I'm Fine and Neither Are You(6)
I emailed the document I had been working on to myself, grabbed my purse, and speed-walked out of the office, praying no one would see me. The official end to our workday was five o’clock, and the department liked to flaunt this so-called perk when recruiting new hires. But ever since I was promoted, my coworkers gave me the side-eye if I was spotted leaving before the night janitor arrived. This frequently made me wonder just how much I really needed a fancy title and an extra eight thousand dollars a year. (On the latter count, the unfortunate answer was a lot .)
Russ did not seem to be subject to the same scrutiny. Maybe it was because he was a man. Or maybe because he waltzed through life expecting that things would go his way—and they mostly did. I sometimes wished I had it in me to emulate him and loudly announce I was going to a VERY IMPORTANT MEETING every time I left the building.
I made it to the parking lot without a single questioning glance and had just begun contemplating which route would get me to the kids’ camp fastest when I realized my car was no longer where I had left it that morning.
Was there another area designated for electric cars? Maybe stress had short-circuited my mental compass. But as I looked beyond the concrete wall, the glowing sign for the buffalo wings bar where my colleagues insisted celebrating every birthday and business deal was blinking back at me—exactly as it had been that morning.
“This cannot be happening,” I said aloud. I knew talking to myself made me look crazy, yet I usually did it anyway, which suggested that I should be more concerned about my mental health than how my muttering looked to other people.
“What can’t be happening?” Russ came sauntering out of the elevator, swinging his keys on his finger. He stopped abruptly and cocked his head. “Uh-oh. What’s wrong, Penny?”
I will not cry, I told myself. I will not cry. I will not . . . I felt a single tear escape the corner of my eye, which I quickly wiped away. “Aren’t you supposed to be golfing?”
“I got held up in a meeting,” he said. “So, what happened to you?”
“My car is missing,” I said.
“Well, can you Uber?” Russ grinned at me. “You do know what Uber is, don’t you?”
“It’s not a good time for jokes, Russell. I’m late to get my kids, my car has been . . .” Now that my aging hatchback was no longer occupying the parking space, I could see the sign on the wall that clearly stated nonelectric vehicles would be towed at the owner’s expense. “Impounded, and—” I had to stop because I was about to blurt out all sorts of vulnerable things to a man who probably ate baby bunnies for breakfast.
Then I had an idea. Granted, it was a terrible idea, but I was low on options and out of time. “Russell, can you drive me somewhere?”
From his expression, you’d think I just asked him to whisk me off to Wyoming. “I’m already late.”
“I know, but this is really important. I have to pick my kids up from camp, and I don’t have time to wait for an Uber. If I don’t pick them up before six, I’ll have to deal with a whole mess of paperwork and fees, and I’ll be even further behind on the Blatner proposal. There’s even a chance I won’t finish it before he arrives tomorrow.”
Now Russ was regarding me like I was leaning over the wall, threatening to splatter myself on the sidewalk in front of a bunch of people dining on dollar hot wings. I suppose I did sound a little frantic. “Okay,” he said, making no effort to hide his reluctance. “Tell me where you need to be.”
Asking Russ for a favor struck me as the epitome of stupidity. It was also the best decision I’d made all day. “It’s about twenty minutes away,” I said. I pulled my phone from my bag and sent up a last-ditch prayer that Jenny had called me back.
She had not.
“We’ll be there in ten,” said Russ, pointing a key fob at his recently waxed black sedan. The car beeped. “What’s the address?”
I gave it to him and, with equal parts reluctance and relief, sank into the buttery leather passenger seat. A glance behind me confirmed that his backseat was so small, it had not been intended to accommodate any living thing, let alone two small children. It didn’t matter. When I got to camp I would call Sanjay again, or maybe Jenny would be there. In that moment, all I needed to do was get to my kids.
“No GPS?” I said as Russ zipped down one side street only to turn abruptly onto another. I wanted to tell him to be careful—of my myriad worries, a child darting out in front of the car was one of the most pervasive and potent—but I bit my tongue and pushed my foot into an imaginary brake on the floor mat.
“I’m a townie, remember?” said Russ. He had been raised in town and had purposefully never left. “You practically are, too, at this point. You should know your shortcuts.”
Was I practically a townie? Stevie would be eight in the fall, which meant we had lived here for . . . seven years. Through the car window, one Craftsman bungalow blurred into the next, and the next. Had it really been so long? In theory, I saw no problem with our having resided in the Midwest for nearly the same amount of time we had lived in New York. But in reality, it was not just that every year here felt like an erosion of the person I had been prior to having children—though there was certainly that. It was that I was not sure what all of those years represented. Was this it? Was this the goal, the reason, the sum total of two decades of adult decisions?