That calmed him down in an instant, especially when he took a close look at my face, which may have been glowing white in the light he shone on me. He turned it off. He must have dropped it, because he cursed and bent over and fumbled around. When his head came back into view I still couldn’t make out his face, but I could see him lean forward and tilt his head to see that I was alone. His doing that made the nerve in my neck spark, but he didn’t get out of his car to offer help, he just asked if I had Triple A. That made me give my brakes an instinctive tap, to find that they were working just fine now. The brakes were working.

“Yep,” I said, mystified. “I’ll call them. You go on, I’ll be fine.”

His voice sounded doubtful when he asked if I was quite sure.

“Yes, I’m sure,” I said. I smiled cheerily to assure him. Then I thought about how we’d been in such a dry spell. “Did you hit that ice?”

I saw the brim of his baseball cap nod in the shadows. He said, “I managed to recover. Only the one spot. That was freakish.” I picked up an aged note in his voice now that he wasn’t yelling, reminiscent of bedsprings and a slow air leak.

Remembering that I had cracked my door open in anticipation of jumping for my life, I opened it wide in order to close it properly. When the man in the other car saw me do that, he gunned his engine and sped off, taking the left turn on the main road with his tires squealing. What was it with that? Did he think I was experiencing delayed road rage and was going to attack him with my tire iron? It was only much, much later that I thought his British accent sounded like an American actor portraying any other nationality.

Twenty–eight

I picked up Gemma-Kate in front of her dormitory and told her I wasn’t in the mood for a movie because I was a little shaken after losing my brakes on the road from Kitt Peak. Would she please come back to the house with me, spend the night, and drive Carlo’s car to Kitt Peak in the morning? I would follow until the mountain road started, and leave the Miata parked at the bottom while we fetched Carlo. That way we could drop her off at school again and continue on to the dealership. She agreed to do that while appearing unconcerned by my near-death.

On the drive up to Catalina I asked questions because she wasn’t talking.

“Have you been back to visit your dad?”

“No.”

“What about Christmas? Are you going home?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You should decide pretty soon before you can’t get a ticket. Do you need money?”