Flirting In Cars

  “Another rich Wall Street type?”

  “Nah, actually, there’s some developers wanting to subdivide and put in some commercial stuff.” Mack swerved as the deer finally made his move, and Zoë slammed her hand onto the glove compartment.

  “Oh my God, you nearly hit him!”

  Mack looked at her white face, surprised. “You kidding? I missed him by a mile. Hang on a sec.” A doe followed the other deer, leaping spasmodically across the road. “They tend to go in pairs this time of year. Sometimes you can even get five or six of them.”

  “And you expect me to learn how to drive with deer leaping out at me?”

  “I thought you said you weren’t afraid of a little danger.”

  “When did I ever say I wasn’t afraid of danger? Fear is a perfectly appropriate response to danger. I think I might have said something about having faced danger, which is something else entirely. But whenever possible, I like to avoid taking unnecessary risks, including playing dodge ’em with rampaging deer. Why are there so many of them, anyway?”

  “No natural predators left. Can you believe that some of the city folks think we shouldn’t go hunting them?” Mack shook his head. “We’ve already had about five deer-related accidents this fall. If folks didn’t shoot some, we’d have deer crashing into cars every damn hour of the day.”

  Zoë raised her eyebrows. “So you have a huge number of deer wandering around bumping into cars, and you think the most humane solution is to blast away at them with shotguns?”

  “Well, yeah,” said Mac, turning up a side road. “Bow and arrow is okay in theory, but too many people don’t really have the skill to make a clean kill.”

  Zoë gave him a cold, sidelong look. Her glasses had a funny way of reflecting the light, almost making it look as if she had a second face. “In my opinion,” she said in a prissy voice, “there are more humane and environmentally sound ways to control surplus animal populations. The problem is that some people think they have a macho prerogative to get out and destroy wildlife.”

  Mack had never heard anyone speak in such complete sentences before. “You rehearse all that,” he asked, “or was it just off the cuff?”

  She drew herself up. “How could I rehearse it?”

  Great, he’d pissed her off. Again. Mack turned onto a side road, past an old Revolutionary graveyard with smooth gray and white stones tilted in different directions. “In high school, I had a friend on the debate team,” he said, thinking that maybe if he explained himself better she’d stop curling her lip at him. “Chris said you sort of prepare arguments ahead of time, like football plays.”

  “I didn’t rehearse it.”

  This was really not going well. “Hey, there’s a great view here,” said Mack in an artificially bright tone of voice. He pointed to a field of tall corn. “This is all part of the Havers farm. You might want to take your daughter here this weekend, they’re going to have a corn maze there, and a pumpkin catapult and hay rides and some local band playing.”

  “That sounds nice,” she said in a very measured way, and Mack remembered that she had no means of getting there, other than himself. She probably thinks I’m just trying to drum up more business. Stupidly, he felt stung by this thought. I was just trying to be a good tour guide, he thought. “I was just saying,” he said.

  “Mmm,” said Zoë, clearly not paying attention. “Listen, are we close to town now? I’m just thinking that I’m going to need a little time to shop.”

  “I’ll head on over there now.” Mack realized she was thinking about the time, because she was paying him by the hour. He’d never had this kind of business arrangement with someone before, and he could see how it complicated things. Previously, Moroney had handled all the money, and Mack had felt that there was something almost pure about his relationship with his students, since he got paid the same no matter whether he taught them well or not. In fact, Moroney hadn’t wanted him to teach too much in the first lesson. But now that he was selling his own services, Mack could see that you had to make sure getting chummy didn’t cross the line into pimping yourself.

  Mack turned off Mountain View and onto the main road again, pointing out the Stewart’s shop and gas station and liquor store on the outskirts of town. “Everything else you need is on Main Street,” he said, pulling into the parking lot.

  Zoë stood up, adjusting the long fringed scarf at her neck. Like her coloring, it had something foreign about it. “You’re not coming in?”

