| |
JULIETTE STARED WIDE-eyed into the rear-view mirror at the red and blue lights flashing behind her. Her palms began to sweat as her heart rate sky-rocketed, and it took her several minutes to pull her little PT Cruiser out of the dinner-hour traffic.
She waited, both hands gripping the steering wheel, as the officer approached her window. Finding it still closed, he tapped on it, and she jumped, letting out a tiny squeal. "Sorry!" she called through the glass, turning the car back on so she could operate the power windows. She worked the knobs, accidentally sending the backseat window up and down twice before she finally managed to get hers open. "Sorry," she repeated, peering up at the very tall officer whose eyes were hidden behind his sunglasses.
"Please turn off your engine, ma'am." His voice was firm, and Juliette scrambled to comply.
"Sorry," she muttered a third time, afraid now to look up at him. She toyed with the keys in her lap, sensing his eyes boring into the top of her head. She was sure she'd smell burning hair at any moment.
"May I see your license and registration, please?"
After wrestling with the latch on the glove compartment, she withdrew the paperwork for her car, then reached into the back seat to grab her purse from off the floor. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him take a step back and put a hand on his holster.
The idea that she might be pulling out a weapon struck her as funny, and she had to bite her lip to keep from giggling. Her hands trembled, making it difficult to slide her license from its plastic casing in her wallet.
"Is everything all right, ma'am?"
"Yes, Officer." The late afternoon sun setting in the sky behind him made her squint. She couldn't tell if he was looking at her or not, but she caught a glimpse of her warped reflection in his sunglasses. "I'm just really nervous, I guess."
"Why are you so nervous?"
"I—I don't know," she stammered as she handed over her license. "I've never been pulled over before, and I'm trying not to freak out."
"I'm not going to hurt you."
"Oh. Good. Thanks." She grimaced. It sounded as though she'd been afraid of just that. "I mean, I know you're not going to hurt me. At least I think I do. I meant thanks for trying to reassure me. I can't help it, though; I get nervous easily." She should just close her mouth. She wasn't making things better by talking.
"Do you know how fast you were driving?"
"Um, I think so." She wrapped her damp fingers around the steering wheel again. "Actually, I'm not sure."
"Ten miles over the speed limit." His voice remained calm, patient, rattling her even more. "Do you know what the speed limit is here?"
"Um, I think so," she said again, a hot flush creeping up her chest and neck. "Actually, I—I'm not exactly sure about that either." Her voice cracked into a whisper.
The officer cleared his throat. "Ma'am, I'm a little concerned. You don't seem to know some pretty important pieces of information that someone who gets behind the wheel of a car should know." His patronizing tone irritated her. "The speed limit here is 35 miles per hour. You were driving 45." He paused, just long enough to make her squirm, before continuing. "Were you in a hurry to get somewhere?"
"No, not really." She shook her head and forgot about keeping her mouth shut. "I was just hungry, and I wasn't paying attention to how fast I was driving."
The officer chuckled, a low rumble that made Juliette's stomach flip-flop uncomfortably. "You were speeding because you were hungry? That's a first."
Her grip on the steering wheel tightened; he was mocking her.
Jerk, she thought to herself. "Well, it's the truth." She tried to glare at him, but the sun made it difficult, and she had to turn away again.
He leaned down to look around the inside of her car while she fumed in her seat. As if satisfied there was nothing suspicious about her, he straightened again, tore off a page from his ticket pad, and handed it to her along with her license.
"Look, Ms. Gustafson. Believe it or not, I appreciate your honesty. But being distracted is a dangerous way to drive, much more so than driving too fast because you choose to ignore the speed limit. Did you know that most accidents happen when a driver is distracted? Let this be a wake-up call for you. It's why we give tickets; not necessarily to punish drivers for bad behavior, but to encourage them to drive better." He pointed at the pink form she was holding. "Just follow the instructions on the ticket, okay?"
She couldn't believe it. He was actually lecturing her! First he mocked her, then he lectured her. No longer nervous, she was offended. She nodded, her lips clamped shut, afraid of what she might say if she let any words slip out.
He patted the roof of her car. "Drive safely now, Ms. Gustafson."
"Thank you, Officer," she managed to squeeze out, her upbringing forcing her to be polite. "Not for the ticket, of course. Or the lecture." Why, oh why couldn't she just stop talking? "I mean, thank you for wishing me safe driving. Thank you for saying 'Drive safely now.'" Her voice trailed off. She stuck her keys in the ignition, turned on the car, and rolled up the window without looking at him again.
"Imbecile," she muttered, not sure if she was referring to him or herself.
~ ~ ~
A TICKET. HER FIRST ever. She didn't know whether to cry or celebrate. And today, of all days.
Today marked six months of life without Mike.
Juliette tucked her feet up underneath her as she nestled into the corner of her over-stuffed beige couch. This was her spot. It had always been her spot, and at this rate, it probably always would be. She maneuvered the TV tray over her knees until it was positioned just the way she liked it.
"Another wonderful meal with me, myself, and I. I can eat whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want, wherever I want. No one can tell me otherwise, and I like it this way." She raised her plastic fork in a defiant salute, then stabbed it into the middle of The Green Dragon food on her tray. She spun the utensil until it was loaded with noodles and shoved the whole bundle into her mouth. She couldn't close her lips around the bite, but she didn't care; she just chewed with her mouth open.
