Gail drove a 25-year-old Mercedes wagon and had loyalty cards at two local thrift stores, but she wasn’t a hoarder. Her two cats, Dog and Buttface, got liver pate on Sundays and Tuesday evenings, after she walked to the mailbox for the mail.
On Tuesday nights, she paid her bills at the ivory-tile writing desk her first husband had brought home from his second road rally in 1984.
Her second husband was dead. After her third marriage ended, she swore off marriage entirely and instead wrote checks to her best friend’s son Quentin to pay for firesuits and Hoosiers and racing fuel. She’d paid for the boy’s first trip to Monaco, too, to give him time to recover after his girlfriend left him for Gail’s third ex-husband.
Sometimes the checks bounced.
But the check she was about to write wouldn’t bounce. She’d deposited a cashier’s check on the previous Friday that would ensure that this one would clear. She sat at the little desk, Dog and Buttface elegantly cleaning their paws and whiskers on the antique Isfahan rug below her, and pulled her checkbook out of the desk drawer. The little brass elephant trunk drawer pull clattered as she pushed the drawer shut.
She cracked her knuckles and picked up her finest-point pen.
“Two hundred eighty-three thousand four hundred and seventy-three and no cents,” she wrote, in a precise and tiny cursive hand acquired decades ago under Sister Monica Mary.
The auto transporter would arrive tomorrow morning, and the trophy she’d fought so very hard for, the win with which she had destroyed her third husband and made his then-girlfriend sob openly in court, would be loaded up into a closed car carrier and shipped out to its new owner on another coast.
She had a Polaroid camera ready on the kitchen table to document the loading. Beside it, an envelope lay waiting, addressed to her third husband’s now-wife.
She folded the check in half and tucked it into a leather handbag sitting on the floor by the carved leg of the desk. After the auto transporter left on Wednesday morning, she’d be heading to the airport for a flight to Monaco. She intended to hand her friend’s boy the check in person, over dinner.
Turning back to the desk, she opened the card and wrote, “I sold the Porsche. Quentin will enhjoy the proceeds. Will you cry again?” She got up from her chair, and walked across the Isfahan to the kitchen, Dog and Buttface trailing behind her, tails in perfectly mirrored question marks. She tucked the card into its envelope beside the camera on the table and poured herself a gin.
"Gail's Tuesday Night": These characters are real.That is an achievement under any circumstances, but growing up in Africa-- I'm impressed. Love Whitsun's valentine paw.
Today's tally: Jenny 1, cancer 0
Very sharply drawn vignette! Kudos!