Leisure Auto Sales and Leasing of St. Louis County was one of those places like the St. Louis Country Club or Creston School, places where Jerry felt judged harshly for having slid so far economically from the lofty perch he was born on. He felt that way even dealing with people who didn’t know and probably wouldn’t care about his precarious situation. He dreaded the reaction of the sales rep, an inveterate snob named Wesley Brickell who owned a good chunk of the dealership; he’d already sneered eight months ago when Jerry downgraded from an LX to an NX. At any rate Jerry thought he’d detected a sneer.
“I need out of my lease.”
“Swapping up or down?”
“Out. I’m going through a rough patch.” His throat tightened just admitting it.
“Listen, we can work something out.” He got up from his desk and crossed around to where Jerry sat, placed a consoling hand on his shoulder. “It can’t be that bad. Why don’t we get you into something with a lower monthly?”
He shook his head. “I really need to get out from under it.”
“Jer, I want to help out any way I can. My dad and yours were friends for decades.”
This wasn’t quite true. Their dads had been coevals and social peers, but his own dad didn’t really have friends so to speak, spending all his time and energy on his oddball, solitary hobbies. “I appreciate it, Wes, but I just want out.”
Wes’s expression took on a harder tone. “There’s a penalty for breaking the lease. Big chunk of your deposit.”
“I know.” He was choking again, his voice catching shamefully. “I was hoping you could cut me a break.”
“I’ll see what I can come up with.” Wes sat back down again. “Let me ask Pete Maloney what I can do.”
“Jesus, the whole ‘let me ask my manager’ routine? I thought you owned the place.”
Wes frowned. “I have partners. And this will have to come out of my end.”
He sat there shrinking into the deep leather chair as Wes detailed his woes over the phone to Pete Maloney, who’d been a couple of years behind him at Creston. Pete had been a football player, not quite a star but good enough to make him a popular kid, and he’d gone on to several careers, each one a little more successful than the previous. He was still married to his first wife and had four kids, all of them at college or recently graduated. He was living exactly the life everyone had expected Jerry to live, and now he sat on the other end of the line listening to the broad outlines of Jerry’s ignominious failure.
At seven that night he was behind the wheel of a 1999 Olds Cutlass that belonged to his mother, sailing east on 64. He’d taken a bath on the penalty, but he was out from under the fucking onerous monthly payments, and his stress level was so close to normal now that he was sailing past other drivers without even cursing them under his breath. He thought he could actually feel his lowered blood pressure in his scalp.
His problem at the moment was that, driving the Cutlass, he couldn’t show up at any of his usual watering holes without inviting questions, or worse, pity, from his cronies. Not that he had many left.
But he hadn’t been to the Loop in a while, and though surely the offerings would have changed up there would still be bars. He turned off Skinker and onto Delmar and immediately began rumbling on some goddamned obstacle or another. It was darker than he’d realized, and when he put his headlights on, he saw that he was driving on railroad tracks. That fucking trolley. Last time he’d been down here, it was still talk; now the tracks were laid, fucking up suspensions and wrecking bicycles. All for an exercise in nostalgia that didn’t even go anywhere, just up and down the street for show.
Parking was scarce, but on a hunch he turned into the movie theater lot and grabbed a space just as it opened up. After a minute standing at the solar-powered meter that served the whole lot, trying in vain to figure out its interface, he gave up, figuring he could afford to risk a fifteen-dollar parking ticket. He was broke, but he wasn’t destitute yet. Directly across the street was the site of one of his old favorite taverns, replaced by something cleaner and probably nicer, and instead of mourning the old place he jaywalked straight over to the replacement.
The crowd was a mix of young and old, and he didn’t see anyone he knew. He took a seat at the bar and watched a Cardinals game. It was the first in a long time he’d paid any attention to, and he wondered how his once-intense interest in baseball had faded. He hadn’t been particularly conscious of it as it happened, but one year as the playoffs neared, he realized he hadn’t been to a single game. Now he didn’t even watch them on TV, barely glancing at the standings in the Post-Dispatch unless they were at the top of the division and headed for the post-season.
He was on his third Bushmills when he saw Mrs. Kimball, whatever her first name was, seated at a table with two other women about her own age. He looked away, not really in the mood to talk to strangers, but at a second glance he recognized one of her companions as a social studies teacher he’d gone out with a few times before marrying Valerie. It couldn’t hurt to stop over and say hello.
What was Mrs. Kimball’s first name? He must have heard it when he met her. For that matter, what was the social studies teacher’s name? He remembered that her canary’s name was Petey, and he remembered her address, at least the one she’d had when they dated, but the first and last name remained buried amid the detritus and trivia of his memory banks.
He rose and approached their table with an ambitiously friendly grin. They all stopped talking and looked up at him, slightly puzzled. “Sorry,” he said to Mrs. Kimball. “We met at the auction. Your husband’s director of development, right?”
“Oh,” she said. “Trey and Belinda’s friend. With the uncle in California.”
“Jerry Haskill,” the social studies teacher said, her voice and expression carefully neutral.
He extended his hand, suddenly aware that this was not proper protocol for greeting someone with whom you’d had intimate physical contact. “It’s nice to see you.”
She took his hand, smirking, gave it a slight shake and then withdrew her own.
“Wells was just talking about your uncle yesterday,” Mrs. Kimball said. “He found an article in Connoisseurship Magazine about Kushik.”
“Who?”
“The painting your uncle’s planning on gifting to the school.”
“What’s his name again?” He really didn’t want to be reminded about his uncle’s plans to give the school money, and made a mental note to call the sleazebag lawyer in the morning to see if together they could forestall any rewriting of the old boy’s will. Surely Rigby objected to the idea as much as he did.
“Kushik.”
The third woman looked up at Jerry as though something had just surprised her. “Wait a minute, Bar, is this the Jerry you went out with before Trevor?”
Bar! The social studies teacher’s name was Barbara. She was suppressing a laugh, but she nodded, and the third woman snorted and then guffawed, leaving Mrs. Kimball embarrassed. “I’ll be sure to tell Wells that I saw you,” she said, looking askance at her friends.
Jerry nodded and, sensing that a second chance with Bar was not in the offing, excused himself and returned to his stool, watching the three women in the mirror. Bar and the third woman were stifling giggles as they told Mrs. Kimball tales of some sort. She reacted with wide-eyed disbelief at whatever they were telling her, occasionally cracking up herself, covering her mouth with her hands and, once, glancing into the mirror and for the briefest of seconds meeting his gaze before looking down.
In the morning, he called Rigby’s office and got the sour-voiced old woman who worked for him. “He’s not here. I’ll leave him a message, but I can’t tell you when he’ll get back to you. He’s not in the office much these days.”
“It’s important.”
“Listen, hon, I’m sure it is. I spend all day trying to get him to pay attention to important things, but his idea of important doesn’t necessarily mesh with yours or mine, if you know what I mean.”
He had been dealing with Rigby long enough to know this. “Okay, can you tell him I need to talk to him? And it’s urgent?”
“I’ll put you on his call list.”
After hanging up, he made himself a third cup of coffee and turned the TV on. He struggled with the remote’s confusing new interface until he got to the Channel Guide and found, to his delight, that an episode of High Cimarron had started. He settled back and comforted himself with the notion that each rerun brought his uncle a little bit more money that would one day be his, unless it went to that goddamn school.