THEY MET AT the 30,000-mile major service. As Natalie parked her car in front of Jackie’s Auto Repair, she let out a cautious breath. Should I take a chance?
Her last service, an oil change at the dealership where she’d bought the car, had ended up costing twice the advertised price. “That’s just for the oil,” the man wearing a shirt and tie behind the counter had explained, pointing out the fine print on the coupon she’d handed him. “There’s also labor and disposal fees.”
That, on top of the job taking two hours, convinced Natalie to take her coworker’s advice and try a local mechanic near the office.
“Be right with you,” a woman called from the service bay in answer to Natalie’s hello. Right, Jackie is a woman. She thought that was cool and very progressive. She probably wouldn’t mention it to her dad, though.
The smell of oil and grease reminded her of watching her dad work on his Chevys when she was a kid. When she’d bought her first car, a used Dodge Colt, he showed her how to change the oil, check the spark plugs, replace the air filter. The easy stuff. And she’d done it herself for many years, but as she’d grown older and moved to an apartment with no off-street parking, she’d gotten lazy and left it to others.
Natalie glanced around the small office. The couch looked clean and relatively new, but a box of grimy parts sat on the coffee table. A ficus by the window dropped yellow leaves on the floor. On the wall behind the desk hung three small watercolor paintings of what could be either dunes or a naked woman’s body. It was hard to tell from a distance. She doubted they were nudes, but not entirely.
“You must be Natalie.”
Natalie spun around, surprised both by the fact that the woman before her knew who she was and a bit embarrassed to think she’d been spotted staring at the paintings. “Yes.” She cleared her throat. “You must be Jackie?”
“The one and only. Have a seat.” She motioned to a chair facing the desk.
A range of impressions ricocheted through Natalie’s imagination. What had she expected? Fonzie with breasts? Rosie the Riveter? Jackie seemed slight for a mechanic. Don’t they have to lift engines and tires? Her short hair seemed more practical than radical. She could have been any androgynous woman in T-shirt, jeans, and work boots.
Jackie reached into a drawer and pulled out a form. “So, tell me about your car. What year is it? How many miles? Anything I need to know.”
“It’s a Corolla, nineteen ninety-nine. Just over thirty thousand miles. That’s why I’m here, for the scheduled service.”
Jackie wrote down the details. “So roughly ten thousand miles a year. Is that mostly city or highway driving?”
“City, I guess. I commute to work about fifteen miles a day. I work out on Main Street. But I take a few trips a year that are highway driving.”
“Oil changes every four thousand?”
“Well . . . more like two or three times a year.” It was like admitting to her dentist how seldom she flossed. She braced herself, but Jackie didn’t scold her, though her father occasionally did.
“Manual or automatic.”
“Automatic. I wanted—” Natalie started to explain how her girlfriend, Sara, didn’t drive a stick, so she’d bought an automatic, though she’d have preferred manual. It wasn’t that she was afraid to come out, and Jackie could be a lesbian for all she knew. Censoring her life had become a habit.
“Security system?”
“A kill switch, no alarm.”
“AC?”
“Yes.”
Jackie ticked off check boxes down the form. “Factory installed?”
“Yes.” That was another concession. Her dad was in his nineties and didn’t handle the heat well. He didn’t ride with her often, but enough to make that an expense worth paying.
“Original tires?”
“No. I had a blowout driving over train tracks last year.”
Jackie gave her a commiserating smile. “Don’t you hate that? Which tire?”
“Front passenger.”
Jackie wrote that down. She certainly was thorough. Natalie considered joking about how her doctor didn’t ask so many questions but decided she didn’t know Jackie well enough to get that personal. Besides, if this didn’t work out, she’d never see her again.
Jackie explained the work she’d be doing—spark plugs, air filter, oil and filter, ATF—
“ATF?”
