need?”
And I speak, too. “Yes.”
I took typing, so I could have one actual skill when I graduated. I got a D-minus. I do my homework during my free period because at home there’s too much to do. After track I take the late bus and help Emma with dinner, with clean-up, with laundry. Our work is done by eight. The Lambiels like us because we’re quiet, and they’re quiet. The husband is a diplomat and the wife a flight attendant; she’s never home, and he drinks the whole time she’s away. Their only child, Jeanne, a blonde all-that, went to our school for about five minutes, but then, feeling rather ignored by the people she held in such contempt, transferred to a private school for children of foreign diplomats. Certainly when I’m in her house, she doesn’t speak to me. Sometimes she says, “Shell-BEEEE, get us some pop cooorn, s’il vous plaît.”
Okay, so the French chick who can barely speak English drawls out my name like the boys at the ice-cream parlor when she wants me to fetch and carry. Nice.
Six days a week, three hours a day, I run. Our meets are Saturday afternoons. On Sundays, our day of rest, Emma and I cook for the week for us and the Lambiels so all we have to do Monday to Friday is heat stuff up.
If people ask, I say I’m a Christian because Christianity is the one religion where you don’t have to do anything to still be a member. I like that, and since I don’t want to say I’m nothing, I call myself a Christian.
I have never been inside a place of worship of any kind.
I have never had outside work. Emma’s been giving me a little money for helping her. I’ve saved five dollars a week for as long as I can remember, and last I looked, my bank account had $2400 in it. My one continued expense has been my running shoes—new ones every three months. Emma pays half. My few leftover bucks go frivolously on hair gel, mascara and lipgloss, Milky Ways and Love’s Baby Soft.
Two weeks ago, Jeanne Lambiel was caught by her father stealing twenty dollars from his wallet when she wanted to go out with her passé French friends. He screamed at her for half the night; the whole neighborhood heard him. Why would you steal from me, he kept yelling. Why? You have thirteen million in your trust fund! And Jeanne said calmly, “Yes, but, Papa, I needed not thirteen million but twenty bucks.”
I got away from Emma and the Lambiels by running. I’ve been cross country and track and field from the time I was ten. I run the mile and the two-mile. Once I ran the mile so fast I had to go to the hospital. They thought I was dying. So much for go all out, try your best, do your best, stop at nothing. Give 110 percent. Well, I gave 110 percent and it almost killed me. So you can just imagine the kind of life lesson I took away from that: a little less than your best, Shelby Sloane—that will have to be good enough.
On my eighteenth birthday in May of 1981, which happened this year to fall on a Saturday, Emma said, unduly excited (Emma never got even duly excited about things), “Come outside with me. I want to show you something.”
I followed her down the stairs and out. In the sap-covered driveway on this Saturday May day, parked behind the Lambiels’ government-issue Mercedes, stood a little yellow Mustang. I say little, but to me, it seemed gargantuan like a house, like an airplane hangar. A bright yellow hangar. It had two black stripes running over the roof and hood. It looked both classic and stunning, as if I knew anything about Mustangs. Except we once saw a documentary on them a few years back, and I might have mentioned that it looked like a cool-cat car, but what did I know, I was thirteen at the time, and Emma had been half asleep.
I stood silently, staring.
“It’s for you.” She coughed. “You like it?” She looked alternately exquisitely excited and morbidly uncomfortable. I think she might have been uncomfortable about being so excited. “I wanted to get you something special. You know—for your eighteenth.”
“You bought me a car?”
“Not just a car, Shel. A 1966 Shelby Mustang!”
I was dumbstruck.
“Go ask your friends tonight about a Shelby Mustang. They’ll tell you.”
What it cost her I have no idea; when I asked, she wouldn’t say. She was very proud of it. “Engine’s clean,” she kept repeating. “V-8 350 horsepower. Transmission’s good. No rust.” And then laughed like she was joking. “After he took my check, I slept in the car overnight, until the check cleared the next morning. I was afraid to let anyone else get their hands on it.”
“Emma …”
“You don’t understand. He was the original owner. He had three of them for sale, the other two were fifty percent more expensive and they sold while I was still deciding on this one. I think the only reason it was cheaper and unbought was the color. Back then, he had it painted special because it was his personal racing car. Honestly, there was a very good chance I might not get it.” She clapped her hands. “But it was fate! It was meant to be. A Shelby Mustang for Shelby. I mean, come on.”
I had not seen Emma this animated since—
The dealer who sold it to her, she said, was a born-again Christian. “So I knew he wouldn’t sell me a lemon.”
“Why?” In a daze, I walked around the car. This couldn’t possibly be mine! I asked what he had been before he became born-again. “Maybe he’s a car thief, out on parole? The other day I read in the paper that a murderer on death-row became born-again.”
“Don’t they all become born-again on death-row?” returned an unfazed Emma. She didn’t know what the man had been, “but he asked me to pray in the car with him after he took my money.”
“Wow.” I peered in. It was all black inside. It had a wood wheel. The backseat was the size of a Matchbox car. It could fit a deck of cards and a GI Joe if they squished. But the two front bucket seats were roomy, and shiny.
“All vinyl foam seating. And air conditioning!” Emma said. “Go ahead, open the door.”
I shook my head, patting the hood instead. I touched the glass, the windshield wipers. I left my hands on the hood. “Emma,” I said. “I don’t know what to say. It’s very …” I struggled. “Yellow.”
“Yes! Summer yellow it’s called. The car can go up to 136.7 miles per hour.”
“Is that because of the yellow?”
“Shelby.”
“Driving 136 miles an hour, is that something you’d like to see me do?”
“I’m just saying.”
I peered inside at the controls. “Guess no FM stereo in ’66.”
She straightened up from unbridled to frowning in 1/60 of a second. “No, and don’t you dare touch anything in this car. It’s a classic. There were only 1200 hard-top Shelbys made in ’66, and only one in this color. Only one, do you understand? You can’t change a single thing in it.”
“I
