The Gap Year

by Sarah Bird

  This story is genetically engineered to melt my heart. Which it does. “Plus, you saw that Next was a load of horseshit and you were an idiot for ever falling for it.”

  “You really need me to say it?”

  “Only if it’s true.”

  “Plus, I saw that Next was a load of horseshit and I was an idiot for ever falling for it.”

  The barometric pressure in the car lightens and I am almost happy. Then I remember that he wasn’t there when Aubrey needed him to protect her the most—he wasn’t there last winter on Black Ice Night.

  DECEMBER 11, 2009

  Three days later, Friday, I wait for Tyler to finish the game and call me. I stand in the front hall, looking out the little barred window in the door. Mom has set the heat down so low that my breath freezes on the glass. Outside, light shimmers off the ice that has turned the street black and shiny.

  I check my phone for about the hundredth time to make sure it is turned on and I haven’t missed his call. It is 9:43. Tyler needs to call. Soon. I have to sneak out before Mom gets home. She’s really been intense with all her new rules. Her evening classes end at nine, but usually she’ll stay and talk and, essentially, hold private consultations for anyone with a question. She actually really cares about her students and their babies. It is why she is such a guru or diva or something.

  I strain to hear the sound of the garage door going up. If I zip out at the first clang, I can be out of the house before she comes in. I’ll have to wait outside in the freezing cold until Tyler comes, but if I don’t leave before she gets home, Mom will trap me. For the last few days, I’ve felt like she is getting ready to lose it.

  I turn from the door and send Tyler a text telling him to hurry. Just as I hit “Send,” the front door flies open and there is my mom. “Aubrey, sweetheart, you’re home. Way to obey the new rules.” She unwraps the muffler wound around her neck. Her nose and cheeks are red from the cold.

  “Why didn’t you come in through the garage?” I ask, panicking.

  She holds up the opener. “Dead batteries. God, it’s freezing out there. The roads are really getting dangerous.” Her hair is up in a ponytail. My mom has this magical belief that putting your hair in a ponytail is the same as washing it.

  One strap of her tote bag slips off her shoulder and all her stuff spills out onto the foyer. The rubber tit with blue veins and red milk ducts bounces away; clear nipple guards go sproinging all over; the boob apron, heavy as the one the dentist puts on for X-rays, lands with the nipples facing up.

  I stoop down to help her gather the paraphernalia up. I stuff her dolls back in the bag. Those dolls with their heavy bottoms were so real, I craved them when I was little and it was a giant treat when she let me play with them.

  “Did you bring my plants in like I asked you to?”

  Before I can answer, she goes on, “And while you’re out there, can you turn the faucet in the backyard on so it’ll drip and not freeze? I’ll go get the one in front. No, never mind. That one never stops dripping.”

  I am heading out the door with her when the phone in my bra vibrates. Tyler. I stop. “Uh, I’ll get the plants in when I get back. I’ve got to go”—I hold up my cell—“help Tyler with his college applications.” Anything to do with college grants instant immunity.

  “Aubrey, you are not going out now. There’s black ice on the roads. It’s late. It’s too—”

  “Mom, I have to. Deadlines for his top-three reach schools are, like, tomorrow.”

  “Invite him in. You’ve been sneaking around seeing this boy for months—”

  “Mom! We are not ‘sneaking around.’ We study together. Period. End of story. Since when do you have to investigate everyone I study with?”

  “I’m not going to investigate him. And be honest, Aubrey. He’s a lot more than someone you study with.”

  “That’s your opinion.”

  “Aubrey, you’ve got on mascara. You flatironed your hair. Don’t try to tell me he is just some study buddy. You’re wearing …” She sniffs me. She is always sniffing me. It makes me paranoid that I stink. “Is that my Jo Malone?”

  I move toward the door. “He’s waiting.”

  She grabs my arm. Hard. “Look …”

  It drives me crazy how she says “look” all the time, like she’s Barack Obama. Every grown-up I know who voted for him starts all their sentences with, “Look,” to clue you in that they are going to be calm and reasonable even though they think you are a raving loon.