“Sorry, automatic transmission fluid. I’ll also change the antifreeze and clean and adjust your brakes.” She wrote the list down on another form while she talked. She stopped and looked at Natalie. “The car is new enough that I don’t expect to find any surprises. And you don’t look like the type who’d abuse a car.”
Natalie bristled at that comment but let it go. How does she know I don’t race up at New Hampshire Speedway on weekends?
“It’ll probably be about two hundred dollars,” Jackie continued. “If that’s okay, sign here and I’ll get started.”
Natalie thought she’d heard wrong. That was less than the dealer had charged her for the 15,000-mile service that didn’t do half that stuff. She didn’t want to look too eager so kept a poker face while she looked over the list and signed her name.
“And a phone number I can reach you at.” Jackie pointed to the place on the form for that.
Natalie sat in awe of her concise efficiency. So far so good. Still, she worried. “This won’t violate the warranty, will it?”
Jackie leaned back and smiled. “You’re not cheating on the dealership. The warranty is with Toyota, not them. As long as the service is done and documented, and I always use manufacturer’s parts, your warranty is intact.”
Natalie liked Jackie’s no-nonsense attitude. “You do come highly recommended.”
“So how come it took you thirty thousand miles to find me?” Jackie’s wink suggested she was teasing. “That’s good to hear. I do my best. I’ll always give you a fair price and an honest answer.”
“That sounds like a good slogan.”
“Maybe I should stencil it on my door.”
When Natalie picked up the car later, she was floored by the bill. It was exactly what Jackie had told her. From then on, Natalie relied on Jackie to fix her Corolla.
AT 43,318 MILES, the battery gave out. Natalie didn’t blame it. A lot had happened in those miles to grind her down as well.
“I’m not in love with you anymore,” Sara, the non-stick driver, had said over breakfast a week earlier.
“Just like that? Bang, you’re done?”
“Of course not. It didn’t happen all at once.” Like that was supposed to make Natalie feel better. “It, I don’t know, dwindled. We’ve grown apart. Isn’t that what couples usually say?”
“You say. Not me. I haven’t grown apart.”
But of course she had. While Sara cleared her dishes and made her lunch, Natalie sat fuming, wondering. She remembered the excitement she’d felt when the state court had ruled that same-sex couples could get married. And the gnashing anxiety that followed. Would Sara expect her to propose? Why hadn’t that been her first thought? They laughed about it that evening. How neither was ready. Six years together didn’t mean forever had to loom.
A week later, she sat in her boss’s office, listening to him drone on about budget cuts and the recession taking its toll, wondering if it meant no raise.
Then, “I’m going to have to let you go,” he said, without so much as a pause to take a breath or change his position, leaning back in his chair with arms folded across his chest.
Inexplicably, her first thought was that she wouldn’t be able to argue for keeping the large apartment she rented with Sara. She couldn’t afford it alone. His chair creaked in agreement.
In the parking lot at the job she no longer had, Natalie sat in her Corolla in the rain, turning the key futilely, the starter whining ever more slowly till it only clicked. She didn’t know how long she’d sat there, hand on the key, no longer trying, when Richard, from IT, tapped on her window.
“Need a jump start?” he asked through the wet glass.
Natalie rolled down the window. “Please.”
She drove straight to Jackie’s. The beauty of being laid off in the morning was that it left the rest of the day to herself.
She sipped dark coffee at a Middle Eastern bakery on Main Street while Jackie installed a new battery, replaced the front brake pads, cleaned and adjusted the rear brakes, and, for no extra charge, rotated the tires. “It’ll be up on the lift anyway,” she’d said, which deflated Natalie’s notion that she’d offered it out of chivalry.
“New battery to get you going where you want to go. New brakes so you can stop going where you don’t want to go. What more could you ask for?” Jackie said as she wrote up the bill.
If only it were that easy, Natalie wanted to say, but didn’t. Jackie was a mechanic, not a therapist. She nodded and wrote out the check.
“You have a good day now,” Jackie said.
