A Permanent Member of the Family (9 page)

Erik turned away. He said to Ellen, “Let's go. We're leaving.”

“Now?”

“Now!”

Joan said, “It's snowing. Don't you guys want to stay the night and go home in the morning? The guest room's all made up.”

Erik said, “We have to let the dogs out.”

“They're already out, Erik. They're huskies,” Ellen said. “They love the snow.”

Erik glared at her.

“You're gonna miss my rhubarb pie and ice cream dessert,” Joan said.

“Then we have to let the dogs in,” Erik said. “In, out. It doesn't matter, goddammit, we're leaving,” he said.

“You're the one who wants to leave,” Ellen said and retook her seat next to Raphael. The others stood together in a group at the end of the table.

Ted said to Erik, “C'mon, man, have another glass of wine and chill. Tonight's huge, man. A cognac, maybe?”

“Leave him alone,” Joan said to her husband. “He's upset.”

Sam said, “Rafe, honey, what'd you say that upset Erik? Do we need a time-out?” he said and laughed nervously.

Raphael turned to Sam and said, “Erik was boiling mad and all conflicted when he got here. It wasn't me who upset him. Erik wants his MacArthur to prove he's a genius but fears it was given to him by mistake. That's all.”

Erik said, “Ellen, I'm going home. You can come with me or not, your choice,” he said and strode from the dining room.

Ellen said to the others, “I guess it's his party and he can ruin it if he wants to.” She pushed her chair back and stood up. To Raphael she said, “You're not wrong about him. But you didn't need to rub his face in it.” Then she lowered her head and left the room.

By the time she got to the front hall coat closet, with Ted, Joan and Sam close behind her, Erik had already pulled on his shearling jacket. Sam placed a hand on Erik's shoulder and in a low voice said, “Don't let Rafe spoil anything for you, Erik. Really, it's not personal. It's just . . . I don't know, maybe it's his novel. He works so damned hard on it. But nothing ever satisfies him. He's a perfectionist. So he tears it up and starts over. The frustration makes him seem intolerant sometimes. Or bitter.”

Ted said, “For most of us life's too short to be a perfectionist. And too sweet to be bitter. Right, Erik?”

Erik looked back in the direction of the dining room and said nothing.

Ted said, “Hey, listen, man, you drive carefully. And watch for cops. We've all had a few tonight, remember. And congratulations again, man. We are truly happy for you.”

Erik nodded, opened the door and stepped outside into the blowing snow.

Ellen gave Joan a quick hug and let Ted and Sam kiss her on the cheek. Then Raphael appeared and leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek, too.

She stood for a second at the open door and watched Erik walk heavily down the path, his tracks traipsing behind in the snow. She seemed to look more at the tracks than at the man making them, as if to see where he had been and not where he was going. Beyond the range of the porch light, his footprints diminished and disappeared in the darkness. They heard the car door open and thump shut.

“I wonder if I should drive,” Ellen said.

Sam said, “M'thinks so, m'dear.”

“I'm sorry to leave so early,” Ellen said. “But it's for the best.”

“That's all right,” Ted said. “We love Erik the way he is.”

Joan said, “He's our Erik, after all.”

“And Rafe is our Rafe. And neither one of them is going to change,” Sam said and put a loving arm around his husband. He called into the whirling darkness, “Good night, Erik!”

Ted said, “Hey, good night, man!”

Raphael said, “Congratulations, Erik!”

Joan said, “Yes. Good night, Erik. Goodbye, Ellen!”

Ellen stepped down to the walkway and saw that Erik was in the driver's seat and had started the car. The headlights cut pale wedges through the falling snow. She stood watching for a few seconds. Then she slowly turned around and walked back up the steps and through the open door into the house. The others followed her, and Raphael, the last to go inside, closed the door on the falling snow and the night.

