BANANA CREAM SODA [Chapter 17]

She was gone when he woke up. Slipped out somewhere in the early hours of the morning. It was for the best. He would have felt bad having to scurry her out the door so he could get off to work. Besides, she almost certainly wanted to get back home before her dad woke up. Kirby couldn’t imagine being that deferential to his parents when he was almost twenty, but he also couldn’t relate to having a father who would have cared at all whether he made it home safe and sound.

The t-shirt she’d slept in was left folded on his bedside table. It was permeated with her scent. The faint spiciness of her sweat mixed a hint of roses that might have been a perfume or a deodorant. Kirby decided to wear the t-shirt under his work clothes. That way he could be reminded of her throughout the day.

Many times during his shift, he pulled his collar away from his body and inhaled deeply through his nose. With his eyes closed, it was an easy enough thing to imagine she was there with him. Which, at least a couple of times, resulted in a workplace inappropriate physical reaction that he had to disguise.

Although Calliope had made him promise not to, Kirby still battled his urge to confront Frank over his inept and neglectful parenting. He and the boss were enemies now. Kirby imagined how his boss would react to finding out that his youngest, and least qualified employee had spent the night with his daughter. That the two were lovers; in a junior highs school kind of way. Kirby made frequent eye contact, and occasionally engaged in small talk with Frank, hoping to gauge the man’s reactions. The only reaction Frank had was to wonder why Kirby was suddenly so desperate for his attention.

Things got awkward.

By the time he’d clocked out and embarked on his walk home, Kirby realized that he could not remember most of what he’d done that day. It wasn’t that he’d spent the whole day thinking about Calliope in specific terms, but essence of her did invade each passing hour. His feelings for her had grown so intense that they almost seemed unreal.

He was ten minutes into the fifteen minute walk down 156th when a car horn startled him out of his daydream. He looked down to make sure he hadn’t wandered out in the street on accident. He’d never done that before, but this did seem like a time in his life for firsts. Looking over his shoulder, he saw Frank’s copper Volvo approaching. Slowly. Very slowly.

Calliope, in her enormously oversized tortoise shell sunglasses and pink beret, was driving, but only barely. Her chin was millimeters away from resting on the steering wheel, and Kirby thought he could see the white in her knuckles from gripping it so hard. She pulled over to the side of the street and the two passenger side tires jumped up onto the curb.

Leaning across the second seat and rolling down the window, Calliope suggested, “Wanna go get some super cheap tacos?”

“Frank let you borrow his car?”

“Tacos? Are we doing this or what?”

Kirby knew exactly where she wanted to go. The Bungalow. A tiny wooden shack, a stone’s throw from one of the many marinas littered along the waterfront. The Bungalow specialized in low-dollar foods with no subtlety to their flavor profiles. It was approximately a thirty minute drive from where they were standing. With Calliope’s driving, it took over an hour.

Whenever she could, Calliope would cut through parking lots to stay off the main roads. She regularly eased to a stop three or four car lengths from the intersection, then gunned the accelerator when the light turned green, but then slowed back down to at least five miles below the speed limit once she was on the other side.

“I take it you haven’t done this in awhile?” Kirby observed.

“You shush. It’s harder than it looks on TV.”

“I’ll have to take your word on it.” Because he had never been behind the wheel of a car in all of his twenty-three years of life. He was supposed to take driver’s education his junior year at his old school, but then he moved out to the city and had missed their program, which was held the summer before junior year at his new school. After that, it never seemed like a priority. He didn’t feel like he made buy a car kind of money, work wasn’t that far away from his house, and the bus system was decent.

There were only four tables inside The Bungalow, each with two seats, and two pub-style tables right outside their front door, partly blocking the sidewalk. The wait staff looked like carnies. The menu had only five entrees: cheeseburger and fries, fish and chips, grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup, scrambled eggs and toast, or three hard shell tacos. Store brand shells from the local supermarket, but filled with slow cooked carnitas aggressive with spice.

Somehow Calliope could eat them like a dainty little princess, without spilling so much as a crumb on her cropped cardigan, but Kirby’s taco shells appeared to be made from a combination of thousand year old ceramic and nitro glycerin. One small bite at the end made his taco explode like a pipe bomb.

“Oh, baby, be careful. It’s just food. Maybe you should try eating it like you’re from Earth or something.” She winked, and then gently dabbed the corner of her mouth with a napkin, just to punctuate her teasing.

“Funny. That’s funny.” He smirked. “You know, coming from a girl wearing pants that look like an ad for an old-timey dude ranch.”

Calliope’s face lit up. “Can we have our first fight? I mean, like, right now?”

“Okay. What do we fight about?”

“How about… my name is Oksana, and I’m an Eastern European immigrant, and you’re a racecar driver named Bobby Ray, and we’re trying to figure out which one of us left the barn door open and let all our… emus loose.”

“I’m in,” he agreed, gently pounding his fist on the table.

They committed to their respective roles, and debated not only escaped emu, but other pressing topics such as his affair with a reality TV show personality — whom Kirby knew only by name — and he berated her for her international crime spree. Their accents were terrible. Kirby sounded like cut rate insurance company’s mascot and Calliope’s attempts at Bulgarian sounded more like Dracula. Nevertheless, they continued to slip in and out of those voices well after their meals were complete and all the way into their drive home.

“Ve should keep driving until ve get to Mexico.” Calliope as Oksana suggested, still gripping the steering wheel for dear life.

