Free A Hard Ticket Home by David Housewright

it came my turn, she stuffed a Polish sausage into a poppy seed bun and dug out a Dr Pepper from the cooler without waiting to be asked.
    “McKenzie,” she said in her sweet accent. “Good see you.”
    “Good to see you, Yu,” I said as I handed her a five and told her to keep the change. “How’s business?”
    “Business good when weather good.” She looked up. The sky was a thin blue and empty of clouds. “Good today.”
    We chatted about the weather for a bit until several other hungry customers took my place in front of the cart. Six bites and a few swigs of pop later I was back in my SUV.
     
     

    The traffic was light and it took me only ten minutes to reach Highland Park. I drove west on Randolph, missed my turn, and ended up motoring past the sprawling campus of Cretin-Derham Hall, the private high school that was alma mater to Paul Molitor, Steve Walsh, Chris Weinke, Corbin Lacina, Joe Mauer, and several other professional athletes as well as many of St. Paul’s movers and shakers. I would have liked to have gone to Cretin, except I didn’t have the money and I couldn’t hit a breaking ball. I was forced to attend public high school, instead—not that I’m bitter or anything. I flipped an illegal U-turn, back-tracked to Edgecumbe Road and went south into the part of Highland Park that smelled most of money.
    A few more turns and I found the Bruder house, a large, brick structure shaded by a balanced mixture of birch and evergreens. In some places it would have been called an estate. The house was perched atop a small hill on a corner lot. I parked in front of a sidewalk that meandered from the curb to the front door. I drove a fully loaded, steel blue Jeep Grand Cherokee 4 X 4 Limited valued at nearly $40,000, yet I was sure if I left it there too long, it would be removed as litter.
    I followed the sidewalk to the door. I rang the bell. When no one answered, I circled the house, hoping the Bruders weren’t one of those families who believe in keeping off the lawn. As I turned the corner I was confronted by a thick wall of red, pink, and yellow roses, the wall nearly twenty feet high. The “wall” was actually a trellis made of thin wood set hard against the house. The branches of the rose bushes were tied to the latticework with twine. I stopped to admire the handiwork, amazed by the number of flowers that were still blooming this late into September. I wondered how the gardener had managed it—I admire horticulturists, mostly from afar.
    I turned another corner and found a long, curving concrete driveway that emptied into an east-west street. A white BMW convertible with license plate JB was parked outside a three-car garage at the top of the
driveway. Between the garage and the house was a redwood fence. Inside the fence I found a swimming pool complete with diving board. Next to the pool was a quartet of lawn chairs surrounding a small table with an umbrella protruding through its center. A few feet to the left of that was a more modest trellis of roses. A young woman knelt before the trellis, her knees resting on a foam-rubber pad. She was scratching at the dirt with a three-pronged hand cultivator, pulling weeds and depositing them into a metal pail next to the pad, while she sang in a pleasant voice.

    I walked into the soda shop.
There he was, sipping pop.
My heart whirled like a spinning top.
My, oh my, oh my.
     
    He walked on over to my side.
“Be my bride, cherry pie.”
Then he looked into my eyes.
“Bananas is my name.”

    I cleared my throat. Immediately, she stopped singing and swung toward me, her hand shielding her eyes from the sun.
    “Bouncy melody,” I said, cracking wise. “You can dance to it. I’d give it an eighty-five.”
    “Who are you?”
    “Jamie Carlson?”
    The question seemed to startle her even more than my unexpected presence. She stood and backed away from the trellis, giving herself plenty of room to run. She gripped the clawlike garden tool