  “My ex-girlfriend works there,” he said, indicating the shop. “I just had a little run-in with her new boyfriend, so I’m thinking better to just stay put.”

  Zoë pointed to the Band-Aid over his right eye. “When you say run-in, do you mean literally?”

  “I pissed him off and he sucker punched me in the diner.”

  “Ah.” Zoë readjusted her enormous shoulder bag. “That explains a lot. Okay, I’ll be back in about ten minutes.” She took about two steps, then turned around. “You’ll be here when I come back? No mothers-in-law needing ambulance service?”

  “I’ll be here.” Mack watched her ass as she walked away, then turned on the radio and drummed his fingers in time to the Dixie Chicks. The sky was clear and bright and there was a good woodsmoke smell in the air. He was feeling good enough to start singing along about poisoning Earl when he saw the person he least wanted to meet striding toward him, beer belly leading the way.

  “Mack,” said Jim Moroney, in a voice that promised a shitstorm of trouble. “We have to talk.”

  Eleven

  T he liquor store was not what Zoë had been expecting. One of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos was playing in the background, there were framed Hudson River Valley School landscapes on the putty-colored walls, and there were Wine Spectator reviews on display in front of the bottles. A small, black dog with a porcine face and a red gingham collar waddled up to her, wagging its stump of a tail.

  “Sit down, Vita,” said a woman from behind the desk. The dog ignored her, grunting excitedly and darting between Zoë’s legs. “I’m sorry,” said the woman, walking over. As she approached, Zoë saw that the woman was about her own age but had prematurely white hair worn in an elegant short cut. She was wearing dark red lipstick, jade earrings, and a black turtleneck sweater with an asymmetrical hem, and for a moment, Zoë felt as if she were back in Manhattan, somewhere below Fourteenth Street. “I hope she’s not bothering you. Vita’s still a puppy and gets a little too friendly sometimes.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” said Zoë, bending down to pet the dog’s short coat. “Large dogs make me nervous, but I like Vita here. What breed is she?”

  “She’s a French bulldog,” said the woman, as if this were an accomplishment.

  “Of course,” said another woman’s voice, “if you deliberately bred a person with stumpy legs, a bulging forehead, and a squashed-in nose, you’d be considered some kind of amoral monster.” This second woman, who must have been in a back room, was tall and slender and nervy-looking, with high cheekbones and bright, naturally blond hair worn in an unflattering Dutch boy’s bowl cut. In contrast to her colleague’s elegantly bohemian style, she was wearing an enormous flannel shirt and dark, baggy jeans. If she were trying to disguise the fact that she was a natural beauty, she had failed miserably. “These dogs are so impractically designed, they pretty much all have to be delivered by C-section,” she continued, reaching into a tin and handing the dog a treat. “You’re a freak of nature, Vita, that’s right, you are.”

  The first woman’s dark eyes twinkled. “Gretchen rescues greyhounds, which is far more noble than spending wads of cash on a purebred puppy. But I suppose you could say I have a weakness for the freaky.” The two women smiled at each other with the kind of tolerant affection that marks people as intimates.

  Zoë felt like doing a jig. Lesbians! She had found a pair of lesbians! If the town was hospitable to wine-savvy same-sex couples, there was hope for other unexpected delights—Indian take-out, for examp
le, or an internet café. Wanting to convey the extent of her approval, Zoë said, “Is this your store? I’ve just moved to the area from Manhattan, and I was prepared for a lot of tequila and zinfandel. But this is wonderful.”

  “You’ve just moved here? Welcome,” said the elegant woman with the short white hair. “I’m Frances, and this is Gretchen. I used to live in the city, too.”

  “What part?”

  “Downtown. I used to own a store in SoHo—Womanly Wines.”

  “What made you leave?”

  “Well,” said Frances, with a sidelong look at Gretchen. “It was a number of different things. I had a weekend cottage here for a while, and then I decided to move someplace quieter to work on my art.” Zoë took a second look at the pictures hanging on the walls.

