I don’t know how long the police car had been following us. I had just turned off the freeway and we were driving east on Thirty-sixth when I finally noticed it. I was pretty sure I hadn’t done anything wrong, but he was right behind me. I hoped I didn’t have a burned-out taillight or anything.
I said to Jen, “Don’t look, but there’s a police car behind us.”
She turned and looked. “Omigod,” she said.
“I said, don’t look.”
She turned back around and slumped low in her seat. “Omigod,” she said.
I couldn’t keep my eyes off the rearview mirror. Waiting for his lights to start flashing. We were coming up to the intersection by Cub Foods when the traffic light turned yellow. I had enough time to make it through the light. The police car behind me had to stop. I was just starting to breathe normally when I saw his lights begin to flash, and he drove right through the red light and came after us.
I turned left at the first side street and punched it.
Some people think Cadillacs are grandma-grandpa cars, but the Hallsteds’ Cadillac took off so fast my head slammed back into the headrest. Jen let out a shriek. I made a screeching right turn at the end of the block just as the police car turned off Thirty-sixth, then another quick right into an alley and I punched it again. I wasn’t looking at the speedometer but Jen told me later we were going seventy miles an hour down that alley. When we got to the end I had to slam on the brakes. I thought the car was going to roll over when I skidded out onto Thirty-sixth and almost smashed into a minivan. There was no sign of the cop. I made a quick left onto Regent and just kept going straight, blowing through three stop signs without even slowing down, until I was sure we’d lost him.
Have I mentioned that Jen was screaming in my ear the whole time?
In movies, stealing cars looks very dramatic and exciting with lots of high-speed chases and screeching tires, but in real life it is something that happens quickly and quietly and mostly nobody notices except that the car is gone. But sometimes even the most careful car thieves must go to extreme measures to get away from the police. It is this possibility that makes auto theft so exciting.
We left the car in the parking lot of a dental clinic—not the one I go to. Jen only had to walk a few blocks to get home. I had to walk almost a mile, and when I got there with my right ear still ringing from her screaming, I saw a cop car at the end of the block, sitting at the curb with the lights off. He must have gotten the license number off the Hallsteds’ Cadillac and was watching their house. I stood behind the Frankels’ garden shed to see what he was going to do. After about twenty minutes, he turned on his headlights and pulled up in front of the Hallsteds’ and got out and rang their bell. Then he went back to his car and sat there for a few more minutes before driving away.
I sneaked back into the Hallsteds’ and put the car key back in the drawer. It was four-thirty by the time I crawled into bed. Four hours later my mom woke me up to go to our mother-daughter Pilates class.
Our Pilates instructor was a woman named Pilar who was, I think, half Mexican and half android from the future. No matter what she did—even some impossible-to-look-good-doing-it thing like scratching her butt—she did it gracefully. Also she was seventy years old and looked forty. My mom was thirty-nine years old and looked twenty-nine, so I am expecting to age gracefully as well. Pilates is supposed to help because even if you get all wrinkly or flabby or bald you can still stand up straight and do things like bend over to pick up a penny, even though it isn’t worth it for just one penny. Pilar could practically make that penny jump off the floor into her hand. Pilates is all about knowing where your center is.
The class was my mom’s idea, of course—once again, she’d read a book or article about successful parenting that said mother-daughter activities produced healthy bonding. I’m not making fun of my mom. She means well, and we both like the Pilates class. It gives us a few minutes to talk on the way there and back, but we don’t have to talk at all during the class. Pilar had some good ideas too, like that it helps to visualize an action before trying to do it. You imagine yourself bending like a pretzel and pretty soon you can practically tie yourself in a knot. She liked to say, “Head,” pointing at her head, “then core,” pointing at her center.
That day my mom let me drive home. I backed out of the parking stall, pulled out onto the street, and brought the car smoothly up to precisely thirty miles per hour.
“You’re getting very good,” she said.
“I’ve been practicing.”
“You have? With Dad?”
“In my head,” I said. “Driving the car in my head. Just like Pilates.”
Jen had left me a couple texts I ignored, being somewhat perturbed at her for a number of reasons that I hadn’t had time to sort out yet, mostly having to do with her going to Taylors Falls with Jim Vail and then making me risk going to jail to come get her and then screaming in my ear so loud my right ear rang for hours. I was stewing over that instead of reading while slumped in the big chair in the TV room with Moby-Dick in my lap (Pilar would have shaken her head gracefully and told me to align my neck and shoulders) when my mom summoned me to assist in her latest culinary effort by going to Byerly’s for some capers.
“The little tiny ones,” she said, handing me a five-dollar bill. “The ones about the size of a peppercorn.”
“Can I take the car?”
“Ha-ha. No.”
“I’ll be super-careful. It’s only six blocks.”
“All the more reason to walk,” she said.
“What if they cost more than five dollars?”
She rolled her eyes, then took her five back and gave me a twenty.
“I’ll expect change,” she said.
I noticed as I was leaving that there was a white card stuck on the Hallsteds’ front door. I walked over and looked at it. It was a small envelope from the police department. I put it in my pocket to give to my dad later.
