Call Me a Cab

2

Well, of course, it wasn’t quite that easy. Back in Manhattan we stopped at her bank for the certified check made out to Harry Fletcher (my father), which I mailed to my parents’ house in Queens, and then we drove downtown to my apartment on East 17th Street. The passenger waited in the cab while I threw some clothing and a toothbrush into my old canvas bag with all the zippers — given me by my parents when I went away to college — and then I sat down at the dinette table to compose a note to Rita.

About Rita. She was the closest thing I had to an actual girlfriend at that time. She worked for a magazine company on the West Side, and sometimes she’d come downtown and stay with me for a couple of days. She had her own key, some of her clothing and cosmetics lived here, and if she made a long-distance call she always paid up when I got my next bill. “You only want me for my body,” I told her once, when she dropped in unannounced and I woke up to find her crawling to bed with me. “Bragging or complaining?” she asked, and I said, “What if I had somebody else here?” She said, “Then I’d tiptoe out again.” It wasn’t what you could call an intense relationship.

As demonstrated by the note: “Am taking a fare out of town, will be gone a couple weeks, phone you when I get back. Better smell the yogurt before you eat it.”

Outside, I put my bag on the front seat and said, “Well, Ms. Scott—” (I knew her name now, Katharine Scott, from the check) “—you still game?”

“Definitely,” she said.

“Fine,” I said, and took the FDR Drive and the Harlem River Drive up to the George Washington Bridge. All the way up, Ms. Scott sat in the back seat with that alert, scrubbed, determined, brave, optimistic look of someone who’s just made an absolutely right resolution, and hasn’t broken it yet.

Across the bridge into New Jersey, and I followed the signs for Interstate 80, lining out due west into what would have been the setting sun if it wasn’t still morning. Switching on my radio one last time, I said, “Two-seven. Two-seven. Two-seven.”

“Tom? Is that you?” There was a lot of static in the air. “I can barely hear you.”

“We’re on our way, Hilda,” I said, speaking loud and clear. “The certified check is in the mail, and we just crossed the George Washington Bridge.”

“Good luck,” she said, through the buzz of static.

“Thanks. See you in a couple weeks.”

She said something I couldn’t make out, with all the static. I yelled, “What?”

“Your father says don’t wreck his cab!”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Tell him don’t worry.”

“What?”

“I said okay!”

“Okay! Drop us a postcard!”

“I will!” I yelled, and listened to nothing but static for a few seconds, and switched off.