The Last Lap

I'm twenty-eight years old and I drive a black Cadillac Escalade for a living. Not for a family, not for an airport shuttle company, but for one specific man, Rashid Anwar, who is thirty-five and runs a biotech firm that makes software for gene sequencing or something. I've been his chauffeur for three years and I still couldn't tell you what the company actually sells. I could tell you his coffee order, his shoe size, and that he hums Bollywood songs when he thinks nobody is listening, but not the product.

Three months ago I got dumped by Kai, who I'd dated for four years, from when I was twenty-four until twenty-eight. He didn't dump me dramatically. He did it on a Tuesday, over leftover pad thai, and said we'd "drifted into roommates." Then he moved in with a woman who teaches spin classes. So that's where my head was at when the annual biotech conference rolled around. Three days in Portland at the Sequoia Tower Hotel, watching a man who bills out at more per hour than I make in a week talk to people about proteins.

I had been feeling old. That's the honest version. Twenty-eight isn't old, I know that, but when you've spent four years planning dinners around a man who eats standing up, you start to feel like furniture. I wanted to feel twenty-three again, back when I did stupid things on purpose instead of stupid things by accident.

It was the second night of the conference. Thursday. Rashid had given a panel in the afternoon and I'd waited in the car for two hours with the seats cooled to sixty-eight degrees because he likes it cold, reading the same three pages of a novel about a lighthouse keeper. The parking garage under the Sequoia Tower is four levels underground, all gray concrete pillars and the same yellow arrow painted every thirty feet, and it echoes so bad that when a door slams somewhere it sounds like a gunshot. I know this garage better than I know my own apartment. I've parked in it maybe a dozen times.

At 6:40 he came out of the elevator bay early, which he never does, and he looked as though he had been asked the same question about market share eleven times in a row. He had his badge already unpinned from his jacket and he was holding it by the lanyard like it was a dead fish. He opened the back door, which was also wrong, then looked at me in the mirror and opened the front passenger door instead.

He got in the front seat. In three years he had never once gotten in the front seat.

"Don't take this personally," he said, dropping the badge in the cupholder, "but I cannot sit in the back of this car for one more minute. If I sit back there I'll fall asleep and wake up in a mood."

"Okay," I said. "Where to?"

"Nowhere. That's the problem. I have a dinner at eight with investors and it's 6:40 and I'm trapped here either way. I figured I'd sit up front and annoy you instead."

"You're not annoying me. You're paying my rent."

He laughed at that, and I noticed he had a good laugh, which is not something I'd ever had occasion to notice from the mirror. Then he went quiet, and I started the car, and we sat there idling in the empty level four of the garage with the fluorescent lights humming.

Then he said, "Scarlett. Be honest. How bored are you right now? Scale of one to ten."

I thought about Kai, and the pad thai, and the lighthouse novel. "Eight," I said. "Maybe eight and a half."

"Good. Me too. So here's an idea, and you can say no." He turned in his seat so he was facing me. "We're four levels down. The exit ramp goes up to the street. I want to race you. You take the car, I'll take the stairs. First one to the valet stand out front wins."

I should mention here that Rashid is competitive in a way I'd only seen from a distance. At the company holiday party he lost at ping pong to an intern and made the intern play best of five until he won. He also runs marathons, which he mentions the way other people mention their children. But it was 6:40 on a Thursday and I was bored to the bone and he was offering me a reason to do anything at all.

"Rashid, this is a hotel garage. There's nowhere to race. It's a ramp."

"Four levels of ramp, and I have to run up four flights of stairs, and I'm wearing dress shoes. You have a V8. The question is whether you can get out of your parking spot and up the ramp before I can run four flights. I think I can. I think I'm faster than a car in a garage."

"That's insane," I said. "Also what does the winner get?"

"Right now, nothing. Bragging rights. Loser buys dinner, and that's the whole stake. Nothing about the job rides on it, ever."

And that should have been my cue to say no, or to laugh it off, or to point out that he's my boss and I drive him places. But here's what I noticed instead, which I didn't say: my heart was doing something it hadn't done in three months, which was beat faster over something that wasn't a text message from my landlord. Also he was grinning at me like a person, not like a CEO, and I realized I'd never actually seen him grin. From the mirror you get maybe the top half of a face.

"Fine," I said. "But if I get fired for this, you're paying my rent for real."

"You won't get fired. This has nothing to do with your job, I promise. The garage is empty, it's a private garage, nobody's down here but us and maybe a caterer. Ready?"

I backed out of the spot while he was still getting his seatbelt situation sorted, which he took as my answer. He got out at the stairwell door on level four, jogged in place for a second like an actual athlete, and gave me a little salute. Then the door clapped shut and I was alone with the engine running and my own reflection in the rearview looking way too excited about a race in a parking garage.

I want to tell you I strategized. I didn't. I did think about one thing, which is that the garage exit on the street side has that stupid gate arm that reads your transponder, and mine was on the visor, and if I fumbled it I'd lose thirty seconds right there. So I clicked the visor down, pulled the transponder off, and set it in the cupholder next to his stupid conference badge. Then I waited, counting. I gave him about thirty seconds of head start, because I'm not a monster, and then I went.

Here is a thing about driving down an empty parking garage ramp at whatever speed I was doing, which I will not write down: it is extremely loud inside a Cadillac. The pillars strobe past the windows like fence posts. Every turn of the spiral I half expected a garbage truck to materialize, and none did, and by level two I was laughing out loud alone in a car, which tells you something about the state of my life. The echo of my own engine came back off the concrete and it sounded enormous.