After buying a jar of capers for $4.65, I walked over to Charlie Bean’s and ordered a Phrap-o-chino. I figured it might power me through another twenty pages of Moby-Dick. My plans for Ishmael, however, were interrupted by one Deke Moffet, the most disreputable member of the soon-to-be senior class. Except he wasn’t really a member anymore. He’d dropped out last spring.
“Hey, did you pay for that drink or steal it?” he asked.
Deke was sitting at a table with Marshall Cassidy, the second-most-disreputable member of the soon-to-be senior class. I had always made it a point to never associate with either of them, but it wasn’t like me to ignore someone who had spoken to me.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
Deke and Marshall were your standard-issue middleclass suburban juvenile delinquents—not recently shaven, longish hair, rock ‘n’ roll T-shirts, jeans with possibly authentic rips and stains, and a few hunks of cheap silver jewelry in their ears and probably elsewhere. Deke was kind of muscley and not bad-looking, and Marshall was thin and hard and nervous like a whippet. They weren’t exactly scary unless you were scared of teens in general, but you wouldn’t want either of them to watch your purse while you went for a swim.
Deke looked at Marshall and they both started laughing.
That was when I should have walked away. Instead, I asked them what was so funny.
“It’s just you don’t look like a booster,” Deke said. “You look more like a Young Republican.”
“Church-choir girl,” Marshall added.
“What’s a booster?” I asked.
“You know—booster,” Deke said, like if he kept repeating it, it might mean something to me. When I still didn’t catch on, he said, “Somebody who steals cars.”
“You’re crazy,” I said, and turned away so they couldn’t see my face turn red.
Deke called after me, “If you ever want to pick up a little extra money, you just let me know.”
I walked home clutching the jar of capers in one hand and my Phrap-o-chino in the other, trying to figure out what to do. Only two people besides me knew about me stealing cars: Jen and Will. One of them had to have told Deke. And I’d have bet my life it wasn’t Will, because Will hated Deke Moffet almost as much as he hated Alton Wright.
Which meant I was going to have to strangle Jen.
It turned out that capers are little green pickled flower buds that are an essential ingredient in something called veal piccata, which is thin slices of teenage cow sautéed and served with a lemon-caper sauce and pasta on the side. My dad went crazy over it. He is always quite good at offering praise. Even when dinner is not so good, he finds something nice to say. As for me, I did not enjoy it much. Too sour. I don’t think the capers helped, and neither did the subject of Elwin Carl Dandridge, which my dad was completely obsessed with and couldn’t stop talking about even at the dinner table. My mom was wearing her adoring-wife face, smiling between tiny bites of lemony, capery veal.
The judge in the Dandridge case had ruled that the bad DNA result (since they supposedly had found Dandridge’s DNA on a victim he supposedly couldn’t possibly have raped because he had been watching baseball at a gay bar at the time) was not sufficient cause to rule out the DNA evidence from the other rapes. My dad was pretty peeved—he said some nasty things about the judge—but he’d also come up with a new angle on the whole deal. He’d found out that Elwin Carl Dandridge had a twin brother who lived in Shakopee, just twenty miles away. Even better, the brother had a record for sexual harassment.
Maybe you don’t know this, but identical twins have identical DNA.
“How come it took you so long to find out he had a twin?” I asked.
“They were both adopted. By different families.” He cut a wedge of veal and coaxed a few capers onto it with the tip of his knife. “Even Dandridge didn’t know he had a twin until two years ago—they were separated at birth.” He put the capery veal into his mouth.
“Does this mean that raping is genetic?” I asked.
“Oh, Kelleigh!” said my mother. “Sexual harassment is not rape.”
“This is absolutely delicious, Annie,” my father said.
“If they’re both perverts and they’re twins, doesn’t that mean something?” I asked.
“Not necessarily. It would certainly not be something I’d bring up in court. John Britton—the twin—drives a delivery van, so he drives all over town. He only has a solid alibi for one of the rapes.”
“Do you think he did it?” I asked. “The twin?”
My dad shrugged. “The fact that a twin exists casts doubt on Dandridge’s guilt.” He cut another piece of veal. I noticed that he always cut triangles, whereas my mother cut her veal into rectangles. I looked at my own plate and wondered how I cut the meat. I could not remember. I picked up my knife and fork and pushed the tines of the fork into the thin slice of teenage cow and sawed at it with the knife, detaching a strip of meat. I guess I’m a strip cutter. I scraped off the lemon sauce and the capers and put it into my mouth and chewed. I wondered if I had a twin. I wondered if she was color-blind. Maybe I was secretly adopted and I had a twin who was out there stealing cars—that is, if criminal behavior, unlike meat cutting, was genetic.
When I called her after dinner, Jen swore she never said a word to anybody about me stealing cars. I couldn’t see her face, but usually I could tell if Jen was lying, which she does sometimes. From the sound of her voice, I didn’t think she was lying this time.
“By the way,” I said, “the police were waiting at the Hallsteds’ when I got home last night.”
