Doubles Read Online Free PDF Page A

him.”
    “Shhh,” I said, but it was too late. She had basically yelled it. The man looked back at us with a wide smile.
    I would drop him off at a gas station in Chapel Hill. We’d be fine. I wanted to be dangerous and calm. I didn’t want her to know how scared I actually was.

    Behind her, on the shoulder, I saw the man call out something to the car in front of us. It was a champagne Grand Marquis, the driver’s head low and gray. The man grimaced and turned his ear as if listening to a response. Then he picked up a small rock and threw it into the side of the car. At an exaggerated slow pace he began his return to the Dart. The gray hair in front of us turned. I could just barely see the face of an old man. It was filled with terror and confusion. The girl hadn’t seen any of it though, and when she finally turned to see what I was looking at, the man was already opening the door.
    “It’s moving up ahead,” he said.
    Traffic began to creep. Fifty yards ahead, a young man stood beside a yellow Jeep Wrangler on the side of the road speaking into his cell phone. As we passed, I saw a red smear across the pavement leading to a deer crumpled on the side of the road, antlers twisting its neck at a sharp angle, horn tangled into the wavering heat. We passed three dilapidated tobacco hangers overgrown with kudzu. A pickup truck filled with young Mexican children drove by us, the boys all facing towards the center of the truck bed, where the head of a German shepherd emerged. The boys all reached for it, petting it, rubbing it, like the dog were some highway celebrity. They pushed and laughed, one reaching over the other trying to get to the animal.
    “Your dad runs that art museum,” the man said.
    The girl cocked her head, like she had heard some distant sound.
    “How’d you know that?”
    “Five for five.”
    “And you . . .” He pointed at me, his long, boney finger wavering in the air behind my seat. He then circled the finger, as if winding a long string around it, and flung his hand upward. “Your daddy is a lawyer.”
    As he said it, the dog leapt from that pickup truck. I watched in the rearview as it landed hard on the pavement, rolled onto the shoulder, and, in one smooth motion, popped up and started to run. Within
seconds it disappeared into the kudzu. The children banged on the truck’s back windshield, trying to make the driver stop. I thought to myself, If I fell from a truck bed, I would surely crumple into a ball and stay that way. How does anything alive just pop back?
    “You guys see that?” I said.
    “I right?” the man said.
    “He right?” the girl said.
    “See what?”
    “Am I right?”
    “About what?”
    “Father esquire.”
    I returned to my own car, reacquainting myself with the fact that I was sitting beside a strange, beautiful woman and an ex-con with tattooed fingers who claimed to be a mind reader. It was the only time I could think of I had been in my own car with two people whose names I didn’t know, let alone one I thought might kill me, and one I felt like I might fall in love with if I looked at her one more time.
    “Six for six,” the man said.
    “How’d you know that?” the girl said.
    But it didn’t take a mind reader to make an educated guess that someone who played tennis came from a family with money. And families with money, lots of them had a lawyer in the fold. Like mine. The guy was smart, but he was no mystic.
    “And I’ll tell you something else, since I’m on such a roll. You didn’t think you were going to be the one driving this girl home.” I let my eyes rise to the rearview. The pickup had stopped far back on the shoulder. In the backseat, the man leaned forward. “Yeah. Your buddies are the ones with the girlie luck. But look at you now.”
    “It’s not like that,” she said.
    “Ah, but it is. Who was it that was supposed to be with her? Another tennis player. You play doubles?”

    I couldn’t believe he knew what doubles