  “Oh, not those. This is mine.” She indicated a ceramic sculpture of a woman’s torso. For some reason, Frances had stuck a taxidermy crow on the shoulder, which seemed a little kitschy.

  “Very nice,” she said, automatically.

  “Do you think so? I’m still not happy with the eyes,” said Frances. “I think this wild turkey really turned out much more successfully.” She pointed to a large stuffed tom turkey that was standing in one corner, holding a frozen TV dinner in its beak. “Nowadays, though, I’m really into amphibians and reptiles.”

  “She’s done an amazing snapping turtle,” interjected Gretchen. “When she picked the body up from the road, it looked totally destroyed, and now the thing looks like it’s about to take a bite out of you. Did she tell you she only uses bodies she finds on the road? Much harder artistically, but Frances feels it’s also a political statement.” She gave the other woman a fond look. “Anyway, I need to take Vita to the vet. You need anything from town?”

  Frances fussed over the little dog as Gretchen lifted her into her arms, and then returned her attention to Zoë.

  “Sorry about that,” she said.

  “Not at all. So, are there a lot of expat city folks here?”

  “Look around you. Do you think this shop could survive without a sizable population of Manhattanites?” Frances went on to explain that her clientele was mainly made up of weekenders who drove in from the Upper East Side and SoHo on Friday evenings. “You may think this is just a sleepy little town,” she concluded, “but we have our share of local celebrities.”

  “You have celebrities?” Zoë glanced away from a display of St. Emilion reds that had caught her eye.

  “Oh, God, this place is crawling with famous folks now. There’s a bestselling English mystery writer not far from the village, and a movie actress, the one who played a pregnant woman in that movie, and of course we have that newscaster fellow.”

  “Really. I’d never have known. I thought I was pretty isolated.”

  “I thought so, too, when I first moved here. Now I can barely get enough quiet time to do my art.” Frances patted her hand. “Oh, it’s an adjustment, I know, but you give it a little time. You’ll wind up loving it. Here.” She handed Zoë a card. “That’s my number. Why don’t you call me when you’re free? I’ll invite you over.”

  A little surprised by the use of the singular pronoun, Zoë decided not to press things. Maybe being a lesbian wasn’t all that comfortable in Arcadia, and the two women had adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. In any case, she hoped Frances really meant it. In the city, the exchange of numbers was often a symbolic act, but perhaps here people actually followed through and called new acquaintances.

  Feeling cheered, she’d headed out to Mack’s truck before she remembered that she had no way to get to Frances’s house unless Mack drove her. Preoccupied with this problem, she was only six feet from the pickup before she realized that Mack was having a serious discussion with another man.

  Slowing down, Zoë observed that the other man was doing most of the speaking. Muscular, barrel-chested, and in his mid-to-late forties, the man had a graying crew cut and was dressed in a navy blazer and khakis. Lawyer, she thought. As she got closer, she could see that he was lecturing Mack.

  “Let me ask you something, Mack. Have you really considered what you’re getting yourself into? I mean, you’re going to have what, one car to teach in? What if it breaks down?”

  “I can fix it,” said Mack. “That’s the nice thing about being a former gearhead. I actually know how cars work.”

  “What about insurance? Did you find out whether your personal insurance is going to cover your students?”

  Mack smiled. “As you kept reminding me, Jim, I’m a vet. Turns out there’s all kinds of help available for a wartime vet trying to start up his own business.”

  The crew cut took a deep breath, which seemed to inflate him for a moment. “All right,” he said slowly. “All right. Let’s look at this another way. I have operated a driving school in this town for the past twenty years. I have a reputation. I have folks I taught to drive sending me their kids. What the hell do you think you have that’s going to compete with that?”

  Mack cocked his head to one side. “I do believe you once mentioned the charm of having a former Special Forces medic teaching you how to parallel park. But what’s the problem? You think this town’s not big enough for both of us, Hoss?”

