Turn Signal Read Free

grin as he walks down the flagstone steps to the sidewalk. “She’s wearing herself out, getting everything ready for the reunion. Thirty years. Damn. It seems like it was yesterday you were out there scorin’ touchdowns.”
    The judge rambles a little about the weather and politics, and it takes Jack 10 hard-to-regain minutes to get away from him.
    â€œTell Susan I said hi,” he yells as he drives off. She lives in the judge’s house now, the one she grew up in. Gina says she’s resting up between marriages. She’s been arrested for two DUIs in the past year, but she’s still driving.
    He guns it, hurrying back to Main Street. “You slow down, Jack Stone!” he hears a voice yell behind him. He thinks it’s Mrs. Guarnieri, who used to work at the dry cleaner’s, but he isn’t sure, and he doesn’t have time for a lecture. He’s happy when he gets out of Speakeasy, where at least the people offended by his driving don’t seem to know his name. Before his mother passed away in March, they would call her up and complain.
    â€œMaybe you could get a job driving one of those race cars,” she said once. “Then people would like it when you went fast.”
    He crosses the flat bridge over the creek. Down below, a boy and girl are sitting in tubes in the middle of the water. It’s over 90 degrees, headed for 95, and in the truck it feels every bit of 100.
    Jack turns left on Humpback Road. He has five deliveries to make in a 20-mile loop that will take him to Holden Springs, where he has enough work to carry him through to quitting time.
    The road parallels the creek for a couple of miles, with hardwoods and swampland to the left, houses and farms to the right. One of the first homes he comes to has a cardinal-and-bluebird festooned mailbox out front, nearly surrounded by clematis. He can barely read the name on it: PRINCE.
    Everywhere Jack Stone turns, his history confronts him. Sometimes these days, it’s hard to delineate between past and present. The girl he got to third base with in 10 th grade is an assistant principal at the high school now, but the last time he saw her, he had this lapse, only a few seconds, when he saw her as she was, and damn near grabbed her ass, right there in the Food Lion parking lot. The boy who was second-string tailback in 1969 is a bank vice resident, but Jack can’t see anything except the little doofus who used to tell him, as they went back out after halftime, leading by three touchdowns, “Don’t kick all their butts, Hoss. Save some for me.”
    He estimates that he passed that mailbox 7,000 times the first 18 years of his life. Sometimes, Jerry Prince would walk to school with him, although it was pretty clear that Arlene Prince did not approve of her son keeping such company.
    The Princes lived in a well-kept brick colonial, four rooms up and four down. It was built two years before McCauley Prince left his wife and son one day, as preamble to marrying his secretary. He was a third-generation lawyer from an old family that had lived in or near Speakeasy almost forever, and he provided for his abandoned family well enough, most thought, although Arlene did have to go to work as a secretary herself.
    Jerry was 5 when his father left. Ken and Ellen Stone encouraged their youngest child to befriend the shy little boy who lived just three houses up the road. They would invite Jerry to come play with Jack, but the invitations were seldom reciprocated.
    By the time they were very far along in elementary school, Jack Stone and Jerry Prince were in different orbits. Jerry was the smartest boy in every grade, without the brass or the athletic ability to keep him within the realm of normalcy and acceptance.
    Jack thinks he sees Arlene Prince in the backyard as he drives past, sitting in a lawn chair under the weeping willow, but he can’t be sure, and he sure as hell isn’t going to slow down and