How To Steal a Car by Pete Hautman Page B

so she could pick up her car from the hotel garage. She hates cabs.“Cabs are dirty and you never know who’s going to be driving them,” she says.
    Elwin Carl Dandridge was a cabdriver. I don’t remember if I mentioned that before.
    Since I had proven to be such an excellent designated driver in the past, Mom decided that I might like to drive her downtown, then do some shopping while she and Becca got wasted, then drive her home. This was only a couple days after my air-shopping experience at DSW. I didn’t know if I was into that kind of retail masochism again.
    “Shopping for what? I don’t have any money.”
    “If you promise to keep it under three hundred dollars, you can use my credit card.”
    Sold.
    I got back to the hotel at three-thirty, wearing a new black leather jacket. It was a ridiculously hot fashion choice for the middle of summer, but wearing it was easier than carrying it. My mom was standing outside the lobby entrance with Becca, who was smoking a cigarette. I had to admit that Becca looked cool, all fashion-model slim, blowing clouds of smoke past bright red lips, totally comfortable in a pair of heels that would have given me acrophobia.
    My mom also looked good, but not as good as Becca. Inoticed that she was smoking too. I walked up to her and said, “Got a cigarette?”
    She did this drunken-recognition thing that would have been comical if she hadn’t been my mother, and if she hadn’t started coughing violently while dropping her cigarette.
    Becca said, “Cool jacket, Kell.”
    My mom was about as smashed as I’d ever seen her, talking fast like a meth freak and slurring her words and making hand gestures like a conductor. I was concentrating on getting off the parking ramp and out of downtown Minneapolis, so I hardly heard what she was saying—mostly Becca said this, Becca said that, blah-blah-blah —until we were finally on the freeway and I heard her say something about Dad.
    “…expect me to have dinner on the table as usual, he’s lucky he didn’t marry Becca—”
    “Dad used to go out with Becca?” I said.
    “Don’t be silly. I’m just saying, she’d have told him where to put his dinner!” She laughed. “Your dad—” She burped and made a sour face. “Remind me to never ever drink another apricot martini.”
    “Dad what?”
    “Do you know all the time he was in law school, and for the first five years of our marriage, he never once said ‘I love you’? You know what he said? He said ‘I luff you.’ And everytime he said it, he’d laugh. A fakey little laugh. Huh huh. Like a kid. ‘I luff you, huh huh.’ Can you imagine?”
    I tried. I couldn’t. My big hairy dad saying “I luff you”? No way.
    “He says ‘I love you’ all the time,” I said. “I’ve heard him say it.”
    “He says it now, but only because now it’s not true. Before, it scared him because it might have been true. But then he just decided one day to lie, and once he decided to lie, it was easy for him to say it.” She extended her fingers and stared at her nails. She’d had them done the day before, getting herself all fixed up for Becca.
    My head was spinning with what she’d said. I mean, I was trying to understand it, trying to make sense of her words. Dad could only say I love you if it wasn’t true? Did that make sense on any level other than the multiple-apricot-martini level?
    My mother let her manicured hand fall to her lap.
    “He does it for a living, you know,” she said, sounding perfectly sober for the moment. “He tells lies.”
    Knowing that her martini lunch would incapacitate her, my mother had made a bean-and-lamb casserole and a salad that morning. When we got home, she put the casserole in the oven, took two Excedrin, and went to bed, asking me towake her up at five-thirty. I went to my computer and spent the next hour on the Web.
    I did a search for “how to steal a car” and got twenty thousand hits. A lot of them were videos with hot-wiring