old friend, a photographer.”
“Someone you see from time to time?”
“You’re making too much of this.”
“What does she look like?”
He hesitated long enough to realize I’d persist. There were some pictures on his phone. She seemed rather plain, wore almost no makeup. Certainly there was nothing about her clothes to draw him in.
“What type of photography? Show me.”
“You aren’t going to let this go, are you?” he said. He got out of bed and took my hand. I was a little wobbly in the heels. He guided me over to a set of large flat drawers. She had her own drawer. I didn’t. I didn’t have a drawer. She was a street photographer. I wouldn’t say she was better than me, just different. It almost looked as if she had posed her subjects, certainly they were standing still in their settings, and she took her time to frame things. I was more abrupt, more into movement, light, and emotion. I didn’t mind that someone was lopped off or caught at a funny angle. I liked to shoot people before they had time to think, to respond.
She was thirty-five, he told me when I asked. They had seen each other on and off for years. But things weren’t like that anymore, he said. I wasn’t sure I believed him.
I closed the drawer and worked on the buckles and left the stolen heels by the door. I got dressed, and all the time he watched me. I turned my phone on again and began to flip through my mother’s messages. There were seven.
“You understand they arrest you if you get caught,” he said, circling back to my small larcenies, pushing away from his.
“I’ve already got a mother,” I said and held up the phone with her texts stacked in a heap.
“If you need money, all you have to do is let me know.”
But I was already working on other ideas. Not clothes.
Pushing in, he offered to give me a ride back to Evanston. I took the L.
Of course it had to be that night when the bill went online breaking things down in preparation for my first year of college. I didn’t tell my mother and called a financial aid officer the next day.
“Things have changed,” I said.
The woman waited as I told her my father had moved away and wasn’t sending much money before she launched in. Maybe the AC units were broken in her office that day or she was working from home and a cat was gnawing at her toes or she just didn’t like the sound of my voice. Whatever it was, she got merciless about the college’s funding distribution practices, the limits of federal aid, how far from extended deadlines I had drifted, the effort they had put in to arrive at a good package for me, as if her entire office had traveled for months in a desolate country to reach me. Finally, she suggested I consider delaying admission for a year. I could reapply for aid next winter. “You might need to submit an updated portfolio,” she said, topping off my empty glass.
“That can’t be right,” I said.
“You’ll want to check with the department.”
“There’s a small fortune in photographic paper, chemicals, the time it took to—”
“I just wanted to give you a heads-up,” she said in her monotone.
“Your head’s up your ass,” I said and dropped the phone into its charger.
A few days later, when Mom asked for my password to get on the site to see where things stood, I said I was taking a gap year. She pushed back hard, but when I said I wouldn’t budge, that I wanted to work at Geary’s full time and save up money, I don’t know, maybe she began to accept the logic in it.
In the letter I wrote to the department I said I would be traveling during my delayed year in order to photograph national monuments that were sinking into the earth along with the reputations of our best educational institutions. Later, I regretted dropping this into the mail slot and then I had to call and ask them not to open the letter, a second would follow, and so on.
From the glossy postcards that continued to arrive every two or three weeks from Dad to Lola, I began to believe that if everything else was going to hell, our father had plenty of beaches where he roamed and that the skies were always blue.
You should see the ocean, he wrote on one card.
You should see how broke we are, I almost wrote back. How Mom doesn’t sleep anymore, how she worries about things you can’t imagine.
Mom held up a copy of The Secrets of Car Flipping. I didn’t realize at first that she was saying she had to sell the station wagon.
“When I went to that retraining session at the newspaper,” she said, “I met a new hire named David, and during the break we talked cars. He just called to say he has to sell his father’s van to help pay for his dad’s home health care. David had his mechanic check it out, and he says it will run until Armageddon.”
That’s one of those statements you have to think about, but I’m not sure my mother did, given her worries. David drove over to our place the next day so she could give the van a spin. He had hair popping out of the edges of his long-sleeved shirt, cuffs and collar, like a physical manifestation of the energy exploding from his psyche. His father, he said, had babied the thing.
“He’ll only sell it to someone who loves it as much as his father did,” Mom told me after he was gone.
“And?” I asked.
“Well. I could haul an awful lot around in something like that. He said he’d give me an exceptional deal and he offered to pitch in over the next year, change the oil, replace the belts, that kind of thing.”
“Was he hitting on you?” I asked.
She reddened, and I felt certain some flattery had been involved. “He showed me a picture of his wife and kids. He has a son your age and …” She stopped and said, “He’s going to list it next Saturday.”
Over the week, she hesitated and worried that the van would be sold out from under her while she hesitated. She read something in Consumer Reports and talked to her bank and her brother, Hal, who wasn’t all that encouraging but didn’t have any other ideas. He wasn’t a car man by nature.
“What do you think?” she said, circling back to me.
It’s not like I knew what she should do. We were both in shock about having to sell our wagon because it had felt so safe driving Lola around in a Volvo. But it was time to get over it and stop asking people. I told her this and she went for that van as if she were leaping from a high-rise, convinced someone would bring out a net if the sidewalk got close.
Fourteen days after we got it, the van sprang an oil leak, and that hairy guy no longer answered his phone. Was it possible he wasn’t actually employed by the paper? Was he just there at the training session to sell someone a bad vehicle? Was this a business venture or a lark? Did he sell other goods as well? Broken radios, busted dishwashers, books with their front covers ripped off?
Mom was too exhausted to puzzle this out or to track him down, and it probably wouldn’t have done much good if she had. She began to use cans