BLUE

Ventana steps off the number 33 bus at 103rd Street and Northwest Seventh Avenue in Miami Shores. It's almost 6:00
P.M
., and at this time of year the city stays hot and sticky thick till the sun finally sets at 8:00. She walks quickly back along Seventh, nervous about carrying so much cash, thirty-five one-hundred-dollar bills. She doesn't want to pay for the car with a check and then have to wait till the check clears before she can drive it home—no way a used-car dealer who doesn't know her personally will accept a check from a black woman and let her take the goods home before the check clears. She wants the car now, today, so she can drive to work at Aventura tomorrow and for the first time park in the employees' lot and on Sunday after church drive her own damn car,
drive her own damn car,
to the beach at Virginia Key with Gloria and the grandkids.

The credit union closed at four so she took the money—one hundred dollars a month secretly saved over nearly three years—out of her account during her lunch break and later in the American Eagle ladies' room stashed the packet of thirty-five bills in her brassiere. She wore a high-necked rayon blouse, even though she knew the day would be hot as Hades and the air-conditioning in the buses would likely be busted or weak. The number 33 at seven o'clock in the morning leaving from her block in Miami Shores to the number 3 in North Miami all the way out to Aventura Mall and then back again over the same route in late afternoon, early in the day or late, air conditioner working or not, it didn't matter, she'd be in a serious sweat just from walking from the bus stop across the long lot to the entrance of the mall and back. And the day was hot from early to late, and she did sweat more than if she wore a sleeveless blouse or T-shirt, but she got through the afternoon with no one at American Eagle Outfitters knowing about the money she was carrying and is relieved now to be walking up Seventh and finally arriving at the gate of Sunshine Cars USA with the money still intact in her bra.

She's forty-seven years old and for twenty-five of those years has been a legally licensed driver in the state of Florida, but this will be the first car Ventana has ever owned herself. Her ex-husband, Gordon, when she was still married to him leased a new Buick every three years and let her drive it with him riding in the backseat as if she were his chauffeur; her son, Gordon Junior, when he went into the Navy bought a new Camaro with his enlistment bonus and parked it in her driveway and let her drive it while he was at sea until he couldn't afford to insure it anymore and had to sell it; and for a few years her daughter, Gloria, owned an old clunker of a van she let Ventana borrow from time to time to help friends move in or out, but then the finance company repossessed it. In all those years Ventana did not have a car of her own. Until today.

Well, she really doesn't own it; she hasn't even picked her car out yet. Most of the vehicles for sale by Sunshine Cars USA are out of her price range, but she knows from reading the listings in the
Miami Herald
that Sunshine Cars USA nonetheless has dozens of what they call pre-owned cars for thirty-five hundred dollars and under: cars with one previous owner, cars with low mileage, cars less than ten years old, cars still shiny and stylish; Tauruses, Avengers, DeVilles, Grand Vitaras, Malibus, Fusions, Cobalts and Monte Carlos. Nearly every day for three years she has stopped on her way to catch the bus in the morning and on her way home at the end of the day and peered through the eight-foot-high iron spiked fence surrounding the lot and checked out the rows of sparkling vehicles for sale. She almost never passed the lot without saying to herself, That Chevrolet wagon looks about right for a woman like me, or, The black Crown Vic is more Gordon's kind of ride, but I could live with it, or, Those SUV type vehicles are ugly, but they safe in an accident. Over the last three years she selected for herself hundreds of pre-owned cars and bought each of them on layaway, and until the car was actually sold off the lot to someone else, in her mind it remained hers. It was a trick she played on herself. It's how she managed to accumulate the thirty-five hundred dollars—pretending each month that she was not saving the money, which is hard to do when you're always short of cash at the end of the month. No, she wasn't saving up to buy a car, she told herself, she was making a one-hundred-dollar layaway monthly payment toward her car, that's what, and if she didn't make her payment on time, she pretended the dealer would sell her car to a customer who had the cash in hand, and all the money she paid on it up to now would be wasted and gone. So she made her payment at the credit union, made it on time. Today, finally, Ventana is going to be the customer who has the cash in hand.

