The Gap Year

by Sarah Bird

  I have to laugh at myself.

  Tyler thinks I am laughing at his recruiting joke and the Dimple appears. OK, now he is being a gigantic cliché. It is so ridiculous that it feels like we are in some bad comedy sketch together and I have no choice but to treat it that way.

  He drapes his hand over the counter for me to shake and says in this skeevy Rico Suave voice, “Tyler Moldenhauer. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  We joke-shake and he hangs on to my hand while gazing into my eyes and giving me the Dimple. Talk about cheesy. I cannot not call him on it. I bat my eyelashes in a flirty pickup way as corny as his soulful gazing and Dimple-dimpling and ask in my best Southern-belle accent, “Why, suh, are you one of the Savannah Moldenhauers or are you a Buh-mingham Moldenhauer?”

  Tyler gets that I have busted him and drops my hand and the whole Señor Suavecito act. He leans down, rests his head on his hands, and points a finger at the official name tag pinned to my chest that Miss Olivia makes all the aides wear. Mine reads AUBREY J. LIGHTSEY. Tyler flicks the edge of the plastic tag. “So is that what you like to be called?”

  He understands. He gets an entire life of defending a name I never liked to start off with. Correcting people, saying, “No, it’s Aubrey, not Audrey.” Then they call me Audrey anyway. Or the real smarties ask me if I know that Aubrey is a boy’s name.

  “Actually,” I answer with no more thought than I’d give to my next breath, “my friends call me A.J.” No one in my entire life has ever called me A.J.

  “What’s the J stand for?”

  “That’s classified.”

  “A to the J, I miss you. Why don’t you ever come to practice anymore?”

  “I quit band.”

  “You don’t go to games, do you?”

  “Only if I have a clarinet in my mouth, and that is never going to happen again. Not in this lifetime.”

  “Ty,” Miss Olivia breaks in with the false intimacy of a fan who would call Britney Spears “Brit.” “What do you need? You know Coach already has you automatically excused from fifth period.”

  “No, I’m good, Miss Olivia.” He shoots her an extra helping of cheese complete with the Dimple and some kind of crinkling twinkling of the eyes that makes me wince and Miss Olivia wheeze like her asthmatic Chihuahua. “I just want to say hey to our girl here. See how the big college tour went. So how’d it go, A.J.?”

  “It went.”

  He nods as if I’ve just given the correct answer to the hardest question on the test. I know I am supposed to ask him about the schools he’s interested in and where he’s applied and what his first choices are. But I don’t care. Even if it is Tyler Moldenhauer, I can’t make myself care. So I say nothing. The moment gets awkward; he taps his fist on the counter and leaves.

  The instant he is gone, Miss Olivia, her face bright and shiny as a kid on Christmas morning, asks, “A.J.?”

  It is me and Tyler she wants to unwrap. To tear through the crinkly paper and pull us out and exclaim, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

  But even if there is nothing inside the package—or maybe especially because there is nothing inside—it is my package, to unwrap when I want.

  So, dry as toast, I answer, “Yes, Olivia, A.J. In the future, I’d like to be called A.J.”

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010

  There’s the exit,” Dori says, pointing to a giant sign welcoming us to the future home of Heritage Acres. Miles of subdivided lots stretch into the distance, prime lunch-wagon territory, since the construction workers would have to drive so far just to get out of the place. We follow the trail of newly framed houses and the sound of air hammers firing nails.

  The one other time I ever drove out here was a month ago, the middle of July, when, for the third time in a row, Aubrey had stood me up for a date to go shopping for the stuff she needed to take to college, and I was determined that, by God, we would buy a dust ruffle together. So, righteously pissed off, I’d made my way to the lunch wagon, then taken a place in line hidden behind a couple of construction workers. Weather-beaten men with hands rough as tree bark, they’d joked with Aubrey as she took their orders. They made her laugh. I tried to recall the last time she’d laughed in my presence. Filling the orders, pushing food wrapped in white paper out the window, she was engaged, expressive. She was a person I didn’t recognize.

  She’s happy. This is where she’s happy.

