The Lesson

by Welch, Virginia

  “Any time. Which tire is it?”

  Gina walked Kevin to the side of the car with the flat. She was thankful that it was in the area farthest from the deadly highway. She was also hopeful that, being in the rear, it was just far enough from Burk that he could not hear them talking.

  Kevin squatted down in front of the flat tire and put his hand on it, feeling for anything that could have punctured it. “I can’t get it replaced tonight, and my spare won’t fit your car. No stores are open, either, especially on New Year’s Eve.”

  Gina’s heart sank. Every moment she spent out on the highway with her sullen date was an intolerable strain.

  “But I know a gas station that’s open late,” he continued. “It’s not far from here. Maybe I can get them to fix it. I’ll take the flat that’s in your trunk and then switch them when I get back.”

  Gina nodded silently like a mature grown-up would, but truthfully, now that Kevin had come to rescue her, she didn’t want him to leave. The thought of him driving away and leaving her behind made the highway seem blacker and the night air colder.

  “I suppose I should say hello to the doctor, though,” said Kevin. He sounded uncharacteristically grim.

  Kevin started toward the passenger door. Gina groaned inside. She hoped Kevin would behave himself. She stood near the rear of the car, cringing with dread, and waited while he knocked on the passenger window. Burk rolled down the window and Kevin explained to him what he planned to do with the flat. She saw Burk nod his head and then, rather abruptly, roll up his window again with hardly a response. Kevin wordlessly walked to the back of the car. He looked disgusted when Gina’s eyes met his. She said nothing. She was too embarrassed. And too cold.

  In a few minutes Kevin had her spare tire in his car and was pulling away from the shoulder of the road. She watched his tail lights as they got smaller and smaller in the distance, and she felt empty. She wished she could drive away with him and enjoy his entertaining company rather than sit in her glum little Austin with Burk, whose demeanor had disintegrated into pouting. But she wouldn’t insult him by driving off with Kevin. He had said the gas station wasn’t far. She fervently hoped they could fix her tire quickly so she could get home and away from Burk.

  At the end of the longest forty-five minutes ever endured, Gina saw Kevin’s headlights pull up behind her car. Again she jumped out to avoid his coming up to her car window. He was carrying her repaired tire, which he set on the ground behind her car.

  “Your date is going to have to wait in my car while I change your tire,” said Kevin. “I’ll have to jack it up several inches, and it’s dangerous for anyone to be sitting in it while it’s elevated like that.”

  “Okay. I’ll tell him. But will you help me get him over to your car?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And will you behave?”

  Kevin said nothing, just shrugged his shoulders and lifted his hands upward in a What-are-you-talking-about-who-me routine. But Gina was worried for nothing. Kevin acted like a perfect gentleman as he helped settle Burk into the passenger side of his beetle. Gina felt terrible for Burk, but by now she was resigned to the fact that their date had been an unqualified, unsalvageable disaster. All she could do at this point was get him safely back to her apartment as fast as possible and let him use her living room phone to call a taxi.

  Kevin got down to the business of changing her flat. All the tools he needed for the job he carried in the trunk of his beetle. He removed a brick and set it in front of one of her other tires to keep her Austin from rolling, and then he started to remove the hubcap. As she watched him she started shivering again.

  “Here, take my jacket,” he said while pulling off his.

  “Oh no, I can’t take your jacket.”

  “Then perhaps you had better get into my car with the doctor,” he said, his eyes meeting hers. “He puts out plenty of hot air.”

  Was that jealousy she detected? She thought of saying something to him but decided to let it pass. He was, after all, kneeling in the gravel on the side of a busy highway changing her flat tire on a freezing New Year’s Eve. One shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

  “I can’t do that either,” she said, keeping her voice low.

  He said nothing more, just held out his jacket and waited. Finally she took it from him and slipped it on. The warmth of his body that clung to the lining was comforting. She remembered the way he had looked in the garage without his shirt, and now, having his warm jacket pulled around her gave her surprising sensual pleasure. But all she said was, “Thank you.”

  Kevin studied her face as he expertly removed a lug nut. “You remind me of a story I heard today. This horse walks into a bar—”

  “Not a walks-into-a-bar joke. Really,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  “You started it.”

  “Okay, okay,” she said, “A horse walks into a bar. And?”

  “And the bartender says, ‘Why the long face?’”

  Gina laughed. “Do I look that bad?”

  “You don’t look happy.”

  Kevin gripped the lug wrench with both hands and loosened another nut. Now that he had lent his jacket to her, Gina noticed his hard muscles straining against his shirt. She leaned against her car and watched him work.

