She thinks she’s coming across as pertly as Sarah Jessica teasing Mr. Big, but she’s being more bitchy Miranda than flirty Carrie. It’s all he can do to keep from telling her, you’re closer to this than you admit, baby, I’ve seen your driver’s license, but he hasn’t yet. And to be fair, she always ends her dramatic reading with a little slap and tickle. “Chicks dig a guy with a senior discount,” she likes to whisper in his hairy ear.
“There’s a Neiman Marcus,” Claudia is saying as she creeps the truck over speed bumps through a labyrinthine parking lot sectioned with bristling waist-high hedges and little trees with purple flowers.
“Whoa,” Kevin says. “Neiman Marcus? Didn’t you say something about Target?”
“It’s Neiman’s Last Call store.” She glances at him. “Everything’s marked way down.”
“Huh.”
“There’s a Wohl’s, too,” she says. “They’re less expensive.”
“Ah.” He relaxes a bit — Wohl’s he knows, there’s a Wohl’s out near Briarwood, on the far side of 94. It’s not much further up the retail evolutionary tree than Target or Sears, but it’s all he needs. Stella would drag him into Neiman Marcus, but then Stella’s not here, is she?
“Wohl’s is good,” he says as the truck rounds a corner into a wide-open, sun-hammered, nearly empty parking lot. A few cars are clustered at the far end where the bleached yellow façade of Wohl’s is taking the sun full in its face, and a few more are parked along the bland redbrick storefronts on the right: postal store, Christian books, big and tall menswear. The rest of the lot, with its faded chevrons of empty parking spaces and minimalist light poles staring down like surveillance devices, seems as desolate as a salt flat. All it needs are the bleached ribs and eyeless skulls of dead cattle. Even through the window tint and the icy blast of AC in his lap, Kevin can feel the blinding glare and the baking heat, and suddenly his stomach knots up so tight he nearly winces.
Don’t leave me here, he almost says aloud. This wasteland is indistinguishable from any strip mall parking lot in North America, but suddenly it seems like the most alien landscape Kevin’s ever seen. He’ll get out of the truck as Kevin Quinn, but by the time he stumbles across to Wohl’s, he’ll be Fred C. Dobbs for sure, all alone and thousands of miles from anybody who loves him — assuming anybody does — hollow-eyed, stubbled, footsore, and lip-blistered, muttering to the first person he sees, “Can ya stake a fellow American down on his luck?” His stomach only clenches tighter when Claudia’s truck rolls to a stop in the emptiest portion of the lot, equidistant from Wohl’s and the shops on the right.
“Last Call’s just around the corner,” she says, and he realizes she’s being polite, leaving the choice to him, but it feels as if she’s leaving him to die. He’s afraid he’s going to beg her not to abandon him, that she’s going to have to get out of the truck herself and drag him out into the heat as he clings to the headrest for dear life, leaving long, desperate fingernail scratches in the upholstery. He turns to her, his mouth dry again.
“He’s wrong,” he says, and when she looks at him quizzically, he adds, “Your father. I’ll bet you’re a fantastic surgeon.”
She blinks at him, momentarily speechless. He shrugs, but makes no effort to get out of the truck.
“Who needs another nurse?” he says. “World’s lousy with nurses.”
She gives a harsh bark of a laugh. “Not really, but thank you.”
“Thank you. For everything.” He hugs the jacket to his chest, gestures weakly at his knee. “I feel better already.”
“Good.”
As he watches her sidelong, desperately trying to think of something else to say, she shifts her focus rather meaningfully toward the department store. No doubt she’s wondering what he’s doing, why he’s postponing their parting, and he can’t decide if he wants her to misunderstand — wants her, in other words, to think it has something to do with her and what passed between them — or if he wants her to understand the truth, that he simply doesn’t want to be left to fend for himself in this empty parking lot under a semiforeign sun, semisunstroked and wearing semitattered clothes, not knowing a soul for miles in any direction, left alone to think only of all the frustrations and disappointments that have led him here, to this barren place. Either way, he realizes, he’s going to seem pathetic to a woman like Dr. Barrientos, and at last, like a dying prospector accepting his fate in that last euphoric moment before the sun kills him, he starts fumbling — for the seat belt release, for the door handle, for something to say that will leave a better impression than he has so far. He’s got the belt unlatched somehow and is disentangling his right arm, and then he cracks the door and lets in the heat, and as he nudges the panel with his injured knee, pushing the door wider, he hears her say, “Everybody.”
He’s got one foot on the running board, his jacket clutched to his chest. She’s not looking at him, but staring through the windshield, not at Wohl’s, but at something infinitely far away.
“Well, listen.” He edges down into the heat. As he plants both shoes on the gritty pavement and puts his hand on the door to swing it shut, she shifts her gaze to him slowly, eerily.
“Everybody is tender and passionate.” It’s almost as if she’s not talking to him, it’s more like she’s talking in her sleep, an utterance out of a dream.
“Everybody,” she says again, her gaze sharpening in his direction.
“I know,” says Kevin.
She gives him the barest of smiles, one lonely prospector passing another in a trackless waste.
“Good luck to you.” She puts her truck in gear.
“And to you,” he says, and bangs the door shut. With a throaty roar the truck glides away in a wide curve across the empty lot, and Kevin lifts his eyes to the freeway interchange, which is close now, ramps swooping over and under each other, lines of cars gliding as if pulled by strings, high above sunburned yellow grass. When he can’t hear the grumble of Claudia’s truck anymore, only the windy rush of traffic, he turns and limps through the heat toward the department store, pulling his sunglasses out of his pocket.
Stepping up on the curb in front of Wohl’s, he meets his reflection in the tinted glass of the doors, and it’s the first time he’s seen himself full-length since the men’s room at the airport — his shirt is half-untucked, the rip in his trouser leg bares the white square of his bandage and an alarming reach of pale shin. Around the bug eyes of his sunglasses, his head seems swollen. That’s just a flaw in the glass, he tells himself, my head’s not that big, but then his image trembles and he has the awful feeling he’s about to evaporate into the overheated air. The door opens as he reaches for it, startling him again, and out comes an elderly woman unflatteringly packed into white capri pants and a red striped top. Kevin holds the door as she teeters past on hot pink heels, her tight coiffure dyed an unconvincing blond, her bright mouth, the same shade of pink as her shoes, puckered under wraparound sunglasses. He nods, but she sails by as if she hasn’t seen him, stepping heavily down off the curb and mincing toward her car. And who am I to call her elderly? he wonders, as earnest as Jimmy Stewart. She gets the same mail from the AARP that I do. Twenty years ago, he might have thought of her as a sexy older woman. And twenty-five years from now, that could be Stella, dyeing her hair and risking her ankles and packing herself into pants two sizes too small. He folds his sunglasses into his jacket pocket and passes through the second set of doors into the mellow fluorescence and cool, dry, floral air of the store, thinking of the once and future Stella. In the three years they’ve been together, this is the first time he’s been shopping for clothes without her and he feels the same mildly illicit, slightly queasy thrill he felt last night when he sat in the big picture window of Blimpy’s and greedily ate a cheeseburger and onion rings. But this is even riskier, because by the time he sees her again — tomorrow night, when she gets back from Chicago — he will no longer smell of onions, but he will have a new pair of trousers, and Stella, who could star in her own production of CSI: Ann Arbor, will eventually come across them in his closet or in the laundry and she’ll say, oh my God, not Wohl’s! Because she’ll know. What on earth were you doing in Wohl’s?