“Okay.”
“And that there are people out there that we’re destined to meet up with. That everyone has, from the moment they’re born, a certain other person that they’re supposed to hook up with for them to fulfill their destiny.”
“I don’t know much about that,” I said. “It’s not the sort of thing I’ve written about. But it’s one point of view.”
Trevor smiled knowingly, nodded slowly. “It certainly is.”
I tilted my head in the direction of the black Chevy. “That’s your car, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t see a lot of those around,” I said. “They haven’t made that model for quite a few years, have they?”
“I don’t suppose so.”
“And yet, with so few of them around, I saw one at the mall last night, at Midtown? Same color as yours, parked right by the doors.”
Trevor swallowed. “Huh.”
“And then, I was heading out of town, toward Oakwood? And I saw another one, just like it, same color, everything.”
This time, Trevor didn’t even have a “huh” to offer.
“Isn’t that a coincidence,” I said. “That I’d see two cars exactly the same, in different places, in the same evening.”
I couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses. Couldn’t tell whether he was looking away.
“Trevor, take your glasses off for a sec.” He sat rigidly, made no move to do what I’d asked. “Trevor, just for a second.”
Slowly, making a ritual of it, he removed the glasses. I eyed him intently.
“I would never want anyone, ever, to hurt my daughter, or scare her, or cause her any trouble.”
“Of course not,” he said, not looking away.
“I just wanted to make myself clear about that.”
“Absolutely,” he said.
“So we understand each other,” I said.
“We do,” Trevor said. I nodded my farewell to him, and moved on.
“And don’t buy my son booze anymore,” I added.
“Whatever you say.”
I turned and walked away.
I had two surprises shortly after that.
The first: As I walked by Trevor’s Chevy on the way back to my car, there, asleep in the backseat, was Morpheus.
The second: After I got back in the Virtue, I turned onto Crandall. Looking up the street, I noticed the back end of a big black Annihilator SUV. Trolling past my house, slowly, then picking up speed as it headed north.
23
“CAN WE WATCH TV WHILE WE EAT?” Paul asked, standing next to me in the kitchen.
I was putting linguine on three plates, and had put the salad in a glass bowl with a couple of tongs.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You know how your mother feels about having the TV on during dinner.”
“Yeah, but Mom’s not here. And
This did raise an interesting question. Did we have to play by Sarah’s rules if Sarah wasn’t home? Especially when
While I made up my mind, I said to Paul, “Call your sister, tell her dinner is ready.”
Without moving an inch away from me, Paul shouted, loud enough to make the wineglasses on the kitchen shelf ring, “Angie! Dinner!”
“Thanks,” I said.
She’d gotten home the same time as I had, headed straight up to her room and closed the door. I’d barely had a chance to ask whether she was dining with us, and she’d had only enough time to grunt “Yes.”
Paul grabbed the TV remote as he took his plate to the table. We have a TV in the kitchen, which we often have tuned to the news. He turned it on, flipped through a few channels until he had the one he wanted.
“Oh!” said Paul. “It’s the one where Homer’s an astronaut.”
That was, I had to admit, a pretty good one. Particularly the part where he eats the potato chips, rotating in zero gravity in a parody of the space station docking maneuver in
And besides, I wanted something to take my mind off things, so that I’d stop obsessing about Trevor, Lawrence, what Angie was doing visiting Trixie, and that Annihilator.
It wasn’t like there was only one Annihilator in the city, or even one black one. Lots of people owned them. The sports editor had one, in yellow. There was a guy around the block had one, in green. And I’d seen plenty of black ones since they started coming onto the market a couple of years ago. It was probably the most popular color.
So a black Annihilator driving up my street was not reason to panic. A black Annihilator racing up the driveway, plowing through the front of the house, that would be reason to panic.
Half an hour earlier, when the SUV had made a left at the next cross street on Crandall, I had tromped on the accelerator. When the Virtue didn’t take off with as much speed as I’d hoped, I literally leaned forward in the seat, as if rocking my own body would give the car some momentum. If I could get close enough to the truck, maybe I’d know for sure that it wasn’t the one from the other night. For example, if I could read the license plate, that right there would be all the evidence I needed to relax. The plates on the one that had chased me and Lawrence, that rammed into Brentwood’s, had been obscured.
And it had had deeply tinted windows. If the SUV that had driven up Crandall and past my house had regular windows, windows that allowed you to see who was driving and riding inside, that would be even more proof that it was not the same vehicle.
I got to the cross street, turned left. The SUV was gone.
I sped up to the next intersection, glanced both ways. They weren’t hard to spot, these Annihilators, towering above all the other traffic as they did. But I didn’t see one, not in either direction. So I drove home, slightly rattled, as always.
Once I’d put the linguine into a pot of boiling water, I went up to our bedroom and dumped the contents of the Gap bags I’d left there that morning onto the bed. I ripped off tags, put the shirts and “loose fit” khakis on hangers.
Angie’d seemed a bit hurt in the morning that I hadn’t been wearing any of my new purchases, so I stripped down, pulled on a new pair of boxers, buttoned up one of the new shirts, and stepped into a pair of tan khakis. Loose fit was right. Although they hugged my waist well enough with a belt, I had all this room in them, certainly compared to the jeans I’d been wearing. They were loose enough in the leg that I might be able to pull them on over shoes, a dressing routine I had abandoned around the same time I’d stopped making peanut butter and marshmallow Fluffernutter sandwiches. I admired myself briefly in the mirror, then went down to finish dinner preparations.
I was waiting for Angie to show before taking my first bite of dinner, and when Paul shoveled in a mouthful of pasta, I gave him a disapproving look.
“She could be forever,” he said. “I think she’s making herself look beautiful, and I can’t wait that long.”
“What’s she getting all dolled up for?”
“She’s probably going out.”
I glanced at the fridge, where we’ve posted an oversize calendar and an erasable marker for keeping track of everyone’s activities. For tonight, Angie had scribbled, “Lecture.”