"Delicious!" she exclaimed when she could speak again. "It's you that I love, Mr. Chen Yu. Only you." She pointed the remote at the television and pressed play. A terribly-acted romance-novel-come-to-life started up again where she'd left it to go pick up her take-out. The heroine was overly made up and vacuous. The male lead looked like he'd been shellacked from head to toe, not a hair or muscle out of place. Even his jeans were pressed. She actually wanted the woman to leave him. The storyline was not making her cry, nor giving her anything else to relate to, and it was sucking all the joy out of her favorite food.
Just as she was debating whether or not she could stand another second of the sappy dialogue, her phone rang.
At first, she tried to ignore it. Then she thought it might be Mike and contemplated throwing the thing out the window. She let it ring instead, and the call eventually went to voice-mail, beeping rudely at her. Sighing dramatically, she turned up the movie, preferring to see it through to the bitter end than to be stuck with her thoughts of Mike.
A few minutes later, the phone rang again. "Are you serious?" She pushed the TV tray away and scrambled for the purse she'd dropped on the floor at the end of the couch. It was Renata. "What do you want," she muttered under her breath, while she considered whether or not she could handle talking to her sister right now.
Either she was calling to make sure Juliette wasn't drowning herself in the bathtub, or she was calling to try to coerce her into going on another family outing to Pizza Haven or the local dog park. "I don't even have a dog! Or a family, for that matter. Or a man." She sighed and brought the phone to her ear.
"Hi, Ren." She knew she sounded miserable, but she didn't care. Regardless of how she answered the phone, Renata believed Juliette was seriously depressed, and if she sounded otherwise, her sister reminded her that she didn't have to fake it with her.
"How are you, sweetie?"
"Why do you call me sweetie?" Juliette voiced the first question that popped into her head, belligerence tattering the edges of her words. She softened her tone just a little. "In fact, you call all of us that."
"Do I?" Renata asked. "It must be because I think you're all so sweet. And actually, I don't call Phoebe that. She'd rip my head off and drop-kick it into outer space."
"Hm. Did you two have another run-in?" Juliette smirked at her own ridiculous question. Renata and Phoebe never had anything but run-ins.
As though reading her thoughts, Renata replied, "We don't have run-ins. We just think differently. But I didn't call you to talk about Phoebe. I called to find out how you're doing."
"I'm fine." Juliette opted for cryptic. She'd forgotten to turn down the movie and was having a hard time focusing on what Renata was saying.
"You're fine? Really? What is that noise? Do you have company?"
"I'm fine. Really. The noise is a movie. No, I don't have company. Any other questions?" She rolled her eyes as the two main characters on screen started moving toward each other across a parking lot in slow motion.
"You're starting to sound like Phoebe." Juliette could hear the disdain in Renata's voice and it made her bristle.
"That's not such a bad thing," Juliette said, defending their younger sister.
"Oh relax. I don't mean it's bad. I just mean you don't sound like you, because you're acting like her." She sighed. "Again, I didn't call to talk about Phoebe."
"What did you call about, Ren?" Juliette couldn't decide which was worse; this conversation or her movie.
"We had a G-FOURce yesterday."
All ears now, she grabbed the remote and paused the lovers mid-lunge. "What? Why didn't anyone call me? I didn't know." She didn't remember scheduling a meeting with her sisters.
"Wait." A terrible thought occurred to her. "Renata, why didn't I know there was a G-FOURce yesterday?"
"Because we needed to meet without you. We're having a follow-up tomorrow, though, and you need to be there for that one."
"What's going on? I don't like the sound of this. In fact, I'm not sure I really want to be there." Juliette's mind was spinning. They'd met without her. That meant they'd met to talk about her. "This is another one of your interventions, isn't it?"
Renata didn't deny it. "We're worried about you, sweetie."
"Stop calling me that! I'm not your sweetie, Renata. I'm not your child, and I'm not some empty-headed twit who needs to be called placating names." Juliette pressed her forehead into the palm of her free hand and closed her eyes, immediately ashamed of her uncharacteristic outburst. "Look, I don't need an intervention, okay? Yes, I'm sad. Yes, I'm even slightly depressed. When I think about Mike, I get hot and sweaty, but not in a good way. I get sad, and then angry, and then wonder what's so wrong with me that he couldn't love me like I loved him."
"Wouldn't," Renata interjected. "Love is a decision, Juliette. That's why John and I are still married after all these years."
Ah yes. Mr. and Mrs. Perfect. "Regardless, my reactions are normal. I'm not on the verge of suicide, and I'm not going to go be a hermit on some isolated mountaintop. I just need a little time to lick my wounds and heal up a bit."
There was silence on the other end of the phone. "Ren? Are you still there?"
"Tomorrow. Five o'clock. Your place. That way you can't ditch us. Come straight home from work, Juliette. Don't dawdle." The phone went dead in her hand.
"Yes, Mother," Juliette muttered. She glared down the sofa to her spot at the other end where her food waited patiently, trying not to congeal. Her plastic fork had been knocked to the floor in her scramble for the phone and was nowhere to be seen. She didn't really care; she wasn't so hungry anymore.
"I need a dog," she said. "One that will love me unconditionally. And eat my cold leftovers."
