James Hynes - Next

He glances at Claudia, afraid he might have said some of this out loud, but if he has, she either didn’t hear it or chooses to ignore it. She’s driving distractedly again, one-handed, while with her other hand she pinches and unpinches a crease in her lower lip. Kevin’s not sure conversation is even possible now, as if the padded upholstery of the cab would soak up every sound. He’s not sure he would make any sense if he did speak, he’s not even sure if he would make sense to himself. For all he knows she’s feeling the same numbness, preoccupied with her father’s disappointment, her own uncertainty, the face of the woman she killed. Way to go, Dr. Barrientos, with the bedside manner! Just what he needs on the day of a job interview, the doctor passing her lacerating self-doubt along to him like Typhoid Mary. He’s still tongue-tied, but somebody better say something quick, because at last Lamar has widened and straightened out, lying as broad as the Champs-Élysées between strip malls and garages and down-market apartment complexes, and instead of the Arc de Triomphe at the far end, South Lamar’s vanishing point is obscured by a freeway overpass where the glittering roofs of cars and SUVs glide in the midday sun.

“How far are these stores?” Kevin says abruptly, at the same moment as Claudia says, “What sort of store are you looking for?”

They glance at each other.

“Sorry?” says Kevin.

“You first,” says Claudia.

Up ahead, freeway signs hang over the road like big green guillotine blades, blunt white arrows pointing the way to Johnson City, Llano, Bastrop. Kevin shifts in his seat, afraid that if they survive the steel blades and enter the tangle of overpasses, Claudia’s truck will get snagged and slotted in and shot like a pellet further south than Kevin wants to go, all the way to San Antonio, all the way to Mexico lindo.

“I don’t want to get too far from downtown,” he says. “I still have to find my way back to, ah…” He nearly says Barad-dûr, catches himself. He can’t remember the actual name of the building, which only makes him feel worse. Bad enough he bared his soul uselessly to this woman, dredging up an ancient hurt for no particular reason and with no particular result other than to embarrass her and make himself feel awful. Now on top of it, he’s having a senior moment, and all at once he thinks of the growing hair in his ears, his enlarging prostate, his receding gums, and how the location of his job interview has become yet another alarming pothole in his memory.

He’s still saying “Ah…” when Claudia cuts to the right and they glide across two lanes into a driveway with a grassy median and a brick sign that says LAMAR OAKS.

Kevin closes his mouth. Her briskness annoys him, makes him feel even frailer, just like Stella does when she brings in his mail and sorts it for him. Technically they have separate mailboxes, she’s still paying rent on the downstairs apartment, but if she’s home before he is, she empties both boxes and brings the mail up to his kitchen table and sorts it into piles, his and hers, junk and not-junk. She especially likes to fish out envelopes from the AARP, the first one of which appeared just before his fiftieth birthday as ominously as a crack in a levee, which has since widened into an irreparable breach, flooding his kitchen table with offers for life insurance, prescription drug delivery, low-interest credit cards, and Mediterranean cruises, not to mention anodyne and unconvincing reassurances that the best of life is yet to come. Stella loves to eat an apple and slice the envelope open and read the letter aloud while he pretends to be a good sport.

“They’ll help you choose a Medicare plan,” she says, chomping with her mouth open. “You’ll get discounts at Applebee’s.”

She thinks she’s coming across as pertly as Sarah Jessica teasing Mr. Big, but she’s being more bitchy Miranda than flirty Carrie. It’s all he can do to keep from telling her, you’re closer to this than you admit, baby, I’ve seen your driver’s license, but he hasn’t yet. And to be fair, she always ends her dramatic reading with a little slap and tickle. “Chicks dig a guy with a senior discount,” she likes to whisper in his hairy ear.

“There’s a Neiman Marcus,” Claudia is saying as she creeps the truck over speed bumps through a labyrinthine parking lot sectioned with bristling waist-high hedges and little trees with purple flowers.

