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So I settle for a grunt.
Classy, I know.
We’ve reached her building now, giving me a convenient excuse to stop this conversation before it gets out of hand and I start saying things I shouldn’t.
“Shoot,” she mutters. I don’t have to ask why. There’s a tow truck in the parking lot and two men are standing outside Nora’s car chatting.
“You called a tow truck?” I cry. “You didn’t tell me that! Nora, if we’re going to do this, you need to—”
“I didn’t call them!” she cuts me off loudly. “I didn’t call them,” she repeats at a normal volume as my gaze swings her way. “I would’ve told you if I did.”
“Then who did?” I ask.
“I don’t know. Maybe Frank. That’s who the tow truck driver is talking to.”
As if they can hear us discussing them, both men look over at us. With a heavy sigh I pull my car the rest of the way up toward them, parking it a couple of spots over.
“Let me do the talking, okay?” I say, and she nods vigorously, green eyes wide. “Hello, there, fellas,” I say as I step out of the car, wincing at my word choice. Fellas? Yikes. What am I, 80? “This is a nice surprise,” I rush on. “Here I thought I’d be changing this tire by myself.” I feel Nora step up behind me.
“This your car?” The tow truck driver asks.
“Nah, this is her car,” Frank answers as he points to Nora.
“Ah.” The driver nods. “You the guy that called me, then?” He peers down at his phone. “A mister Ian Wharfman?”
I hear Nora let out a squeak of surprise.
“Mr. Wharfman called you?” Frank asks the driver.
“That’s the name he gave.” The tow truck driver looks around. “None of you are Ian Wharfman?”
So the jerk called the tow truck for Nora? What a weirdly solicitous thing to do right before trying to assault her. The incongruity of the two actions makes no sense.
“None of us are Ian Wharfman,” I confirm.
He sighs heavily. “Well, he’s not answering his phone. But he told me to take the car anywhere so long as I got it,” he peers at his paper again, reading off it, “the hell off his lot before the morning.” He looks up at us. “Apparently he has some bigwig clients coming in the morning, and he doesn’t want a junker of a car to be the first thing they see. All that’s his words, not mine.”
Ah. Now it all makes sense.
Behind me Nora gasps indignantly. Someone just called her beloved Chevy a junker. Yeah, no way she liked that. What her car lacks in actual value, it makes up for in sentimental value—or so she always used to say. It was her grandfather’s car, and she takes great pride in the fact that she’s kept it running this long.
Not that she’s the one doing the maintenance. No, Nora doesn’t actually know much about cars. But she is religious about taking the car in for every recommended service or maintenance appointment. She’s that way about most of her possessions, though, preferring longevity to constantly replacing things.
Perhaps that’s part of why I took her rejection of my proposal so hard. I thought she’d jump at the chance to make our relationship a permanent fixture in her life, but instead she said she wasn’t looking for that level of commitment.
She could commit herself to a car, sure. But not to me.
I shake these morose thoughts away. Not a good time to be dwelling on the past.
Nah, better to do it while angrily pumping iron in my basement like I usually do.
Nothing gets me to increase my reps quite like thinking about everything that went wrong in my relationship with Nora.
“Yeah, so, I’m thinking I oughta tow your truck, ma’am,” the driver goes on. “That okay?”
“If that’s what Mr. Wharfman wanted you to do, that’s what you should do,” Frank interjects.
“Oh no, it’s not necessary for you to tow it,” I say, because we don’t need even more people getting looped into the situation with Nora’s car. I can put the spare on and then tomorrow, after we’ve managed to pin Ian’s murder on some imaginary villain (or vigilante, the way I see it), I’ll buy a real tire and install it myself. “I’ll put the spare on, and we’ll be on our way.”