“You too.” Natalie didn’t add that this had been the best part of it. That when her life had gone to shit on all fronts, Jackie was the one bright spot. She almost asked her out for a beer, but knew she wouldn’t be able to stand it if she was turned down, or worse, found out Jackie was as flawed as everyone else in her life.
After spending the next three days online looking for jobs and apartments, Natalie realized there was no point in finding a place until she knew where she’d be working, so she decided to move back home with her dad. He needed the help anyway, she rationalized.
Her parents had divorced when she was a teenager and she’d lived with her mom through college, only seeing her dad on a calculated formula of weekends and summer vacations. When her mom moved to Florida ten years ago, leaving Natalie unmoored from family, she had reconnected with her dad. So it wasn’t like she had an old room to move back into. She was thankful he had a guest room and helped him move boxes and piles of clothes off the bed.
“You’ll find a better job,” he said.
“I know.”
“How’s the car running?”
“Fine.”
“For a Jap car.”
“Dad.”
“What?”
His speech had changed since he got dentures, but the content hadn’t.
“If more people bought American cars, this country wouldn’t be in such tough shape and you wouldn’t get laid off. That’s all I’m saying.”
“There’s a reason why people buy Japanese cars, Dad. The quality is better.”
“And you have the unions to thank for that.”
Natalie shut up. No point in continuing that line of thought. She didn’t win arguments against her father, no matter how wrong he was.
BY THE NEXT major service, at 48,799 miles, Natalie had a new job and had moved in with her new girlfriend, Ginny. They were planning to get married. Or rather Ginny was. Natalie couldn’t seem to wrap her mind around the concept of a big wedding. She wasn’t out to her dad, so how could she get married? Ginny said she understood her dilemma but persisted in pressuring Natalie to settle on a date.
“We need to do it sooner rather than later,” Ginny argued in her lawyer way. “If Governor Romney gets his way, we won’t be able to get married at all.”
“Then let’s go to town hall and elope,” Natalie countered.
Ginny wouldn’t buy it. She had her heart set on all the trimmings. So they were at a temporary impasse.
Natalie’s new job was no longer down the street from Jackie’s, so taking her car for repairs meant driving forty minutes in rush-hour traffic, leaving the car, then taking an hour on two buses to get to work. Her friends ridiculed her for going so far for a repair, right after complaining about their dealer breaking something just to overcharge them to fix it.
The ficus had rallied and its green leaves shone in the sun by the window. While she wrote out a check for the serpentine belt, spark plugs, and PCV, whatever that was, Jackie commented on her engagement ring, with its large diamond that Natalie was having trouble getting used to.
“Welcome to the club,” Jackie said. She pulled a gold band out from inside her shirt where it hung from a thin chain.
Natalie had not considered the notion that Jackie might have a significant other, let alone be married.
“Why don’t you wear it?” she asked.
“Too dangerous,” Jackie said. “One spark from a battery cable and my finger’d be toast.”
Natalie flinched. She knew the job had its hazards, but hadn’t considered electrocution one of them.
“Maura and I got married as soon as it was legal,” Jackie said. She outed herself like it was nothing.
Natalie tried to imagine their wedding. Did Jackie wear a tux? Did their families approve? She didn’t ask those kinds of personal questions, though. She didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize her relationship with the best mechanic in the world as far as she was concerned.
“What about you?” Jackie asked. “Did he get down on one knee?”
He? She didn’t know.
“She—actually—didn’t go quite that far, but there were candles and dinner involved.”
“Nice.” Jackie nodded her approval. “Have you set a date?”
“Not yet,” Natalie said. She folded the receipt and stood to leave so she wouldn’t have to elaborate.
On Saturday, driving to visit her dad, she practiced.
“Dad,” she said to the car in front of her, “you know Ginny is a good friend of mine, right?” She’d never lied about being friends with Ginny, and when she’d moved in, she lied only by omission when telling her dad why. He had said she was being very practical and that he was happy to get his house back, though Natalie worried about him being alone at his age.
