“W
here you going?” Dale’s mother asks. She’s sitting on the couch with a full ashtray on the coffee table in front of her, their Siamese, Pookie, curled up on her lap.
“Just over to work. I need to pick up my paycheck.”
“Grab some cigarettes on your way back?” her mother asks, pulling the last one from her pack. “There’s some money in my purse.”
“I may stop at Sarah’s for a minute too,” Dale lies. She needs to buy time. She hasn’t spoken to Sarah in over a year.
“What for?”
Dale shrugs.
Sarah lives down the street from Dale. They grew up together, and she heard she’s home from college for the summer. Dale and she don’t have anything in common anymore. Sarah is premed at the U of A. She’s engaged to some guy she met at school and volunteers at St. Joe’s three days a week.The last time she and Dale hung out they ran out of things to talk about pretty quickly. Sarah is nice, but she’s not the same girl that Dale grew up with. Looking at her fiddling with her gigantic diamond ring, Dale could barely believe this was the same girl who used to eat her own scabs and gave her instructions, in graphic detail, about how to give a blow job. Sarah knew things that nobody else knew when they were kids: about periods and Schnapps and S and M. Now she seems so
sorority
. So prim and
good
.
Dale’s mother thinks that Sarah’s stuck-up. She’s always thought so. Dale knows it’s actually just that she hates Sarah’s mother. Her perfect house and her perfect husband and her perfect vacations to their time-share in Puerto Vallarta. Dale misses Sarah, misses the long afternoons they spent sitting by Sarah’s pool, drinking her mother’s wine coolers and talking about boys. She felt almost normal those days, almost real.
“I’ll be back in a couple hours,” Dale says, grabbing a five from her mother’s wallet.
She found the car on craigslist. Some guy over near school was selling it for $750 OBO. She offered $500, and he bit. She walks the three blocks from her house to the Blockbuster to pick up her check. It’s her second to last one; she gave her two-weeks notice during her last shift. It’s already over a hundred degrees, and her thighs stick together as she walks. She goes to the bank next-door, cashes her check and takes out another $300 from her savings account. She gets the bus to Tempe, and fingers the crisp bills. She can’t sit still in the seat, and she keeps craning her neck to see if it’s her stop next.
The house looks just like her house, small and flat and stucco. The yard is the same too, except most of the grass is brown, and there’s a
FOR RENT
sign planted by the sidewalk. The guy, his name is Eric, is out in his driveway, leaning over the engine of the Bug. Her gut tells her this is not a good sign, but when he stands up, she can see he’s just been polishing it.The innards shine and shimmer in the heat.
“Hey,” he says. His smile is warm, and his face is smudged with grease. Dale likes him right away. “You Dale?”
She nods, feeling shy.
The guy looks like a college student, sort of a hippie. Long hair in a ponytail. No shirt. A tattoo on his chest. He catches her staring, trying to decipher what looks like script.
“Thoreau,” he says.
“In wildness is the preservation of the world,”
she reads aloud. “Cool.” She has the impulse to trace the words with her finger. Instead, she pulls the bills from her wallet and hands them to him.
“Thanks. Like the ad says, she’s a sixty-four. Last year I replaced the whole brake system, lines, rotors, shoes, pads. Everything. The engine’s about five years old, but she runs great.”
He opens the door for her and motions for her to sit in the driver’s seat, like a guy on a date, pulling a chair out for her. She blushes and sits down inside the car, examining the unfamiliar dash. It is so simple. No frills. Speedometer. Gas gauge. Radio.
“Sorry, the wipers totally don’t work. Haven’t really needed them here.” He laughs. “But you might, so I installed this little device ... cutting edge of technology ...” He motions to the shoestrings, attached to the wipers and then threaded through the smaller triangular driver and passenger side windows. “Tug on these and they’ll do the trick.”
She takes the key from him and looks for the ignition.
