Lake City

by Thomas Kohnstamm

  THEY DRIVE PAST THE FLOORING store with its changeable-letter billboard that reads HAL LAWSON IS A CROOK.

  The neighborhood used to have a movie theater. A creek. A bowling alley. The theater is now a Mennonite church. The creek is buried in cement drain pipes, only surfacing in a few ravines full of ferns, nettles and discarded furniture. The bowling alley is a parking lot for Laidlaw cheese buses, with razor wire all around it.

  If only the people who lived here showed some personal pride and gave a damn about their community, about the future of this place, Lane thinks.

  Maybe it’s because he’s hungry, but he does notice a new crop of restaurants up the length of Lake City Way. There’s a pho place. A Thai bar, a halal market and a Mexican storefront jammed with canned hominy, mangoes and posters for five-dollar and ten-dollar international calling cards.

  He steps on the accelerator. Food can wait. They’re not going to stop before they get out of town, out of King County or further.

  But he has to fight the growing sense that there could be the seeds of potential in the neighborhood. Not potential by normal standards, but a local, mutant strain. A few green-cross signs for medical marijuana dispensaries catch his eye. He drives by an old dry cleaner that has been fitted with reflective windows and a perimeter gate. Young men load cardboard boxes into dropped BMWs and Lexuses. At a playground between low-rent apartments, women in hijabs watch over their children spinning on a merry-go-round. Inez even tells him that there are plans underway to resurface the creek. Could it be that the gentrifying, homogenizing city’s last northern frontier will become the most original and authentic part of town? Was Lake City was finally going to—

  Nah, fuck this place, Lane thinks.

  “IT’LL BE GREAT TO SEE Grannie. For Jordan to meet her. I used to write her as a kid,” Inez muses. “You know, maybe things all happen for a reason.”

  Lane smiles through the fact that he can’t tell how much gas is in the tank and feels what may be a sputter in the engine. He dismisses it as his imagination.

  “Thank you, Lane.” She turns to him. “Maybe I was wrong about you.”

  They make it as far as the trailer park before the engine starts to choke and seize. Lane can no longer deny it. He looks over his shoulder to see if there are any cops, swears under his breath so Jordan won’t hear, and they coast into the Shell station.

  “Don’t thank me yet.” He isn’t sure if he’s joking or not.

  He must leave it running. There’s no other choice. They can’t risk a dead vehicle this close to Inez’s place. The rain has started, and the wind picks up. He gets the pump going and jumps back into the car with her and Jordan.

  Inez rubs her palm on this thigh. “You’re right: Once things settle, I’ll talk to the judge. It’ll be fine. These, uh, Aunties, they can foster another kid, no problem.”

  “Yeah, but be prepared. Nina and Tracey’ll put up a fight. I bet they want him as much as you do.”

  They see two cop cars driving down Lake City Way, and they duck below the windows of the vehicle. Lane peeks back over the edge of the glass in time to see them turn into University Trailer Park.

  “Nina?” she asks.

  “She won’t give up. I’m guessing. From the situation. I said, ‘I bet that—’”

  “No, how do you know her name?”

  He feels like she pulled the emergency brake in a moving vehicle. “You told me?”

  She shakes her head.

  “You must be forgetting.” He takes the iPod out of his pocket and starts pushing buttons. Not rattled at all. Totally chill.

  “I couldn’t have. I only know Tracey’s name. Just Tracey. She’s the one adopting. They’re not married.”

  “Maybe Jordan told me? Right, Jordie?”

  No answer.

  Lane and Inez stare at each other across the front seat.

  THERE’S NO WAY TO EXPLAIN it. Not well. To make it sound good. He tries. As best as he can. About Nina. The luau. Her plan. How he thought he was helping out Jordan. How it was never supposed to get so complicated.

  “I could’ve just let it play out, but I realized—You see, I’m here now, and that’s what really matters.” He’s not sure if Jordan is listening along and if the kid understands or not. He hopes not. It’s a bad sign for your argument when you’re evading the judgment of a toddler.

