The Red Car Read online

  “No,” I said, offended. “I am not.”

  But I had never had tapas before. She drove us to the restaurant she had picked out. I was distracted. I realized I was not sure what I would do, after work, what I could expect. If I had a home to go back to. I let Judy order. The car had upset me. Judy had found a parking space right in front of the restaurant and I could see the red car from our table. Taunting me. There was something about the way she talked, too, that reminded me of Beverly. Of fifteen more years at the office. A life sentence. I wanted Judy to return the car. To quit her powerful job. But she would never do these things. This, as she had said, was it for her. I was not a baby. Somehow, I felt older. Like I had aged in a day. Judy ordered a carafe of sangria. The waiter asked to see my ID.

  The sangria was delicious.

  “I have high hopes for you,” Judy said, refilling our glasses. “You know that. You are going to do incredible things.”

  “No,” I said, though I wanted to. “I am not.”

  “I am going to make sure of it,” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Let’s celebrate.”

  “Celebrate what?” I asked.

  “The day,” Judy said. “This lunch. My red car. To our future good fortune.”

  The waiter came to our table with a tray full of small plates of food. Judy had ordered well. Fried potatoes, roasted artichoke hearts, sautéed mushrooms, calamari.

  We made a toast.

  “This is the best calamari I have ever had,” Judy said.

  I smiled at Judy. It was also the best calamari I had ever had, though I couldn’t say how many times I had had calamari. Three, maybe. Perhaps four. I was not a baby, but I had more to do. I felt content again in the moment, with the food, with her company. I didn’t even mind the red car if it made Judy happy. It was not my car, after all. It was not my life. We were both a little bit drunk by the end of the meal.

  “I can’t drive like this,” she said, laughing.

  We drank one espresso and then another.

  We sat at our table in the window, unable or unwilling to leave. “Screw the office,” she said.

  I laughed, delighted to hear these words come out of my boss’s mouth. I think I knew even then, that afternoon, when we never ended up going back to the office, that this day was something special. The waiter brought us an order of caramel flan, on the house. We shared the dessert, taking small bites with small silver spoons.

  “Delicious,” Judy said, smiling at me.

  TEN YEARS LATER

  IT WAS BEVERLY, FROM THE OFFICE, who wrote to tell me that Judy had died. It had been a car accident. Another car had gone through a red light and plowed directly into Judy’s red car, no longer new, and she had died, instantly. Her neck had broken on impact. I read the email from my apartment in Queens as my husband cooked dinner.

  I was not sure how to process the information. Judy was dead. We had lost track of each other over the years. She had been happy for me when I quit my job to go to graduate school. I had been her assistant for two years and I had begun to do my work slower and then slower still. It was Judy who had urged me to apply to writing programs. She even proofread my short stories, locating typos and offering praise that I didn’t deserve. Once I got in, Judy threatened to fire me if I didn’t go.

  Still, it had seemed ridiculous at the time: to leave a good-paying office job to get a degree in creative writing. Creative writing. Judy, for instance, had a graduate degree in painting and look where that had gotten her. To a higher-paying office job.

  Beverly’s email was a shock.

  I had woken up early that day, before the sun had come up, and snuck out of bed, gone to my desk that was also the kitchen table and cleared space for my computer. I had written the last scene of my novel. It had come as a surprise to me. I had not realized I was so close. I had finished my novel. The entire day passed and I had not told anyone. I had not told my husband, Hans. Always looking for a reason to celebrate, he would have run out to buy a bottle of champagne. I had written the last sentence and I felt a humming inside me, a sort of quiet happiness. I did not want to ruin it.

  Judy was dead.

  I sometimes thought I applied to graduate school to avoid renting my own apartment. To get away from Daniel who I had actually lived with for an entire year. From the start it was understood that it was temporary, he was low on cash, and when he asked me to leave, I sublet a room for a couple of months in the Haight, and then another room out by the ocean, and then I left. I went down south, to a writing program in Louisiana, of all places, where I had received a fellowship.