“Oh, sorry, it’s right here,” he says, motioning to a place below the steering wheel, a small chrome receptacle. His hand brushes hers, and it feels like she’s been shocked. She puts in the key, depresses the clutch, and starts the car.A billow of smoke blows out behind her. She glances in the rearview mirror anxiously.
“No worries ... that happens every time you start her up. It’s just oil on the engine burning off. I call her
Puff
.” He laughs again and whistles the first bar of “Puff, the Magic Dragon.”
He hands her the title and she fills out her information. He tears his part off and then kisses the other half and hands it back to her.This makes her blush again. He closes her door and pats the hood. “Bye, old friend,” he says. She grips the wheel and feels her heart beating in her throat.
“Where you headed anyway?” he asks.
She looks at him, at his pale chest and the black ink that crawls across it.
“Vermont,” she says.
It was by accident that she found Sam Mason’s son’s MySpace page. She’d actually been looking for the soundtrack to
The Hour of Lead.
She’d bought the DVD with her employee discount at work. When she hadn’t had any luck finding the soundtrack on Amazon, she returned to Google. Out of habit, she tried
Franny Mason, Finn Mason, Mena Mason,
just to see what appeared. First a Web search and then an image search. That’s how she’d found the pictures of Franny a month ago, which led her to
her
MySpace page.That’s also how she’d found the name of Mena’s catering company. That’s the great thing about the Internet. It’s always changing, expanding.There is new information available about everything,
everyone,
every day. She knew it was just a matter of time before she found what she was looking for.
Of course, she knew they lived in San Diego. It said so at the end of every author bio since his second novel. But it’s not like they were about to print an address. San Diego’s a big city; he could be anywhere. The letter she’d written had gotten to him via his publisher in New York. (She read once in an interview that he didn’t use e-mail. He called himself a
Luddite,
a word that tasted like dense bread on her lips as she tried it.) And the letters that came back had no return address. But then, a new Web page appeared ... black background, purple font, loud surf music playing in the background.
Male, Sixteen, Last Log-in: June 8, Mood: Pissed Off, Latest Blog Entry: Headed to Butt Fuck Nowhere (AKA Lake Gormlaith, VT) in two days. Hasta.
Next to the entry was a photo of Finn and some girl, arms around each other, leaning against a Buick woody station wagon with a surfboard on top. It was the only entry, the only photo. It was as if it was there just for her.
No wonder Sam hadn’t answered the most recent letters she sent to his publisher. He probably hadn’t even gotten them. According to Finn’s entry, they had left for Vermont nearly two weeks ago. The letters were probably sitting in some pile on an editorial assistant’s cluttered desk. She felt such tremendous relief she couldn’t believe it. But now it didn’t matter. She had found him. She used the Google hybrid map to locate and look at Lake Gormlaith. From what she could tell, it was a pretty small lake. Maybe only twenty or thirty cottages or so littered around it. She zoomed in as close as she could on each of them, wondering which one he was inside.
She gave notice at work that day, found the Bug on craigslist, and started to pack her clothes.
Hasta,
she thinks as she pulls out of Thoreau’s driveway, rolling down the windows and feeling the hot air on her skin like a kiss.
T
hey have already started getting mail. The flag is up on the mailbox when Sam gets home from dropping off the mower at Magoo’s again. He can barely keep up with the yard. In San Diego it was all he could do to coax some crabgrass out of their lawn. This is the second time since they got here that he’s had to borrow the mower. He reaches into the mailbox and feels a slight wave of anxiety. He quickly thumbs through the stack: AT & T, a Shop’n Save flier,
Have You Seen Me?
postcard. Nothing important.
