It happened right there...

“It happened right there, at the bottom of the underpass,” Amanda tried to explain. Julian wanted to accept what Amanda was telling him but despite the years, the roadway just looked too clean. He couldn’t see any pebbles or truck debris or animal carcasses or sticks or dirt. There was no graffiti, no broken concrete, there weren’t even any weeds. If this were any other town, this underpass would not look so brand new which could lend some credibility to Amanda’s story. But no. This was Stilton, part of a complex of overdeveloped utopian suburbs that existed without, according to his father, a taxed allegiance to a beleaguered, welfare-spewing crime-factory. Instead it was its own flat landscape parsed into square mile increments by six-lane roads accented by strip malls and superstores.

Amanda was a nice girl; blondish and a little heavy. Julian’s Father called her buxom one time. She came from a modestly affluent family of bankers and engineers. She went to private schools and traveled a little, but for some reason always seemed to carry herself with a proletarian air. She lacked the refinements that privilege and a good education normally instill. Her stories of drunken nights, threesomes, sci-fi conventions, head-banging music, graduate school, and resort-town living never seemed to add up properly. It was certainly possible especially when she told stories that lacked reasonable rationality. But her stories always seemed tragic and extraordinary, and often too extraordinary. As if the teller didn’t want the audience to end or maybe enjoyed the attention that lacked elsewhere.

Julian wanted to believe that Amanda’s boyfriend lost control of his jeep and hit the the underpass. He wanted to believe that the boyfriend died in the accident while she sat here in this same café looking on. He wanted to believe how painful if was for her especially considering she said they were about to be engaged.

It was over five years ago and there was probably some real accident. She might have even known the driver. The roadway was probably cleaned up in less than a day. There was really no easy way to disprove her story. He could ask her family or look up the details, but that would probably cause her more pain than whatever was making her lie in the first place and give him some realities about her he didn’t want. Doubt, like speculation sometimes, was better than knowing the truth.

Julian never knew if her lies were truly harmeless, harbored any malice rooted in cycles of control, or if they came out of some deep childhood psychosis or some combination of the three. Since the neurotic answer was easier to stomach and fit her proletariat tendencies, he often reassured himself that she was in much worse shape than he was being lied to. Her lies never really hurt him anyway, only made him feel lonelier because she was one of the few friends he had left in town anymore.

Despite the retro appearance of some of the strip mall facades, Stilton was only 30 years old. Founded by a group of real estate speculators at a time when the murder rate in the country was skyrocketing. The group felt that if they could build a city with all the amenities of good suburban living far enough away from crime, high taxes, and blight then they could have a city walled by hundreds of miles of open land.

Julian grew up outside of Detroit in the mid-west’s version of New Jersey. Detroit, a city without mass transit, a city known for making cars, a city that could lay claim to the title “most segregated” in the country and account for less than twenty percent of region’s population. The remaining eighty percent would claim allegiance to the big-city’s sports teams when they won but disavowed any other association the rest of the time. In fact many of Julian’s friends, several of whom grew up in neighboring towns that also made the “most segregated” list but for different demographics, were not allowed to go into Detroit when they were growing up. It was just too dangerous their parents said.

The city saw its population boom with both the growth of the auto industry and the wide spread availability of the automobile. Before Detroit needed subways or elevated trains like Boston, New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, it got cars and wide roads spaced out every mile. It was a city of the future just like LA. But today only twenty-five percent of the families own cars.

Amanda’s father worked on the financing of the new towns and was able to purchase development property along Blissfield Avenue, the first six-lane platted in the area before the big guns came in. He built a large house in a garden neighborhood just three blocks away from the original Stilton farmstead, the now restored historic society whose lands were acquired after a bitter fight between the nearly bankrupt grandchildren and the coyly-named Crosby Land Trust. The battle eventually sunk the Stilton’s who had to sell out to pay their attorneys fees.