  The dead bolt on Phoebe’s apartment on Castro Street never opened. I came home from work and found my belongings in the hall outside the front door: my laptop computer, my cheap desk, some but not all of my clothes neatly folded in my suitcase, which had once been in the closet. Phoebe had forgotten my stuff in the bathroom, I remember, which was annoying to me. I had new bottles of Aveda shampoo and conditioner. It’s funny how I remembered that shampoo still because I no longer bought myself Aveda products. They were out of my price range.

  Judy had bought me a leather backpack, a going-away present. My boyfriend who was not my boyfriend had told me he loved me.

  “You are kidding me,” I said.

  But he wasn’t. He had become less beautiful to me in the year that we had lived together.

  “You are telling me this now.”

  “I didn’t know until now,” he said.

  Instead, not long before I left, I made out with Diego, but he wouldn’t have sex with me.

  “I don’t have sex with drunk girls,” he said.

  That made no sense whatsoever to me. There was no way, in any capacity, that I would have had the courage to make a pass at Diego if I weren’t drunk. Also, I was leaving. At least he did kiss me. He did put both of his hands around my ass and leave them there. “You are funny, Leah Kaplan,” he said. “I am going to miss you.”

  I thought about all of these people, people from my past life, my life in San Francisco, they all flashed before my eyes as I read and reread the email from Beverly about Judy. I thought about Alice and her broccoli coleslaw. I did not know what had happened to her. For all I knew, she was also dead. I felt tears well in my eyes. I wanted to call Alice. I did not have her phone number. I could not even remember her last name.

  At the end of the email, Beverly asked me to call.

  Hans watched me from the kitchen, stir-frying the shrimp.

  “My boss died,” I told him.

  Hans and I had been married for five years. We had met in graduate school and had left Louisiana together for New York City because he had always dreamed of living there. Hans was from Austria. He was in the kitchen, making pad thai. He was very proud of his pad thai. He bought noodles at the Asian market and fish sauce, limes, bean sprouts and peanuts, and fresh shrimp, tofu. It was a production. Whenever he made it, it was my job to tell him how good it was. And it was good, but it wasn’t any better than the pad thai that came from the local Thai restaurant and didn’t require profuse praise and sometimes sex afterward.

  “Scottie?” he asked. “Holy shit.”

  “Oh,” I said. “No. Sorry. Scottie is fine. Still an asshole.” Well, that wasn’t fair. Scottie wasn’t an asshole, but he paid me by the hour, and for a while, I had been doing my work too quickly and therefore not being paid enough, but I had figured it out and I had slowed down. “Judy,” I said. “Judy died.”

  I had told Hans about Judy, at least I had thought that I had, but the name was not familiar to him. Scottie was my current boss. It was not a crazy surprise that after completing my MFA, I had gone back into administrative work. At first I temped, and then I had gotten hired full-time by the place where I temped, and then when the economy crashed, I had gotten fired from that same job. Not long after, like the best birthday present ever, I was rehired, a part-time gig working from home. It was perfect, the perfect job for me. I was lucky. I kn
ew that I was lucky. Whenever I was impatient with my life, I told myself that I was lucky.

  Judy had died.

  She was dead on impact, a broken neck. I thought of her shiny black hair, her head bent over at the wheel. I had never felt safe in her car. I had not been in contact with her for a long time, three or four years, but I did not want her to be dead.

  Hans left his pad thai on the stove to wrap me in his arms, but I did not want to be held and I squirmed out of his embrace.

  “It’s too hot,” I said.

  It actually was. It was a hot summer.

  Judy had warned me about getting married. I had written her to tell her that I was getting married to my boyfriend from graduate school but I was slightly apprehensive. His student visa was about to expire and if I did not marry him, he would have to leave the country, go back to Europe. I loved him and I did not want him to leave. It felt as if I had no choice. It was not a good feeling.

