Page 29 of Error Handling
“It’s a 2006.”
“Doh.”
“Doh?”
He pats the dashboard. “She’s on her last leg.”
“No, she’s—I mean, he’s not. He still rides like a stallion.”
“Not tonight.”
“Well...”
Brake lights blink beside us. Someone needs to leave, and my car is blocking them.
“Shoot,” I say. “They need to back out.” I cast an apologetic look at the vehicle, hoping they see it in their mirrors.
Christopher hops out. “Jump in and throw it into neutral.”
We trade places again and he runs around to the back of the car.
“What are you doing?” I holler.
“I’m pushing,” he hollers back.
“What if I start to roll backward?”
“Push the brake pedal.”
Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. I throw the car into neutral, and Christopher manages to push the car forward. He obviously has a set of muscles, but wow. That’s a lot of power packed in one small body.
Together, we ease the car into a parking spot. I put the car in park, and Christopher comes up beside me. He isn’t even winded.
“I think we need to call a tow truck,” he says. “I know a guy.”
Chapter 7
Sarah
The clock in Christopher’s Chevy Equinox reads eleven-thirty when he and I pull up in front of my duplex on Steuben. I occupy the front half of the house. The back addition belongs to a couple with a baby. I rarely speak to my neighbors, but sometimes I spy on them through the bathroom vent when they’re arguing (I’m bad. I know). She accuses him of cheating. The poor baby cries. It’s really quite awful.
The house is a 1930s nondescript one-story bungalow. Two pitches in the front give it some character; however, the modern gray vinyl siding covers any detail the original wood siding might have had. A slab of concrete barely wide enough for two people acts as a porch, and a metal awning reaches over the concrete to give me some shelter when it rains.
Large azalea bushes line the front of the house. They grow in barren earth. Someone went through the trouble of planting them but didn’t bother to beautify their surroundings. In March the azalea’s purple flowers will bloom, and their beauty will make up for my landlord’s inattention to the yard.
A couple of years ago, I planted some annuals, but I never found time to water them. They shriveled and made the house look sadder than it otherwise did. Unsurprisingly, I gave up my quest to beautify the house’s exterior and focused instead on making it beautiful on the inside within my meager monthly budget.
Tonight, my half of the house is dark. I forgot to leave the porch light on for myself. I didn’t expect to stay out this late.
We waited an hour and a half for the tow truck, which belonged to Marco, a cousin of Christopher’s friend. Marco said he’d be at Joe and Go in half an hour, but it turned out he had to deliver a meal to one of his wife’s church friends who had a failed knee replacement surgery and recently had two pounds of pus drained from her leg. He had to take the food to her, and one of her dogs chewed a hole in his jeans.
Marco’s story continued for another few minutes while we all shivered in the cold. During the soliloquy, I regretted not signing up for Triple A. They might not have arrived any sooner, but I wouldn’t have had to stare at Marco’s form-fitting Tommy Johns through the hole in his jeans.
Joe and Go closed at ten o’clock, so we waited for Marco in Christopher’s Equinox with the engine running periodically to keep us warm. Our conversation never became stale or awkward. Quite the opposite. Words flowed freely from my mouth, a phenomenon I’ve never experienced on a date. Not that I’ve been on many dates.
Dating usually renders me mute because I instantly know whether I can be “with” a man, in the Biblical sense. The whole point of dating is to find theone, and if I know my date isn’t theone, what’s the point?
Except tonight something changed. I have no idea if Christopher is the one. I just know I enjoy talking to him. And the longer I talk to him, the cuter he becomes.