“Ginny is more than a friend.” Natalie tried to picture her father’s reaction. She couldn’t. Years ago, her therapist had suggested that she allow her parents the same amount of time to get used to her being a lesbian as it had taken her. She assumed her dad was too old. There wasn’t enough time. How was she to know he’d still be around fifteen years later despite decades of smoking and poor eating habits. Her mother, twenty years younger than her dad, was still working on acceptance. Being two thousand miles away helped.
When she pulled into his driveway, she slipped the diamond ring off her finger and tucked it in her jeans pocket. One step at a time.
Throughout the evening, every time she formed the thought to begin the conversation, her heart raced and her hands shook. This must be what jumping out of a plane was like. The brain screaming in instinct, don’t do it, you’ll splat! So she changed the subject to calm down. Finally, after dinner, after washing the dishes, during a commercial for an arthritis drug with more side effects than benefits, she muted the TV, turned to her dad, and spit it out before her heart or hands could catch up.
“Oh, your mother told me that years ago,” he said, staring at the silent TV. “I was tempted to say something, but wanted it to come from you.”
The roar in her ears quieted, her rampaging heart slowed. “You don’t mind?”
“I didn’t say that. But I know your mother said it out of spite, so I won’t give her the satisfaction.”
“That’s not exactly comforting.”
He turned to her, but she couldn’t bear to look into his eyes. He’d slipped his watch off and was winding it. A mindless motion he’d repeated thousands, millions of times. “I want you to be happy. Are you?”
Am I? “Yes, Dad, I am.” I am.
Wedding planning kicked into high gear, and on the big day Natalie’s dad walked her down the aisle, her mother weeping in the front pew—Natalie wasn’t sure if they were tears of happiness or disappointment—and Ginny followed on the arm of her own dad.
MONTHS PASSED AND the odometer rolled through the 60,000-mile service (spark plugs and PCV again, transmission fluid, and another tire rotation). Despite Natalie’s recommendations, Ginny wouldn’t take her car to Jackie. She leased a new one every two years, so said she didn’t see the need.
WHEN, AT 65,336 miles, the Corolla’s muffler dropped to the roadway on I-95, Natalie called AAA. It hadn’t fallen off completely or she’d have tossed it in the trunk and kept going. It was dragging on the ground. There was no way to drive with it like that. She waited two hours in the breakdown lane while cars whizzed by, people rushing to get somewhere important, meet someone special. She called to cancel the appointment she’d been heading to. Once the AAA guy arrived, he took only ten minutes to wire the muffler back up. She drove over to Jackie’s.
When she pulled in, she spotted Jackie through the window, sitting at her desk, chatting with a customer. The woman’s back was to the window, so Natalie could see only Jackie’s expression. She smiled and laughed, leaned in confidentially. Then she glanced to the side and spotted Natalie. She froze for a split second, then glanced at the woman and back to Natalie. Maybe it wasn’t a customer. Maybe it was her wife. Or a friend. Or a lover. Jesus, Natalie scolded herself. Get a grip. Jackie waved at her to come in. The woman stood to leave, taking keys from Jackie. A customer.
Jackie remounted the muffler and reminded Natalie that she’d told her it would fall off before it rotted. “They don’t make them like this anymore,” she’d said. And it was true.
Natalie slumped on the couch while Jackie worked on the car. She didn’t have the energy to go out to the bakery for a cup of coffee. The ficus had taken a turn for the worse and most of its branches were bare. She was in no rush to get home. Ginny was working late. Again. Associates have no control over their workload, Ginny had explained. What good was the salary of a lawyer if there was no time to spend it?
The paintings behind Jackie’s desk caught her eye. Examining them closely, she could see that they were indeed sand dunes, but flowed in sensuous curves.
“Like them?” Jackie stood in the doorway to the garage, wiping her hands on a soft rag.
