The coolant needle—calm azure blue—trembled in the red zone. Burning… slightly-sour…sweet…butterscotch…graham crackers…rubber? I called AAA. In a way it felt good to collect on the dues I’d paid all those years.
A few minutes later the towing guy called: “Will you need a ride in my truck?”
“Good,” he said, when I said no; “No room for you anyway. My wife’s riding with me today.”
I imagined the two of them, a hardy, ruddy, jolly pair, rollicking from one towing job to the next. I was living alone in a rented Cape with a bad sump pump.
Soon his flatbed truck pulled up to the driveway. A small woman in a purple beret and short gray hair sat erect in the passenger seat looking straight ahead. “That was quick,” I said as he climbed out of the truck.
Thickset, with a slight stoop, a high pink forehead and wavy white hair, he looked like Socrates or Zero Mostel playing Socrates. “Seventy-five and still towing,” he bellowed, “And I’m always on time.” He nodded toward the cab of his truck, “Her caretaker didn’t show up today.” Then he looked at my car, “What happened to her?” When I told him he shook his head sympathetically. “Shouldn’t be, a nice vehicle like her.”
He lowered the back of the flatbed and attached two hooks at the end of a winch to my car. “Her attention span’s three seconds now.” He pulled on the cable and grunted.
“That’s got to be tough,” I said.
“Tough all right when her caretaker doesn’t show.”
I glanced up at the cab. She was still staring straight ahead.
“I don’t get it,” he said; “She hides rolls of toilet paper in our bedroom bureau.”
I thought of the lottery tickets my ex-wife used to stash in her top dresser drawer.
“She pulls eight times on the roll, then folds and folds before she uses and flushes.” He stood by the truck, his eyes moving across my driveway as if searching for something. “She won’t let me touch them either. The rolls, I mean.”
He moved my car on the flatbed and secured the chassis, then climbed back in the truck, twisted the cap from a water bottle and handed it to her. She stared at it, then drank, looked at the bottle again and handed it back. He started the engine. Slowly she turned her head, a ventriloquist’s doll with vacant eyes and a menacing smile. She stared at me as if she knew we’d been talking about her, stared as he pulled away, the gears of his flatbed grinding.
Richard Gotti’s fiction appeared in Chautauqua. A finalist in the Lost in Words international short story contest, he co-authored Overcoming Regret (Bantam). His plays have been produced or had readings at The CENTER for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck, Albany Civic Theater and other venues. He has an MFA from Bennington.
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