  “You wanted to help Jordan. Like you said: to do the right thing.” Her face is hard. Trying to convince herself that the situation is still somehow salvageable. She takes the iPod out of his hand and clicks through the song list on the screen. “This thing’s cool. But your music is way shittier than I guessed.”

  “OK, look, I mean, if I’m totally honest, I wanted to help . . . me. But I wanted to do the right thing too, if I only knew what that was. And I didn’t know you yet. And now that I know Jordan, know you, that I even feel like we’re maybe—Listen, I’m still trying to do the right thing. For you and Jordan.”

  Her expression starts to crack. She rubs her eyes with her hand and keeps rubbing them so he can’t see her cry. He reaches for her knee. She slaps his hand away without even looking. Jordan starts crying too.

  “You’re . . .” She cries. “You’re filthy, Lane.”

  He strains for some levity. “Filthy filthy? Like Seattle filthy? Or just regular ‘filthy?’”

  She cries harder. “Just . . . lame.”

  Lane sees the cashier walking across the lot but doesn’t hear what he’s saying and doesn’t even notice that he shouting. There is too much going on inside of the car. A loud rap on the glass gets his attention.

  “Are you crazy, man? Turn off your car when you fill it,” the man shouts, a Sonics hat pulled down low over his eyes.

  “Hold on.” Lane dismisses the guy through the window and tries to soothe Jordan.

  “Shut off your goddamn car, man. Before you blow up my station.”

  “I said, hold on.” He turns back to Inez. “You understand, don’t you? The truth is: it’s that, I guess I don’t have anything more figured out than anyone else.” His vision blurs with tears.

  “Do I suck as a mom?” she asks with her hands still over her face. “Be honest.”

  The gas station attendant starts around the other side of the car.

  “What does my opinion even matter? What do I know?”

  “Answer me.”

  “You’re new to this, but I have confidence in you. Yes.”

  “That sounds nice. But I don’t trust a word out of your mouth.”

  He watches her lips as she talks and then cuts in. “Please, Inez, I think maybe I, no, I know, I lov—”

  “Especially not that.” She clears the final tears from her eyes. “Not that.”

  The attendant pounds on the window and holds on the driver’s-side door handle, “Did you hear me? Shut your fucking car off.”

  Lane opens the door, “Dude, there’s a kid in the car. Watch your language.”

  “I called the police,” the man shouts. “Turn off your car off and pay me right now.”

  Lane steps out of the vehicle. “Take it easy, man. We need just another second—” The wail of sirens closes in from beyond the bend in Lake City Way.

  Inez jumps across the bench seat to take the wheel and throws the shifter on the steering column into DRIVE. She blows Lane what he thinks is a kiss, although she could be flipping him off. He can’t be sure.

  He could stop her. Sprint to open the door, grab the shifter, grab the key. But he doesn’t. His body goes slack. He feels a sense of calm, a release of the tension in his neck and temples. He breathes in and feels the cool air go all the way to the bottom of his lungs. His chest expands. And then it all goes out. The sirens get closer.

  The car rolls forward, straining against the pump in the gas tank, stretching the fuel hose as far as it can go. It’s Lane’s last chance to stop her. Instead, he leans forward and yanks the pump handle out of the tank, freeing it just in time for the car to peel out of the station. T
he clerk runs behind the vehicle, screaming for Inez to stop.

  Lane picks the gas cap up off the pavement and holds it in one hand with the pump in the other, and watches the top of Inez’s head as she swings the sixteen-foot-long station wagon into traffic. Jordan stands up in the back seat and waves to Lane. It looks like a wave. He can’t be sure of that either.

  They disappear, along with his rotisserie chicken bag full of money, up and around the top of Lake City Way toward the freeway, mountains, reservation and beyond.

  He feels a leaden sadness roll down behind his eyes. A premature and permanent departure from a world he had only started to explore. Loneliness, again. But something else. A small sense that he touched some sort of unadulterated greater good. Then he thinks of Nina and Tracey, and the feeling evaporates.