I could hear her suck her breath in.
“They left a note on the door,” I said.
“What did you do?”
“I gave the note to my dad.”
“What did he do?”
“He just read it and didn’t say anything. I think he doesn’t want to worry me. You know, about there being dangerous criminals in the neighborhood. So you’re sure you didn’t say anything to anybody?”
“No!”
Which left Will.
I rehearsed calling up Will and accusing him of telling Deke Moffet that I was a car thief. It didn’t play. For one thing, Will had despised Deke Moffet ever since Deke pantsed him in seventh grade right in the school foyer with like a million people watching. And even if he hadn’t hated Deke, I just couldn’t see Will blabbing to anybody.
I dialed his cell number.
“Hey,” he answered.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Not much.”
“My dad’s figured out a new way to get his pet rapist back on the street.”
“Cool.”
This was why I didn’t call Will on the phone very often.
I said, “So…have you talked to Deke Moffet lately?”
“Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know. Have you?”
“No. Why?”
“I just thought you might have mentioned something to somebody about Alton’s Hummer.”
“Nope.”
“You haven’t said anything to anybody?”
“Nope.”
I believed him. Unlike Jen, Will Ford did not lie.
I said, “I think Deke knows we did it.” I put the we in there mostly because I didn’t want to be alone, although for all I knew the car theft that Deke had found out about could have been the Nissan or the Cadillac. Or he might even have seen me that night driving around in my dad’s Lexus.
Will said, “That’s not good.”
The next day I saw Marshall at Charlie Bean’s again. He looked all pale and red-eyed and jerky, like he was on his hundredth cup of espresso. He was playing a game on his cell phone, moving these little blocks around. His fingernails were gnawed to the bleeding point. It made me all squeamy inside to look at him.
I asked him why he and Deke thought I was a car thief.
“Deke said you deep-sixed Wright’s Hummer,” he said, not looking up from his game.
Marshall shrugged, intent on his game.
“Why would he say that?”
“Ask him. Shit!” He slammed his palm down on the table. “Level seven!”
Like I would know what he was talking about.
“Where can I find him?” I asked.
Marshall shrugged again, then said, “I bet you could catch him at the mall. Food court.” He grinned, showing me his scummy teeth. “Look around, you’ll spot him.”
Marshall was right. Deke was sitting at one of the bench tables in the food court with a slice of sausage pizza and a Red Bull. I walked up just as he took an enormous bite.
“Hey, if it isn’t the booster girl,” he said, not bothering to chew and swallow first. “I hear you been stalking me.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Marsh called and warned me,” he said.
I sat down across from him.
“So what’s up?” he asked.
“I want to know what makes you think I stole a car.”
I waited as he finished his slice and washed it down with Red Bull. He was enjoying himself.
“I saw you,” he said.
I waited some more.
“I couldn’t believe it. Alton Wright’s Hummer, that was so cool.”
“You saw?”
“I was sitting right across the Pit, having a smoke. I see you and that scrawny what’s-his-name get out of the Hummer and, y’know, I was thinking I had me some good weed, but not hallucinating good, and then you went and sank yourself. Laughed my ass off. Surprised you guys didn’t hear me.”
“I was sort of busy trying not to drown.”
“Yeah, no shit.”
We sat for a few seconds without talking, me trying to figure out how to keep Deke from telling everybody what he’d seen, and worrying about it getting back to Alton Wright.
Deke said, “I got busted for auto theft last year, y’know.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. That’s how come you didn’t see me around school.” He leaned toward me and lowered his voice. “Actually, me and Marsh, we were going for fifty, like in Gone in Sixty Seconds. You ever see that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It was stupid.”
“No shit. But it was cool too. Anyway, Marsh and me got cracked on number fourteen. Both of us.”
“You stole fourteen cars?”
He put his hand over his heart. “I swear. Only I had to give it up.”
I waited.
“On account of I just turned eighteen. I got off with sixty days in juvie, plus probation, which I’m still on. That’s how come I’m working here now. Got to stay employed, be a productive member of society. I get nailed again, I’m screwed.” He stood up. “I’m going for another slice. Want one?”
“I’ll take a Coke,” I said. I watched him saunter over to the Sbarro counter, walking like he knew I was watching him, which I was. I may not have mentioned that despite his ridiculous name and tough-guy attitude and retro-thug clothing, Deke was kind of okay-looking. Not that I was interested, but at least it wasn’t hard to look at him like it was with Marsh and a lot of other guys. Plus I wanted to know more about the car thing. I knew Deke had been in trouble the year before, but I hadn’t realized it was for auto theft. I’d figured it was more like vandalism or stealing garden gnomes. Knowing that he was a genuine criminal type made me trust him more. I know that sounds stupid, but I figured if he was a career criminal he’d be less likely to rat me out to Alton Wright or the police.
When he returned with my Coke and another slice for himself, I asked him straight out, “You aren’t going to say anything to Alton about me and his Hummer, are you?”
“Alton Wright is a rich piece of shit.” He looked me in the eye then, completely serious. “I think you should steal his new FJ and see if it floats.”
