Or maybe she knows that. Do you, Lauren? Do you like to tease other men, make them want you? Do you still need that validation? Have you figured out that none of that matters?
Or will you always want more?
? ? ?
“The pink one,” I say. “No, the hot pink.”
The chubby clerk with the pock-marked face in the “superstore” in Racine, Wisconsin—about eighty miles north of Chicago—lifts the phone case off the rack and runs it over the scanner.
“So this is a thousand minutes?” I confirm.
“Yeah, a thousand minutes. And with our plan, you can get monthly—”
“Nope, no plan.”
“You don’t want a plan?”
“No. Just this phone, a thousand minutes, and that hot pink case. Don’t worry,” I add with a chuckle, “I’m not a criminal. This is for my daughter. It’s a trial run. I want to see how quickly she burns through these minutes before I decide whether a ten-year-old needs a phone.”
I wish I did have kids. Vicky said no way. She thinks the taint of her rotten childhood would somehow seep into any children she had.
The clerk glances at me briefly before nodding and taking my wad of cash and giving me another look. A no-plan, prepaid phone, paid for in cash.
? ? ?
“The green one,” I tell the elderly saleswoman in the “superstore” in Valparaiso, Indiana, which is 130 miles southwest of Racine, Wisconsin, and about 60 miles from Chicago. Green again, like my green journal, for fresh and new and blossoming and, you know, all that shit.
“And you say you want a thousand minutes?” she asks.
“Yes.” I pull out cash and drop it on the counter.
“And . . . would you be interested in one of our monthly plans—”
“No, ma’am, no thank you. Just the phone and the minutes and the green case.”
She looks down at the cash.
“I’m a drug dealer,” I say. “I sell heroin to children.”
She looks up at me.
“Just kidding. It’s for my ten-year-old son. It’s a trial run. I don’t want him getting more minutes each month until I see how fast he burns through these minutes.”
“Oh, I have a granddaughter who’s ten years old,” she says, brightening. “Is your son going into the fifth grade?”
“He sure is!”
“Where does he go?”
Uh, boy. “We homeschool,” I say and pull my phone out of my pocket as if I’m answering it, before this woman gets any nosier.
This sneaking-around stuff is harder than it looks.
13
Vicky
I get out of bed a few hours after Simon left and search through his chest of drawers. Simon is organized enough to keep a backup list of all his important passwords but is far too paranoid to put them on a computer or phone. Electronic surveillance is the bread-and-butter of Simon’s scholarship; he is convinced the government looks at a lot more of our information than it lets on, and the Fourth Amendment is being shredded in the process. He says “old school,” good old pen and paper, is the smarter way. He writes his passwords on a piece of notebook paper he keeps in his sock drawer, or maybe he said underwear drawer, I don’t remember.
On top of the chest of drawers are photographs of Simon’s mother, Glory. Some are from before she married Ted Dobias, Simon’s father, but most are after. I see a lot of Simon in her, the chestnut hair and warm eyes and radiant smile, which is how I describe Simon’s smile when he chooses to flash it, which isn’t often enough.
The early pictures: a high school yearbook photo of Glory looking over her shoulder in that awkward school-picture pose. A picture of her with her parents at Wrigley Field when she was a toddler, her face smeared with mustard. One of her standing on Navy Pier in her cap and gown, holding her diploma from the University of Chicago Law School.
The later ones, after she married Ted Dobias, do not feature Ted at all, just Glory and Simon. Glory holding her swaddled newborn in the hospital bed, a beaming but exhausted mother. A photo of them laughing at each other, noses almost touching, when Simon was five or six. The two of them outside Symphony Hall. Eating pizza at Gino’s East, the cheese stretched like rubber. Little Simon in his mother’s arms after she just completed the Chicago Marathon, her hair matted with sweat, a silver runner’s poncho over her shoulders, Simon holding the runner’s medal and staring at it with that inquisitive look he never lost.
That’s the Glory I always hear about, vibrant and active and silly and whimsical, always ready with a corny joke or a smile.