Free The Leisure Seeker: A Novel by Michael Zadoorian

this was when John was starting to truly understand what was happening to him. We have always been worriers, both of us. I’m just more likely to worry out loud. John keeps it in, like a man tends to do. I imagine him realizing with a horrible finality that he was indeed going to end up like his mother. Who knows what triggered it? But I imagine him running it through his head over and over as we drove along. That was enough to leave him breathless and heaving by the side of the road. And that, as they say, was the beginning of the bad times.
     
    We eat lunch at a little barbecue joint called “The Pits” in Claremore. Both John and I feel better now, but then barbecue pork sandwiches will do that. John is an unholy mess with orangey-red sauce and grease smeared on his face and fingers. I look much the same way, I imagine.
    This is our trip to eat anything we want. You have to remember, after you achieve a certain age, there are always people telling you what to eat and what not to eat. We start off in this life on milk and pablum, and they’d like to finish us off that way as well. (But without the milk because, you know, the cholesterol .) I say all this now, but I know, even with the Pepcid we took in the car, there will be gastric hell to pay later for this barbecue sandwich.
    “You two look like you’re enjoying yourselves,” drawls ourwaitress, a rangy middle-aged redhead with too short a skirt, who appears from nowhere.
    I smile, wipe the sauce off John’s face, then my own.
    “More tea, dear?” she says to me, her voice thick and low pitched, already refilling my glass.
    I have never been dear ed and darlin ed so much in my whole life as on this trip. If you’ve experienced that first middle-aged shock when you become “ma’am” or “sir,” it’s nothing like when you become “dear.”
    “No, thank you,” I say, smiling back. It doesn’t really matter because she has already filled the glass. “My back teeth are already floating.”
    “Heh, heh.”
    Normally I wouldn’t say anything like that, but I don’t seem to care lately.
    When she leaves the check, I grab my purse from down between my feet (away from pickpockets and sneak thieves and such) to fetch my wallet. I give the money to John and let him go up to pay. Meanwhile, I hunt down the ladies’ room. As I sit there on the pot, I look up and see that someone has written something in a delicate script on the stall door.
     
    Love Always, Charlie
     
    Who the hell would write something like that in the ladies’ room toilet? The world just keeps getting stranger. As I washmy hands, I worry that John has taken off on me, but when I exit the restroom, he’s waiting for me, nice as you please, polishing off a Hershey bar and talking to Red like it’s old home week.
    “We’re headed back home to Michigan,” John says to her.
    “I’ve never been to Michigan. Is it nice?”
    “It’s wonderful,” says John. “We’ll be back in a day or two.”
    I don’t bother to correct him. As I approach, he holds out his arm for me to take. It makes me glad to be married.
     
    We pass on the Will Rogers Memorial in Claremore. I never much cared for the man. A big phony, I believe. Anyone who never met a man he didn’t like just isn’t trying hard enough. I roll down my window all the way and hang my arm out. The wind tries to push my hand back, but I flatten my palm and hold it strong against the flow for a moment, then dip my hand horizontally, then cup it as if I were swimming. I weave my hand up and down, a reverse sidestroke through the air. There is a strange freedom to this gesture, a childishness, I know, but it feels good to be silly. There is so little silliness at this period of one’s life, but it’s the time when you need it the most. I cup my flowing hand and keep swimming in the wind and to my surprise, water soon appears along the side of the road—a long swimming hole, with a fringe of bulrushes, and a giant blue whale smack