  The incoming police car blazes by without stopping and turns down into the trailer park. Lane gives the attendant one of the fifties from his pocket to get the guy to stop yelling.

  He starts walking.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  LANE STANDS IN THE DOORWAY of the garage and watches Chaz and one of the teenagers load his belongings around the cardboard boxes on the upper shelves.

  “I know it’s not the best, but it’s for a couple of days, right?” his mom says. “I gotta pick Toby up. We’re gonna try to replace one or two of the worst tires and hit the road.”

  Lane leans into the doorframe to relieve the blisters on his feet. He didn’t come straight home. He walked as if each stride would burn off another layer of grime added on by his life, by his choices, and get him closer to the core of who he is or who he could be.

  “Heard you’re going back to New York,” Chaz says. “Made it work, huh?”

  “Something like that.”

  The teenager nods in near admiration as he finishes putting Lane’s books on the shelf. Next to his Cub Scout gear, Star Wars toys and a stack of old Mad magazines.

  Lane surveys his belongings. It’s not much. Nothing really. Some dirty clothes. Books that he hasn’t read. He asks Chaz and the teenager if he can be alone to talk with his mom.

  As soon as they’re alone, she says, “Chaz is gonna front us some cash so we can at least replace the flat and get down there before they give Toby’s job to somebody else.”

  Lane looks out the window to see Chaz packing a dip and roughhousing with his inbred offspring. “Aren’t you supposed to be getting rent from him, not borrowing cash?”

  “It’s OK. He’s like a son to Toby,” she says.

  “Like a son,” he says to her, to nobody in particular. He pulls his remaining cash out of his jacket and hands it to his mom.

  “No, Lane, you need that.”

  “Think of it as payback for the flight. The one you bought.”

  “That’s too much.”

  “I kinda lost your car too.”

  “My car? How’d you—” She holds the money. “But, Lane, you need—”

  “So do you. Make sure to tell Toby that the ten bucks he loaned me is in there. And to buy some more Rainiers too.”

  He gives her a long hug and helps her up in to the driver seat.

  “You sure you know how to drive this thing, Ma?”

  She sits on the purple TV-watching pillow to boost her up enough to see out the windshield. She taps the pillow and says, “I always loved these things.”

  “I know,” he says, and closes the door for her.

  LANE LIES ON THE CAR seat in the garage listening to the radio. He searches for local broadcasts with any bulletins about Inez but doesn’t find any. The rest of the news is grim enough on its own. The first American soldier died in Afghanistan. A plane crashed into a mountain in Pakistan and more soldiers died. This whole national vengeance quest may not be as straightforward or gratifying as we’ve been led to believe. He’s not motivated to get up and turn off the radio, but he’d like to dissociate himself from his reality for a bit longer. Lane works on trying to fall asleep even though it’s light-out and he’s not tired.

  As he starts to fade off, a series of loud car horn blasts pierces the quiet. Lane bolts up off the bench and looks out the window to see Nina’s Mercedes parked partway on the lawn. He had been waiting for something like this to happen. Nina or the cops.

  He’s almost to the door of her car when it swings open and Nina steps out drinking a pint bottle of vodka. “What’d you tell her?”

  Lane sees Chaz and the teenagers all standing in the living room window staring at them. Chaz starts toward the door, but Lane waves him back. The teenagers’ eyes are wide with excitement.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lane says. “Take it easy.

  “You take it easy, you white trash liar.” She lunges at him but staggers to the side, missing him by more than a foot.

  He considers playing dumb. Saying he hasn’t seen Inez. That was his plan before she showed up. And Nina can’t prove otherwise. But he is tired of evasion. Tired of positioning.

  All he can think to say is “I’m sorry.”

  “I never should’ve trusted you.”

  He is a paragraph into telling her what happened before he realizes the lack of a stutter. In fact, her insults pass right through him. He understands that she is hurt, and he takes a moment to reflect on why.

  “You’re not listening to me, Lane,” she spits. “Nobody took Jordan. Jordan is at home with Tracey right now.”

  Lane stops talking.

