carburetor in a heavy snow in a dark parking lot?”
“I’m not tinkering with my carburetor.”
He pulled his penlight from his pocket and shined it down, underneath the car hood. “That’s the carburetor, and it looks to me like you’re tinkering with it.”
“My car won’t start,” she admitted.
“And you’re a mechanic? That’s why you’re attempting to fix it?” From the look on her face, he figured he was about to get hit with a snowball, but to put himself in the position of the knight in shining armor coming to the rescue of the damsel in distress simply didn’t suit him. Oh, he’d help her. It was the only proper thing to do. But he wanted to make sure it was on the terms of the relationship they’d already established for themselves. Contentious. That was the only safe thing to do when he couldn’t keep a safe distance from her.
“No, I’m not a mechanic. And I don’t know a carburetor from… from anything else under the hood.”
“Then I’d suggest you get out from under the hood, get into the car and give it a crank so I can hear what’s going on.”
“You’re going to help me?”
She actually sounded surprised, which made him feel bad. And guilty. She was a nice woman with a tough life. Maybe he didn’t want to get involved in all that, but he certainly didn’t want his problems heaped on top of hers. “Look, Angela, I know we’re got some differences?”
“Big differences,” she interrupted.
In spite of himself, he couldn’t help smiling. This was the Angela that intrigued him. “Big differences. But I never meant you to get the impression that I was downright mean.”
“And rude,” she supplied.
He chuckled. “OK, mean and rude. But I’m at a bad place in my life right now, which has nothing to do with you. And I really just want to be left alone. Which is hard to do when—”
“When I keep coming at you?”
“Actually, you do keep coming at me, but that’s not it. It’s… everything.” He gestured to the restaurant, to the Three Sisters mountain peaks shadowed in the distance, to the main street of the village. To the parking light, where in the pinkish haze the snowflakes danced like fairy ballerinas. “It’s everything. I don’t want to be here. Don’t want this kind of life. Not medicine, not anything that I’ve had. But I’ve got it for the next year and a half, like it or not, and so far you seem to be the one who’s always closest when I feel it all closing in around me.”
“So, because of proximity, I get the brunt of your bad mood?”
Mark cringed. She was right about that and it made him feel ashamed. Yet something in the very essence of Angela Blanchard made him want to correct his life, and correct it immediately. Whatever it was about her that stirred that frantic beast in him burrowed to the very heart of what he needed. When she wasn’t around, he was able to concentrate on the tasks at hand; when she was, that compulsion to change, to try on a different existence nearly consumed him. “Something like that, and I’m sorry. I read your proposal earlier, and I respect what you’re trying to do. It looks like an amazing program and I have every intention of speaking up on your behalf tomorrow, and supporting it in the months I’ll be here.”
“I hope you’ll speak on my behalf with a smile on your face, because with the scowl you’re usually wearing, Eric and Neil won’t be convinced that you really think it’s a good idea.”
Yes, she did come straight at him and he was beginning to like that directness. “I don’t always scowl, do I?”
“About ninety-nine percent of the time.”
“Then tomorrow I promise ninety-eight.”
“You resist moving by leaps and bounds, don’t you? You prefer baby steps.”
“And you always move by leaps and bounds.”
“Life is short,” she said, pulling her scarf tighter around her neck as a gust of wind hit her. “I know there’s that poem that talks about not going gently into the good night, and that’s how I want to live my life, because there’s so much I want to do, and I won’t get it done going gently. I lost eight years I can’t get back, and I’m not wasting another minute.”
“Which is why you want to be a mountain rescue paramedic,” he said, feeling a fragile thread of guilt for not including her in the program. But he wasn’t going to. If he had to do this, he was going to give it his best, and that included putting the right people in place. As tough as Angela was, she still didn’t fit the criteria and, on that, he couldn’t budge. “So I assume this is where you’re going to make your pitch again? Right?”
“Wrong. You’re not getting rid of me, and I intend on being in your class, not in the back row, though. But I accept your decision. Don’t like it, but I’ll make it work for me.”
Which was one of the reasons he couldn’t afford any kind of relationship with her. She was so dynamic, so positive. He truly feared it could rub off on him. Truly feared it could make him change his mind about so many things he’d been etching in stone these past couple of years. “Well, right now we need to figure out if we can make your car work for you.”
Angela climbed in, turned the key, elicited only a clicking noise. No grinding, no sputtering, no nothing.
“How long’s it been since you’ve had a new battery?” he called out.
“A month. That was my last repair.” She tried it again. Still, nothing happened.
So he checked the battery cables and terminals, jiggled, adjusted and had her try one more time, to no avail. “Well, the good news is it’s not the carburetor,” he said, pulling out from under the hood. “The bad news is it’s either the starter or the starter solenoid. Meaning you need a mechanic.”
“I’ve needed a mechanic almost every other week lately. Or it’s the time to buy a new car. I’ve got to find something more dependable because of Sarah.” She pulled her cell phone from her pocket. Started to dial.
“Calling a cab?”
She shook her head. “Calling Eric.”
“Let him spend the evening with his family. I’ll take you home,” Mark offered impulsively.
“Are you sure?”
Again, she acted surprised that he had a little niceness in him. He really did have to work on that… some. “You fixed me a good dinner. It’s the least I can do.”
“Then I accept.” She tucked her phone in her pocket, grabbed her purse, her briefcase, and her laptop computer from the back of her car. Mark took the laptop and briefcase, and led her to a large black pickup truck that was so high off the ground she wondered if she could get herself inside it without making a complete fool of herself. “Men and their big trucks,” she said, hoisting herself up.
“Practical when you’re living in the mountains,” he said while he waited for her to settle herself.
He was barely inside when she asked,“But