  But she quickly gives up on calm and reasonable and orders me, “OK, that’s it. That is it. You are not going anywhere. If I have to sit on you, you are not leaving this house. This is no longer up for discussion.” She blocks the door, crosses her arms.

  The thought of not seeing Tyler makes me frantic. She has to be moved. She has to get out of my way. I shove her aside and rush out. The wind is so cold and strong that it punches me in the chest and knocks the breath out of me, like jumping into the quarry did. I run down the porch stairs.

  To my amazement, she follows me. I am already at the edge of our yard when she grabs my hair and stops me dead. “What are you doing?!” I scream at her. “Let go of my hair!”

  “This is over, Aubrey. This sneaking around. This disrespect. This lying to me. You are staying home tonight! End of story!”

  “Is this the way your mother smothered you?”

  “Don’t even try. You are so unsmothered it’s not funny.” She lets go of my hair.

  “That’s because you’ve never had to smother me! I have never done one single thing to make you worry or doubt me! I still haven’t!”

  I try to walk away, but she grabs my arm and yanks me toward her. “Get back in this house!”

  I put my hands on her shoulders and physically halt her. “No!”

  “Yes!” She clamps onto my wrists and starts dragging me back. “Get inside the house this instant!”

  I refuse to be dragged. Light flashes from the window of the house across the street where the neighbor pulls back the blind to see what is going on.

  I shove her away. A second later, she has her hands all over me, wrapping around me, pulling me down, drowning me. I wrench away, stand back, and raise my hand up above my head like the Statue of Liberty. I am going to hit her. We both know it. I stop only because, on the porch behind us, Pretzels barks a hideous, strangled bark.

  Almost deaf, almost blind, she struggles to see into the darkness. She stands on the side of the porch, away from the stairs, barking, searching, ready to save us. Mom and I both realize that, no matter what, Pretzels is coming to rescue us.

  “Pretzels, no!” Mom screams.

  Using memory more than muscle, Pretz jumps off the porch. With only old bones to absorb the shock, she hits hard and crumples onto the ground, yelping piteously as she lands. My mom runs back, kneels beside Pretzels.

  “Aubrey, come help! We’ve got to get her to the vet!”

  Mom hoists her up around the middle. When I see Pretzels struggle to her feet and stand, I run from them.

  I would have run even if she hadn’t gotten up.

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2010

  Martin has taken over the driving. I try to recall how long it’s been since I sat in the passenger seat while a man drove. I narrow the time frame down to A Long Time.

  We’re passing through a field of what I know to be sorghum because Martin once identified this crop for me. At the edge of the field is a stretch of bare earth that has been molded into humps and hollows, crisscrossed by trails. A kid on a motocross bike bursts over a low hill and gets enough air to shimmy his back wheel before landing.

  Martin slows down as we enter a small town. Most of the businesses are boarded up. “We’re almost out of gas,” he says, dropping his speed even more. He always used to do this on trips, practically crawl through small towns, reading out the names of businesses, the wisdom posted outside of churches, the funny team names being boosted on the Dairy Queen marquees. He loved cafés,
diners, drugstores with lunch counters.

  We pass a couple of sleek new gas stations with a dozen bays out front, but, as I knew he would, Martin heads for a battered, two-pump establishment. I always liked that he preferred the local, the homegrown.

  We park next to an ancient gas pump. Martin points to the door on an outside wall of the station with RESTROOM painted on it. “You need to?”

  “No, I’m fine.” Much as I like the local, the homegrown, when it comes to restrooms I prefer the corporate, the national.

  “We’ll hit the DQ on the way out of town.” It was what we always used to do on trips. How we accommodated his thirst for the authentic and my microbladder.

  He hops out, flips the lock on the pump nozzle into place so that the gas flows automatically, goes into the station, and, for one second, I think, This is how it would have been for the past sixteen years. Someone else, not always me, would have, even occasionally, driven, pumped the gas, worried about our child.