Natalie pretended she didn’t feel like a kid caught looking at porn. “Very much. Where did you find them?”
Jackie tapped her head. “In here.” She smiled when Natalie furrowed her brow in confusion. “I painted them.”
“You paint?”
“Don’t sound so surprised.”
“It’s just . . . how do you find the time?”
“Nice save.” She paused to look at the paintings, like she hadn’t done that in a while, then sat at her desk. “It was a long time ago.” She punched numbers into her calculator, changing the subject.
Natalie got out her checkbook. “I don’t know why, but I keep hoping each repair will be the last.”
“I thought you liked me,” Jackie said. “I’m crushed.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—” Natalie stopped when she saw Jackie’s teasing smile.
“Cars are all about entropy,” Jackie went on. “From the moment you drive them off the lot, they lose value. They are in a constant state of falling apart.”
“Isn’t everything?”
Jackie nodded silently and ripped off the receipt.
Instead of going home, Natalie drove over to her dad’s. The plus side of Ginny’s workload was being able to see him more often. The downside was being able to see him more often. She’d been urging him to get more help at the house—cleaners, Meals on Wheels, rides to the senior center.
“I don’t want to sit around with a bunch of old people,” he had complained.
Tonight, she found him asleep on the couch, TV blaring, no food in sight. She clicked off the TV and microwaved a bowl of stew.
“Dad!” she shouted, not from anger, but for hearing.
He snorted awake. “Jesus, what’s wrong?”
She helped him to the table. “You need to eat more.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Try.”
“My teeth hurt.”
That night she stayed up till Ginny came home. “Dad can’t live alone anymore.”
Ginny flung off her shoes and stripped off her suit as she crossed the bedroom. “Can we talk about this some other time? I’m beat.”
“You’re home. There is no other time.”
“I’ve had a crap day.”
“So have I,” Natalie said to the closing bathroom door. An electric toothbrush whirred. She thought of the paintings at Jackie’s. She could use a weekend at the beach.
“What do you think?” Natalie asked when Ginny crawled under the covers beside her.
Ginny yawned. “One of the partners specializes in geriatrics. I’ll ask her for nursing home recommendations.”
“I don’t want to put him in a nursing home.”
“He’s not coming here.”
“Why not? We have a spare room.”
Ginny lay still for a long moment then rolled over. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”
By the time Natalie woke up, Ginny had left for work.
THE AIR CONDITIONER gave out at 72,727 miles. For three days, Natalie ignored it. She didn’t need it for her dad anymore. Six months ago, she’d found her father on the couch again. When she couldn’t wake him, she worried he’d had a heart attack or a stroke. His living will stipulated no extreme measures should be used, but they hadn’t discussed in depth potential circumstances. What did “no hope of recovery” mean? A full recovery? Able to speak and think? To walk? None of that mattered as she groped for his pulse, his neck cool and dry, no beat of life throbbing against her fingers.
“Fix him!” she wanted to scream at the ambulance driver.
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” the funeral director said. He said that every day. That was his job. She only had one father. This wasn’t a loss. He wasn’t a sock, misplaced in the laundry.
All her fears about having to pull the plug transformed. If she had stood up to his refusal to leave his home, to Ginny’s refusal to let him move in, this wouldn’t have happened. He shouldn’t have died alone. She should have been with him, holding his hand, telling him he could go, that she’d be okay.
Her mother didn’t come for the funeral. “He was your father. I’m sorry you loved him and that I don’t.”
“Didn’t,” Natalie corrected. “You can’t not love him anymore. He’s dead.”
Ginny held her while she cried. Went with her to pick out the casket. Arranged for the cemetery plot. The only thing she didn’t do was say she was sorry.
“It must be a relief in a way,” Ginny said over coffee one morning a month later.
“How so?”
“You don’t have to worry about him anymore.”
“I wouldn’t have worried about him if he’d been living here.”
“Really? You’re still on that? People don’t live forever, Natalie. He still would have died. He was old.”
