The last thing I did before I left Gibbs alone in her Escalade was set an appointment with her for the following Monday morning. Early. SevenA.M.early. It’s all I had free.
I zipped down Ninth and stopped by my office to get some material for a report I planned to write over the weekend, then decided to run a couple of errands downtown.
I regret sometimes that the Downtown Boulder Mall is no longer a place where I can buy some brass Phillips-head screws or have a prescription refilled. Before the Mall was built-transforming a few blocks of Boulder ’s “Main” Street into an alluring brick and tree-lined promenade-downtown Boulder was like a thousand other Great Plains downtowns: a two-lane thoroughfare with a coffee shop, a hardware store, a drugstore, and maybe even a five-and-dime.
My old landlady-the kind woman who had given me a lovely place to live during graduate school and had ultimately sold me the house that Lauren and I now live in-had regaled me over endless cups of jasmine tea and plates of fresh-baked cat’s tongues about the Boulder she’d fallen in love with, the Boulder that existed before the gentrification of downtown in the seventies and eighties.
Lois had been a good friend of Fred, who’d owned Fred’s Restaurant, and of Virginia, the matriarch behind the Printed Page. Lois didn’t live much in the past, but she’d occasionally allowed herself some intense longing for a piece of Fred’s apple pie, or for a copy of some unheralded book that Virginia would insist she just had to read. Neither the pie nor the literary recommendations had, apparently, ever disappointed Lois. Although she loved walking the new mall right up until the time she repatriated to Scandinavia, Lois never lost her affection for what Boulder had been for most of the century before.
Now? Fred’s is gone. So is Fred. The Printed Page has moved away, and the Downtown Boulder Mall is lined with shops, not stores. There are lots of places to buy crafts. National chain stores seem to outnumber local retailers.
I was thinking about those kinds of changes as I rushed down Pearl Street in search of a DVD that Lauren wanted me to pick up for Grace. My daughter had developed an inexplicable fascination with trucks, and apparently there was no shortage of videos on the subject that were specifically intended for the toddler set. I had a list of acceptable titles from Lauren. What I didn’t have was any confidence that the Downtown Boulder Mall contained a store that sold toddler-oriented DVDs about eighteen-wheelers and hooks and ladders.
I was approaching the pedestrian light at Broadway when I heard, “My God, would you slow down a little? Whose idea was it to put bricks down here, anyway? And whose idea was high heels? And is it ‘was high heels’ or ‘were high heels’? I want to know that.”
The fancy digital walk signal on the far side of Broadway counted down from six to zero while I waited for Diane to catch up. Traffic began to zoom by before she huffed up beside me. “You can probably find the answer to all your questions on the Internet,” I said.
“Want to know the last thing I found out on the Internet? You’ll love this. I decided that I wanted to be able to say ‘My God’ to my husband in Spanish-you know, so I could say ‘My God, Raoul, aren’t you lucky to be married to me?’ in his native tongue-so I typed ‘My God’ and ‘Spanish’ into Google. What do you think I got? I got a website that told me how to say ‘Oh my God, there’s an axe in my head!’ in one hundred and two different languages.”
“Was one of them Spanish?”
“Yeah.”
“There you go, then.”
“¡Dios mío, hay un hacha en mi cabeza!”
“That will come in handy someday, I’m sure. How are you doing, Diane?”
“Good. My practice is full, my patients think I have a healing touch, my husband’s a dream, I have money in the bank, and I don’t have ahachain mycabeza. What more can one ask? Oh, I know: What are you doing down here on Friday, and why the hell are you in such a hurry?”
“I’m on a mission.” I explained about the DVD. I didn’t explain about my front-row seat at the execution of the search warrant at Gibbs’s house.
“Mind if I jog alongside? I have something important I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“I’d love some company. What do you want to know?”
The walk signal changed to green. The digital scoreboard said we had twenty seconds to cross Broadway. It seemed like a long enough time, in theory, but the numbers were descending so rapidly that I wanted to hurry even more.
“Were you popular in high school?” Diane asked.
“Excuse me?” I said, though I did not miss the irony that she had asked the question as we were approaching the display windows of the teenage clothing mecca, Abercrombie amp; Fitch.
“In high school, what group did you hang with? The geeks? The nerds? The jocks?” She took a moment to laugh at the thought of me hanging with the jocks. “Come on,” she prodded. “What group? I’m testing a theory here. I won’t tell anybody.”
“I wasn’t one of the popular kids, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Aha! I bet you were in the Freud Club or something.”
“Your school had a Freud Club?”
“Never mind. Next question. This one’s important. Did you ever have the hots for any of the popular girls?”
Oh.I watched the pieces begin to fall into place. “You mean theüber-popular alpha bitches?”
“Just answer me.”
“Where is this going?”
“I’m trying to understand why you’re being so precious with Gibbs. Like I said, I have a theory.”
“And you’ve decided it has to do with some high school time warp I’m locked in to?”
“Just tell me, did you ever have a thing for any of the popular girls? You know who I’m talking about.Them.The ones who sat atthattable at lunch, the ones who never said anything in a normal voice. The ones who were always whispering to each other or saying things loudly enough that the whole world knew what they were thinking.”
Several steps passed before she repeated, “Them.You know exactly who they were.”
“No,” I said. But I immediately had a 70mm Technicolor image of Teri Reginelli flash onto the wide screen in my brain. Wavy hair, brown eyes, and a smile that could plaster me to Teflon.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“No, you’re not. Be honest-who are you thinking about right now? Give her a name, come on.”
I sighed. “Teri Reginelli.”
“Cheerleader? Prom queen?”
“Neither. Mere goddess.”
“She was above you socially?”
“It was crowded territory.”
She punched me and said, “Still is.” Her tone softened. “Isn’t it strange how being an adolescent never really stops? Isn’t it? Show me what someone was like during their high school psychosis, and I’ll put together a damn good road map into their romantic future.”
I didn’t want to argue with her. Mostly because I knew that there was plenty of truth in her words. To deflect attention from myself I asked, “What was high school like for you?”
“I was fully occupied thinking up ways to kill the Teri Reginellis of the world. Andthatis the source of my transference to the Dancing Queen.” She admitted her introspective success triumphantly.
“A question,” I said. “Did you ever think about whacking ahachainto thecabezaof a Teri Reginelli or three at your school?”
“I was taking French-Mon dieu, il y a une hache dans ma tête!Otherwise, I’m sure I would have gotten there eventually. So, at what store down here do you think you’re going to find your daughter a DVD about trucks?”
“I don’t know.” I’d totally forgotten about the DVD. Teri Reginelli had that effect on me.
We crossed Thirteenth. Diane leaned close to me, tugged my head down so my ear was closer to her level, and whispered, “It’s called transference, Alan. It sneaks up on all of us. Don’t ignore it just because I’m the one who brought it up.”
Before I could reply, Diane peeled away from me like an F-18 dropping out of formation. She was making a beeline for the bank down Thirteenth, one of her favorite places downtown.
“Dios mío,”she said over her shoulder.“Adiós.”
Transference:treating, responding to, and/or having feelings about someone in the present as though they were someone important from the past.
Teri Reginelli.
Gibbs Storey.
Me.
Help.