  When he returns, Martin is carrying a white plastic shopping bag. In the car he extracts a package of pork rinds, another of CornNuts, holds them up, and asks, “Which one?”

  My face wrinkles in disgust. “Martin, I hate pork rinds and CornNuts.” I’m glad I stop myself from adding, You know that, because he whips out a jumbo bag of honey roasted peanuts and crows, “Gotcha!”

  I smile and take the peanuts, always my favorite of the gas station foods. “You are such a jerk.”

  Martin tears the package of CornNuts open with his teeth. Their smell fills the car, takes me back to other trips. He shakes out a handful, puts a CornNuts-crammed fist to his lips, tips his head back, and taps them into his mouth.

  With the first filling-cracking crunch, I wince. “How can you eat those things?” The words are out of my mouth before I realize that this is a question a girlfriend, a wife, someone concerned about the state of a man’s dental work would ask.

  “Only way possible …” Martin answers, pausing to back out of the station, then slide into traffic. He nods at the shopping bag. “You mind?”

  I fish out a can of the obnoxious red soda he always favored on road trips. “God, you don’t still drink those?” I hand it to him, and keep the Diet Sprite that was always my road bev.

  “You’re right: It’s red with pork rinds, white with CornNuts. Pass me the Diet Sprite.”

  I hug the drink to my chest and pivot away, protecting it from his joking grasp. “I don’t think so.” I fill my mouth with sweet peanuts and sweet bubbles, chew them into a carbonated mush, and watch the small town turn back into sorghum fields.

  There is no DQ and Martin asks if he should turn back and find someplace with a good restroom. I tell him I can wait.

  Gradually, the fields of grain are replaced by high, spindly pines that shadow the lonely road. Time rolls past so easily that Martin startles me when he says, “We’re almost there.”

  We pass a tire repair shack and a barbecue joint. Farther on, I point to what appears to be an abandoned trailer park on the road ahead. Old trailers and RVs lie abandoned beneath the tall pines next to the rusting hulks of ancient cars. “Is that the place?”

  Martin leans forward, squints, and reads off the hand-painted sign: “ ‘Worthy Restorations. Randy Worthy, Prop.’ Well, I guess we can eliminate any high-tech Soviet-Mafia identity-theft ring.”

  “Yeah, that and probably indoor plumbing.” I wish I’d hit the restroom when I had the chance. “This is like something out of Deliverance.”

  Martin bumps off the highway onto a dirt road and stops for a moment. The high-pitched shriek of metal being cut reaches us. Martin considers the sound and the piles of car frames and comes up with “Chop shop?”

  He’s joking, but in a way that shows that his antennae are tuned to the same frequencies of danger and menace as mine.

  We follow the saw’s whine back to a large portable building with big barn doors at either end. Parked outside are half a dozen old Airstream trailers in various stages of repair. One is finished and shines in the sun, polished to a blinding glare.

  “Well,” Martin says as he parks. “We know now what Randy Worthy, Prop., restores.”

  “Please, sweet Jesus, do not tell me that that lunkhead jock got our daughter to spend her college money on a roach coach.”

  Again. “Our” daughter.

  The sliding doors at either end of the workshop are open. Where stalls would have been are stacks of quilted metal siding, small tires, stainless-steel sinks, slabs of foam, propane tanks. Some of the parts are gleaming new; most are crusted with rust and grease. Empty liter bottles of Mountain Dew perch everywhere. Presiding over this empire of debris is a wiry guy wearing a khaki shirt with the sleeves ripped off to reveal stringy, tattooed biceps. He’s hunched over, intent upon slicing a thick metal rod. A carrot-colored beard divided into two braids pokes out like a snake’s tongue from beneath his welder’s mask. As he cuts the rod in two, bits of metal and sparks flash from the teeth of the grinder in his hand and ricochet off the helmet with its gun turret of an eye shield. ZZ Top—“Lawd, take me downtown! I’m just looking for some tush!”—plays over the screech.

  I think two thoughts: Outlaw biker and Leave. Leave now. I grab Martin’s arm to tug him away; it’s time to get law enforcement involved.