It wasn’t exactly I-swear-on-all-that-is-holy-I-will-never-tell, but it was something, his letting me know we were on the same team.
I felt myself relax, just a little.
He said, “Y’know, what I said yesterday? I was serious. About making some money?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Look, you get caught doing something when you’re underage, they don’t do shit.”
“They locked you up for two months.”
“Yeah, but I already had a record. Plus, you’re a girl. Girls always get off easy.”
I sat back and crossed my arms and looked at him. “You think I should become a professional car thief?”
“I’m just saying you could make some money if you wanted. I still got the connections. I just can’t get caught behind the wheel. I—” He sat up straight. “Shit, my break’s been over for like three minutes.” He stood up and picked up an apron he’d been sitting on and a crushed paper cap. He punched the cap back into shape. Printed on the front were the words WOK ON THE WILD SIDE. With an embarrassed smile and a shrug, he put the cap on his head and tied on the apron. “Probation,” he said, and walked quickly across the food court to Wing’s Wild Wok.
Two things I want to make clear. I did not have any sort of a thing for Deke Moffet. His first and last names alone were enough to rule that out.
The other thing is that I was not seriously considering taking up car theft as a part-time job. The fact that I had—technically—stolen four cars recently was purely a matter of irresistible opportunity, dire necessity, or peer pressure. I mean, twice it hadn’t even been my idea. So the thought that I would perform grand theft auto for money was completely ridiculous.
But I have to admit I was kind of flattered that he thought I could do it.
As soon as I got outside the mall, Deke Moffet left my mind and was replaced by Jim Vail. I kept thinking how if my grandmother hadn’t died, I would have been the one up in Taylors Falls fighting off his drunken advances. Or maybe if it had been me, Jim wouldn’t have gotten so drunk. Or maybe I wouldn’t have fought him off. The point being that if it had been me instead of Jen, things would probably have gone differently. And if they hadn’t—if it had been me stuck in Taylors Falls in the middle of the night and I’d called Jen all teary and desperate—there’s no way she would have stolen a car to come get me. And now, since Jim had abandoned her in the wilderness, there was no way I, her best friend, could have anything to do with him, which made me kind of mad.
As I waited for the bus to pick me up from the mall, I let my righteous anger build—not against Jim, but against Jen. I decided she was out to ruin my life, and I decided to confront her. By the time the bus arrived, I had rehearsed several versions of a conversation that would cause Jen to sob hysterically and beg my forgiveness. I imagined going to her house and barging into her room and blasting her with accusations.
Instead, I went over to Will’s.
Will was the middle kid of five, with two older sisters and two younger brothers. His grandmother lived with them too, so there were like eight people in this little three-bedroom rambler. Will lived in the basement, but when I got there he was out in the backyard kicking a soccer ball with his brother Bobby.
“Hey,” Will said when he saw me. He kicked the ball my way. I made a passable block and tried to kick it to Bobby, but I was off by about ten feet.
“Sorry,” I called after him as he chased down the ball.
“‘Sup?” Will asked.
Bobby kicked the ball to Will, who grabbed it out of the air with his hands and held on to it. I could see the disappointment on Bobby’s face. My arrival had interrupted his quality time with big brother.
“I talked to Deke,” I said.
Will looked away. I wondered what it was like for a boy to get pantsed in public.
I went on. “He was there at the Pit that night, smoking dope and watching us almost get drowned. That’s how he knew. But I don’t think he’s going to tell anybody. He doesn’t like Alton much either.”
“He’s such a jerk,” Will said.
I didn’t know if he was talking about Deke or Alton. Probably both. I wanted to tell Will about Deke getting caught stealing his fourteenth car and about him suggesting that I get into the auto theft business, but I didn’t because Deke and I had this unspoken agreement now. We were criminals together, and even though Will had been in on the Hummer thing, it just wasn’t the same.
I said, “I’m mad at Jen.”
That caught him by surprise. “Why?”
I realized then that I couldn’t really talk about that either, because I couldn’t tell my sort-of boyfriend Will about Jim Vail, and I also couldn’t tell him about stealing the Hallsteds’ Cadillac, because that would lead right back to why Jen was stuck in Taylors Falls in the middle of the night. Besides, I did not want Will to think of me as a car thief any more than he already did.
“It’s a girl thing,” I told him.
“Jen’s nice,” Will said.
“I know. I’m just being a bitch.” I shrugged. “You find a dead rat yet?”
“Huh?”
“You know. To hide in Alton’s new car.”
“I bet you could find one over by the grain elevators. They must have lots of rats. I think they poison them.”
“I’m not really so into the rat thing anymore. Even if I did it, it wouldn’t change anything. Alton would still be an ass.”
“You sound like my mom.”
“Your mom’s nice.”
It was true. My mom is nice.
How nice my mom is:
There’s more, but you get the idea. My mother has dedicated her life to being a nice person. Now, you might be thinking that she must have a not-nice side, but you would be wrong. All of my mother’s sides are nice, which puts a lot of pressure on a person like me, who can be sort of nasty, even to her friends.