  That thought was immediately eradicated by the memory of an old black-and-white photo I’d seen once of Chinese coolies racked out on planks as they took their leisure at an opium den. They had looked happy too.

  When the guys in front of me had stepped aside, and the smell of frying onions, bad coffee, and fermenting ketchup wafted out of the order window on a blast of oven-hot air. Aubrey pivoted, saw me, and her happiness curdled. She leaned down and hissed, “What are you doing here?”

  Tyler, his back to us at the grill, had yelled, “A to the J, was that hold the jalapeños? Or extra jalapeños on the Mexi-burger?”

  The steam and heat had twisted his dark hair into heavy curls that flopped across his forehead. Without the ball cap, wearing a white apron streaked with orange chili grease, he was harder to hate. Aubrey whispered in his ear. He jerked his head up, smiled, and pivoted, sticking his large, scarred hand out the order window. His class ring caught the sunlight. The only people I ever knew who wore high school rings were proud that they’d graduated from high school; they never went on to collect college rings. That made me remember that Tyler Moldenhauer was the opium trapping my daughter in this hellish den.

  Before I could shake his hand, Aubrey leaned in and told me that she couldn’t leave and I could buy whatever I wanted without her; she, they, had customers. And they did. Half a dozen hungry men jostled behind me. That day, for Aubrey’s sake, I didn’t make a scene. Today I am going to make a scene.

  “There it is.” Dori spots the catering truck before I do, a dingy rolling metal box with PETE’S EATS written above the order windows and a line of workers waiting outside. “Pete’s Eats? Who’s Pete?”

  “I’m not sure that there is a Pete. It’s sort of a franchise. Tyler rents the truck. Something like that. Aubrey hasn’t exactly shared all the details with me.”

  “Probably because ‘Pete’ is exploiting them.”

  “That is a distinct possibility.” I park behind a flatbed truck loaded with planks of engineered wood flooring. The planks are the same blond-colored woodlike product that’s in my house. I know how light and airy and elegant the floors will be after the installers have finished and tiptoed out in their stocking feet. I know how scratched up and cheap and shoddy those floors will look after a few weeks. Even when you go crazy and insist that everyone who enters the house put on slippers like the Japanese do. I know how the floors will delaminate around the doors and windows and anyplace where even a drop of water hits them. I know that, unlike real wood that can be walked on for centuries, then sanded back to newness, once this stuff gets scratched, it can only be ripped out and replaced. And if you can’t afford to do that, you just have to live with it.

  I start to get out and Dori opens her door as well. I tell her that it might be better if I go alone.

  “Good point. Don’t want to look like we’re ganging up on her. I’ll be in the car. Just wave if you need backup.”

  “Thanks, Dori. Really. Thanks.”

  She waves my gratitude aside. “Eh, you’d do the same for me.”

  As I approach the wagon from the side, I plan out what I am going to say. Mentally, I dial in a calm yet forceful tone as I rehearse how I will tell Aubrey that there is a problem at the bank and we have to go. Right this very second.

  Aubrey will, of course, be embarrassed by my very presence. She’ll lean down and hiss through the window, “I’m working. We have customers.”

  Tyler will pause in his microwaving activities and ask her what the problem is. Then he’ll stand beside her, maybe wrap his arm protectively around her, a uni
ted front against the threat that is me.

  I don’t care how big a scene I have to make to get her to come with me. I don’t care if I make her so mad that she seethes like a bad nuclear reactor rod. As long as I can get her into the car and to the bank, she can melt right through the burgundy plush upholstery. If a little China Syndrome is the price I have to pay to collect what Martin owes us, and get her the hell away from Tyler Moldenhauer and out of Parkhaven, then I will gladly pay it. Martin owes us both so much more, but if college tuition is all we’ll ever get, I’m going to make damn sure we collect every cent we have coming.

  At the lunch wagon, I duck behind a guy I assume is a carpet layer from the knee pads he has strapped on over a pair of jeans flocked with fuzzy beige carpet fibers. I don’t want to lose the advantage of surprise. Through the order window, I catch glimpses of Aubrey’s slender torso. Everything from the shoulders up and midthighs down is obscured. I always hated that, the way her crotch was practically at eye level with every goon who ordered a burrito. It gave me the creeps, like seeing her in one of those places in Amsterdam where the girls waited behind picture windows.

