your share of the blame. She’d heard that from an insurance commercial once.
“Not directly. But—” She turned to indicate the bent woman approaching from the driver’s side. Bent with age, not accident damage, it appeared. Kiersten—summer blond wisps of hair stuck to the sides of her face—stepped between the two older women and spoke to Lucy in soft tones. “She insisted on driving us home. Insisted. I guess respecting your elders has its limits. I am so sorry.”
When she was in eighth grade, family responsibilities had forced Kiersten to drop band and chorus. It broke Lucy’s heart. And not just because they’d needed her on French horn. The accident now seemed a rude intrusion on Lucy’s longing to reconnect with the young woman these years later and find out how she was doing.
Kiersten stepped to the side. “Grandma, I’d like to introduce you to Mrs. Tuttle, my former music teacher.” The apology on her face couldn’t have been more pronounced.
The older woman toddled to the spot where the two bumpers seemed locked in a wild embrace. “Oh, this isn’t good.”
“It’s not so bad,” Lucy insisted, mentally calculating the cost of bodywork added to the new exhaust system Charlie’s Traverse was getting in a shop down the street. “A little crinkled.”
Kiersten’s grandmother pinched her eyes shut, then opened them wide. “Still here. It’s real, I guess. Well, if I had a license, it’d be gone now.”
“Grandma, you don’t have a driver’s license? You didn’t tell me that.” Kiersten’s face lost a decade in age with that revelation.
The woman touched an undamaged part of the SUV’s bumper. “Kind of a moot point now. This is as nasty as a cat in a lace factory.” She looked up into Kiersten’s face. “Don’t tell your father.”
“Grandma, I have to tell him.”
The woman’s shoulders heaved. “Then you’ll have to tell him the whole truth—that I overpowered you and took the wheel against your better judgment.”
Kiersten and Lucy laughed at the way Kiersten’s grandmother flexed her biceps as she spoke.
“I suppose we need to call the police so they can file a report. And exchange insurance information,” Lucy said. Her head throbbed. Her first fender bender, ever, and it had to be with one of her former students. Correction. A former student’s rambunctious grandmother.
“I already called it in,” Kiersten said, indicating her cell phone.
A small, sympathetic crowd gathered. A library assistant. A friend from church. Patrons who got more than they expected—a good book and a show. Finally, the law enforcement officer—also a former student but from a decade earlier—and Lucy’s insurance agent, whose office was across the street from the library. Handy, in incidents like this.
Statements taken, truth told, bumpers untangled, the women were freed to leave the scene. Plastic bumpers on both vehicles meant they were left with unsightly holes, but nothing dragging behind them. Drivable, but a little broken.
Lucy’s sigh expanded to fill the suffocating interior of her Malibu. “Me, too,” she said, patting the dashboard. “Drivable, but broken.”
Thank goodness for the accident. Thank God for it. She’d managed to divert every conversation that started with “So sorry about your job” to instead focus on the traffic jam in the library parking lot and the two wounded vehicles at the center of attention. That, and the crumpled grandmother who couldn’t stop crying. They made an interesting threesome—the ex-schoolteacher who’d gotten additional practice weathering embarrassment, the young woman whose only sin was giving in to her grandmother’s request, and the older woman whose keys had already been taken away but now faced the humiliation of other people’s keys being taken away from her, too.
Lucy hadn’t called Charlie. What could he do with his own car out of commission? She drove to the body shop for an outrageous estimate, then opted to drown her estimate sorrows in taco salad at Bernie’s. She’d call Charlie after that. Or go home. Or . . .
“Raspberry lemonade?” the waitress asked.
“Oh, sure.” The humor helped somehow. “Let’s make some lemonade out of all of this.”
“Pardon me?”
“Lemonade. Yes. Thank you.” And some to go.
Lucy’s two forkfuls of taco salad fought each other in her stomach when Evelyn Schindler walked into the restaurant on a path that would take her right past Lucy’s booth. Lucy dug into the salad as if looking for buried treasure under the lettuce.
“Lucy!”
Foiled again. “Mrs. Schindler.”
Evelyn Schindler sent her lunch companion to a table nearby with instructions to order her a lemonade. What right did she have to drink lemonade? Lucy swallowed the hooked barbs of wounded pride.
“I’d hoped to have a chance to talk to you about the budget cuts,” the woman said, leaning her Stella McCartney fragrance-of-the-month into Lucy’s personal space. “Nothing personal in all that. Purely a financial decision. We had no choice.”
Lucy’s three-point, fourteen-page rebuttal fell in line like iron shavings to a magnet. How could ripping music and art from the lives of young children ever be a wise decision, in light of the impact of those two disciplines on brain function, self-worth, and a sense of community through the arts, for one thing? What was “pure” about it? And how could it not be personal, especially for Lucy, who had carried on the tradition established by her father? Not personal?
Three bullet points. Extra emphasis on the third.
All three stayed buried under seasoned meat and shredded cheese. Lucy sipped her raspberry lemonade for courage. “I understand.” Wait? What? That’s not what she’d planned to say.
“Well,” Mrs. Schindler said, “best wishes in your future endeavors.” She paused a long moment before leaving Lucy to her salad and super-sized lemonade.
Future endeavors. I’m fifty-six. Almost. You chopped at least nine years off my future endeavors. Not that Lucy seriously entertained the idea of retirement at sixty-five. Ninety sounded more reasonable, providing she could stay a little more alert than Kiersten’s grandmother.
Her cell phone vibrated against the tabletop. She picked it up and checked caller ID. Charlie.
“Where are you, Lucy? Are you okay? Martin heard from Steve’s mother that you were in a horrible accident. Why didn’t you call?”
“Weren’t you fishing?”
His pause made her think they’d lost the connection. “I still am. Reception’s not great out here. Talk to me.”
“Charlie, I’m fine. A small fender bender. In a parking lot. I already got an estimate from the body shop.”
“You did?”
“It’s crazy how little damage it takes to push a repair bill past the deductible.”
“You sound okay.”
Lucy