I did not call Jen back for two days, even though she kept texting me. That might seem cruel, but the thing was, I knew if I talked to her I’d say something really nasty. But after two days I was feeling guilty for being mad at her so I called her and said (like nothing was ever wrong), “Let’s go check out the shoe situation at DSW.” Jen is crazy for shoes.
“How come you haven’t called me?” she whined.
I told her my phone was messed up. I’m pretty sure she knew I was lying.
Designer Shoe Warehouse, by the way, is one of the worst places to buy shoes. They mostly deal in shoes nobody bought at full price because they’re ugly. But it is also the very best place to buy shoes, because it’s self-service and you can try on a hundred pairs and nobody makes you feel guilty for trying on too-small sizes, or not buying anything, or not putting socks on, and it’s mostly free because you hardly ever find anything you want to buy. So in a way it’s the perfect shoe-shopping experience if you don’t actually need new shoes.
Will thinks it’s ridiculous that Jen and I like to shop when we are not planning to buy anything. He calls it “air shopping.” But what he doesn’t get is that we just might buy something—and that’s what keeps it interesting. Every now and then DSW will have the perfect pair of shoes in the right size and color and price. I bought my high-heeled strappies there. If I ever go to a formal I will have to learn how to walk in them.
Jen said she was looking for some boots for fall.
“Like elf boots,” she said.
I knew exactly what she meant: pointy toes, soft floppy leather around the ankles, low heels, but not too low. I figured her chances of finding such a thing at DSW were about as good as her chances of riding her bicycle to the moon. But like I said before, that was just fine.
Me, I was hoping to find some black suede faux-athletic shoes, preferably with no stripes. Not likely, but then I didn’t have any money anyway, having invested heavily in important items such as Phrap-o-chinos, fast food, and cell phone bills.
I could hardly imagine how I’d ever be able to afford a car. I mean, a car of my own.
How I get money: My father gives it to me.
He gives me an allowance of two hundred dollars a month, which is not as much as it seems like because half of it goes into a savings account for college. It used to be that all my money went into the college savings account. My parents opened it when I was practically a baby and put in a hundred dollars a month. When I was thirteen and started needing money desperately, my dad agreed to increase his contribution to my future. I now have more than twenty thousand dollars I can’t touch and a hundred bucks a month that I usually spend in like five days.
I had made several attempts to negotiate my allowance upward. I even threatened to get a part-time job, which would probably interfere with my schoolwork. My dad called my bluff and said he thought it was a good idea, so I went out and applied for jobs at Macy’s, Starbucks, and Jamba Juice. Macy’s and Starbucks said no. The guy at Jamba Juice offered me a job, but the hours sucked and it was very minimum-wageish, so I decided to make do with my hundred a month plus the birthday money I always got from Grandpa John and a few other little driblets of cash like from selling my old bicycle to Jamie Weiss and emergency babysitting for my aunt Tessa’s two preschoolers, which was not worth the money but I kind of had to do it.
Basically I was trying to live on about fifteen hundred dollars a year, which is pretty pathetic. It made me wonder how much a good car thief made. I would have to ask Deke if I ever ran into him again. Just out of curiosity, of course.
The thing about shopping is that even if you shop with no intention of buying anything at all, it is nice to have money so that you know if you happen to come across some amazing bargain or the perfect pair of shoes, you can buy if you want. But with only three dollars in my purse, I was not having much fun at DSW.
Jen was trying on everything in the store. I hadn’t said anything to her about how I was mad at her because every time my mouth wanted to bring it up it sounded really lame. I mean, except for screaming in my ear she hadn’t actually done anything wrong. So I just moped around the store, trying on shoes I hated, and some I didn’t hate but couldn’t afford, while Jen went up and down the aisles as if she was training for the Olympics speed-shopping event.
And guess what. She found her elf boots. In the one-of-a-kind clearance racks. They were pearl gray, her third-favorite color. Marked down 70 percent to $38.99.
They fit her perfectly.
“It’s a miracle,” she said.
I was raging jealous, especially when she paid for them with her mom’s credit card. I might have said something nasty if I could have thought of anything, but I was rendered speechless by the unfairness of it all. Then Jen took me out to Sammy Wong’s for spring rolls and firecracker shrimp—also on her mom’s card. I couldn’t stay mad at her.
I am such a total bitch inside for some reason, even though mostly I don’t show it. But the things I think—sometimes I’m surprised they don’t just claw their way out through my skin.
Walking home from the bus stop, I saw Jim Vail. He was running down the sidewalk—running as in exercising—but he stopped when he saw it was me.
“Hey. Kelleigh Monahan,” he said, dripping sweat and trying to control his breathing.
“Hi,” I said. “How was Taylors Falls?”
“Fun!” He dragged a sweaty hand across his sweaty brow. “Only we lost Jen.” He laughed weakly. “I suppose you heard about that?”
“Yeah, I had to go pick her up.”
“Oh. So she’s okay and everything?” I couldn’t tell if he was embarrassed or not because he was already red in the face from running.
