Stuart Kaminsky - Denial

I got up as fast as I could, rubbed my hands against my jeans, picked up the car keys where I had dropped them as I limped toward my parked car.

“Oh my God. Are you all right?” a woman said, rushing across the parking lot. She was small, huge busted with big round glasses, carrying a baby.

“Fine,” I said.

“It looked like that maniac was trying to kill you,” she said, rubbing the baby’s back to comfort him or her, though the baby didn’t seem the least bit upset.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Maybe I should call the police,” she said. “Driving like that through a parking lot. He could have hit my baby or me. I’m calling the police. You wait here.”

“Did you see his license number?”

“No,” she said.

“Make and color of the car?”

“I… no. But a man was driving it. I think he had a beard or something. I could tell the police that.”

The baby decided to cry.

“You could,” I said, going to my car.

“You’re sure you’re all right?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, thinking that I was all right until the next time.

I got in and closed the door.

My hands were shaking. I closed my eyes. I had not been there when my wife had died. The police had pieced together a likely narrative in their report, but it left a universe of imagined scenarios. I had tried to come up with one I could cling to but it kept changing. Sometimes Catherine is struck by a huge Caddy driven by a distracted old man. Catherine doesn’t see it coming. She was alive one second, dead the next. Or, sometimes Catherine is frozen in the path of a pickup driven by a drunken, grinning ex-con. Someone she had put in prison.

Now I was juggling three hit-and-run scenarios, Catherine’s, Kyle McClory’s, mine.

My hands stopped trembling. They hadn’t been trembling with fear. They had been trembling because the person who had tried to kill me had opened the curtain, letting in memory.

Since my wife had died, among the things I had lost were fear and a willingness to experience joy.

The woman and the crying baby were back on the sidewalk standing in front of Ace Hardware. I drove slowly. There was a predator on the streets and my knee and shoulder hurt.

I caught what there was of a rush hour as I headed down Fruitville toward Tamiami Trail. The Gulf Coast was in season, which meant lots of tourists, lots of snowbirds. Jaguars, red convertibles with their tops down, a Lexus or two, pickups, SUVs, almost all being driven badly.

Traffic rules in Sarasota: (1) If the light recently turned red, step on the gas and go. (2) If you come to a stop sign, do not stop. Just slow down a little and look both ways. (3) At a four-way stop, it doesn’t matter who gets there first. What matters is how big a vehicle you have and how mad at the world you are that day. (4) If there is just enough room for you to fit, you can speed up and cut off another driver. (5) Checking the rearview mirror before changing lanes is optional and checking side mirrors is to be avoided. (6) The law is wrong. It is the pedestrians who should yield to the cars.

Driving badly is an infectious disease on Florida’s Sun Coast. I think it started with native Floridians in pickups and baseball caps who zipped in and out of traffic in a hurry to win the race that had no winner. A variation, in mutated form, had been imported from the North with little old retired men and women who kept their eyes straight ahead, drove a dangerous ten miles under the speed limit, never looked at their side or rearview mirrors even when they changed lanes as they sat with necks craned so they could see over the dashboard. Finally the disease had been passed on to people angry at the pickups, angry with the ancient drivers. This group drove a few miles over the speed limit and had an uncontrollable urge to curse at everyone who hogged or shared the road.

Someone inside one of those cars on the streets of Sarasota with me that day was even more dangerous than all the rest of the drivers on the road. He was the one who had tried to kill me.

I pulled into the driveway of Flo Zink’s house on a street off Siesta Drive before you get to the bridge to Siesta Key.

My leg hurt. My shoulder ached. I was thirsty.

The SUV was in the driveway. Before I knocked, I could hear guitars and singing beyond the door. This meant that either Adele was out somewhere with the baby or the baby was not taking a nap. The sound system and the pumping of country-and-western music played several decibels too loud were turned off when Adele’s baby was sleeping.

Flo, glass of amber liquid in her right hand, opened the door and smiled at me. Flo is a short, solid woman in her late sixties. She used to wear too much makeup. Now she wears a little. She used to dress in flashy Western shirts, jeans and cowboy boots. She still does.

The music was loud behind her, but nowhere near as loud as when I had first met her. I must have looked at the drink in her hand. She did too.

“Pure, zero-proof Diet Dr Pepper,” she said.

I looked at the drink, saw the bubbles and nodded. I had pulled some strings, very thin strings, to get Flo’s driver’s license back. Adele was a few days away from turning sixteen. She would be able to drive on her own then, but until she could do it legally, she needed a licensed driver in the car. That was Flo.

“Quiz, my sad Italian friend,” Flo said, stepping back to let me in. “What Cole Porter song did Roy Rogers make famous?”

“‘Don’t Fence Me In,’” I said.

The song was playing throughout the house. I didn’t recognize Rogers’s voice, but I recognized the song.

“You are a clever son of a bitch,” she said. “What are you drinking?”

“Diet Dr Pepper will be fine,” I said.

“You know where the kitchen is.”

She closed the front door behind me. I limped in and she said, “What’s wrong with your leg?”

“Bumped into something.”

“Let me take a look. Sit down and drop your pants,” she said, motioning toward one of the living room chairs.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“And I’m Nicole Kidman. Sit. Drop ‘em or roll’em up.”

I sat and rolled up my pants leg. Flo looked down at it. Roy Rogers sang about gazing at the moon.

She looked down at my leg.

“Knee’s a little swollen,” she said. “Nothing too bad.”

She patted me on the shoulder. I winced.

“What’s wrong up there?”

“Bumped into something else,” I said.

“You are one injury-begging sad sack or a liar,” she said.

“Adele home?” I said, rolling down my pants leg, getting up, about to head for the kitchen, just left of the front door off the living room.

“Sit back down. I’ll get it,” said Flo, holding up her glass and heading toward the kitchen and calling back, “She’s home. I’ll get her after I bring your drink.”

Behind us Roy Rogers sang about starry skies and wanting lots of land.

I didn’t want lots of land. I wanted to get back to my small box of a room behind my office. And I could do without starry skies. I liked small enclosed spaces. I hated lying on my back outdoors at night. It made my head swirl. I had felt a little of this before Catherine died. Since she was gone, it had gotten more defined. I welcomed it.

Flo didn’t have to get Adele. Adele came down the hallway to the living room, baby in her arms. Adele smiled at me. No, actually, it was a grin. Catherine, five months old, thin blonde hair, was thoughtfully chewing on her mother’s hair.

“Mr. F,” Adele said. “Want to hold her?”

“No thanks,” I said.

Flo came back in the room, handed me a cold glass of Diet Dr Pepper, touched Adele’s face, kissed the baby’s forehead and scurried off down the hall.