  Girding for battle, I pump both my fear for Aubrey’s future and the adrenaline overload released when I was ambushed by Martin’s voice into the edgy pugnacity this showdown will require. By the time the carpet layer steps out of the way, I am ready to dive through the window and drag Aubrey out by the throat.

  Except that it’s not my daughter’s face that leans down into the order window and asks, “Know what you want, hon?” Though she has the body of a teenager, the woman asking for my order has to be forty at least. A hard forty. A forty who could be selling corn dogs in a carnival midway.

  “Is Aubrey here?” I stand on my tiptoes and crane into the order window to see if Aubrey or Tyler is hiding inside. The only other person, though, is another carny-looking individual, a younger woman in a tank top that shows off ropy muscles bright with gaudy tattoos, stretching up to pull a tower of Styrofoam cups off a high shelf.

  The young woman turns, catches my frantic investigation, and regards me with a hostile gaze that I classify as lesbian hatred for a straight suburban breeder. A crown-of-thorns tattoo encircles her neck. “Something we can help you with?” she asks suspiciously, as if I might be about to whip out a subpoena.

  “I’m looking for Aubrey Lightsey. Or Tyler? Tyler Moldenhauer?”

  The two women exchange looks. Crown of Thorns answers, “You mean that chick and her boyfriend used to have this wagon?”

  “Used to?”

  The older woman speaks up. “Oh, yeah, they gave notice to Pete. What? Week ago? Ten days? They’re gone.”

  NOVEMBER 2, 2009

  I am standing at pickup/dropoff, reading The Scarlet Letter for the essay that is due in English on nature imagery, and I am sweating because we’re having a weird late fall heat wave. Mostly, though, I am holding a book in front of my face so that I can act like I am not aware that I am the only senior at Parkhaven who does not own a car. Usually I take the bus, but Mom arranges her schedule so she can pick me up on Mondays and drop me off at Mrs. Cherniak’s. I babysit for Mrs. Cherniak when she goes to continuing-ed classes so that she can keep her nurse anesthetist license current for when her kids are in school and she goes back to work gassing plastic surgery patients. She doesn’t want to work, but they need the money. “College fund,” she explained to me. College, school, they control our whole, entire lives.

  Since the Guinness Book of World Records is nowhere in sight, I know Mom won’t be on time, so I sit down on a bench next to a chubby freshman wearing a yellow T-shirt with a piñata on it and the words I’D HIT THAT. Then I dive back into Scarlet Letter. I actually like Scarlet Letter. A lot. Maybe because it is practically the only book I’ve ever read for school that has a female heroine who is just a plain-vanilla WASP and not hiding from the Nazis or dealing with getting her feet bound or some other ethnic dilemma that I honor and everything but is not exactly real pertinent to my own personal life. Mostly, though, I like the way love was back then. Important. Important enough to be cast out forever for. To die for. To risk your immortal soul for. Love, marriage, family, your kids, nowadays they’re all disposable. Just something you can walk away from the second a better idea comes along.

  I block out the buses lined up like elephants at the water hole and the kids running for them with heavy packs pummeling their backs, and get deep into my Hester and Dimmesdale. They are meeting in the forest, sitting beside a brook, and I am imagining Dimmesdale with his shirt off pressing his flaming cheek to the scarlet letter heaving on Hester’s bosom. I have Hester unlacing her bodice a little when, in the outermost rim of my peripheral vision, I notice some jerk in a gargantuan truck with a bumper like he is going to be clearing cows off a railroad track cut to the head of the pickup line and start honking. Then yelling. Which makes the people behind him start honking for him to move. He ignores the honking.

  I am tuning the jerk out and feeling really sorry for whoever his poor kid is when the chubby freshman nudges me and says, “I think Ty-Mo means you.”

