Turn Signal (2 page)

“Probably. My social calendar isn't too full these days.”

“Gina coming?”

“Dunno. That's up to her.”

“So you think you can leave off the great American novel for a day, then?”

Jack shrugs and looks out the window.

Pauline comes up to take Milo's order. He grabs a menu, although he knows it by heart.

“Let's see, I'll have the Salisbury steak, with mashed potatoes and………macaroni and cheese.”

Pauline walks away shaking her head. Jack smiles down into the remnants of his lunch. Milo has been making him laugh for most of his life, and he generally appreciates that. They played high school ball together, Jack as a running back and linebacker, Milo as a skinny, motor-mouth wide receiver.

“Can't believe it's been 30 years,” Milo says.

“Because we still look so young, right?”

“Well, at least some of us do.” Milo brushes back imaginary hair, having lost almost all of it while he was gaining about a pound a year. “You know what Cully Dane told me?”

“What?”

“He said Jerry Prince was gonna come back for this one. That'd be a hoot, wouldn't it. I wonder what ol' Jerry Prince would look like now. Remember the time he tried out for the JV football team? The chin protector?”

“Hard to forget.”

Jerry Prince, weighing perhaps 110 pounds, had somehow gotten his mother to let him try out for junior varsity football when they were all in the ninth grade. But he'd neglected to bring a jockstrap, didn't even seem to know what one was when Milo produced his and asked him to identify it.

So, Milo Wainwright and Mack McLamb showed Jerry Prince how to wear his “chin protector.”

“If you don't wear this, and somebody hits you under the helmet, they'll knock you out like a light,” Milo told him. “This'll hold everything in place.”

When the coach came into the locker room that first day, Jerry Prince was wearing a jockstrap over his head, with the elastic waistband encircling it from crown to chin, the cup dangling behind him.

“Mack laughed so hard he wet his pants,” Milo says. It is obviously a fond memory.

It was not the kind of story that would be worn to forgetfulness by four years of Buster Gladden High School, or even 30 more years of adulthood.

It was Jack Stone who offered to loan Jerry Prince a jockstrap after he left practice that day in tears before it even started. But that was it for Jerry Prince and football.

“God, I wonder if he ever got married.” Milo, retelling the story for the benefit of the two or three people in the diner who didn't know it already, has been laughing so hard he has to wipe a tear from his cheek.

“I heard he's still in New York,” Jack says. “Some kind of big editor or something.”

“Well, good for him. Good for ol' Jerry Prince.”

Jack stands and leaves six dollars with his check on the table.

“Gotta go,” he says. “No work, no pay.”

Milo tries to get him to stay, even blow off the afternoon. He runs the insurance agency one block from the diner, and he seems to have all the time in the world.

“We could shoot some pool.”

Jack waves him off, gives a general goodbye to the rest of the room, and heads for his truck.

The hardest part, he supposes, is the uniform, a shade of brown seldom worn voluntarily. But the pay is good for a guy like him, strong and energetic enough to outhustle kids half his age. He tried once to get Brady to go to work for UPS, but the way his son turned him down made him realize that even Brady, whose most prestigious job to date was a six-month stint managing the QuikStop in Riverdale, thought Jack's present station was beneath him.

He looks at his watch. One o'clock. Even with Milo for entertainment, he's only wasted 30 minutes over lunch. He makes three more deliveries in town, the last one over at Judge Edmonds' house on Second Street, the nice, shady part that overlooks Sycamore Creek. The judge, who's retired now, sees him coming up the street, and Jack feels obliged to stop and talk to the old man, father of one of his old classmates.

“Susan's inside, gettin' her beauty sleep,” the judge says with a grin as he walks down the flagstone steps to the sidewalk. “She's wearing herself out, getting everything ready for the reunion. Thirty years. Damn. It seems like it was yesterday you were out there scorin' touchdowns.”

The judge rambles a little about the weather and politics, and it takes Jack 10 hard-to-regain minutes to get away from him.

