Carl Hiaasen – Basket Case

“Sounds good. I’ve got to track down a source of mine in Beckerville.” Now I’m even talking like frigging Woodward. It would seem I’m trying to impress her—all I need is a parking garage for the rendezvous.

“Great,” she says. “See you in an hour.”

You learn a lot about people from the way they drive. Anne, whom I loved anyway, was a rotten driver; inattentive, meandering and, worst of all, slow. Anne behind the wheel made my eighty-three-year-old grandmother look like Richard Petty. But Emma, to my surprise, is a regular speed demon. She’s buzzing along the interstate at ninety-two miles per hour, deftly winding through the church-bound traffic, which is light. She says she’s wild about her new car.

“Excellent mileage, highway and city,” she reports, sipping from a plastic bottle of boutique spring water. Like almost everyone else I know these days, Emma travels with her own clear fluids. I should probably do the same, as I’m entering the stage of life when kidney stones tend to announce themselves. I must have mumbled something along these lines, for Emma is now extolling the wonders of ultrasound bombardment, a technique that successfully atomized a granular constellation in her father’s urinary pipes. That’s right, her father.

I’m driven to ask how old he is.

“Fifty-one,” Emma replies, and I take unwarranted comfort in the four-year gap in our ages.

“He’s a reporter, too,” she adds.

“Really? Where?”

“Tokyo. For the International Herald Tribune.’1’1

I’m surprised Emma has never mentioned this; I had her pegged as the daughter of an academic.

“Are you two close?”

“My best friend,” she says, “and a good writer, too. A really good writer.” She peers dubiously over the rims of her sunglasses. “Didn’t run in the family, obviously. That’s why I became an editor. Which exit do we get off?”

Emma is wearing snazzy tangerine sandals, but only one of her toenails is painted—with a charm-sized red heart, if I’m not mistaken. What could that mean?

She catches me staring and says, “It’s just a scab, Jack. I stubbed my foot on the rocking chair.”

My mother has always been a zippy driver, and adept at talking her way out of speeding tickets. When I was a kid she would take me to Marathon every summer, and on the trip down we’d always get stopped once or twice by state troopers. We stayed at a tatty one-story motel on the Gulf, and in the mornings we’d rent a small Whaler and go snorkeling, or fish the mangroves for snappers. I couldn’t catch a cold but my mother is a canny, intuitive angler, and more often than not we’d return to the dock with a full cooler. I can’t recall why or when we stopped vacationing in the Keys, but it probably had something to do with baseball and girls. These days my mother occasionally goes fishing in the man-made lakes on the golf course in Naples, where she and Dave own their condominium. Once she called to say she’d caught a nine-pound snook on a wooden minnow plug, and offered to FedEx me one of the fillets on dry ice. Dave, she explained, eats strictly red meat.

Yet she loves him still.

“Here’s our exit,” I inform Emma, who engages the ramp at a gut-puckering velocity.

“Right or left?”

“Left. Guess who showed up in the newsroom yesterday—Race Maggad his own self.”

“Again?” Emma’s brow furrows attractively.

“We had a conversation that he will likely recount as unsatisfactory. He demanded an advance peek at the MacArthur Polk obituary—”

“Which you haven’t finished.”

“Or even started! I told him he couldn’t preview it under any circumstances. Rules are rules.”

“The CEO of the publishing company—you told him that?”

“Emphatically. Two more lights, Emma, then hang another left.”

She’s gnawing on her lower lip, a job I would gladly (here I go again!) undertake. “What did he say? Did he mention me?” she presses on.

Once upon a time I wouldn’t have hesitated to tell Emma that the chairman of the company had botched her name, but now I don’t have the heart. “He’ll be speaking to you shortly,” I say, “about my impudence and so forth. But he did provide a dandy quote for the story. Old Man Polk would blow out an artery.”

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