“Fuck you.”
With no AC, driving home from work felt like sitting in a sweat lodge without the cathartic religious experience. When she cranked down the passenger side window, she spotted the burn mark. Her dad had put out a cigarette on the armrest in his haste to hide it from her.
Natalie didn’t think Jackie fixed air conditioners, but she asked anyway.
“I don’t, usually,” Jackie said over the phone. “But I’ll do it for you.” Two little words. “For you.” When was the last time she’d heard that?
Day two of a heat wave with the triple-H: hazy, hot, and humid. On the radio, the weatherman warned of high ozone levels, hazardous conditions for anyone with breathing problems. The asphalt in front of Jackie’s shimmered, like it was molten. Her bay door was open. Her office, however, was a cool oasis. The sweat that had dripped between Natalie’s breasts chilled her.
Jackie came in wiping her face with a paper towel. “Can you believe it?” she asked. “Hell of a time to lose your AC.”
“Any other time, I probably wouldn’t care.”
She waited while Jackie checked the car, hoping it would be an easy fix, like Freon or whatever they used these days. The ficus was gone, just a brown stain on the floor where it had stood.
Fifteen minutes later, Jackie returned with the bad news. “Needs a new compressor.”
Jackie continued talking, but Natalie heard only snatches—some hundred dollars—the sound growing fainter. Her vision blurred and she began to shake. Her last straw didn’t snap, the entire straw house went up in flames. Her face scrunched into a silent agony and she burst into deep sobs.
“Are you okay?” Jackie asked, her voice still tinny. “Do you need a drink of water?”
Natalie gasped for air and nodded as she sank onto the couch. Jackie held out a mug and sat beside her, her right knee touching Natalie’s left. She gripped the mug with both hands, like a life preserver. After a few gulps, she set the mug on the table and wiped her face.
She inhaled a stuttering breath. “I’m so sorry.” She stared straight ahead. “I, uh, it’s been a rough time for me lately.” She glanced at Jackie. Her expression didn’t indicate any embarrassment or impatience.
“I was afraid of that. You don’t seem yourself.”
Myself? How can she know what I’m usually like? This woman I see a couple times a year.
“My dad died. A few months ago. Not yesterday or anything. I’m not sure where this came from.” She indicated her eyes and the tears.
“That’s rough. You were close?”
“As close as you can be to a horrible, bigoted curmudgeon.” Natalie dug through her purse for a wad of tissues and blew her nose.
“They can be the worst to lose.”
“Why?”
“No chance for redemption.”
“My wife thinks I should be relieved.” Natalie balled up the wet tissue.
“Oh?”
Jackie smelled of something nice through the background of grease. Soap? What was that the soap her dad used to use after working on his car? Lava. She almost started crying again. “Are you close to your dad?”
Jackie grinned. “I’m the second ‘Jackie’ to run this shop. My pop was the first. He’s been gone five years now. Yeah, we were close. I miss him.”
“Was he a curmudgeon?”
“No, but it’s still hard.”
“I wonder sometimes what it would have been like to have a dad who supported me. Approved. He was okay with me being gay, but only on the surface. I think it tortured him inside.”
It was the most Natalie had revealed about herself. To this near stranger.
“Pop always wanted a daughter. He didn’t mind at all that I was a tomboy. His only regret was not getting to walk me down the aisle.”
They sat in silence, letting the stillness of memories settle around them. The phone rang. Natalie jumped. Jackie didn’t move.
“I’m fine now. I’m really sorry about this.” Natalie stood. “Call me when the car’s ready?”
“Will do. And Natalie? You shouldn’t feel anything except the way you feel. If that makes any sense.”
“It does. Thanks.”
AT 80,624 MILES, the gas tank developed a leak. They stood under the car, up on a lift. Jackie shined a light on the fuel oozing around a tube coming from the top of the tank. “That explains why you only smell gas when the tank is full,” she said.
