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“Good luck, Josh. You should try getting a better job. She’s very expensive.”
As I turn around to walk back to the table, I see Dennis staring at me, confused. Deborah has returned, and she is obviously alarmed. I walk right up to her and cup her elbows in my hands, drawing her to me so I can kiss the top of her hair.
“Give her anything she wants, Dennis. Put it on my bill. Josh, too. I hope he is not allergic to oysters or anything.”
Her eyes are wide with alarm. “Clay? What are you talking about? What’s going on?”
“Oh, here’s cab fare,” I smile, dropping a hundred-dollar bill on the table before turning away. “I’ll have the black card canceled in a few moments. You can keep the dresses.”
As I return to the front door, the maître d’ gestures frantically toward the valet. Through some mysterious telepathic communication, he seems completely prepared to handle everything I need.
The ring still burns in my pocket as I slip back behind the wheel of the Jag. As I roll back out onto the dark, country road, I hit the gas hard and just let the engine roar like it’s supposed to.
Chapter 8
Penny
Once I get to the St. Louis airport, I can already feel the air is different. I’m back in middle America. Back in the heartland, as they say. My “home.”
It kind of makes me shiver.
The lady at the car rental counter is uncomfortable in her bright yellow uniform, I can tell. She pops her gum from between her molars as she unfolds a map in a practiced way and circles a few things with her pen, drawing lines between them with way too much pressure. After I sign the rental agreement, she gives me a prepackaged smile and gestures toward the parking lot, telling me to pass the competing rental car signs until I get to the one where my car will be.
I don’t travel very often, but this all seems sort of familiar. I’ve been up and down the East Coast for work, usually within a few hours. Usually with Wanda, I just realized. She’s like my better half, probably the kind of woman I imagine I am when I’m not being pushed around by my boss or Ethan’s teachers or life in general. Wanda doesn’t take any crap from anybody. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I always think that is me, too.
It’s late, and it’s still Friday. I activate the GPS instructions with my thumb and follow the handy dashboard screen to the highway that will lead me back to Beaumont, Illinois. Home of Justice College and the Kirkman School of Management. Or, it’s probably more precise to say Beaumont is Justice College. I don’t think the town would exist if the college didn’t.
The pit of my stomach is all knotted and tense, getting worse with every passing mile. I open the window to inhale the misty farm and asphalt smells of the long stretch of highway between here and there. Unlike the East Coast, the landscape here is really flat, so flat I could probably see Beaumont on the horizon if I squinted.
I really don’t want to do this. It seems incredibly pointless. If Nathan hadn’t been such a complete jackass to me today, I’m sure I could have withstood Wanda’s peer pressure. But now I am thinking this is kind of a vacation. And I deserve a vacation.
Besides, I already paid for it. It’s not like I have limitless vacation funds rolling around my bank account.
Which reminds me, I should probably feel bad about that too. I’m about to see a bunch of people I knew from fifteen years ago, when we had no idea how everything would turn out. Some of them are probably rich. Some of them are probably married lottery winners with new ti
ts and mutual funds and extra cars that they keep in their third and fourth garages just for fun.
And here I come: single mother with a two-bedroom house, nonexistent love life, and a frustratingly dead-end career.
At least I got tits, I remind myself. After I had Ethan, I got to keep the maternity boobs indefinitely. So that’s nice.
Just smile and nod, I tell myself. People only want to talk about themselves anyway. If anybody asks, I can lie. Or I can change the subject back to them. That always works.
I have used that trick at least a thousand times. It’s one of the reasons I’m so successful at my job, though you wouldn’t know it if you talked to Nathan. People like me because they can brag to me. I’m interested. Or at least I pretend to be interested. I make a safe space for them to talk about how great they are. Really can’t go wrong with that.
The hazy smudge on the horizon tells me that yes, I am getting closer to Beaumont. Somewhere along here there’s supposed to be a Motel 6 coming up. I have a reservation. Yes, a reservation in a Motel 6, which strikes me as funny somehow. Motel 6 seems like the sort of thing you just pop into when you’ve had too much to drink after line dancing way out in the boonies. Like, who goes to Motel 6 on purpose?
This girl, that’s who. The kind of girl who has a coupon, that’s who.
Finally I do see the yellow sign for the motel rising high in the air. There is a truck stop sign just below it and the golden arches of a McDonald’s, which makes my stomach grumble. It’s late. Too late for French fries, I am sure.
On the other side, I spot a billboard for Crosswind Estates, which is a surprise. After all this time? My mom mentioned it right after I graduated, because it was an ambitious project that took a lot of legwork with the county and no less than six farmers’ land. One of those farmers was a good friend of my mom, and she had all kinds of gripes about the entire process. In the end, she did decide to sell her land, but she got an extra 10 percent just for being a pain in the ass. That’s an important lesson, my mom had told me at the time. Don’t be afraid to ask for what you really want.
On a whim, instead of turning left to get to Motel 6 and the McDonald’s French fries that certainly await me, I turn right toward the development. Almost immediately the road is plunged into darkness. It is still very much a farm road, with ditches on either side and gravel shoulders. No lights, except the light reflecting off the rolling mist on the fallow fields.
Clicking on my brights—which takes a few tries, since I don’t even know where they are on this car—I squint through the windshield and slow down dramatically. The last thing I want to do is hit a deer out in the middle of nowhere after I just promised the rental car company to donate an internal organ if I should bring it back with a scratch on it.
It seems weird that there is not a development here, but eventually I roll up on the rather magnificent brick arch over half the entrance. Not the whole way, just the half that doesn’t face the highway traffic, strangely enough. Kind of a lonely metaphor, having the Crosswind Estates sign pointing way out to miles and miles of farm fields, never seeing the traffic from the highway that won’t go here.
