Twenty-five minutes later, I’m back in the car when a tow truck pulls up behind me. The driver, a middle-aged guy with a big bald spot and low-slung pants under a big belly, hops out, scratching his head, and instead of approaching me in the driver’s seat, he goes directly to my flat front tire.

“What’d you do?” he asks gruffly as I step out of the car.

“Uh . . .,” I begin, not knowing what to say. He’s already bending down to examine my tire, so I join him. It’s now basically just a flat strip of rubber that smells like it’s burning.

“You are damned lucky you didn’t destroy your rim,” he says after a moment of examining the remains of the tire. “You coulda been killed. You shoulda pulled over sooner,” he adds. “You got a spare?”

I tell him I’m not sure and he looks at me like I’m crazy.

“How do you own a car and not know if you’ve got a spare?” he barks. I shrug, embarrassed.

“I just bought the car a few days ago,” I explain sheepishly.

Grumbling under his breath, the driver asks for my key and goes to the front of my car.

“I thought you said you just needed the tire,” I say, wondering why he’s about to lift the hood.

He stares at me like I’m crazy. “In old Beetles, the trunk is in the front of the car,” he said slowly. “The engine’s in the back.”

“Oh” is all I say.

He rolls his eyes and opens my trunk (which is in the front, as it turns out), where, thankfully, he does find a spare and a jack. I watch in astonishment as he quickly raises the car with the jack, loosens the wasted tire, removes it and puts the narrow spare on. Then he stands up and dusts his hands off against his jeans.

“You’re good to go,” he says. “That’ll be a hundred seventy-five dollars for the service call. You should have AAA. Would have saved you some serious cash.”

“I’ve heard,” I grumble. I hand over the money, in cash, and feel very uneasy as I realize this leaves me with only about $225. He hands me the keys to my car. “But you can’t go more than a few miles on this. Are you headed far?”

I sigh. Obviously I’ll have to kiss the mall trip goodbye. No money for Forever 21 now. Darn it.

“No.” I shake my head and point down the street, back in the direction of the horrid motel. “Just another mile or two back down Fourth Street.”