  Even from where she was standing, Zoë could tell the other man was now seriously pissed off. “Nothing you do could have any real impact on my business, but you are turning yourself into a nuisance. Having two driving schools in one small town is going to confuse things, and you know it.”

  “Town’s got two garages,” Mack pointed out. “Nobody’s gotten them mixed up.”

  “This is about Jess, isn’t it?”

  “Actually, it has to do with me trying to make a living,” he said, very quietly.

  “She was always too good for you.” The older man paused, but Mack didn’t say anything. “And if you think I’m going to recommend you as a safe driving instructor…”

  Fascinated, Zoë started to walk closer to the men and accidentally swung the bag she was carrying, clanging the bottles of wine together. Mack and the other man both turned to her. The other man looked annoyed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, self-consciously pushing her glasses up on her nose. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “She’s with me,” said Mack. “Throw the things in the back, Zoë.”

  “Let me help you with those,” said the crew-cut man, reaching out for her bottles of wine.

  “That’s all right,” said Zoë, putting them carefully in the rear of the truck, propped up by a spare tire.

  “She’s a feminist,” said Mack, sounding happy about it. “Zoë Goren, meet Jim Moroney. Jim runs a driving school, too, but at the moment he only has the one instructor, who’s about to turn eighty.”

  Jim Moroney ignored Mack, addressing Zoë instead. “Listen, miss, I’m not the type to go sticking my nose in, but I hate to see any woman getting mixed up with John Mackenna. He tell you he just broke up with a girl? He tell you he just got fired?”

  “No, but I’m piecing things together,” said Zoë. She’d learned from interviewing people that when someone had to inform you that he or she was not nosy or cruel or vindictive, it was pretty safe to assume the opposite was true.

  The man shook his head, as if she had disappointed him. “You may think you know him, but do you really? I don’t like to mention it, but he came back from the war with some issues. As in post-traumatic stress.” He shook his head, as if he were speaking out of sympathy, but Zoë could see the gleam of satisfaction in his eyes before he turned on his heel and walked away.

  “Jesus Christ,” Mack called after him, “is this the way you’re going to play it, Jim? You’re going to go around bad-mouthing me?”

  Zoë climbed up into the passenger seat beside Mack. She could feel the tension coiled in his lean body, and she felt a moment’s concern. “How much of what he’s saying is true?”

  Mack looked at her. “My name’s really John Mackenna.”

  “Were yo
u in Iraq?”

  After a moment, he nodded. “I don’t have any trouble with my temper, though. I just have a problem with him.”

  “In that case,” said Zoë, “why don’t we get out of here?”

  Mack did something to the engine that made it growl, then pulled out in a squeal of tires. That was one thing car culture had going for it; you could make a quick getaway. As Mack left town and picked up speed, she gazed out the window, abruptly wishing for the easy anonymity of public transportation. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Mack, she did. And in a way, the whole parking lot incident had been diverting. But was she going to get sucked into some hillbilly soap opera every time she wanted to go out? She glanced at Mack through her peripheral vision. He seemed to understand that she was not entirely happy with what had transpired, but he didn’t try to explain the whole story or argue his side. She couldn’t decide if he was unusually sensitive to other people’s moods, or if he just didn’t care what she thought.

  When he deposited her at her house, he hesitated, one hand braced against the open window of his truck.

  “You want to call me when you know when you need me again?”

  Zoë nodded. “I just need to check my schedule. I’m thinking probably Sunday or Monday, if you’re available.”

  “All right then,” said Mack, starting the engine. “By the way, by the end of next week, I’ll have a car ready for you to start lessons. So you can be independent.” The way he stressed the last word made her wonder if he had intuited what she’d been thinking.

  “Mack, listen, I’m not sure…”

  But with a growl of his engine, he was already halfway down her driveway and out of earshot.

  The following day was the longest of Zoë Goren’s adult life. A quiet day in the country with no interruptions was supposed to be conducive to work, but Zoë sat in front of her computer, feeling as restless as her cat.