Natalie nodded. “But you can fix it, right?”
Jackie clicked off the light. “Sure. But do you want me to? Replacing the tank will cost close to what your car is worth.”
Natalie blinked, shocked. It was like Jackie was telling her she had to put her dog down. It had never occurred to her that the day would come when fixing the Corolla would not be worth it.
“You want to think about it? Take your time, burn off some gas, then let me know. But if you decide to replace it, I’d consider buying it from you.”
“Why would you want this old thing?”
“It’s a great car.”
Natalie stared at the paint faded from years of no garage, the windshield sandblasted by New England winters, that scrape of white paint on the bumper where she’d misjudged the narrow driveway and clipped the fence at the inn where she and Ginny had honeymooned. There was nothing remarkable about this car and that made it remarkable. It was a vehicle of time travel. She’d been young and hopeful when she’d bought it. Now, as she glanced at Jackie, whose expression was inscrutable in the dim light under the car, she felt ancient. It took Jackie, a stranger to Natalie but not to the car, to see the value of this old thing.
She drove around town, for once trying to waste gas, and pondered her options. It took only a perusal of the Consumer Reports new-car issue and an hour or so on the Internet to convince her that she was better off keeping her Corolla. She’d fantasized about a Subaru because of the snowy winters, but all that money for a couple of months of snow? A hybrid made sense, until she factored out how long it would take in gas savings to recoup the extra upfront cost. “Fifteen years?” she’d complained to her calculator.
Face it, 80,000 miles was nothing to a Toyota. Maybe in a few years hybrids would come down in price. The bottom line was, Natalie loved her car and didn’t want to give up on it. Loving a car was one-way; it didn’t have a mind of its own, talk back, or decide the grass was greener with the cute Starbucks barista.
She should have seen it coming. An associate in a law firm couldn’t work long hours without a lot of coffee. Three years after becoming one of the first same-sex couples to legally marry, they became one of the first to legally divorce.
Early the next week, Natalie dropped her car off with Jackie and approved not only the gas tank, but also other repairs she’d held off on—struts, springs, brakes, and the usual oil, belt, and coolant.
“It’ll be like a new car,” Jackie said, patting the fender.
Two days later, Natalie headed to Jackie’s, excited to get her wheels back. Public transportation was great in theory, she decided, but the reality pretty much sucked with erratic bus schedules and crowded, broken-down trains.
As soon as she stepped off the bus, she noticed the eerie darkness. Though the sun was setting, no streetlights were on. Storefronts were dark. The traffic light down the street was blank.
“What’s going on?” she asked the Middle Eastern baker who’d stepped outside and was looking up and down the street.
“No lights anywhere,” he said in a thick accent.
No kidding. She turned down the side street toward Jackie’s. She could see the place was dark except for a faint flicker through the window. The garage door was open, a dark maw, but proof Jackie hadn’t left for the day.
When Natalie entered the office, Jackie rose from her seat behind the desk. Candles on the coffee table gave a faint glow, enough to see her sheepish expression. “I called but you must have left the office. You’re not going to believe this.” She clicked on a flashlight and waved the beam into her garage, illuminating a car high on the lift. Natalie’s car.
It took a second for the meaning to sink in. “Is it stuck up there?” Natalie asked.
“’Fraid so. I was just finishing when the lights flickered. I couldn’t get it down before the power failed. I haven’t been able to get through to the electric company to see how long it will take or how widespread it is. It’s not a circuit breaker. I checked.”
“It’s the whole neighborhood,” Natalie said. “The power’s out back to the main street.”
“Crap. I’m sorry you got all the way out here.”
They stood silent for a moment. For the first time in all the years Natalie had known her, Jackie looked confused, with no answers. But Jackie could fix anything. Natalie struggled to understand this new reality.
“Christ, what do I do?”
“I can’t leave or I’d take you home. I can’t close the bay doors, I can’t set the alarm. I can’t leave.” Jackie sounded helpless.
