Free Ride Around Shining by Chris Leslie-Hynan

dark. Looking back at the house I saw the front door ajar, and a thin figure standing shrouded in the aperture. She stepped forward and I saw a woman with her arms crossed. She too was dressed and made up as if for a night on the town. Her face gleamed down on us petulantly, and I could see a tattoo on her calf.
    Antonia must have followed my gaze, because she stopped in the drive. “What?” she asked the girl harshly. “What do you want? There’s nothing to say.”
    Some kind of complicated rebuke passed over the girl’s face, and she took another step toward the car. Antonia motioned abruptly for me to get her door, as if to forestall her. “Don’t wait up,” she said, and the girl melted back into the dark.
    Out on the road we blew the heat and I edged around Antonia’s wild mood.
    â€œShe was at the party,” I began, but Antonia waved her hand disgustedly through the air.
    â€œAnything but her,” she said.
    â€œOkay. How is he?”
    â€œHe’s well enough—there wasn’t anything for me to do. The family’s all there.”
    â€œI didn’t expect you so soon.”
    â€œIt’s not that long of a surgery, really. For what it is. For where they break your knee on purpose.”
    â€œIs he definitely out for the year?”
    â€œHe is. I think they’re still going to pay him, though.”
    She said it like she actually thought that was what mattered to him. I glanced over, and the look of her dark painted eyes pained me. I wished she hadn’t done that to herself. It made all the strange wildness, which otherwise might seem like a reckless opening of herself I was privileged to see, into trouble. I had a premonition that she was gathering all the trouble we could ever have into this night and loosing it, to have it out and behind her.
    â€œWhere are we going?” I asked. I’d just been driving toward everything not in her house that we could care about at that hour.
    â€œLet’s go to a strip club,” she said instantly.
    â€œExcuse me?”
    â€œI am a girl who just wants to have fun,” she said in a strange, wry voice, as if quoting someone else’s assessment of her.
    Clubs were not a totally foreign subject between us. The first time I’d ever been to a strip club had been delivering food, and she’d once trapped me in a painfully elaborate story about bringing Cobb salads to cabarets and lingerie modeling houses. She liked to tease me about going to this one place, Sassy’s—I think she thought I had a habit. But I didn’t want to go to a club. They were the only places in the city where I found it impossible to desire anything. I tried to imagine what kind of man it was who could get pleasure from laying dollar bills in front of a naked girl. Who could make a healthy, honest transaction out of that? I tried to imagine what type of man it took, what his face would look like, as he lorded over his little table with his roll of bills, laughing to his friends, taking a girl’s sass and throwing it back to her, comfortable, enlivened, and unwithered.
    â€œWhich one?” I asked.
    â€œYou know which,” she said, and we flew on toward the rain-washed, incalculable city.
    As we came over the bridge, I decided I’d just drive on. So many times I’d been poised at the edge of something like this, a real break. I’d just drive on, past the club and into the teeth of the night, and wait for my nerves to tell me what I should do.
    â€œCan I make a rule?” I asked.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œNo texting in the club. I don’t want you there just passing the time. If you’re in, you’re in.”
    She laughed. “All right.”
    â€œWhy don’t I hold on to it.”
    â€œYou’re confiscating me?”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œI can just turn it off.”
    I held out my hand and she gave it over with a big sigh. As I brought