“Tell Susan I said hi,” he yells as he drives off. She lives in the judge's house now, the one she grew up in. Gina says she's resting up between marriages. She's been arrested for two DUIs in the past year, but she's still driving.

He guns it, hurrying back to Main Street. “You slow down, Jack Stone!” he hears a voice yell behind him. He thinks it's Mrs. Guarnieri, who used to work at the dry cleaner's, but he isn't sure, and he doesn't have time for a lecture. He's happy when he gets out of Speakeasy, where at least the people offended by his driving don't seem to know his name. Before his mother passed away in March, they would call her up and complain.

“Maybe you could get a job driving one of those race cars,” she said once. “Then people would like it when you went fast.”

He crosses the flat bridge over the creek. Down below, a boy and girl are sitting in tubes in the middle of the water. It's over 90 degrees, headed for 95, and in the truck it feels every bit of 100.

Jack turns left on Humpback Road. He has five deliveries to make in a 20-mile loop that will take him to Holden Springs, where he has enough work to carry him through to quitting time.

The road parallels the creek for a couple of miles, with hardwoods and swampland to the left, houses and farms to the right. One of the first homes he comes to has a cardinal-and-bluebird festooned mailbox out front, nearly surrounded by clematis. He can barely read the name on it: PRINCE.

Everywhere Jack Stone turns, his history confronts him. Sometimes these days, it's hard to delineate between past and present. The girl he got to third base with in 10
^th
grade is an assistant principal at the high school now, but the last time he saw her, he had this lapse, only a few seconds, when he saw her as she was, and damn near grabbed her ass, right there in the Food Lion parking lot. The boy who was second-string tailback in 1969 is a bank vice resident, but Jack can't see anything except the little doofus who used to tell him, as they went back out after halftime, leading by three touchdowns, “Don't kick all their butts, Hoss. Save some for me.”

He estimates that he passed that mailbox 7,000 times the first 18 years of his life. Sometimes, Jerry Prince would walk to school with him, although it was pretty clear that Arlene Prince did not approve of her son keeping such company.

The Princes lived in a well-kept brick colonial, four rooms up and four down. It was built two years before McCauley Prince left his wife and son one day, as preamble to marrying his secretary. He was a third-generation lawyer from an old family that had lived in or near Speakeasy almost forever, and he provided for his abandoned family well enough, most thought, although Arlene did have to go to work as a secretary herself.

Jerry was 5 when his father left. Ken and Ellen Stone encouraged their youngest child to befriend the shy little boy who lived just three houses up the road. They would invite Jerry to come play with Jack, but the invitations were seldom reciprocated.

By the time they were very far along in elementary school, Jack Stone and Jerry Prince were in different orbits. Jerry was the smartest boy in every grade, without the brass or the athletic ability to keep him within the realm of normalcy and acceptance.

Jack thinks he sees Arlene Prince in the backyard as he drives past, sitting in a lawn chair under the weeping willow, but he can't be sure, and he sure as hell isn't going to slow down and find out.

His late mother's house looms ahead. The For Sale sign is still up, as it has been since early May. If they don't sell it soon, he'll have to talk Mike and Sandy into going thirds on a paint job. It's been five years since the last one, and the old wood really drinks it up. He's not unhappy that his son is living there now, even if it is more or less from necessity.

Brady's dirty red pickup is out front, which means he's either taking a long lunch break or his latest career, as an apprentice bricklayer, is just one more line on a long, discouraging résumé.

He knows he should stop by and speak to his son. He knows he's lying when he tells himself he absolutely has to keep moving, that he can't afford to dawdle, that the online-ordered bounty in the back of his truck must go through. But he keeps driving anyhow.

By the time he's finished his oblong loop, it's after 4. He crosses back into town from the south, over Speakeasy Creek, where half a dozen more kids are lying mostly submerged in the cool, shady water, hands and feet hanging on to inner tubes. The kids at Sycamore Creek were white; these are brown. The schools have been integrated since before Jack started ninth grade, but the creeks are still Jim Crow. The funniest thing is that sometimes, it's the African-American kids who float about in Sycamore Creek and the whites in Speakeasy. Somehow, both races seem to know whose creek is whose, according to the day or the season. He sees them interacting sometimes at the McDonald's, or hanging out in the Food Lion parking lot, but at the creeks, it might as well be 1955.

