This story first appeared in Frank: An International Journal of Arts, Paris France.

Luke Whisnant

Connor's Story

Connor is noting the signs. Red arrows, black caps, yellow flashing bulbs—they blast him head-on or catch the corner of his eye. In his father's Toyota he down-shifts and honks, creeps in heavy traffic past fastfood huts and parking lots, and reads aloud. No One Gets Out Alive—the marquee for a horror flick. Jesus Is Watching You, claims A-1 Used Cars. Outside a gas station: two 4 $1 best ht dogs u ever 8. “U Thant,” Connor says, and keeps driving. “I'm noting the vital signs,” he mumbles. In a minute he'll be taking his pulse.
        He's home for a weekend with the folks, and has just come from lunch with June, his oldest and dearest ex-girlfriend. “I'm friends with all of them,” Connor says often. “Amicable partings, happy reunions. Take care, keep in touch, all that.” He and June had spent two hours sprawled on blue throw-pillows in front of her fireplace, drinking wine and catching up on old news. “I guess you heard I was getting married,” she told him softly. Connor hadn't. He offered congratulations, said it was about time, asked if she was happy. June closed both eyes, smiled, nodded, showing her white and beautiful neck. It was her characteristic gesture, preserved perfectly from their high school days together, and Connor's battered old heart ached. At the door, she kissed him, two short, one long. Then he went to get his father's car inspected.
        “The sticker was out of date. The old man's nearly senile.” Connor, TV journalist, M.A.'ed in history, thirty-two years old, is singing along with his car radio: James Taylor doing “It Used To Be Her Town Too” and Connor is in perfect pitch. He's let down, hacked off, a little blue. Ain't no reason to feel this way, he sings. But he can't find a service station.
        “I got lost,” Connor says now, whenever he tells his story. “I used to know my way around, but not anymore.” Every place he saw was one of those Kwik Stop Hop Shop things. Store-24, Cigs & Milk, U Pump It, Pay-In-Advance. No garages. “Finally I found a place with a mechanic. Who was out to lunch”—a cardboard sign, at least, with real human handwriting in a big greasy scrawl. Connor got back into his car, cranked up the radio. He kept singing. And suffered through songs that brought back too many faces.

She had looked good. Old faded bluejeans and an oversized men's shirt with the sleeves dangling loose, and her feet were bare. “Like some bad Top 40 lyric,” Connor said: “Sitting on the rug, drinking wine, me and you after all this time, doo-wah, doo-wah.” June laughed, poured him another glass. They drank to the wedding. Then they drank to old flames. “Remember,” Connor asked her, “remember how I used to brush your hair? For hours and hours?”
        She handed him the hairbrush. Connor sat on his knees behind her, lifted her heavy hair aside, kissed the back of her neck. June laughed, low, throaty, and reached back without looking and squeezed his knee.         “David,” she said, “when are you going to get serious?”
        Connor played dumb. June told him to stop pretending. He slid the brush through her hair, tugged gently.
        “Are you seeing anybody?” June said.
        Connor nodded at the back of her head. “Sure.”
        “Are you in love?”
        “I don't know.”
        “You don't know?”
        He hit another little tangle. “Your hair's so long now. It was never this long when we were dating.”
        “See, I know you,” June said. “I know you so well. I know just what you're like. You're in love with some girl now but it's only momentary. It's just a temporary thing.”
Connor said he'd been seeing this girl five months now and June said five months was still temporary and that she knew the way he worked: he had this heroic vision, this image. To live alone and die alone and just move from relationship to relationship, a few months here, a year or two there. “Did you know bachelors over 30 are the most unhappy people in America?”
        “So help me out,” Connor said. “Elope with me. I'm already down on my knees here.”
        Then he was sorry he'd said it. He had proposed to her once before, years ago, the night before she was scheduled for an abortion. They had planned it all out—setting up house together, quitting school, getting jobs and saving for the baby—and for a few hours they believed it. In the morning they got dressed and drove to the clinic almost without speaking. A month later they had broken up.
        Now he apologized for bringing back bad memories. June tilted her head to one side and looked over her shoulder at him. “It's okay. It was a long time ago.” Connor nodded. “I'm just worried about you, David. You're not a kid anymore.”
        “I know.”
        “I want you to be happy. I'm not just saying that.”
        “Thanks. Let's not talk about it. Tell me about your new beau.”
        That was the scene. She kept talking and he kept brushing. Whenever he hit a tangle, he'd set the brush down and work it out slowly with both hands. They'd finished the wine already. Finally he'd gotten up to leave, got his kiss at the door, headed back out into the heat, doo-wah, doo-wah. Driving around town in a daze.