  “Inez dropped him off with Tracey and kept on going God knows where,” Nina says.

  “OK, wait a minute . . .”

  “She left me. Tracey left me. Kicked me out of my own house. Inez told her the whole story. About you and me. The luau. My plan.” Nina bursts into tears. “How did she know?”

  He shrugs.

  “You told her, didn’t you?”

  He can’t muster any reaction.

  She drops the bottle and leans against her car.

  Lane puts his arm on her back. She shakes free.

  “I was trying.” She starts to sob.

  “Me too,” Lane says.

  Nina keeps crying.

  “Go back to Tracey,” he says. “She’ll come around. C’mon. Nina Radcliffe always gets her way, right?”

  “Fuck you, Lane. You think you can hug me like it’s all OK?” She slaps him across the face, grabs her pint bottle and stands up. “Enjoy New York. You’re still a loser.”

  Nina gets in her car and backs up off the lawn, leaving deeps ruts of mud behind her. Lane keeps his feet planted in the overgrown grass while rubbing the red palm print on his left cheek.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  “HE’S NOT WHO I THOUGHT he was,” Mia says.

  “Your dad?”

  “No, my dad’s as big of an asshole as ever.” Her mouth is getting dry, her tongue clicking against her palate. “That guy. The consultant. It’s not like he can watch Charlie Rose with me like you used to. He doesn’t want to talk about globalization. He doesn’t even have an opinion on the Tobin tax, at least not one he’ll share with me.” She trails off and then resets. “When do you get here?”

  He picks up the manila envelope with the annulment papers he hasn’t looked at since Christmas Day and thumbs through the stack. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Who I am. Where I’m going.”

  “I know who you are, Lane . . . I know that I want you here. Need you here. We can figure it out.”

  He pauses. “I’m not sure.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean: I’m not your bunny rabbit.” He swallows. “You know, to pet to—never mind.”

  “To death?” She goes quiet. Processing. “What does that make me then? Some sort of semiretarded migrant farmhand?”

  “Migrant? No, you know, ‘I will hug him and pet him and squeeze him . . .’ like in Looney Tunes.”

  “Yeah, that’s from—um—don’t they offer tenth-grade English in Seattle?”

  Lane had always feared that she’d realize he was little m
ore than a few well-placed archipelagos of memorization in an endless ocean of ignorance. “Sorry, I had a job in tenth grade and didn’t have time to read all of the assigned books.”

  Mia lectures him about how her life isn’t all easy just because her family has high expectations, values education and is prudent with money. She had to work hard too. Endure social politics. Navigate her own mental and emotional instability. Accept that money often supplanted love in family relationships.

  His thoughts wander and fade into adrenalized white noise as if he were working up the nerve to grab the most expensive bottle of wine off the liquor store shelf and book out the door. Then it all erupts back out of his mouth.

  “You can’t hope to understand me, my life, my path—even riding shotgun on it—if you can opt out whenever you feel like it. And I can only visit your world as some sort of budget tourist who got a lucky upgrade. An exchange student, at best. With you as, like, my host mom or Rotary Club sponsor in it or some shit.”

  “I’m not sure that I . . .” She changes course and mumbles something about him being confused. He can hear her breathing, her mouth drier than before.

  “Thank you, Mia.”

  They both try to figure out what to say next.

  “Thank you for what?” she asks.

  He holds a few moments as if he is considering.

  “Lane? Thank you for what?”

  “I don’t know . . . For all of it.” He hangs up and lets the papers spill from his hand into the trash.

  LANE STANDS IN FRONT OF the Washington State Liquor Store up on Lake City Way. He looks through the window at the rows of wine. The vodka section. The wall of bourbons. Tequilas.

  He counts out the change in his pocket. It’s around two dollars. He counts it again to be sure. He wonders where Inez is. If she is happy. If she has thought of him. If she is becoming the person she could be. He may never know, and he needs to be OK with that.

  He heads inside. The same clerk is behind the register in her orange vest.

  “Long day, Shirley?” He extracts a single tallboy from the cooler case.