Shawna White took both hands off the steering wheel and picked up her cell phone to compose a text message. After thirty minutes on the northbound one-ten, she’d traveled about four miles. This being Los Angeles, she usually didn’t bother to seek an explanation for traffic slowdowns. They happened, like lightning bolts from an angry god. You couldn’t predict them, prevent them, or avoid them if it was your fate to get stuck.
But today, the reason for the jam was pretty clear. In those four miles, Shawna had seen five stalled cars, and only three of them were on the side of the road. The other two were blocking lanes of traffic. In the maxed-out highway system of L.A., a slowdown could be triggered by a single driver carelessly changing lanes and forcing just one other car to hit the brakes. So it was no surprise that those stalls were wreaking havoc on the road.
Must be the heat, Shawna thought. It was so freaking hot out on the pavement that her car’s air conditioning was having a tough time keeping up. She worried that the nine-year-old Chrysler might overheat, and decided to get off the freeway for a potty break and a soda. She took the exit for West Jefferson Boulevard and pulled in to a filling station with a minimart.
Technically it wasn’t afternoon rush hour yet, so after topping off her tank and buying a bottle of Sobe, Shawna opted to try her luck on surface roads. As she expected, the going was slow (red light… red light… red light) but she was heartened by radio reports that the traffic jam on the one-ten was getting worse instead of better. For once she’d made the right choice of route.
After another wasted forty-five minutes, she reached her home in Westlake, near Wilshire Boulevard. She had two hours before the start of her shift as a cashier at Food 4 Less.
Shawna knew stop-and-go driving like that was hard on a car. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had the oil changed. The car was a clunker, but it was paid for. Money was tight; she couldn’t afford to have it break down. Better to spend a little now than a lot later. She decided to stop at a quick lube joint before work.
A lanky young man in greasy overalls took her keys. Shawna watched him drive her car into the open-air bay and seated herself in the waiting room. A tattered copy of Us magazine dated three months ago lay on a table. She stuck a quarter in a candy machine and turned the crank for a handful of generic M&Ms.
It came without warning. The explosion rattled but did not break the floor-to-ceiling windows in the waiting room. Colorful little candies scattered across the floor as she dropped them in surprise. A metallic boom and the sound of shattering glass came from the garage. Men shouted. An alarm went off. Shawna and the other customers in the lounge dashed for the exit and gathered on the sidewalk outside. Smoke billowed from the work bay.
She recognized her car. It was suspended in the air on a post lift, engulfed in flames like an overheated marshmallow on a stick. She stared at it in disbelief.
Then with the black humor of a person accustomed to bad breaks, she said, “So much for preventive maintenance.”