“I don’t expect you to,” Natalie said quickly.
“You might as well sit.” Jackie motioned to the couch. She went back to her desk. When neither spoke, the silence was complete. No compressors, no traffic, no engines revving.
“I guess you’re stuck with me,” Natalie said.
Jackie exhaled and relaxed, her familiar smile returning. “Fine with me.” Then she cleared her throat. “Let me try the power company again.” She slipped her cell phone off her belt and punched some numbers. She smiled hopefully while she listened. She punched another number. She nodded then sighed and closed the phone. “They know about the power failure and say crews are looking into it. May be an hour.” She glanced nervously around her small office. “How’s your day been otherwise?”
Natalie relaxed back into the couch. “Not great. This was supposed to make all the rest better.”
Jackie winced. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“The good news is that once I get your car down and take it for a test drive, you should be all set. She’ll ride like a dream.”
They sat, quiet in the flickering candlelight. Natalie hadn’t seen Jackie since the divorce. She couldn’t remember Jackie’s wife’s name or she’d have asked about her to be sociable. She didn’t know anything about her—hobbies, family, dietary preferences.
“You don’t need to entertain me,” Natalie said. “If there’s anything you can do, please go ahead. I’ll be fine right here.”
Jackie rubbed her thighs. “You sure? I could put some tools away.”
Natalie waved her hand toward the door. “By all means.”
She watched the flashlight beam bounce around and heard tools clatter, drawers open and close, cabinets bang. Jackie whistled a faint tune. The sounds of a normal routine comforted her.
A half hour went by and still no lights. Jackie came back to the office, wiping her hands on a rag, the flashlight under her arm. “Feel like a card game?”
Natalie looked at her, surprised. “I guess. Why not?”
Jackie went behind her desk and pulled open a drawer. “Have a seat,” she said, nodding toward the chair. She shuffled a pack of cards. “Gin rummy?”
“Sure.”
Natalie was relieved to be able to focus on the cards and not this awkward situation. After a couple of games, Jackie leaned back. “Should you call home? Let someone know where you are?”
Natalie froze for a second, then laid her cards down. “There’s no one who needs to know where I am these days.”
“Oh.” Jackie swept up the cards, then stopped. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have . . .”
“I don’t mind. It’s been over for some time now.”
Jackie stared at her hands and took a breath. “Me too. Divorced, that is.”
“I’m sorry.”
She cut the deck. “It’s also been a while.”
Natalie examined Jackie, keenly aware of what she both knew and did not know of her. Professionally, Jackie was reliable, courteous, kind, thoughtful, and honest. She could fix anything. No, not everything. “Jesus, who’d divorce the best mechanic in the world?” she said.
Jackie looked up, startled, then burst out a laugh and shook her head. “I’m glad someone appreciates that.”
Natalie took the cards from her. “My turn.” She shuffled the deck then dealt cards, each sliding across the smooth desktop.
A thought began to form. Should I take a chance? Then as quickly, her heart raced and her hands shook. Instead, she focused on the game.
When it was Jackie’s turn to deal, she watched the cards flutter across the desk. Balancing everything she both knew and did not know about Jackie, she came out on the side of making that leap. That reminded her of the joke her dad used to tell. It’s not the fall that will kill you. It’s the sudden stop at the end.
She didn’t know who was winning and Jackie wasn’t keeping score. Natalie reached for the cards. Her turn. This time, before her heart could race out of control, she braced her hands on the desk and blurted out, “Once the power comes back, would you like to get some dinner? If you don’t have plans or anything.”
The time it took for Jackie to respond stretched to several hours, month, years. What if she said no? What would she do once they broke up?
It’s only dinner.
To brace for the blow, she stared at the candle flickering on the desk.
“I’d like that.”
She looked at Jackie. She was grinning. She’d really said that.
Natalie’s breathing resumed. She picked up her cards. “Great. I’ll drive.”