I hit the exit gate, the arm lifted before I'd even fully stopped, and I swung out onto the street and pulled up to the valet stand, and Rashid was already there, hands on his knees, breathing hard, dress shirt stuck to his back. But he was laughing too, I could hear it in the breathing, this huffing sort of laugh, and when I rolled down the window he pointed at me and said, "Stairs. Never again. I want a rematch but I want to pick the venue."

"You lost," I said. "To a car. The car won, and I was driving the car, so I won."

"You got a head start. I heard the engine. You gave me like twenty seconds."

"Forty."

"Thirty," he said, standing up straight and wiping his forehead with his sleeve. "But fine. You won. He walked around and got in the passenger side again, which by then felt almost normal, which is its own strange thing to type. "Dinner's on me, I'll make good on that. And then I get a rematch somewhere with actual racing involved. There's a go-kart track out past the east side. I've driven past it a hundred times."

"Go-karts," I said.

"Midnight Saturday. After the conference dinner, I'll slip out, nobody will notice. Loser buys dinner. Same stakes as tonight, which is to say none that matter."

I pulled away from the valet stand and merged into traffic, and I need to explain what was going through my head, which was mostly that I had not made plans for a Saturday at midnight in a long time, and that the last time I felt this specific buzz in my chest I was twenty-three and climbing a fence behind a bar in Sellwood. This was a bad idea professionally. I knew that. I also knew that I had one dinner with investors to get through first, and that I intended to win again.

The dinner with investors went the way those dinners go. Rashid talked about gene sequencing software for two hours while men in good blazers nodded at intervals, and I sat near the kitchen door of the private room at the steakhouse, eating the food they sent out for the drivers, which was better than what the investors got, honestly. Bar wings and a pile of garlic bread. I read three pages of the lighthouse keeper on my phone and thought about go-karts.

Between airport runs and coffee runs and one emergency trip back to the hotel because Rashid forgot his slides, I kept catching myself looking forward to Saturday, which told me something sad about my calendar and something hopeful about go-karts. Kai had taken the evenings with him when he left. I could not decide if a boss suddenly willing to fill them with races was sad or great.

Saturday came. The conference dinner ran long because somebody gave a speech about biomarkers, and I waited in the lobby of the Sequoia Tower reading the same page about a storm four times. At 11:40 Rashid came down the hall with his jacket over his arm, walking fast, and he gave a little wave at a table of colleagues like he was going to the gym and headed for the doors. Nobody noticed. He was right, nobody ever notices where the CEO goes after ten at night, they just assume you are important somewhere else.

We took the Escalade, because it felt funny to take the Escalade, and I drove east with the windows down. The track was in a strip of everything-closed businesses past the east side, one bright box of light in a dark parking lot, with a sign that had one dead letter so it read GO- ARTS. There were maybe six locals outside smoking and a guy at the counter who looked like he had been watching a small television for decades and would not be surprised by anything we did.

Rashid paid for two races and the rentals, and he argued about the waiver, and I signed mine in about four seconds. They gave us suits. I want you to understand that this company, this gene sequencing software company, is worth more than my building, and its CEO put on a red nylon suit that smelled like other people's sweat and cinched it with a velcro strap, and looked delighted.

"Stakes," he said, while the guy checked the karts. "Loser buys dinner. That's all. Nothing to do with work, nothing to do with your job, not ever. I want that clear, because I'm your boss and I know how it sounds."

"Good," I said. "You can't bet your schedule anyway, you have a board."

"They'd live." He pulled the helmet liner over his head, which muffled him. "But no. Dinner."

He wasn't asking me for anything he shouldn't, and some part of me, the part that had been sitting in a cooled car at 68 degrees reading about a lighthouse for three years, said yes to that instantly, without conferring with the rest of me. "Deal. Loser buys dinner. We both say it out loud now."

"Deal. Out loud." He stuck his hand out over the kart between us and I shook it, and his hand was warmer than I expected, and I noticed that and then told myself to stop noticing things.

They put me on the inside of the grid, which I later decided was the whole reason I won. The track was small and had one hairpin at the far end that everyone talks about, a left that comes back on itself so tight that you have to basically stop and turn. The first two laps I let him learn the track. He drove like he drives everything, fast in the straights, cautious everywhere else, and on lap three I went by him on the back straight with my hand up off the wheel like I was waving at a parade.

He did not like that. I could hear the kart behind me for the rest of it, that little two-stroke buzz nosing at my bumper on every straight. On the fifth lap we came into the hairpin side by side, which should not be possible on that track, and I turned in and he turned in a half beat later, too late, correcting, and for about two seconds we were both sliding and neither of us was really steering. Somewhere in that mess, before I gathered it back up, the back of his hand hit the back of mine on the wheel. Not a bump. It landed and stayed, his fingers over my knuckles for the length of the slide, half a second, maybe less, both of us gloved in those cheap vinyl gloves, and I felt it anyway, the way you feel a fly land on your arm through a shirt.

Then the corner ended and we were two karts again and he was behind me and I won by about a kart length and one bad move on his part. We rolled off the track into the pit lane and he pulled his helmet off and his hair was flattened into a shape that made him look like a retired news anchor, and he was breathing hard and pointing at my kart.

"You braked at the hairpin. You braked and I didn't and that's why I went wide."