  “You might not want to hear this,” she wrote, “but I am going to say it anyway. Don’t get married if you are not sure. Even if you love him. Marriage changes everything. It sucks you in and leaves you dry. Don’t do it if you are not sure. Don’t do it because of a green card.”

  I didn’t take her advice. It was exactly what I wanted to hear and it also wasn’t. I had already agreed to get married. I imagined how hurt and angry Hans would be if I told him I’d changed my mind. I couldn’t fathom it. Hans, my sweet goofball Hans, had an ugly temper. He had once thrown a plant during an argument about something I could no longer remember, breaking the ceramic pot when it smashed against the floor. Later we walked to the hardware store together and bought a new one, replanted the small plant together. I had discovered that I liked having plants, though I did not take the best care of them. I had a tall ficus. A potted African violet on the kitchen windowsill.

  And why would I listen to her? My old boss. Her life was no example. She had married an alcoholic. She worked in Human Resources in a Facilities Management Department. Painting for her was just a hobby. I did not want to be a hobbyist. I wanted to be the real thing, a writer. So I pulled away from her after that email. Which was easy enough. She lived across the country.

  Judy had died.

  She was dead.

  I was thirty-three years old and I did not have much experience with death. I knew in theory that I had to prepare myself for certain things. My mother would die. My father would die. But none of my friends had ever died. No one I had ever been close to. I had lived a blessed life and I didn’t even know it. I went back to my computer and did a quick search of my email. My last email to Judy had been three years ago. I told her that work was going well on my novel. I told her about a trip I had taken to Belize with Hans and the beautiful fish we had seen snorkeling. I had been bragging. I had felt like it was necessary for her to know that I was happy.

  “She was the short one, right?” Hans said. “Who drove the red car?”

  “She got killed in her car.”

  “That is awful,” Hans said. “Baby.”

  He began clearing the coffee table in front of the TV in the living room. He brought out two beers, beer mugs from Austria, and the pad thai. He began looking for the remote control for the television, which was always, invariably lost. I watched him do all of these things and did not offer to help. “What do you want to watch?” he asked.

  I am not sure how it started. Probably, because we did not have a dining room table, we always ate on the couch, and most of the time, we watched a show or a movie while we ate. Like me, Hans was working on a novel. But he also wrote reviews for the entertainment section of a website and so we were always getting DVD screeners. He made a small amount of money writing these reviews, but basically it was my part-time job that paid our rent. We were always broke. I bought cheap shampoo.

  “I don’t think I’m hungry,” I said.

  “But I made pad thai.”

  “I know you did. I’m sorry.”

  I sat down at my computer and read the email again. Beverly wrote that I should call. “I’m going to make a phone call,” I told Hans. I picked at an old pimple on my chin, reopening a scab.

  “Don’t do that,” Hans said. “You are ruining your face.”

  I had started picking at my face after I had gotten married. Not a lot, just when my skin broke out, which it did, without fail, once a month, as if I were still a teenager.

  “I am going to make this call in the bedroom.”

  “What about dinner?”

  I looked at Hans. He was like a puppy. Why did he want so much praise for making dinner? In the refrigerator, I had a bag of broccoli coleslaw. It was something I had learned from Alice. It was the easiest way to make sure that I ate cruciferous vegetables, though I did not have mine plain. I mixed my coleslaw with mayonnaise and lemon juice. I would have happily had coleslaw and a beer. Or melted cheese on a tortilla. Or a chocolate pudding and a beer. I would have happily not eaten dinner at all.

  That was something I had discovered once I married Hans. Every night, he wanted to eat dinner. He wanted to know what I wanted for dinner. He wanted to know who was going to shop for dinner. He wanted to know what we wanted to watch when eating dinner.

  “You can start without me,” I said. “I don’t feel hungry.”

  “I bought the large shrimp,” Hans said.

  I stared at him. “My friend died,” I said.

  “I thought she was your boss.”