I was thinking, Why didn’t you call her to find out? But I didn’t say that. I didn’t really want him to call her, because if he was a nasty drunken almost-rapist I didn’t want him anywhere near my best friend…unless it had just been a misunderstanding and he was really a nice guy like I’d thought before. Then maybe I wanted him for myself. Someday.
“She’s fine,” I said.
“We’re selling the puppies this week,” he said. “You still want one?”
“Sure—what did you think? They’re worth four hundred bucks each.”
“I don’t think I can afford it,” I said. Not that it made any difference, since there was no way I could bring a dog home, but it bugged me that he didn’t offer to give me one for free, especially since I distinctly remembered him offering me one. At least I thought at the time that was what he meant. Maybe if his mom hadn’t yelled down the stairs the dog would have been for free. Even though there was no way I could have taken it.
“I think my dad would sell you Limpy for less.”
Limpy was the one with the crooked foot.
“No thank you,” I said.
I had been looking at the photo of my grandma Kate a lot. I tried to imagine Grandpa John holding the camera and saying “Smile!” But the girl in the photo had only a sleepy half smile. You could see a little of her teeth, bright white against her dark lips and tanned skin.
Her cutoff jeans were tight and frayed, and she had a pale L-shaped scar on her right thigh. Or it might have been a birthmark. Her halter top looked like a T-shirt that she had taken scissors to. Kate—her name had been Kate Unger back then—had probably left her home in Michigan wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and maybe a jacket, but by the time she met Grandpa John in Monterey she’d cut off and thrown away half her clothes. She had been just seventeen—I looked up her birth date and figured it out—seventeen years old on May 10, 1967. She’d taken off for California the summer after her junior year.
In the photo she looked much older than seventeen and very erotic, like maybe right after Grandpa John snapped the picture they’d had sex right there in the middle of the day on the beach.
The Volkswagen in the picture was faded green—or maybe pink, or pinkish green, if there is such a color—with a yellow hood. I wasn’t sure if the two-tone effect was intentional, or if it was a junkyard patch job, or even if it was their car. The words in the margin of the photo—Kate—Venice Beach—1967—were maddening in that they did not give the month. The photo could have been taken anytime after the Monterey Pop Festival, which was in June—I looked that up too. My dad was born April 17, 1968, so Kate must have gotten pregnant in July. But when exactly had the photo been taken?
It was driving me crazy.
I realized as I was dialing that I had never called Grandpa John on the phone before. I think that was because I was afraid Grandma Kate would answer and I’d have to listen to her raspy, whispery whining. I know that makes me a bad grandkid. I was so bad I was even a little bit glad she was gone. But I would have loved to have met the girl in the photo.
“Hello?” Grandpa John sounded angry.
“Grandpa? It’s me, Kelleigh.”
“Kelleigh!” His voice changed. “Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine. How are you?”
“Staying busy. That’s what they tell me I should be doing. I was just boxing up some of Kate’s clothes. I don’t suppose you’d be interested in going through them?”
“Uh, sure…” I imagined box after box of saggy oldlady clothes. And then I imagined a pair of cutoff denim shorts. She might have saved them. Grandma Kate had been a little pack-rattish. “Yeah, I’d like that.”
“I’ll set ’em aside for you. Anything you don’t want, which I imagine will be most of it, I’ll give to the church ladies for their sale. When are you coming up for a visit?”
“I don’t know. Dad’s been sort of busy trying to get this rapist out of jail.”
Grandpa John bellowed laughter. “Who’da thought a couple of peacenik hippies would end up raising a kid like that!”
For a second I wasn’t sure if he was talking about me or my dad; then I figured out that it was Grandpa John and Kate who were the “peacenik hippies.”
“You going to law school too, Kelleigh?”
“Actually, I’m thinking of becoming a criminal. To give the lawyers something to do.”
He laughed again.
“Hey, thanks for sending me that picture,” I said.
“Your grandmother would’ve wanted you to have it.”
I was holding the picture in my lap.
“What about you? Do you want me to scan it for you?”
“I have lots of other pictures,” he said.
“When was this one taken?” I asked.
“Nineteen sixty-seven.”
“I know, but what month?”
“Um, we were in L.A., so I guess it must have been summer. Maybe July? I think by August we were back in the Bay Area.”
“Was Grandma pregnant then? When you took the picture?”
It took him a few seconds to answer.
“I swear, the world went to hell the day we taught you kids to read a calendar.” He paused for a breath or two, then continued. “My guess is, it was right around that time. But we didn’t know it until later, of course. We were staying with this band up in San Francisco and she realized she was a month late.”
“So you got married?”
“Well, we waited a few months.”
“And lived happily ever after.”
“Yep. Why? You aren’t pregnant, are you?”
“Grandpa! No!” I felt my cheeks get hot.
“Good. You stay that way.”
Desperate for a change of subject, I said, “The Volkswagen in the photo—what color is it?”
“You’re the one looking at the photo, kiddo.”
“I’m color-blind,” I reminded him. Or maybe he never knew.
“Oh! Well, as I recall, it was faded-out red, with a yellow hood. At least that’s what Kate told me. I’m color-blind too, you know.”
