LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Joe, it’s Mary Jane Cherry.”

      “What’s up?”

      “I’ve— Something terrible has happened. I’m so sorry. I’ve crashed the car.”

      “You’ve—”

      “Rear-ended someone. It’s all crumpled in front and it won’t start, and it’s going to be towed, and I thought you might want it towed back to the garage, and that you might have a towing company you could recommend.” She sounded very, very shaken, and undeserving of his immediate inner rage.

      You are kidding me! This is the last thing I need.

      “Wait, are you okay?” he asked.

      “I’m fine. I think. Shaken. The police have cited me and I know it was my fault.”

      “Don’t worry. It’s insured.”

      “Yes, I was sure it would be, but still, I am so, so sorry. I’ll cover your deductible, obviously.”

      “Don’t worry about that now.” He swallowed his anger, told himself that this was going to be way more of a pain in the butt for her than for him, and that these things happened to the best of people on a bad day. “Let me give you the name of a towing company, and yes, have them bring it back to the garage. Do you have a ride home?”

      “N-no, I don’t.” Now she sounded close to tears, but two seconds later she’d brisked herself up, with an effort he could hear over the phone line. “But I’ll get a cab, so that’s fine.”

      “I’ll come pick you up.”

      “You don’t have to do that.”

      “I want to see the car.”

      “Right. Of course.”

      “Tell me where you are.”

      She told him and he didn’t need to write it down. Pretty easy. He used that supermarket all the time, and knew the traffic lights you went through off of the interstate, just before you got there.

      “Five minutes,” he promised.

      “Thank you so much!”

      “Girls, time to get out,” he said, when he’d ended the call.

      They protested, of course. They were swimming their plastic ponies in there. Apparently there were these newly invented magical creatures called water ponies that could jump like flying fish. As a result, an astonishingly large percentage of the bathwater was now pooling on the bathroom floor.

      “No, you really have to come out,” he insisted, using the voice they knew meant business. “This minute.”

      Dad was snoozing on the couch downstairs, and Joe wasn’t going to disturb him to ask him to supervise a bath that had already gone on quite long enough. The girls had wrinkled fingers and toes, and the water was tepid at best.

      He wrapped Holly and Maddie in their towels and sent them off to their room to put on their pj’s while he let the water out and attempted to use a towel to soak up the spills. He might have done better with a mop and a bucket. In their doorway, he told them, “I have to go rescue someone from a fender bender.”

      “What’s a fender bender?” they wanted to know at once.

      “A car crash where the cars are damaged but no one’s hurt. But she’s a little upset, so I can’t keep her waiting. You had those potato smiles so you can’t be hungry—”

      “We are!”

      “Well, you can wait, anyhow. I’ll be as quick as I can. You play in here and don’t disturb Grandad, okay? Unless it’s an emergency.”

      “What kind of emergency?”

      “Fire or bleeding. And don’t you dare do anything to make either of those things happen!”

      Shoot, should he wake Dad up? He was spooky and overprotective about this stuff and he knew it—knew the reasons for it, too. He was trying to let go a little, trying to tell himself that they didn’t get themselves into trouble nearly as often as it seemed. They were seven, and bright, and good, mostly...and in no danger. The impulsiveness and lack of any sense of risk had gotten a lot better, the past year or so. And if they screamed for any reason, Dad would wake up. He was sixty-five, not eighty-five, and he was just a little tired.

      “Tell Grandad where I’ve gone, okay, and that I’ll be back soon.”

      “But you said not to wake him up.”

      “Tell him if he wakes up.”

      Why did these simple conversations always take so long, and involve all these left-field questions he hadn’t expected? After a little more back and forth, he got himself out of the house and across to the old-fashioned detached wooden garage, with its wooden doors.

      No remote-control opener for this old friend. It contained his minivan, still warm from a day spent sitting in the sun in parking lots at the lake, mini golf and the ice cream parlor, while Dad’s pickup was parked in the yard, relegated to the open air. Dad had insisted on that, claiming that the minivan was the more important vehicle, since it was the one that mostly transported the girls. Joe wasn’t going to argue with that.

      He pushed the creaky old garage doors open, reversed the minivan out and climbed out of it again to go shut the doors because Dad had tools in there that were older than the Declaration of Independence and more precious to him than gold, so they couldn’t be left unprotected.

      He’d already taken quite a bit longer than five minutes before he even got on the road.

      Chapter Three

      What if he didn’t come?

      Joe had said, “Five minutes,” and because he’d been so accurate in his time estimate when he’d picked her up at Spruce Bay, Mary Jane had pinned herself completely on that five minutes and was getting very jittery about the fact that he wasn’t yet here.

      It had been fifteen minutes at least since she’d spoken to him. The tow truck had come, loaded up the Capelli Auto car and gone again. The helpful witnesses had been interviewed and had left. The driver she’d crashed into, whose car had started on the first try, was long gone, and even the police officers had driven off now.

      At least this was June, so it was still broad daylight even though it was now past six o’clock in the evening. But the sky had clouded over and there was a breeze, so it wasn’t that warm anymore. Goose bumps had risen on her bare arms and she was starting to shiver—whether it was just from cold or from delayed shock, as well, she wasn’t sure.

      She felt like an abandoned waif, standing here on the verge while cars drove back and forth through the unlucky intersection, ignoring her. She had begun to think about calling a taxi after all—thank goodness she’d remembered to retrieve her purse from the car before it was towed, so she had money and her phone—when at last she saw a minivan slowing down as it came toward her, and when she peered at the driver she saw it was Joe.

      Hang on, was it?

      Yes, it really was—Joe Capelli, driving a maroon minivan, and a rather elderly looking one, at that. “Hop in, stranger,” he drawled at her, leaning across to open the passenger door. “Sorry I took longer than I said.”

      “It’s f-fine. I couldn’t expect you just to drop everything.”

      “Well, I did, but dropping everything can still take a while, at my place.”

      “Oh, o-k-kay.” She should probably ask him what he meant by that, but she was struggling so hard not to show that she was shaking. Her head felt as if it had an iron band of pain around it, she hadn’t eaten since a pear and a banana for lunch at around noon and her empty stomach felt queasy from shock and cold and sheer misery.

      “You’re freezing.” He quickly reached to switch the

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