Like a kid eager for Christmas morning, Stuart Ramey, age forty-one and second-in-command at High Noon Enterprises in Cottonwood, Arizona, rolled out of bed bright and early that Friday morning, put some eggs on to boil, and then jumped into the shower. He was due to take a big step today, one he had never imagined possible—this morning he was scheduled for his first-ever lesson in driving a stick shift. Learning to drive a standard transmission was the last obstacle in Stu’s late-breaking campaign to become a licensed driver.
Orphaned at an early age, Stu had been raised by impoverished but loving grandparents. He’d been a “special needs” kid long before those words made their way into public education’s social consciousness. Now it was easy to recognize his high-functioning autism. Back in elementary and high school, though, he’d been considered a freak and had suffered through years of schoolyard bullying.
In all those years, he’d had only one friend, Roger McGeary, an equally geeky kid, who had been every bit as odd as Stuart. The two boys had bonded over a mutual love first of video games and later of computer coding. Buoyed by their friendship, the two outcasts, disparagingly referred to by their classmates as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, had almost made it through high school. Then, during Stu’s senior year, disaster struck. First Roger had moved away. Later on Stuart’s grandmother died, leaving the devastated teenager on his own.
The whole time Stuart was growing up, his grandparents hadn’t owned a vehicle. They had made do by relying on buses and the occasional taxi for their transportation needs. Not having a family car had made signing up for driver’s ed an impossibility for him, and once his world fell apart, he hadn’t revisited the issue.
At age seventeen and left to his own devices, Stuart had ended up in a homeless shelter, where someone had noticed his computing skills and brought him to the attention of B. Simpson. At the time, B. had been involved in a computer gaming start-up. Years later, when B. founded a cyber security company named High Noon Enterprises, he had brought Stu on board, and Stu had worked there ever since.
B., recognizing Stu’s deficiencies along with his talents, had found work-arounds for his inability to drive. For a long time, B. and his wife and partner, Ali Reynolds, had allowed Stu to live on-site by using the back room as an unofficial crash pad. A year or so earlier, they had gone to the county and obtained a zoning variance that enabled them to create a bona fide additional living unit, a studio apartment, in what had once been designated storage space on the far side of the computer lab. Happy with the new arrangement, there had been no indication that Stu would make any changes in the status quo as far as transportation was concerned.
But, weeks earlier, Stu’s life had taken a surprising turn when Julia Miller, the aunt of Stu’s long-ago chum Roger McGeary, had turned up on High Noon’s doorstep. She had come bearing the unwelcome news that Roger was dead, supposedly having taken his own life. She was there asking for High Noon to investigate the death.
To everyone’s amazement, including his own, the previously reticent Stuart had somehow risen to the occasion. He had used his considerable technical skills to track down and unmask a serial killer named Owen Hansen, a computer genius who used cyber bullying techniques to drive desperate victims into taking their own lives. First Stuart had managed to track down one of Hansen’s potential victims in time to save the young woman’s life. Later on, Stuart had encountered the crazed killer on a lonely mountain road. On his own and armed with only his grandfather’s Swiss Army knife, Stuart had faced down the gun-wielding man, called his bluff, and watched his friend’s murderer leap to his own death.
To those around him, that incident seemed to spark an incredible turning point. It was as though Stuart Ramey had suddenly come into his own. Other than the people at work, Stuart had been relatively friendless for most of his life. Now, though, he seemed determined to reestablish and maintain his long-interrupted connection to Roger McGeary’s Aunt Julia.
In the intervening weeks he had made several visits to her ranch, Racehorse Rest, located near the town of Payson. The trip was more than seventy miles one way, and using a bus to get there and back wasn’t an option because there was no bus service between Cottonwood and Payson. Once, he had ridden there with his coworker Cami Lee. But at this juncture in his life, learning to drive was less threatening than the necessity of having to ask someone else for a ride. And so, two and a half decades after most of his contemporaries had learned to drive, Stuart had embarked on his own journey to become a licensed driver.
He’d had no difficulty passing the written exam, and people at work had been eager to help facilitate the process. Both Cami and Shirley Malone, High Noon’s new receptionist, had taken him for driving lessons. Ali’s friend, Sister Anselm, had even gotten into the act by letting him do a supervised driving excursion back and forth to Aunt Julia’s in the good sister’s Mini Cooper.
Two days earlier, after the last of those driving lessons in Cami’s Prius, she had pronounced him ready to go for the exam. That’s when the project had ground to a sudden halt over the stick shift stumbling block.
“Not before I can drive a standard transmission,” he had objected.
“A standard transmission?” Cami echoed. “Who even has a standard transmission these days, and why on earth would you want to drive one?”
“Because I have to be able to drive both,” Stuart had insisted. “If I can only drive automatics, I won’t be a real driver.”
“Whoever gave you that weird idea?” Cami wanted to know.
“Pops,” Stu answered simply, “my grandfather. He always used to say that people who could only drive automatics weren’t real drivers.”
Rather than argue the point, Cami had gone in search of a standard transmission solution. In the world of High Noon Enterprises, there were plenty of vehicles with automatic transmissions to choose from, but the only possible stick shift candidate was the antique Bronco owned by Ali Reynolds’s father, Bob Larson, and that was the vehicle Stu would be driving today. Ali had agreed to drive the Bronco over from Sedona that morning so Stu could take it for a supervised spin.
He was excited about the idea but worried, too. Physical coordination had never been his strong suit. He knew that he’d have to be able to operate the clutch, the gear shift, and the gas pedal all at the same time. He had watched YouTube videos of the process over and over, trying to get the hang of it. Stu was a wizard when it came to fingers on keyboards, but his oversized feet had always left him feeling clumsy, and he wasn’t the least bit sure he could make them work as needed.
Taking a coffee mug with him, he ventured into the lab. Despite the fact that it was half past six, Cami was already there. “Today’s the big stick shift day?” she asked.
He nodded. “Yup.”
“Don’t worry,” Cami told him. “You’ll be fine.”
“I hope so,” he said, “I really do.”