“Was it yours or Grandma’s?”
He cleared his throat and chuckled. “Kate had the VW when I met her, but it belonged to this other guy she’d been with…” He trailed off the way adults do when they catch themselves talking to a kid like an adult.
I said, “Like, her boyfriend before you?”
“Something like that.” He chuckled again. “Crazy times. They’d split up just before I met her, and I guess—well, you knew your grandmother. She was feisty.”
I remembered her mostly as whiny. But I didn’t say that.
“I didn’t find out until later that she’d just gone and taken the guy’s car when they broke up. I didn’t know about it until he caught up with us in Santa Rosa and took it back.”
“Just that one time,” he said.
Most people think of car thieves as squinty-eyed young guys with tattoos and grease under their fingernails, but you never know who will steal a car.
The fact that auto thievery might be as genetic as color blindness was both disturbing and reassuring. I couldn’t resist asking my dad that night at dinner if he’d ever stolen a car.
He almost dropped his fork. “Have I ever what?” he said.
“You know, when you were young. During those wild years you never talk about.”
My mother stifled a laugh with her napkin.
“I had no wild years,” said my dad.
I looked at my mom, who shrugged and said, “It’s true.”
“I talked to Grandpa John this afternoon—he sent me that picture? Of Grandma standing in front of a VW?”
My dad nodded. “The one he kept on his desk.”
“Did you know she was pregnant then?”
He blinked. “I guess I never thought about it, but I suppose she was.”
“So Grandma and Grandpa had this wild hippie free-love thing going on, and you never got in trouble the whole time you were growing up?”
“Of course I got in trouble. But I certainly never stole a car!”
“Grandma did.”
“She did?” My mom had this quizzical smile. “Kate stole a car?”
“Just one,” I said. “That Volkswagen.”
My mom looked at my dad. “This is so much more interesting than talking about your rapist again, isn’t it, dear?”
In our house my dad was supposedly in charge. He earned most of the money and he was the biggest and hairiest, but in some ways my mother was even more in charge, like a farmer poking an ox with a stick to keep him headed in the right direction. Some days she poked harder than others.
“Don’t worry,” my dad said. “The Dandridge case is almost over. I’m going to plead him out. Turns out his brother is his fraternal twin, not identical, so the DNA evidence is back in play. And that photo of him in the bar with the baseball game? The game was taped. It turns out he was at the bar the night after the rape. Elwin Dandridge has been a real disappointment to me. But I think I can get him a deal for three to five, because the DEA needs his testimony in a drug-trafficking case. I might even swing a suspended sentence with probation, if he agrees to go into treatment.”
“For drugs? Or raping girls?” I asked.
“I assume both. The judge is likely to—”
My mother stood up suddenly. She picked up her plate and glass of wine and said, “I’m going to eat in the den.”
We watched her go, surprised. What my mom had just done was, in her version of reality, the height of rudeness.
I thought it was cool. A good hard poke to the ox’s ribs.
Deke Moffet was very regular about taking his meal breaks from Wing’s Wild Wok, only this time instead of pizza he was eating a burger from McDonald’s. He didn’t say anything right away when I sat down. I waited.
He said, “Don’t worry, I haven’t told anybody about the Hummer.”
“Good.”
“Marsh might have, though—he never shuts up. I wouldn’t worry about it. Nobody really listens to him.”
I nodded.
Deke said, “That what you wanted to hear?”
“Yeah, but…can I ask you something?”
He took another bite out of his burger and nodded.
“When you stole all those cars, how did you do it? Break in and hot-wire them? Or what?”
“Or what,” Deke said. He paused to swallow. “I wouldn’t know how to hot-wire a lawn mower. Besides, the kind of cars we were stealing, you can’t just cross a couple wires. We weren’t looking for stuff to chop. We were after the highbuck stuff—Beamers and Benzes. Cars like that got all this antitheft stuff built in. You pretty much gotta have a key.” He gave me an appraising look. “Why?”
“I was just curious. How did you get the keys?”
“I got my ways.” Deke hunched close over the table and lowered his voice. “I can get a key for just about any car, anywhere.” He sat back and grinned.
“Then what?”
“Then what what?”
“You sold the cars to somebody?”
Deke took another huge bite of his burger. I waited. One thing my dad told me once is that most people can’t shut up once you get them talking about their work.
He swallowed. “I sure didn’t drive ’em into no pond.”
“How much did you get?”
“Depended on the car. This guy I know—my client, I guess you could say—he swaps out the VINs, replates ’em, and ships ’em out of state.”
“What is ‘swap out the VINs’?”
“Vehicle identification numbers. He gets a new title with a new VIN number.”
“How did you get caught?”
“We got pulled over for speeding.” He rolled his eyes. “That moron Marsh. We weren’t even in a hurry.”
Being arrested for auto theft is no doubt very traumatic, as you can go to jail for it. It is not nearly as bad as rape or murder, however.