And it seems to him later that the events of the day made some kind of sense, that they were connected. That there was some kind of meaning to what went before and what came later. “A story in two parts: The old girlfriend. The quest for inspection.” He begins to tell it, not much caring who listens. Strangers, friends, his older brother. Each time the story is different. He's worrying it, trying it on, shaping and arranging. Sometimes he quotes from the signs. Sometimes he leaves out the kisses. To his brother, and no one else, he mentions the abortion. He deletes and emends, digresses and backtracks, but the plot resists revision: He brushes June's hair. He wanders for hours. “I must have missed every garage in town—driving and thinking and not looking where I was going.” He tried a half-dozen places and struck out at each. One mechanic was booked up 'til tomorrow or the next day; another yelled “Too busy” from the bay door and waved him on with a grimy hand. Two places said they'd stopped doing inspections: too much trouble. “Pump gas, check the oil, punch a cash register—that's all they know how to do anymore.”
        And everywhere he looks he sees the signs. Anything Free Is Worth What It Cost—a bit of wisdom from the donut shop. Outside a steakhouse, one word:ONLY—sheer mystery of the universe. And the Methodist church porta-sign claims God Is In Control. Which reaffirms for Connor his conspiracy theory of history, how the individual is slave to vast and immutable forces, the butt of some incomprehensible Cosmic joke. “Because see,” Connor says now, “this guy Ron, her fiancee—he was a sign salesman. He sold signs. You know the kind I mean.” Mobile marquees for trailer parks and take-out grills, come-on's for topless bars. Do-it-yourself daily specials. “On wheels, with those black and red plastic letters you set one at a time, like Scrabble pieces, and synchronized flashing wraparound lightbulbs.” The kind of thing that put your quality old-fashioned sign-painters out of business. Congratulations June & Ron! And that's why Connor was noting the signs.

At last he finds a place, Mechanic On uty, "duty" with the d missing. And here, Connor says, is the point of the story: it's a family garage. “There's a mom, and she's slinging a baby under one arm and slapping down the paperwork with her free hand, filling out my receipt and taking the money. And Dad's out there checking my high beams and measuring the tread on my tires. And there's a little boy, too, scraping the old sticker off the windshield and smacking the new one on. And they're all singing, singing along with the radio.” Or not along, really, but singing to each other, with each other, a kind of call-and-response work song. And Connor is struck by this, more than struck, moved, nearly to tears. “Goddamned mawkish fool,” Connor says now, laughing, but then he stood there and looked at this family, gritty and efficient and happy in their chosen work, and realized in a breath that he would never marry, would never have children, that it was too late for him and June was right: he would probably die alone in a nursing home somewhere. That's his epiphany, his moment of recognition. And lump-throated, tragic, he climbs into his car and drives away. He drifts around town the rest of the afternoon, driving abstractedly, radio low. “That's it,” Connor says. “That's a wrap. Exit left, into the afternoon traffic, and fade to black.”
        End of story. Sort of. An hour later, coasting absently down a strip of burger joints and run-down malls, Connor sees another sign: handpainted Greek letters, SIGMA CHI CAR WASH $2. He pulls in on impulse. Gets out, pays. A dozen sorority girls in shorts and damp tee-shirts lather his car, rinse it, bend down and minister to it, brown bare arms, hair pony-tailed; and he watches, motionless, wishing June could see; he watches them sway to wipe the headlights, sees them laugh and lean across the windshield on one leg like long-boned ballet dancers: plié, arabesque, pas de deux. “I watched all of it,” Connor says now, “every little motion. Every dip and bounce and smile. I wanted to squeeze every ounce of significance out of that moment.” It was a sign, he says, a gift, an affirmation. “See? An alternate ending to my story.” Connor says he tells this to women he's just met, at parties.

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