We both stood for a minute, exhaling, our white breath thick in the air between us like a chaperone.
“I’ll be out of here when I get a car. And finish school. But mostly when I get a car,” I said. My mother liked to remind me that I’d barely put away enough for a pine air freshener after three years of my big talk, but she was a woman who went by Mamie because she didn’t like the sound of Mommy, said it reminded her of creepy skinny guys who pay money to be bossed around by ladies in leather. And she couldn’t use Mom, because that was for women with tennis bracelets and husbands. I’d ride a Power Wheels down I-84 just to prove that lady wrong.
“I lived in three countries without a car. Now I have a car, and I don’t leave to go anywhere anymore,” Bashkim said.
“Don’t tell me it’s because you reached your destination.”
Bashkim ashed his cigarette, then pulled the one from my lips and ashed that one, too. I decided to interpret that as a weird Albanian act of chivalry, though really, any act of chivalry would have been just as foreign to me.
“You’re freezing,” he said. “Hell froze over. Your boyfriend is picking you up?”
“My mother. I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Yes you do. I am your boyfriend.”
“I don’t know if your wife will like that,” I said.
“You don’t say anything about my wife. That’s rule number one.”
Rule number one. It was settled, then. We had our first rule before we had our first kiss, but for damn sure that was what made him my boyfriend. And it hurt me to face that kind of truth, like seeing my ugly face on the video cameras on display in the front entrance at Sears, but I couldn’t wait for rule number two.
—
The next night, Gjonni, on duty for what must’ve been his twenty-seventh straight hour, argued with Bashkim in words that sounded like a Zeppelin record played backward. I never could understand who at the Ross was actually related to each other, since everybody called each other Cousin, except for Gjonni, the boss, who went by Uncle, and Yllka, his wife, who people were too afraid of to call anything but her proper name. But I knew Gjonni and Yllka were real family to Bashkim, because the three of them fought the hardest, and because Bashkim and Yllka, who the waitresses told me shared actual blood, had matching deep creases scored across their foreheads and mouths, Yllka’s just a little deeper set with middle age. She’d already gone home for the night, though, so this bout was strictly man-to-man.
Gjonni said to me, “You can use our phone to call your mother. You don’t have to spend your money on the pay phone, princess.”
Bashkim answered for me. “It’s late, xhaxha, this is when regular people sleep. It’s not busy. I will drive her home, I will come back.”
Gjonni shook his head and spoke louder, talking so fast that I didn’t think even Bashkim could catch it all in his native tongue. But even though Gjonni’s voice overpowered Bashkim’s, apparently Bashkim still won, because a few seconds later he was unknotting the apron strings around his waist.
“Let’s go,” he said.
He wadded the apron into a tight ball that tumbled apart when he threw it onto the counter behind him. Inside my intestines were doing the same, streaming into my legs like unspooled thread from a bobbin.
Bashkim led me to a Fiero in the parking lot, a white coupe in fresh-off-the-lot condition even though Pontiac had booted that model from the assembly line years before. It was the kind of sports car that Franky and the rest of the auto-shop meatheads in my school used to drive, since it implied muscle and always needed to be worked on, but it apparently also appealed to Eastern Europeans who were pretending to be James Dean without ever having seen a James Dean movie. Bashkim thumbed at a scratch that didn’t exist before he unlocked the door for me.
“This is what you’re saving for, huh?” he asked.
“Kind of,” I said.
“You know how to drive something like this?” His pointer and middle fingers wrapped over the stick shift, those two digits thick enough to span the entire eight ball that, naturally, was the shifter’s knob. Big thick fingers like that reminded me of the overfed amaretto-soaked shift bosses who always volunteered to play Santa at my mother’s Christmas parties back when the factories would spring for Christmas parties, but somehow on Bashkim they didn’t gross me out. They seemed right, like he needed strong hands for more than just fondling preadolescents after a fistful of rum balls.
“Not really,” I said.
“Your father did not teach you?”
“Last thing my father taught me how to drive had training wheels,” I said.
“That’s reverse.”
“What? Where’s reverse?” I asked, but he just wiggled the shifter somewhere else.
I tried to pay attention to what his clutch foot and shifting arm were doing as he lurched forward and pulled out onto Wolcott Road, but mostly I fiddled with the radio, rolling the knob from the AM talk radio station it was set on through a half dozen FM classic rock stations, all of them playing songs more worn-out than classic. Bashkim pressed harder on the gas, and the engine revved into the same shrill pitch as the Billy Squier pumping through the speakers.
“Aren’t you supposed to shift it?” I asked.
“I know how to make this car move, ding-dong. You just pay attention.”
The car was moving. Moving and bucking and growling like a rabid junkyard dog.
“Okay. You have to take a left up here at Stillson,” I said, but he drove right past it and instead banged a last-minute right onto Long Hill, a road that lived up to its name, lined on both sides with woods dense enough to bury the victims of the kinds of things that took place in the neighborhood where Long Hill ended.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Bashkim shrugged. If he was taking me somewhere to slay me, I hoped the newspaper would get it right when my body was discovered and some local crime reporter had to come up with three hundred words about it: that I was happier to have died Bashkim’s victim than his nothing-at-all.
Instead he pulled the car into the parking lot of an L-shaped warehouse tucked behind a gate of overgrown shrubbery and parked it nose-out at the farthest corner from the road. “Get in this seat,” he said. I moved my hand to open the door but he grabbed my wrist. “Just crawl over me.”
I swung my leg over to the driver’s side and slid across his lap. He grasped my hips between his hands and held me on top of him for a few seconds. His lap was so warm a million tiny beads of sweat sprouted from my skin and I felt greasy and disgusting, exposed for what I was.
He let go.
“Tight squeeze,” he said.
I nodded, pulled myself the rest of the way over to the driver’s side, and gripped the steering wheel tight while he settled into the passenger seat.
“What are you doing, ding-dong?” he said. “You have to turn the car on if you want to drive it.”
I turned the key in the ignition. The car turned over and retched and stalled out.
“You have to push the clutch in to start it,” he said.
I pressed the clutch down and tried again. The car turned over and the engine kept running this time.
“Hey, I did it,” I said.
“You have to move before you can say that.” He pulled my hand onto the shifter and draped his over it. “You start in this gear. Push in the gas a little bit and let out the clutch a little bit at the same time.”
The car choked like an asthmatic and puttered out.
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