rest of the country?” Tad asked.
“Right,” Drew said, “because you entered the work force, the whole country is gonna have a cataclysmic economic meltdown.”
Gordon slammed on the brake, sending Mandy’s head slamming into the back of the front seat.
“What the fuck?” Drew said.
Mandy lifted her head and saw a sea of red lights when she turned toward the front of the car. At first she thought it was some kind of dizzy aftereffect, but she realized it was brake lights. And there was a long line of cars at a standstill. In the distance she could see flashing emergency lights.