“Whoa,” Kevin says. “Neiman Marcus? Didn’t you say something about Target?”

“It’s Neiman’s Last Call store.” She glances at him. “Everything’s marked way down.”

“Huh.”

“There’s a Wohl’s, too,” she says. “They’re less expensive.”

“Ah.” He relaxes a bit — Wohl’s he knows, there’s a Wohl’s out near Briarwood, on the far side of 94. It’s not much further up the retail evolutionary tree than Target or Sears, but it’s all he needs. Stella would drag him into Neiman Marcus, but then Stella’s not here, is she?

“Wohl’s is good,” he says as the truck rounds a corner into a wide-open, sun-hammered, nearly empty parking lot. A few cars are clustered at the far end where the bleached yellow façade of Wohl’s is taking the sun full in its face, and a few more are parked along the bland redbrick storefronts on the right: postal store, Christian books, big and tall menswear. The rest of the lot, with its faded chevrons of empty parking spaces and minimalist light poles staring down like surveillance devices, seems as desolate as a salt flat. All it needs are the bleached ribs and eyeless skulls of dead cattle. Even through the window tint and the icy blast of AC in his lap, Kevin can feel the blinding glare and the baking heat, and suddenly his stomach knots up so tight he nearly winces.

Don’t leave me here, he almost says aloud. This wasteland is indistinguishable from any strip mall parking lot in North America, but suddenly it seems like the most alien landscape Kevin’s ever seen. He’ll get out of the truck as Kevin Quinn, but by the time he stumbles across to Wohl’s, he’ll be Fred C. Dobbs for sure, all alone and thousands of miles from anybody who loves him — assuming anybody does — hollow-eyed, stubbled, footsore, and lip-blistered, muttering to the first person he sees, “Can ya stake a fellow American down on his luck?” His stomach only clenches tighter when Claudia’s truck rolls to a stop in the emptiest portion of the lot, equidistant from Wohl’s and the shops on the right.

“Last Call’s just around the corner,” she says, and he realizes she’s being polite, leaving the choice to him, but it feels as if she’s leaving him to die. He’s afraid he’s going to beg her not to abandon him, that she’s going to have to get out of the truck herself and drag him out into the heat as he clings to the headrest for dear life, leaving long, desperate fingernail scratches in the upholstery. He turns to her, his mouth dry again.

“He’s wrong,” he says, and when she looks at him quizzically, he adds, “Your father. I’ll bet you’re a fantastic surgeon.”

She blinks at him, momentarily speechless. He shrugs, but makes no effort to get out of the truck.

“Who needs another nurse?” he says. “World’s lousy with nurses.”

She gives a harsh bark of a laugh. “Not really, but thank you.”

“Thank you. For everything.” He hugs the jacket to his chest, gestures weakly at his knee. “I feel better already.”

“Good.”

As he watches her sidelong, desperately trying to think of something else to say, she shifts her focus rather meaningfully toward the department store. No doubt she’s wondering what he’s doing, why he’s postponing their parting, and he can’t decide if he wants her to misunderstand — wants her, in other words, to think it has something to do with her and what passed between them — or if he wants her to understand the truth, that he simply doesn’t want to be left to fend for himself in this empty parking lot under a semiforeign sun, semisunstroked and wearing semitattered clothes, not knowing a soul for miles in any direction, left alone to think only of all the frustrations and disappointments that have led him here, to this barren place. Either way, he realizes, he’s going to seem pathetic to a woman like Dr. Barrientos, and at last, like a dying prospector accepting his fate in that last euphoric moment before the sun kills him, he starts fumbling — for the seat belt release, for the door handle, for something to say that will leave a better impression than he has so far. He’s got the belt unlatched somehow and is disentangling his right arm, and then he cracks the door and lets in the heat, and as he nudges the panel with his injured knee, pushing the door wider, he hears her say, “Everybody.”