He turns left just past the bridge, onto Larkmeadow Lane. To the right, it's Eighth Street. It used to be Eighth Street the other way, too, before Cully Dane and his partners who built Speakeasy Glen persuaded the town council to change it to something “more poetic.”

Jack passes two shady side streets with faux-aged wooden signs, then turns onto Woodpecker Way. He parks on the street, taking up most of the curb fronting their cul-de-sac contemporary. He enjoys the new house, barely three years old. It's just that it's so different. He spent all those years living in the farmhouse, with low ceilings and no more windows than an early 20
^th
-century country home should have, and the space and light here sometimes overwhelm him.

The ceilings are so tall he needs a stepladder to change light bulbs, and there are so many skylights that he's told Gina he's thinking about wearing sun block inside the house. The spiral staircase still seems strange, with its wedges of metal and carpet surrounded by air. Wesley, the terrier, has to be carried down them at least twice a week after following Jack or Gina or Shannon upstairs and then whimpering at the abyss, as helpless as a cat up a tree.

Jack is happy enough with it, though, or would be if the mortgage payments were more appropriate to his and Gina's present salaries.

He gets a Coke from the refrigerator and climbs the steps, calling to Shannon to keep Wesley from following him.

He goes into the back room and shuts the door.

They have a routine. He will write for an hour and a half, then come down to help prepare dinner. Gina gets home at 6, and by 8, he's back upstairs.

It's been two years now. When he started, he had no idea how long it would take, only that he had to do it.

It wasn't easy to give up the long-distance job, driving his own rig, making more than many of the college graduates around them. The money he got from selling his rig carried them for a while, and he's invested some. Mack McLamb is a broker, and the tech stock he talked Jack into buying in 1998 is soaring.

But even he knows they can't go on like this forever.

He can't fault Gina. She deserves some kind of medal for not just packing up and leaving, or at least trying to have him committed.

It should help that he is actually in the same house with his wife and daughter much of the time now. He wonders, though, if it isn't worse, knowing he's a closed door away, but that he might as well be in California, and that his mind is farther away than that sometimes.

He's tried to explain it to Gina, and she at least pretends to understand, although he knows she worries about money. He does, too.

“This is what I'm supposed to do,” he told her that first night, after he'd spent the rest of the trip out west and back again thinking about the old man and his story. “I'm as sure of that as I am of the sun rising. We'll all be glad if I do this. Believe in me.”

He'd gotten on his knees when he said that, like a suitor proposing.

“Well,” Gina had said, shaking her head and smiling slightly, “it could be worse, I suppose. You could have gotten the call to forsake your earthly belongings, like Jimmy Tucker.”

Jimmy Tucker had been one of their neighbors before he went to a revival at his Baptist church and heeded a call nobody else heard. According to the Bledsoes, three doors down, he and his family have moved somewhere in Southwest Virginia, where he is starting his own congregation.

Jack hasn't felt much magic in his life, and he is somewhat shocked himself at how self-indulgent he's been lately, how un-Jack-like, as Milo Wainwright put it. And if people want to think it's a mid-life crisis, well, it's probably easier to explain it that way.

But he knows he's right. He doesn't even know exactly why he's so sure, but he is. Something in the old man's voice maybe, something in the look he had right before he disappeared.

Lovelady
is more than 400 pages long now. Jack has rewritten it three times, aided by the computer he bought with some of the money he got for the rig.

He hasn't told too many people about what he's doing, although most know it has something to do with a book. The ones who don't subscribe to the concept of mid-life crises just think he's had some kind of breakdown.

CHAPTER THREE

The three of them rarely have breakfast together. Usually, Jack's either already gone or upstairs writing when Gina comes tearing through, late for work. He and Shannon sometimes overlap, during the school year, but in the summer, Shannon sleeps as late as they'll let her.