Page 11 of Finding Silence
“It was for a good cause, and you can charge me for the most comprehensive detailing package you can find.”
She shakes her head and gets behind the wheel, gagging dramatically as she rolls down all her windows, leaning out to glare at me.
“You’re a pain in my ass.”
“And yet you love me like I’m blood,” I tell her.
Then I jog behind her car to the end of my driveway and into the road, and—with a big smile on my face—jump up and down and wave goodbye with both my arms in the air until she disappears in a cloud of dust.
When I turn around, I catch sight of my neighbor’s pickup behind me, stopped dead in the middle of the road. He’s leaning over his steering wheel, squinting through the windshield at me.
Lovely.
I’m sure I didn’t earn any points in the man’s esteem.
Brant
* * *
The woman is nuts.
Either that, or she’s an alien.
Not that I believe in that kind of hogwash, but damn if she doesn’t make me consider the possibility there are, in fact, little green men. Or in her case, purple-haired women.
What sane person would stand in the middle of the road doing jumping jacks? Or shove a rank goat in the back seat of a Mercedes for that matter?
Better yet, who, with full faculties intact, would pay fifty-five goddamn dollars on a scrap of lace the size of my hand? Fifty-five dollars for one single pair of those panties she likes. I buy a darn five-pack of boxers for ten bucks, and those are sturdy cotton that can last a good long time.
I’d picked up my mail yesterday afternoon on my way to the poker game. Buck’s place is right by the post office. I’d noticed the white foil envelope but it didn’t register until I finally got around to opening my mail this morning, this was the order I placed online a couple of days ago. I guess I wasn’t expecting it so soon, but I reckon for fifty-five blasted dollars per pair of panties—and I bought four; one in every color my miserable goat ate—they’d better be delivered in two days.
A bit of a shocker though, sitting in my kitchen enjoying a cup of coffee and having those colorful bits of fabric slide onto my kitchen table. Unfortunately, there is little wrong with my imagination, and I had no trouble at all picturing Phil—or whatever her name is—in nothing but those bright scraps of lace. The woman is built like a brick house, although I’m sure that descriptor is no longer acceptable these days.
And now she’s dancing, or doing whatever she’s doing, in the middle of the damn road. She’s like a child in a woman’s body.
I don’t even have a chance to decide whether to stop and hand off the package as I’d intended, or keep on driving down the road pretending I’m on my way somewhere, which may be the safer option. She’s already knocking on my window, which I reluctantly roll down.
“Morning!” she chirps, wearing that smile which seems to be a permanent fixture on her face.
Seriously. How much can one smile about in a day?
“Mornin’,” I echo.
“You just caught me saying goodbye to my friend.”
I guess that sort of explains the spectacle I witnessed.
“Right.”
“She was helping me move in. You may have noticed the moving truck a couple of days ago? I’ve got all my stuff here now. Oh,” she adds, blabbering on, clearly not needing any encouragement in the way of a response. “And did you see I got new wheels? I left the bus with Clem at Main Street Mechanics to get serviced. It had a leaking gasket.”
“Clem’s a good guy,” I find myself sharing.
She grins even wider. “I hope so, he appears to be the only game in town.”
“Has been since Davy Jefferson closed down his place and moved out to Coeur d’Alene.”
“Why’d he leave?”
