There were obvious logical problems with this statement—her birthday wasn’t for another week, and anyway, she was only thirteen. Explaining this seemed too complicated, so she got into the car.
They set out driving. North of town, in the parking lot behind the Amway store, they switched places. Gary showed her how to slide the driver’s seat forward, to adjust the mirrors. They didn’t bother about seat belts; it’s possible there weren’t any.
She started the car.
It’s hard to say how long she drove. It might have been minutes or hours; even at the time she wasn’t sure. The feeling was dreamlike, trees and barns and houses slipping past. Indian summer, the clear light tinged with sadness. The leaves had begun to turn. The black vinyl seat stuck to her bare legs, superheated from the sun.
The driving lesson finished where it had begun, in the Amway parking lot. Claudia pulled around to the back of the building and engaged the brake, and Gary reached across her lap to cut the engine. The silence was a little shocking. Birdsong in the distance, the quiet tick of the motor cooling down.
“Happy birthday,” he said, and kissed her on the mouth.
He had been drinking, which was normal. She wouldn’t have said that he was drunk. Gary was a big man with a high tolerance, and the beer he liked was cheap and watery. He could demolish half a case with no apparent ill effects. In a person who rarely spoke, drunkenness was hard to discern.
She didn’t want to kiss him, and she certainly didn’t want his cold muscular tongue in her mouth, but Gary seemed not to notice.
He said, “I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time.”
MANY YEARS LATER, CLAUDIA WOULD TELL HER THERAPIST about that kiss, but at the time she kept quiet. She didn’t even tell Justine. Their conversation about the motorcycle （You touched him?） still haunted her. She feared Justine would think it was her fault, that she’d given Gary the wrong idea, and that this was possibly true.
Of course, she didn’t tell her mother. She didn’t have to. When she came home from school the next day, Gary’s motorcycles were gone.
“I kicked him out,” Deb said flatly. It was a Tuesday, her day off, and she was lying on the couch with a heating pad under her back, watching Wheel of Fortune. “I had enough.”
Enough of what? Claudia didn’t ask. Her cheeks burned as though she’d been caught in a lie.
There was a long silence.
“He came to my school,” she said finally. It was hard to get the words out. “We went for a drive.”
She didn’t have to say it. She could tell by her mother’s face that Deb already knew.
Another silence in which they both stared at the TV screen. Pat Sajak had cut to a commercial, a chorus of exuberant kids singing about vitamins. The commercial seemed endless. Even as a child, Claudia hated the sound of children singing.
Deb said, “He shouldn’t have done that.”
Claudia waited for her to say more, but there was no more. Her mother reached for the remote and clicked through the channels.
“He’s gone now,” Deb said. “He won’t bother you again.”
HERE’S ONE FINAL FACT ABOUT GARY CAIN. THIS IS SOMETHING Claudia doesn’t like to think about. As he kissed her in the Amway parking lot, he pressed her left hand to his groin.
It was a confusing moment. Her knowledge of male anatomy had come from diapering fosters, and this had in no way prepared her for what felt like a clenched fist beneath Gary’s button fly. In those two or three seconds she thought of Justine’s dog Daffy, who had a fast-growing tumor between her shoulder blades that would eventually kill her. Claudia loved Daffy and continued to pet her, even though her tumor was disgusting. When Gary pinned her hand to his lap, she felt a similar mix of revulsion, pity, and alarm.