You Think It, I'll Say It(3)
“This is the person who was your passenger to the Garden Center Hotel,” Nell says. “You dropped me off about forty-five minutes ago.”
“Hey there.” Immediately, Luke sounds warmer.
Trying to match his warmth, she says, “I might have left my driver’s license in your van. Can you check for me? My name is Eleanor Davies.”
“I’m driving now, but I’ll look after this drop-off, no problem.”
Impulsively, Nell says, “If you find it, I’ll pay you.” Should she specify an amount? Another twenty? Fifty?
“Well, it’s here or it’s not,” Luke says. “I’ll call you back.”
“I was sitting in the first row, behind you,” Nell says, and when Luke speaks again, he seems amused.
He says, “Yeah, I remember.”
* * *
—
He hasn’t called by the time she has to go to dinner. She calls him again before leaving her room, but the call goes to voicemail. The dinner, attended by nine people, including Nell, is more fun than she expected—they spend a good chunk of it discussing a gender-studies department in California that’s imploding, plus they drink six bottles of wine—and the group decides to walk back to the hotel. In her room, Nell realizes that, forty-two minutes ago, she received a call from Luke, and then a text. “Hey call me,” the text reads.
“You at the hotel now?” he says when she calls, and when she confirms that she is, he says, “My shift just ended, so I can be there in fifteen.”
“Wow, thank you so much,” Nell says. “I really appreciate this.” He will text when he arrives, they agree, and she’ll go outside.
Except that when she reaches the lobby, he’s standing inside it, near the glass doors. He’s not wearing the shiny orange polo shirt; he has on dark gray jeans and a black, hooded, sleeveless shirt. His biceps are stringily well-defined; also, the shirt makes her cringe. She has decided to give him forty dollars, which she’s folded in half and is holding out even before they speak. He waves away the money and says, “Buy me a drink and we’ll call it even.”
“Buy you a drink?” she repeats. If she were sober, she’d definitely make an excuse.
With his chin, Luke gestures across the lobby toward the hotel bar, from which come boisterous conversations and the notes of a live saxophone player. “One Jack and Coke,” he says. “You ask me, you’re getting a bargain.”
* * *
—
Having a drink in the hotel bar with Luke the Shuttle Driver is almost enjoyable, because it’s like an anthropological experience. Beyond her wish to get her license back, she feels no fondness for the person sitting across the table, but the structure of his life, the path that brought him from birth to this moment, is interesting in the way that anyone’s is. He’s twenty-seven, older than she guessed, born in Wichita, the second of two brothers. His parents split up before his second birthday; he’s met his father a handful of times and doesn’t like him. He’ll never disappear from his daughter’s life the way that his father disappeared from his. He and his mom and his brother moved to Kansas City when he was in fifth grade—her parents are from here—and he played baseball in junior high and high school and hoped for a scholarship to Truman State (a scout even came to one of his games), but senior year he tore his UCL. After that, he did a semester at UMKC, but the classes were boring and not worth the money. (“No offense,” he says, as if Nell, by virtue of being a professor, had a hand in running them.) He met his ex-wife, Shelley, in high school, but the funny thing is that he didn’t like her that much then, so he should have known. He thinks she just wanted a kid. They were married for two years, and now she’s dating someone else from their high school class, and Luke thinks better that guy than him. Luke and his buddy Tim want to start their own shuttle service, definitely in the next eighteen months; the manager of the one he’s working for now is a dick.
Eliciting this information isn’t difficult. The one question he asks her is how many years she had to go to school to become a professor. She says, “How many after high school or how many total?”
“After high school,” he says, and she says, “Nine.”
Without consulting her, he orders them a second round, and after finishing it Nell is the drunkest she’s been since she was a bridesmaid in her friend Anna’s wedding, in 2003; she’s wall-shiftingly drunk. She says, “Okay, give me my license now.”
Luke grins. “How ’bout I walk you to your room? Be a gentleman and all.”
“That’s subtle,” she says. Does he know what subtle means? (It’s not that she’s unaware that she’s an elitist asshole. She’s aware! She’s just powerless not to be one. Also, seriously, does he know what subtle means?) She says, “Is hitting on passengers a thing with you, or should I feel special?”
“What makes you think I’m hitting on you?” But he’s still grinning, and it’s the first thing he’s said that a man she’d want to go out with would say. (How will she ever, in real life, meet a man she wants to go out with who wants to go out with her? Should she join Match? Tinder? Will her students find her there?) Then Luke says, “Just kidding, I’m totally hitting on you,” and it’s double the exact right thing to say—he has a sense of humor and he’s complimenting her.