Sam hasn’t told Mena about the letters. He usually doesn’t keep things from her, but the last thing she needed after everything with Franny was to worry about this too. The first one had gone to his publisher, and so it (like all the other fan mail) arrived in his mailbox about three months after its postmark date. It arrived unopened but slightly battered. He’d expected the usual: some oddball writing to find out if he had based the characters on
real
people, because the narrator was
so very much
like him or her that it was eerie. Or, if the author of the missive was a woman, it might be a solicitation for something varying from the romantic to the lurid. (The author photos on the back of books were generous in their renderings of him. The photographers, all of them, had instructed him not to smile, to look contemplative, intellectual, and the airbrushed results had been of a man who was both serious and playful. The dimple in his right cheek never disappeared, not even when he was trying to look serious. And they’d done a terrific job hiding the small bump on his nose and the remaining half dozen pockmarks on his cheeks that served as a reminder of a ridicule-filled adolescence.) But now, the most recent book (and author photo) was over three years old and he suspected that if he ever published another book, they’d have to bring in a team of experts to photograph him. Of course, he was flattered.There had even been a few times when he’d realized that, had he been so inclined, he could have slept with some very attractive readers. (Sometimes they attached photos of themselves—one brunette included a photo of herself wearing nothing but his second novel spread open across her quite lovely torso.) But it had been a long time since he’d gotten one of those sorts of letters, and so when this letter arrived, he opened it with more anticipation than normal.
The first one had been relatively straightforward. It was from a student named Dale Edwards at Arizona State who was writing her Honor’s thesis on the novels of Samuel Mason. She’d read somewhere that his wife was from Flagstaff, and she was wondering if he might be willing to meet with her the next time they were in the area. This was the third or fourth time he’d been contacted by a student, though ultimately he never actually read any of their theses. It, frankly, scared him to imagine the kind of people they must be: students who, with the pick of the greats, chose
his
work to analyze and postulate about.What was
wrong
with them? He wrote a quick note back (he always wrote back), and said that certainly, the next time they were in Arizona, he would get in touch. His response was followed almost immediately by another letter with a series of questions for him to answer regarding his work. This one he ignored, pretending that it had gotten lost in the mountains of fan mail he hoped she wrongly assumed that he was receiving. But the third letter persisted.
He didn’t want to encourage her, but, again, he was simultaneously flattered and horrified by the prospect of someone’s academic career hinging on his work, and so he obliged. He’d written a kind letter thanking her but suggesting a biography might be a bit premature. The letter she wrote back was handwritten—he could barely make it out.
I’ve received an advance,
she wrote.
At first he thought she meant an advanced reader’s copy. But there was no book coming out. No new work. He scanned the page, the scribbling.
I have received an advance from a well-known publishing house. To write your biography. I hope you will authorize it.
“Are you kidding me?”This had to be a joke.
I submitted my thesis to an agent who thought there might be a lot of interest.
He’d laughed at that. He couldn’t help it.
Especially now,
she wrote.
After Franny.
And then Mena had pulled into the driveway. He’d taken the letter and stuffed it back into the envelope.
“What’s that?” Mena asked. She’d been at the doctor’s office again. She’d been getting headaches since September.
“Fan mail,” he said.
She probably wrote a half dozen more times over the course of the next few months; he tried to ignore them, but they just kept coming.
Mr. Mason, if you just give me a chance. I’ll let you see every chapter. You can approve every single word. Please,
she pleaded. He did not respond.
Finally he stopped opening the letters and told his editor to hold any mail until after they got back to San Diego from Vermont. He kept the letters though, and reread them a few times, looking for clues about what her motives might be. She didn’t really sound like some sort of parasitic journalist. She sounded like a kid. But still, he had no idea what was sitting on his editor’s desk. He’d deal with that when they got home. He didn’t want anybody digging into his life. His
work,
fine. But his life? It seemed both ludicrous and cruel.
As he thumbs through the junk mail, he knows it’s ridiculous to think she’d have found his address at the lake. He’s pretty sure that even Monty doesn’t know his address here.
He brings the small, benign stack of mail into the kitchen. Mena is sitting at the table, looking at a recipe in a glossy-paged magazine.
“Anything exciting come?” she asks, not looking up at him.
“Not today,” he says.
He knows he should have told her, but she’d only worry. She worries about everything lately. He can’t protect her from much, but he can protect her from this.
“How does moussaka sound for dinner tonight?” she asks.
“Good.” He nods. “It sounds good.”