The Sunshine Cars USA showroom is a peach-colored concrete bunker, windowless on three sides with a large plate glass window facing the street. The exterior walls of the building and the window are decorated with signs that shout,
We Work With Any Credit Type!
and promise
$1,000 Down—You Ride!
The spiked fence runs behind the showroom from one corner of the building to the other like a corral for a hundred or more used cars, closing off half the block between Ninety-seventh and Ninety-eighth Streets. Every ten feet droops an American flag the size of a bedsheet waiting for an early evening offshore breeze.

Ventana stops in front of the big plate glass window and looks into the dimly lit showroom beyond. A very fat black man in a short-sleeved white guayabera shirt sits behind a desk reading a newspaper. A red-faced white man with a shaved head, wearing a black T-shirt and skinny jeans, talks into his cell phone. Multicolored tattoos swarm up and down his pink arms. Ventana has seen both men many times hanging around the showroom and sometimes strolling through the lot with potential buyers, and though she has never actually spoken with either man, she feels she knows them personally.

She likes the black man. She believes he's more honest than the white man, who is probably the boss, and decides that she will buy her car from the black salesman, give him the commission, when suddenly a woman is standing beside her on the sidewalk. She's a fawn-colored Hispanic girl half Ventana's size and age. Her lips are puffed up from the injections that skinny white and Latina ladies think make them look sexy, but instead make them look like they got popped in the mouth by their bad boyfriend.

The girl smiles broadly as if she's known Ventana since their school days together, although Ventana has never seen her before. She says, “Hi, there, missus. You want to drive away with a nice new car today? Or you still just window-shopping? I see you walk by almost every day, you know. Time you took a car out on a test drive, don't you think?”

“You see me going past?”

“Sure. Ever since I started here I been seeing you. Time to stop lookin', girl, time to start drivin' your new car.”

“Not a new car. Used car. Pre-owned car.”

“Okay! That's what we got at Sunshine Cars USA, guaranteed pre-owned cars! Certified and warranteed. Not new, okay, but
like
new! What you got in mind, missus? My name's Tatiana, by the way.” The girl sticks out her hand.

Ventana shakes the hand gently—it's small and cold. “I'm Ventana. Ventana Robertson. I only live two blocks off Seventh on Ninety-fifth, that's why you been seeing me here before. On account of the bus stop at a hundred and third.” She doesn't want the girl to think she's already decided to buy herself a car today and is carrying the cash to do it. She doesn't want to look like an easy sale. And she is hoping the fat black man will come out.

“Okay, Ventana! That's great. Do you own your place on Ninety-fifth, or rent?”

“Own.”

“Okay. That's perfect. Married? Live alone?”

“Divorced. Alone.”

“Okay, that's wonderful, Ventana. And I know you have a steady job that you go to every morning and come home from every night, because I see you coming and going, and that's very good, the steady job. So what's your price range, Ventana? What can I fit you into today?”

“I'm thinking something like under thirty-five hundred dollars. But I'll look around on my own for a while, thanks. The price tags, they on the cars?”

“Yes, they sure are! You just go ahead and kick the tires, Ventana. Check over on the far side of the lot, way in the back two rows. We've got a bunch of terrific vehicles right there in your price range. Will you be bringing us a trade?”

“Trade?”

“A car to trade up for the new one.”

“No.”

“Okay, that's good too. We close at six, Ventana, but I'll be inside if you have any questions or decide you want to take a test drive in one of our excellent vehicles. It's still too hot out here for me. Don't forget, we can work with any kind of credit type. There's all kinds of arrangements for credit readily available through our own financing company. You have a Florida driver's license, right?”

Ventana nods and walks calmly through the open gate into the lot as if she's already bought and paid for her car, although her legs feel wobbly and she's pretty sure she is trembling, but doesn't want to look at her hands to find out. She knows she's scared, but can't name what she is scared of.

Tatiana watches her for a few seconds, wondering if she should follow her, the hell with the heat, then decides the woman isn't really serious yet. She strolls back inside the showroom and reports that the woman is a long-term tire kicker, probably a month or more from signing away her firstborn, which makes the black man chuckle and the white man snort.

