Dear Wife(30)

As soon as the parking lot is quiet again, the woman clambers to her feet. “Help! Somebody help me. Help!”

I tell myself it’s fine, that she’s fine. Scared and shaken, maybe, her white jeans smudged where they made contact with the dirty asphalt. But otherwise, everybody is fine. Everybody but me, trapped here in this lot. The woman is standing between me and the only exit.

A gaggle of sorority types push out the restaurant’s double doors, talking and laughing. They hear the woman’s cries and stop on the concrete, their happy expressions falling into surprise.

“I was robbed!” the woman screams at them. “He pointed a gun at my head and he took my wedding ring. He took everything. Oh my God, don’t just stand there. Somebody call the police!”

A tall blonde pulls out a cell phone, and I eyeball the curb height to the street, trying to judge if it’s too high for the Buick to plow over without blowing out a tire. Would the women even notice? Would they jot down my license plate and hand it to the cops as a potential witness?

And what if I don’t leave, then what? What will I say when the police find me sitting here, hiding in my car? I glance at the clock on the dash. Less than ten minutes until I’m supposed to meet Jorge. Even if I ditched my car and ran, I’d never make it on time.

The women are all babbling now, gesturing and talking over each other, their expressions tight with the near miss, and guilt pushes up from somewhere deep inside me. All my life, I’ve believed in karma, in the universal principle of cause and effect. Do good, and good comes to you. Do bad, and... Well, you better watch your back.

And today I stood by and watched a woman get mugged.

What does the universe have in store for me now?

  The women storm inside, and I start the car and drive as fast as I dare, squealing into the strip mall Jorge directed me to a full six minutes late. I pray Jorge’s not a punctual guy, the type who doesn’t tolerate clients who show up later than promised. Then again, I am the client, and I’m guessing the black market ID business must by definition remain fluid. In the grand scope of things, six minutes isn’t all that long.

I step out of my car and scan the half dozen storefronts. Jorge didn’t give me anything other than an address, so which one? Discount stores and carnicerías, a cell phone shop, a smashed window covered in butcher paper. And then at the far end, I spot a single word: fotográfico. I slam the door and hurry to the store.

Inside, the place is tiny—a shoebox of a room with a camera on a tripod, a register counter and not much else. Jorge is waiting for me by the register, beside a man he introduces as Emmanuel, no last name. Emmanuel demands six dollars in cash, then points me to a grubby white wall. “Stand there. No smile.”

Emmanuel is a man of few words, but he gets the job done. There’s a blinding flash, and by the time the spots have cleared from my vision, two passport-size pictures are rolling out of his printer.

While Emmanuel cuts them into tiny squares, Jorge hands me a piece of paper and a pen. “Write down name, birth date, height, weight and address. You can use fake ones if you want.”

“Do your customers ever use real ones?”

He shrugs his linebacker shoulders. “Don’t know. Don’t care.”

I write Beth’s full name across the top of the paper, dredging up a middle name on the spot—Louise, a character from some book I just read. I give Beth two extra years, born on February 20, 1983. She’s my height, five foot eight, but I tack on a few pounds. The best way to hide in plain sight, I’ve decided, is to put some more meat on my bones with a strict pizza, doughnut, hamburger and french fry diet. Her address is the one for Morgan House.

I hand the paper back to Jorge, and he holds out a meaty palm.

“Three-fifty, right?”

He grunts. “Funny.”

I contemplate the wisdom of forking over the money now, before I’ve gotten my ID cards, but I’m not exactly in a position of power here. I slap the three hundred and seventy-five dollars I already peeled off my stash into his hand. Jorge counts it, then counts it again.

“What’s your number?” he says, pulling out his phone.

I open my mouth, then stop myself just in time. The only number I know by heart is my real number, for the phone sitting at the bottom of a trash can back in Arkansas. My new number, the one for the prepay phone in my back pocket, is a blank. I haven’t memorized it yet.

“I...I don’t remember.”

Jorge heaves a sigh that reeks of cheese and jalape?o, and the look he gives me says “amateur.” He rattles off a string of numbers that I realize too late is for his cell phone.

“Hang on, hang on.” I fumble for my phone, and he repeats the numbers, this time slower while I type them in. I hit Send, and his cell phone lights up in his hand.

He flips it so I can see. “Your number. I call you when ready.”

“How long?”

He lifts a meaty shoulder. “Thirty minute. Maybe more. Wait at Sonic up the road.”

It is seventy-three eternal minutes before a shiny black SUV rolls into the Sonic parking lot. I watch from my table by the window as a man who is definitely not Jorge—too dark, much too skinny—slides out. He looks up and down the parking lot like a villain on an episode of Cops, then tucks a manila envelope under the Buick’s windshield wiper and hustles back into his car. By the time I make it outside, the man is long gone.