  I shook my head, my arms hanging down at my sides. She was my friend and I had loved her. I was an idiot. I was such a fool. Sometimes, still, I heard her voice in my head. I would be swimming laps, and I would think, today, maybe I will write Judy, and then, I didn’t. I went into the bedroom and closed the door. I sat on the bed. It felt strange to call Beverly. I remembered my last day of work. They had a send-off party for me in the office and I felt guilty because I felt so overwhelmingly giddy to be leaving, and they were all staying. That was the night I made a pass at Diego. I did the math. Ten years had gone by. Beverly had five more years until retirement. I supposed, really, that that was not very long.

  “I AM SORRY TO TELL YOU the bad news,” Beverly said.

  “I am sorry you have the job of telling me bad news.”

  “Do you remember?” Beverly said. “I never thought Judy should have bought that car. I told her that.”

  “The car made Judy happy.”

  I sat down on the edge of the unmade bed. I tried to remember. Did I make the bed that morning? Yes, yes I had. At some point in the day, Hans must have taken a nap. He had not remade the bed. These were the things about being married that I hadn’t anticipated. Judy knew. Judy had warned me. Judy had never met Hans.

  I got up and pulled the comforter straight. It took a couple of seconds. I walked over to the window and I opened it. It was surreal, looking out into the small fenced-in backyard. We did not have access to the backyard; it belonged to the landlord and his family who lived downstairs. This summer they had put in a tiny aboveground pool that completely filled the space. Outside, the two Morillo kids splashed in the water. I felt a fresh tear roll down my face.

  “She named me the executor of her estate,” Beverly said. “She left you the car. And some other things.”

  This took me by surprise. The car was Judy’s most precious possession. Also, she had died in that car. A car crash.

  “It’s not totaled?”

  “Apparently, it’s not,” Beverly said. “It’s at a mechanic’s. He is waiting on you for how to proceed.”

  “How to proceed.”

  I felt a little bit dumb. It was a Thursday and it was hot outside, ninety something degrees. Could that explain it? I could hear Hans’s TV in the living room. He was watching something with shooting in it. Guns and police sirens.

  “I don’t want the car,” I said.

  “I think you should respect Judy’s wishes.”

  “I don’t think she wanted for me to have a wrecked car. It’s crazy that
she left me her car. She loved her car. It was her most prized possession.” It looked nice, the Morillo’s swimming pool. It was small, but big enough that I could have floated on my back, looked up at the sky. “You said there were other things.”

  “She left you a small painting and a sealed envelope. I have it here at the office. I don’t know what is in the envelope. You need to come out here, sweetheart.”

  A painting. An envelope. A red car. I bit my lip. It was cruel of the Morillos to put in that pool. Cruel to taunt me like that. I thought about jumping out the window, jumping into their swimming pool, how surprised they would be. But it wasn’t feasible. Yes, I could jump out the window, but there was no way to take a running start. Probably I would land on the small strip of concrete just in front of the pool. I would jump out the window and I would break some bones.

  “I think you should come,” Beverly repeated. “The funeral is tomorrow. I should have called you sooner. I did not know about the will.”

  “You are kidding me,” I said. “I can’t come to a funeral tomorrow.”

  I wiped the tears from my cheeks. Lately, I felt like I couldn’t do anything, even though Hans constantly told me otherwise.

  “I checked online, sweetheart, and there are flights. They are expensive, granted, but there are flights.”

  “I can’t come,” I said.

  I wasn’t sure why I insisted I couldn’t come. I wasn’t sure what plans I had for the next day. I had work, but I could get out of work. Anyway, it was a telecommuting job. I could do my job in California. I had ideas for how I was going to spend the day. There was a movie I wanted to see. Or maybe I was going to go to the Russian gym I belonged to around the corner and swim laps. Suddenly, I remembered the novel I had finished that morning. I had finished it. I had finished my novel. Maybe I was going to go sit in a café and read my novel. That was something I wanted to do.

  “Give me the phone,” I heard someone say, and then Diego was on the line.

  “What is your problem, Leah?”

  “Diego,” I said. Suddenly, I was grinning. Clutching the phone, the biggest smile on my face. “You still work there?”