I said earlier that the only times my mom drank too much were at Book Club and weddings. I left out this one other time: when Becca Ekman, my mom’s old roommate from college, came into town from New York a couple times a year and took her out for lunch. Martinis were Becca’s thing.
They always went to The Oceanaire in the Hyatt, where they ripped a new one for every guy they’d ever met—which in Becca’s case, I gathered, was a lot of guys. I think my mom’s job was mostly to listen. She had told me a few Becca stories, I think in hopes that I would avoid following in her best friend’s footsteps.
As far as I know, Becca had never stolen a car, but if she had I would not have been surprised.
Becca always stayed at the Hyatt when she came to town, so getting back to her room after multiple martinis was not a problem. But Mom always had to take a cab home and then get a ride downtown with my dad the next morning so she could pick up her car from the hotel garage. She hates cabs. “Cabs are dirty and you never know who’s going to be driving them,” she says.
Elwin Carl Dandridge was a cabdriver. I don’t remember if I mentioned that before.
Since I had proven to be such an excellent designated driver in the past, Mom decided that I might like to drive her downtown, then do some shopping while she and Becca got wasted, then drive her home. This was only a couple days after my air-shopping experience at DSW. I didn’t know if I was into that kind of retail masochism again.
“Shopping for what? I don’t have any money.”
“If you promise to keep it under three hundred dollars, you can use my credit card.”
Sold.
I got back to the hotel at three-thirty, wearing a new black leather jacket. It was a ridiculously hot fashion choice for the middle of summer, but wearing it was easier than carrying it. My mom was standing outside the lobby entrance with Becca, who was smoking a cigarette. I had to admit that Becca looked cool, all fashion-model slim, blowing clouds of smoke past bright red lips, totally comfortable in a pair of heels that would have given me acrophobia.
My mom also looked good, but not as good as Becca. I noticed that she was smoking too. I walked up to her and said, “Got a cigarette?”
She did this drunken-recognition thing that would have been comical if she hadn’t been my mother, and if she hadn’t started coughing violently while dropping her cigarette.
Becca said, “Cool jacket, Kell.”
My mom was about as smashed as I’d ever seen her, talking fast like a meth freak and slurring her words and making hand gestures like a conductor. I was concentrating on getting off the parking ramp and out of downtown Minneapolis, so I hardly heard what she was saying—mostly Becca said this, Becca said that, blah-blah-blah—until we were finally on the freeway and I heard her say something about Dad.
“…expect me to have dinner on the table as usual, he’s lucky he didn’t marry Becca—”
“Dad used to go out with Becca?” I said.
“Don’t be silly. I’m just saying, she’d have told him where to put his dinner!” She laughed. “Your dad—” She burped and made a sour face. “Remind me to never ever drink another apricot martini.”
“Dad what?”
“Do you know all the time he was in law school, and for the first five years of our marriage, he never once said ‘I love you’? You know what he said? He said ‘I luff you.’ And every time he said it, he’d laugh. A fakey little laugh. Huh huh. Like a kid. ‘I luff you, huh huh.’ Can you imagine?”
I tried. I couldn’t. My big hairy dad saying “I luff you”? No way.
“He says ‘I love you’ all the time,” I said. “I’ve heard him say it.”
“He says it now, but only because now it’s not true. Before, it scared him because it might have been true. But then he just decided one day to lie, and once he decided to lie, it was easy for him to say it.” She extended her fingers and stared at her nails. She’d had them done the day before, getting herself all fixed up for Becca.
My head was spinning with what she’d said. I mean, I was trying to understand it, trying to make sense of her words. Dad could only say I love you if it wasn’t true? Did that make sense on any level other than the multiple-apricot-martini level?
My mother let her manicured hand fall to her lap.
“He does it for a living, you know,” she said, sounding perfectly sober for the moment. “He tells lies.”
Knowing that her martini lunch would incapacitate her, my mother had made a bean-and-lamb casserole and a salad that morning. When we got home, she put the casserole in the oven, took two Excedrin, and went to bed, asking me to wake her up at five-thirty. I went to my computer and spent the next hour on the Web.
I did a search for “how to steal a car” and got twenty thousand hits. A lot of them were videos with hot-wiring instructions. I watched a few of those. Every one was different. Some said to cross the green wire with the red; some said the red with the yellow; some said to cross all three. It looked really complicated. I could see why Deke had never learned to do it.
One video showed a guy jamming the tip of a screwdriver into the ignition switch and turning it to start the car. But if it was really that simple, then why would all these other guys bother with the hot-wiring? Another video showed a girl breaking into a locked car using nothing but a tennis ball. She cut a small hole in the tennis ball, put the hole over the lock, and smooshed the ball with her palm. The sudden air pressure made the lock pop up. Cool.
There were a few videos of guys actually stealing cars. Some of them you could tell were real—you could see how pumped they were, yelling and grinning and high-fiving each other.
I heard my mom in the shower just after five. I erased my browsing history and went downstairs to read about Ishmael and his cannibal friend, Queequeg, who is actually the coolest character in the whole book. By the time my dad got home, Mom was acting and looking almost normal, although she was moving a little slow and her eyes were red.