The black man checks his watch. “Yeah, well, she only got thirty minutes till we outa here.”

Tatiana says, “She'll be back tomorrow. Early, I bet. The girl's decided where she's going to buy, now she just got to figure out what to buy.”

“How much she got to spend?” the black man asks.

“She's sayin' three-five. I'll start her at five and work up from there.”

“Too low. The '02 DeVille, start her with that. The bronze one. It's listed at nine. Tell her she can drive it home for six. Fifty-nine ninety-nine. Sisters like her, they too old for the Grand Ams but still hot enough to want a Caddy. She got the three-five?”

“Prob'ly.”

“Gonna need financing. Forget the fucking Caddy. Go higher.”

“For sure.”

“Get her into the blue Beemer,” the white man says.

 

V
ENTANA MAKES HER WAY
toward the cars in the far corner of the lot, as instructed. She walks quickly past and deliberately avoids looking at the nearly new cars that she knows she can't afford. She doesn't want her car, when she finds it, to appear shabby and old by comparison, not pre-owned but
used.
Used up.

When she gets to the far corner of the lot and walks past the cars that are supposed to be in her price range, most of them look used up. Rusted, scraped, dinged and dented, they seem ready for the junk heap, just this side of the cars sitting on cinder blocks or sinking into the weeds in the front yards of half the houses in her neighborhood, unsolvable mechanical problems waiting to be solved by the miraculous arrival of a pocketful of cash money from a lottery ticket payout, which will never come, and the vehicle will be finally sold for junk.

There is a black 2002 Honda Civic fastback that at first looks good to her, no dents or dings, no rust. The doors are locked, but when she squints against the glare and peers through the driver's side window she can make out the numbers on the odometer—278,519. End of the line, for sure. The sign in the window says,
Retail Price $4950, Special Offer $2950.

There is a blue 1999 Mercury Grand Marquis with half the teeth in its grille missing, bald tires, torn upholstery, trunk lid dented at the latch so she'll have to tie it closed with wire to keep it from yawning open when she drives it to work. A sign taped to the driver's-side window says,
Retail Price $5950, Special Offer $2950.

Maybe she should go up a notch in price, she thinks. After all, even though they call it a “special offer,” it's actually just an asking price, a number where negotiations can begin. That's when she spots a light blue 2002 Dodge Neon with a big yellow sign on the windshield that cheerfully yells,
Low Mileage!!!
The retail price is $6,950, and the asking price is $3,950. If she offers $3,000, they might settle on $3,500.

Okay, that's a car to test-drive. But instead of driving just one car, she'll try to find two more, so she can compare three. In very little time she has added a 2002 Hyundai with 87,947 miles, clean body, no dents or rust, good tires, and has found a metallic gray 2002 Ford Taurus that she really prefers over both the Hyundai and the Neon. It's a large four-door sedan with a tan cloth interior, and this car too has a
Low Mileage!!!
sign, including the actual number of miles, 55,549. It's stodgy and boring, the kind of four-door sedan a high school math teacher or a social worker might own, nowhere near as sleek and borderline glamorous as the Neon and the Hyundai. It'll burn more gas than either, for sure. But the respectability and conventionality of the Taurus suit her. And unlike the Neon and the Hyundai, maybe because of its size, it does not feel
used
to Ventana; it feels
pre-owned.
Well cared for. By someone like her.

She takes another slow walk around the vehicle looking for scratches or dents she might have missed on her first pass, but there aren't any to be seen. When she steps away from the Taurus, intending to take another last look at the Neon and the Hyundai before heading for the showroom, she hears from behind her the low rattling growl of a large animal and, turning, sees a gray dog coming toward her at full speed. It's a thick-bodied pit bull running low to the ground five or more car lengths away and closing fast, eyes yellow with rage, teeth bared, growling, not barking, a dog not interested in merely scaring her and driving her away. It's a guard dog, not a watchdog, and it wants to attack her, attack and kill her.