Feeling at ease on its cracked vinyl seats, surveying its dark-red dashboard and ivory paint, I’d come to think of it as mine. So when I left the Michaelsons’ I spent a while just driving around the August-dead city, the flowers dry and nodding, the grass in lawns gone halfway to dirt. The white rocks in other yards looked skeletal in the sun, each one a bleached, miniature landscape worthy of O’Keeffe. At an Allsup’s I stopped for gas and a bucket-sized soda, its sweet cold shooting straight to my brain. At the counter, a middle-aged couple was arguing about the nutritional value of the fried, crusty burritos that lay baking under the orange heat lamps, while the teenaged clerk batted her long, fake eyelashes in boredom.At a pay phone in the back by the restrooms, I called information and asked if there was a listing for Plumbarama. There was, but the phone rang almost ten times before a man answered.“Yeah,” he said. It wasn’t Angus.“Is this Plumbarama?”“Who wants to know?”
What do You think about The Missing Person (2007)?