“Woo-wee, that there sure is a darn tootin’ fine idea, Miss Oksana.”

“Seriously,” she suddenly dropped completely out of character. “Let’s do it. I mean, what have we really got to lose?”

They both sat in silence for the many minutes it took for Calliope to drive about a mile. Finally Kirby asked, “Why Mexico?”

“It doesn’t have to be Mexico. Let’s just go anywhere. We’ve got the car. We can do whatever we want. Do you really want to go back to your weird smelling house?”

“My house smells weird?”

“Like fruity cabbage,” she admitted with her eyes widened for effect.

Once he was able to stop laughing, Kirby surmised, “Here’s the thing, Calliope: Where would we live? How would we live? I’ve got a little money in the bank, but not run away to Cabo San Lucas money.”

She sighed. “I know. I was just being silly.”

“Besides, the way you drive, we’d die of old age before we ever got there.”

For the first time since he’d gotten in the car with her, she took one hand off the wheel. But only to slap him in the arm with it. It was playful, but she didn’t seem to enjoy the playing. Kirby could tell from the look on her face that she was pretending to be okay.

“What’s bugging you, baby?”

“You know how I met my mom yesterday?” she asked without hesitation.

“Of course.”

“I think Frank is going to try to make me go and live with her.” Calliope continued on to explain that her coming to live with Frank was never something her father was thrilled about. He only agreed to it because it was no longer possible for her to live at her old house. Since the first day of her arrival, Frank had been looking into various alternative living arrangements. “I know he can seem kinda harmless and dead inside, but he hates having people around.”

Kirby considered that take on his boss of three plus years. It felt like there could be a measure of validity to her claim. Frank St. Benedict was never particularly malicious, but he wasn’t a terribly warm man either. Frank didn’t encourage or discourage camaraderie, but Libra’s Books hadn’t had any sort of team building extracurricular events that Kirby could remember. And it wasn’t like Kirby was the same person at work that he was at home either. It sounded very plausible that Frank’s workplace stoicism could escalate into misanthropy when he was in the comfort of his own home.

“Well, let’s look at getting a place together then.” He blurted it out before he lost the nerve to say it.

Calliope rolled her eyes. “Ha ha.”

“Why not?” he shrugged. “I’ve been thinking about getting out of my place since Noah moved out over the New Year. I doubt I could qualify for a two-bedroom, but — ”

“Why would we need a two-bedroom?”

“I didn’t want to assume,” he muttered.

“Assume,” she scoffed. “You’re being serious right now?”

“Yeah. I mean, it’ll probably take until March to get into a place. What with the application process. And I’d have to give my housemates a month’s notice.”

She was hyperventilating. Not dramatically, but enough that Kirby got concerned. He looked over to see that her hands were quivering. Her head snapped to the side and she locked eyes with his. “Let’s just do it now. You don’t like your housemates anyway. We’ll drive around tonight and find somewhere that has a for rent sign.”

“That’s not quite how it… CAR!”

Calliope’s attention returned to the road ahead just in time to swerve out of the way of an oncoming car. One that was in its proper lane. Avoiding the collision caused her to overcorrect, sending the Volvo up over the sidewalk where it was stopped by the wall of a corner convenience store. Which did more damage to the store than the fender.

Being a vehicle from 1971, there was no airbag to keep Calliope from bouncing her head off the steering wheel, and the lap seat belts kept them from exiting through the windshield, but did little to keep both driver and passenger from lurching forward. Kirby, who had attempted to brace against the dashboard to minimize impact, smashed his nose into his forearm.

“Oh, for unlawful carnal knowledge!” she shouted. The purple lump on her head was growing by the second. Quaking and struggling to take a sufficient breath, she repeated, “We’re so screwed. We’re so screwed.”

Kirby could feel warm blood cascading down his lips and off his chin, but that wasn’t his primary concern in that moment. Softly and calmly, he assured her, “It’s going to be fine. The car’s barely scratched, and I’m sure Frank has really good insurance.”

“Frank doesn’t know I have his car.” She looked over and almost screamed. Kirby’s nose was flat against his face and everywhere from his philtrum to his sternum was drenched in dark red. “Oh god! I killed you!”

“I’ll be fine,” this wasn’t his first broken nose. It was his second, but still. “What do you mean Frank doesn’t know?”

“I found spare keys in the garage, so I walked up to the mall and stole his car.”

“Ah,” was all he could muster. He winced and tapped into all of the problem solving skills an unhappy childhood had bestowed on him. Reaching over, he unbuckled her seatbelt and commanded, “There’s a bus stop two blocks up, in front of the car wash. Go home, clean up, and pretend you never left the house.”

“What are you…?”

“The cops will be here — not soon, but soon enough — I’ll tell them I was driving.” He chuckled, “My face looks like I was driving.”

“I hate this idea,” she concluded.

“Go. Please.”

Kirby got out and stumbled to the other side of the car. He made a shooing motion while Calliope alternated between timidly moving forward and stopping to look back, before the flight part of fight or flight kicked in, and she raced to the bus stop. Once he saw that Calliope was clear of accountability, he was able to relax a little. It would be fine. Sure, he might have to go to jail, but he’d been to jail before. Once. Kirby rested his head against the steering wheel. He thought he might have heard a siren. Perhaps even two. He thought about looking around to see how far away they were, but he suddenly needed a quick nap.

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