Caveat Emptor

When it clouds over, Carla Cosanatti gets into the big white Highlander she bought after her first US Women’s Open win, the Highlander she bought instead of the Range Rover which Merv said was too bougie, too spectacular, as in making a spectacle when, really, her bump-and-run was the real spectacle, the way the ball glided past Juanita Bautista Cortez, four-time LPGA all-round champion, who’d turned to follow its splendid path across the green and into the hole, a moment of rainbow glitter, which had ended with Juanita shaking Carla’s hand and people cheering and Merv hooting from the sidelines like a big red ape and Carla’s dizzying realization that she’d done it, won her first big purse, had hit the peak she’d dreamed of for so long and that her life, from that moment on, would be a long slow descent, a morose thought that she shoves aside now, as the dim cumuli bunch up like a good-bye kiss overhead, raindrops already splatting against the Highlander’s windshield as she wends along the A1A, the heat-bleached pavement darkening under her wheels, the great sprawl of the Atlantic filling the window in the false twilight of afternoon cloud, but the Highlander handles like a champ, all the more amazing since she’d bought it used from Juanita herself, who’d phoned Carla two hours after her big win to congratulate her again and confide that she (Juanita) was retiring, that she’d had enough, that she was moving to Monterey with her boyfriend (Adam) and her beagle (Amy), selling everything including her gently-used, fully-loaded Highlander and Carla, drowning in Juanita’s mango-lush sibilance, had said no kidding, had said I’m interested, had asked for a test-drive, had Ubered lickety-split over to Juanita’s condo, texting Merv only that she was checking out an SUV, to which he’d texted back No Range Rovers in the know-it-all way that he had as her coach and publicist, to which she’d replied Aye-aye, captain, not caring how it would irk him but thinking only of Juanita, wondering why she hadn’t noticed Juanita’s voice earlier, how those undulating phrases somehow cupped breasts and hips and knees like custom-fit bolsters and it was true that she wanted to replace her aging Corolla, could afford it now, which is what she told Juanita, sitting in the white leather driver’s seat, with Juanita beside her for the test drive, Amy the beagle on her lap, telling Carla to go easy, at first, then feel free to open her up, really open her up over the heat-bleached pavement, beyond the throngs of clomp-footed tourists, where the road skimmed straight into the blue Atlantic, salt-whipped, which was what Carla let herself think about, that first drive, and afterward–another kind of bump-and-run, delicate but assertive in a melon-sweet milieu that had nothing to do with a professionally-tended golf green except for sharing a certain voluptuousness, which was what Carla dwelled on, now, not the rest of it, the ending that came before the beginning had barely started, like a sun dimmed by ten feet of water between you and air,  before the Highlander’s registration had even arrived in the mail, when she’d found Juanita in amongst the moving boxes, back turned, avoiding Carla’s eyes, though Amy was happy to see her, yipping and dancing around her knees so that she gathered the dog in her arms until Juanita finally looked up to say Adam went to pick up the U-Haul and we’re leaving on Saturday and what Carla wanted to do was violence, a third kind of bump-and-run under a snuffed out August sun like Hurricane Laura all over again in that sky-is-falling, world-is-ending way but really, it was just a replay of that old, old adage she should have known all along and she drives, now, in the big white Highlander, with it looping in her mind as the dim cumuli bunch up like fists overhead and the rain starts down warm as blood.

Tanya Perkins‘ work has appeared in numerous journals including South 85, Tupelo Quarterly, The Woven Tale Press, Fiction Southeast, Watershed Review, The Forge, The Raleigh Review and others. Her chapbook, People are Naturally Attracted to You, was published in March 2018 by WTAW Press and, in 2021, she received the Masters Review Prize for Flash Fiction. An MFA from Murray State Univ., she teaches writing at Indiana Univ. East.

A Song for Tanya