Miss Furbish keeps smiling, shaking her head gently. “Don’t think for a minute that you didn’t win the city,” she tells him.
Dale smiles through glossy eyes.
She continues studying him with her glossy eyes. “I’d like you to see how fortunate you are to lose that game at this time in your life,” she says.
“I love everything you ever say,” he tells her.
“I’m going to leave now,” she says. “I won’t be seeing you like this again. Which isn’t to say I won’t always have you in my mind.”
Dale looks into her shining eyes.
“You make a grand life for yourself,” she says, getting to her feet. “Make me proud,” she adds, as she backs off and is gone. Miss Furbish, of whom he dreamed so many dreams, has left while he is not as alone as he was before.
CHAPTER 2
IF SHE PASSES ON THE SIDEWALK, DALE DOESN’T SEE HER IN THE reflecting flashing lights from the street. Removing a quarter from his pocket, reaching along to a counter console, he inserts the coin and presses D17 as in the past.
Leaving the cigarette to burn itself out, he stares through glass at the neon-flashing city street with all its cars going somewhere. Thereupon a lyric enters the air like a story entering his mind.
A white sport coat . . .
And a pink carnation . . .
Waiting for a dream to get started, to have somewhere nice to go.
About the Author
Photo by Marsha Robinson, 2012.
THEODORE WEESNER was born in Flint, Michigan in 1935. Abandoned by his teenage mother at age two, he lived until age five—with his brother Jack, two years older—in a home managed by a 550-pound immobile woman who took in stray children from broken homes. At ages five and seven, Ted and Jack went to live with their father when he set up housekeeping with a farm woman named Hattie Rex.
Elementary school was normal for the brothers, until Hattie was hired at AC Spark Plug and, like their father at Chevy, began working second shift, leaving the prepubescent boys on their own until the shift change hour each day at midnight.
In junior high, Ted and Jack began having scrapes with authorities until, turning seventeen, Jack left high school to enlist in the Air Force. Ted, following into high school and although an avid basketball player, was charged with car theft and incarcerated at the Genesee County Juvenile Detention Home. Ultimately (and permanently) suspended from high school, Ted enlisted in the army as a GED, also at age seventeen, and began a circuitous, personal journey back that would see him graduating from the Honors College at Michigan State University and publishing fiction nationally as a graduate student at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
Leaving Iowa with an MFA, Theodore Weesner went on to publish fiction in the New Yorker, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, Best American Short Stories, and other anthologies such as Audience and Ploughshares. His first novel, The Car Thief, a Book-of-the-Month Club Featured Alternate, was published to critical acclaim in England, Japan, and Germany. While publishing, to date, five other novels and a collection of short stories, Weesner has received Guggenheim, NEA, and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants. Down through the years he has taught at University of New Hampshire and at Emerson College in Boston.
Also by THEODORE WEESNER
THE CAR THIEF*
WINNING THE CITY REDUX*
WINNING THE CITY
NOVEMBERFEST
HARBOR LIGHTS
A GERMAN AFFAIR
CHILDREN’S HEARTS
*Published by Astor + Blue Editions
Winning the City Redux Page 24