  I look up. Tyler has leaned over and is yelling out the passenger window of the truck, “A.J.! Yo! Hey, A.J., you wanna ride?!”

  In the suavest of moves, I glance over both shoulders, then, seeing no one standing behind me, stab a finger into my chest where Hester would have had her big A and mouth, Me?

  He waves me over as the honking from the minivan moms rises to an angry crescendo. Before the honking can get any louder or any more people start turning in my direction, I run over and hop into Tyler Moldenhauer’s truck. Once I slam the door shut, I say with my trademark flair for the obvious, “You’re not at practice.”

  He points to his ankle, wrapped in an Ace bandage. A pair of crutches is jammed in the space behind the seat. “Sprained it.”

  “How’d you sprain it?”

  “Being an asshole.”

  “Yeah, but what did you do that was different?”

  Without taking his eyes from the road, he points a finger at me, says, “Good one,” and whips a U-turn that fishtails us into the traffic going the other way.

  It is stupendous being up high with windows all around. I wonder what I’ve ever had against trucks, then remember that it is Mom who hates trucks. Or, at least, the people who drive trucks. As for me, I never want to ride in a teeny-tiny, claustrophobic car again.

  As we head away from school, I spot Mom pulling into the end of the pickup line. The only thought that crosses my mind is, I hope she doesn’t see me.

  “Where we going, Aubrey Josephine?”

  I smile at the joke name, at him trying to guess what the J stands for. For a second I think about Mrs. Cherniak, all showered and dressed up, excited about seeing her nurse buddies, about getting the classes she needs to take out of the way. Kyle, six, and Jessica, four, waiting for me to come and play “Dance Dance Revolution” with them on their Wii. On the refrigerator, a twenty-dollar bill under a magnet with the Papa John’s delivery number on it.

  Then I answer, “The quarry.”

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010

  Gone? Gone where?” My fingers clutch at the inner rim of the order window as if I’m preparing to leap into the food trailer.

  The younger woman with the noose of thorns around her neck steps forward, snarls, “Why do you need to know?”

  “I’m her mother, for Christ’s sake. She’s supposed to meet me today so we can go to the bank and get the money my asshole ex left for her college education.”

  The older woman waves the younger one aside in the peremptory fashion that only a mother can get away with and I see that the younger woman is her daughter, not her lover. Mention of the asshole ex seems to have forged a common bond, because the mother’s tone is been-there sympathetic when she leans down on her elbows so that her eyes are level with mine and says, “Darlin’, I wish I knew more to tell you, but I don’t. I know she’s not anywhere around here, though. Pete makes everyone s
ign one of those noncompete deals.”

  “Ten days?” I mumble, too stunned to form a coherent question.

  “Least that. Pete demands two weeks’ notice or he keeps your deposit. But we just finished switching everything over yesterday and she gave us the keys last night.”

  I try to wedge this new piece into the puzzle, but it won’t go. All I keep thinking is, Does this mean it is more or less likely that she’s pregnant?

  “Did you check the bank?” the woman asks. “Maybe she thinks you’re meeting her there.”

  Her daughter leans in. “Mom and I are always getting our wires crossed like that. She’ll think she said, ‘Meet me at the Safeway,’ but she really said Albertsons. So I’m over there twiddling my thumbs for an hour.”

  “You weren’t there for an hour, and what’s so hard about keeping your phone turned on? Darlin’, are you okay?”

  I realize that she’s asking me and mutter that I’m fine.

  “It’s gonna get better,” she tells me.

  Recognizing that I am talking to a woman who’s spent her whole life waiting for it to get better, I try to pull myself together and move out of the way of her customers. Instead, I hear myself saying, “Today’s her birthday. She turned eighteen today.”

  The mother puts her hand on top of mine and sounds exactly like me talking to one of my mothers when she says, “Oh, sweetie, they always know exactly how to hurt you the most, don’t they?”

  I nod numbly and back away.

  “Good luck,” she calls out to me.

  Back at the car, Dori’s response to this new development is “What the fuck?” Then she brightens. “Maybe the woman’s right. Maybe Aubrey got confused and is waiting for you at the bank right now.”