  But Martin is already yelling, “Yo! Hey, Randy! Hello!” and ambling into the guy’s limited field of vision. I’m glad Martin’s wearing jeans. No telling what might happen if this guy were to see a suit.

  “Mr. Worthy! Sir! Sir!” He waves his arm and steps closer. The guy still doesn’t hear him and bends forward to finish the cut. His shirt presses against the waistband of his work pants and a distinct hump appears close to the base of his spine.

  “A gun!” I yell at Martin, but my warning is lost in the shriek of the blade. I point, drawing Martin’s attention to the hump, and back away, waving frantically for Martin to do the same. He doesn’t. He nods, gives me a stay-calm hand bounce, and keeps moving forward. It seems that the alpha-dog intimidation tactics are not just bluff. Sometime in the last sixteen years, Martin has become a badass.

  The guy finally sees him and, in one fluid sequence, stops the grinder, flips the mask away from his face, and grabs for the gun in his waistband.

  Martin extends his hands out in a wide I-come-in-peace gesture, and chuckles. “Whoa, dude. Hey, Randy, dude, sorry.” His words echo in the sudden silence.

  The guy’s eyes dart from me to Martin several times. They dart a lot. Too much. I combine that with his twitchy, emaciated state and add another entry to his résumé: meth head.

  Next must have also helped Martin become a shape-shifter, because he sounds completely relaxed, like this stranger’s oldest friend playing a prank on him when he chuckles. “My bad, Randy. Didn’t mean to startle you. I’d never walk into a man’s workshop unannounced like this, except I don’t have a number for you.”

  If we get out of here alive, I am definitely calling the police. This person could not be in Aubrey’s world unless she is in serious, serious danger. Similar to the serious, serious danger I feel that Martin and I are now in. As with Coach Hines, though, Martin is able to play Randy so perfectly that the guy takes his hand from the gun and eases into whatever permanently wary state passes for his version of relaxed.

  “You here to pick up the …” Randy points out toward another portable building. “The little Bambi? I guess you didn’t get my message? That Hensley Arrow hitch didn’t come in. They promised me. Swore up and down. I know I said I’d have it done today, but—”

  “No, that’s cool. We’re just fans of your work. Really like what you did for a buddy of mine.”

  “Yeah.” He tenses back up. “Who’d that be?”

  “Tyler. Tyler Moldenhauer?”

  “You know Bronk?”

  Bronk?

  “How d’ya know Bronk?”

  “Football.”

  “Oh. You a coach?”

  “Well, assistant.”
r />   “Yeah?”

  “Just wondering where we can find him.”

  Randy’s twitchy eyes narrow. He steps back a bit, the better to keep both of us under surveillance. “If you don’t know where he is, then you haven’t seen what I did for him, have you now, cuz they just picked it up.”

  “When?”

  “This morning. Look, I do not know where Bronk come up with that money. That is not my responsibility. Knowing his people, though …”

  His people?

  “Coulda been anywhere. But I do not know, and furthermore, I do not care. That was a custom job, and custom jobs don’t come with any ninety-day warranty. I got a strict no-refund policy on custom. He knew that. That was made clear up front.”

  “No, no, hell, no, man.” Martin eases into the full cracker. “We ain’t lookin’ to recover. Not from you. We just need to locate Bronk. Talk to him.”

  “You the coach he was living with?”

  Martin nods.

  “Look, I sympathize. I dealt with his people way back to before whenever they all got run off, but this is not my responsibility. Once a customer takes delivery—”

  “No, we get that, bro. We’re just, you know—”

  “Was there a girl with him?” I demand brusquely. I’ve had it with the jovial folksiness.

  “Ma’am, you’re gonna have to step back and take all this up with Bronk. And I’m gonna have to ask you to leave. Now. You’re trespassing.” He flips the visor of his helmet back down to signal that the conversation is over. It clangs into place, covering his face, he switches the grinder on, and sparks shoot out as it slices into the metal rod.