When she’d started the internship, only a month after graduation, she’d assumed that the people at K&P Commercial were smarter, more interesting, more open-minded — in every sense above and beyond the product they produced. An overoptimistic judgment, as she’d since found. When Violet came into the office in the morning and was asked how she was doing and answered, “Not so good,” she always received the same response from her colleagues: “Great! Me, too!” Violet wished it was meant to be sarcastic. Of course she missed the old Violet, the one who’d rebelled against everything, left, right, and center, but she also observed how much easier it was to protest and do the right thing when one’s parents paid for the train ticket to the demonstration. After knocking off for the evening, a group of her coworkers, 80 percent of them interns, gathered regularly around a Mac to applaud a few of the recent commercials — except for Violet, who was easily able to contain her enthusiasm for cappuccino advertisements featuring cowboys and sea monsters. Accordingly, she’d been pulled aside by the producer and encouraged to show a little more spirit. So that now, in the mornings, when the inevitable question came, she always answered, “Totally great!”
Now, behind her, a Mercedes honked. She stepped on the brake, and wanted to shift to “drive,” but her hands were shaking. That happened once in a while. She couldn’t drive on like that. She got out and topped off the tank, to buy time. In the snack shop she wandered aimlessly along the aisles, without buying anything. She paid for the gas with her credit card, and bent low over the receipt as she was signing, so that the cashier wouldn’t notice her shaking. She couldn’t read her own signature. She went back to the car, saying “Violet!” again to herself, then took a deep breath and slipped behind the wheel, started the engine, and steered back into traffic. By the next stoplight, the Jeep began to judder and buck. She had to floor the gas pedal to get the thing moving. Midway through the intersection the engine flooded, and the Jeep stopped short. She turned the key, the indicator lights flared, the engine coughed. A terrible suspicion crept over her that she should have refilled with diesel rather than unleaded. Pairs of headlights rushed toward her and flashed. A concert of horns. She didn’t dare get out of the car. A soft melody tickled her ear. She dumped her handbag out on the passenger seat and managed to get hold of her cell phone. The screen read: Albert.
“I’m really sorry about the airstrip.” Albert swallowed and crouched, so as to be at about eye level with Violet. “Listen, I need your help. I have to get to Helena.”
“And?”
Albert took a breath. “I wanted to ask if you’ll drive us.”
“Us?”
“Fred and me.”
Violet looked him in the eye, and he took a step back. “Take a bus!”
“You know he won’t do that.”
“Then leave him here!”
“I can’t.”
“Why not? I mean …” She leaned out the window and her hair fell in her face and she flicked it aside. “Why not? How far away can this Helena of yours be? Four hours by car? Five? What’s the problem with leaving Fred alone for that long?”
With a stuttering squeal of rubber brakes, a glider touched down behind them, and at the same moment, Albert, holding up a pair of fingers, began to explain.
You Don’t Go Dead Every Day
The sky seemed to be mulling the pros and cons of rain and sunshine, as the Beetle followed a country road through thick pine woods. Violet cut a good number of curves, not altogether unintentionally. And in particular, whenever Klondi gave a histrionic groan from the backseat, or asked exactly how long it was that Violet had had her license. And Violet, almost without moving her lips, would answer, “You don’t go dead every day.” The argument came from Fred, who had refused to accompany them to Saint Helena if Klondi didn’t come as welclass="underline" “You don’t go dead every day. But when I go dead, Klondi has to be there, too.”
That was a moment that hadn’t been at all to Albert’s liking; the four of them standing across from each other in Fred’s garden, nobody saying what everyone (aside from Fred) was thinking: Do I really have to lock myself in a car with them? Albert had clutched the makeup compact tighter as Klondi stepped over to Violet and the two of them shook hands. A natural, reciprocal aversion had been detectable between them ever since, and this was concentrated now in the enclosed space of the Beetle. There was no obvious reason for them to dislike each other, thought Albert; after all, they barely knew anything at all about each other. On the other hand, there was no particular reason for affection. Albert wasn’t about to interfere; he’d be happy as long as Violet didn’t steer them into every pothole on the road, wedged as he was between Fred’s passenger seat, which was pushed as far back as possible, and the car’s awkwardly slanting roof. Crammed into this sardine can of a car, it was hard for him to ignore the fact that they were all on the road because of him. All for one, and one for himself. It made him uncomfortable. In spite of this, he had to get to Sister Alfonsa, he had to find out who his mother was. He wanted an answer to the great WHY. And if it was someone banal, fine, he’d be satisfied, actually, he’d even prefer that, then there wouldn’t be any doubt that he hadn’t lost anything much in the first nineteen years of his life, that growing up in Sister Alfonsa’s care had been, in the truest sense of the word, a blessing.
Fred bent his upper body over the digital clock in the center of the dashboard. “There certainly aren’t ninety thousand minutes left anymore, are there?”
Klondi leaned forward. “What do you mean, sweetie?”
“Albert says, ‘In ninety thousand minutes I’ll be dead.’”
Klondi glanced over at Albert. “Is that what he says?” She laid a hand on Fred’s shoulder. “You’ll live much longer than that.”
Violet downshifted and stepped on the gas. “I’m not so sure you should say that.”
Albert, who didn’t want to get caught in the crossfire, lifted up his chess notebook, in which he’d recorded a few becauses over the past years, in front of his face.