  “You’re a mystery to me, Gina,” he said as he gripped the lug wrench again and began to turn the next nut.

  “How so?”

  “You’re smart. You’re beautiful. You’re getting a fancy education. You can do anything you want with your life, be a success all in your own right. But you think you need to attach yourself to successful guys to be somebody. You don’t belong out here, stuck on the side of the road, with some middle-age chemist.”

  “Burk is not just any old middle-age chemist. He’s involved in very important research.” Her voice rose a little higher. “He’s working with a famous chemist from France on enzymes, the thermodynamics of enzyme-catalyzed reactions, you know, those organisms that eat chemicals and break things down. His work has huge potential.”

  “Well that’s really handy to know.” Kevin was still kneeling, but he turned away from the car and stopped working to look directly at her. “Next time my C-O has a backed up toilet, instead of me being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, I’ll tell him to call Doctor Burkhard Fangauf.”

  “Shhh, Kevin! He might hear you.”

  “So? He needs to hear.”

  Gina glared at him.

  “Okay then, call your lawyer boyfriend.”

  Gina was taken aback. She had given Kevin no specific information regarding Michael and his career, and it was curious that Kevin spoke in the present tense. How much did he actually know?

  “How do you know that Michael is a lawyer?”

  “It’s not like your life is classified information.”

  Kevin loosened all the lug nuts with the lug wrench and started the final counterclockwise turns to remove them from the wheel with his fingers. In a few minutes he had jacked up her car and her flat tire was lying on the side of the road. He looked up at her.

  “In fact, you’re pretty easy to read.”

  “Really?” Gina was truly puzzled and not a little miffed. What was he talking about? Then, as she watched, he lifted the flat tire to transfer it to his car.

  “I’ll get this one fixed for you too. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Thank you.”

  For once she was glad for the help. If she’d had the money for a tire repair a few months ago she wouldn’t be in this predicament now. He carried the flat tire to his car and then she held his front seat forward so he could push her flat into the back seat. Then he grabbed the repaired tire from the ground and started to put it on her car. She leaned against her Austin again to watch him work. Her torso was tolerably spared the worst of the cold because of Kevin’s jacket, but her legs were freezing. She pulled the jacket tighter around her.

  “I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Ke
vin.”

  He stopped working entirely then and stood up to look her in the face.

  “What I want to know is, Who retired and made you C-O of your own ship? You told me that you had given your life entirely into God’s hands. But from what I’ve seen, you have a bad habit of taking it back again and making a mess of it.”

  “A mess? My life’s not a mess!” As she said this Rolando’s face popped into her mind.

  Kevin did not respond, just stood looking into her eyes, which made Gina uncomfortable. She had never seen the angry side of Kevin. In a strange way, she found it attractive, even manly. Finally he spoke.

  “Okay. Not a mess. I spoke out of place. I apologize. Please don’t be offended.” He sounded sincere but still ticked off.

  “I forgive you,” she said, though still indignant.

  Kevin leaned back down to tighten the lug nuts, and in a minute he was standing up again. “All done. The repair should last you a good while.”

  “How much did it cost? And for the other tire too? I can reimburse you when I get paid next week.”

  “You don’t owe me anything,” said Kevin. “I like helping you.”

  “Actually I do owe you. I owe you a lot for coming out here like this on New Year’s Eve.” After his quick apology, she was feeling considerably warmer toward him, and a little guilty too. “It was very nice of you, especially considering … you know,” she said, jerking her head toward Burk, who was still sitting, morose and taciturn, in the front seat of Kevin’s car. “And you know I don’t like calling my parents for every little thing.”

  “If you want to pay me back, then go to dinner with me without an argument for a change. There’s a place on the Wharf, Alioto’s. I’m told it has great food. I’ve been wanting to try it, and it would be nice to go out with some pretty company instead of eating alone all the time like I do on most weekends.”

  She thought for a minute and then let out a big breath. “Okay, but I’ll go on one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You wear your dress blues.”

  “Hmmm,” was his only reply, but he raised one eyebrow, thinking. Then, “Two can play that game.”

  “Oh?”

  “I have a condition too,” said Kevin. “If I have to wear my dress blues, then you have to wear what you’re wearing tonight.”

  That seemed like a small price to Gina, so they agreed on a date and then lingered on Monterey Road a minute longer. Gina hated to get back into the dour environment that now enveloped the front seat of her car. Despite his forward ways and weird clothes, she had always found Kevin’s company a pleasure. Oddly, despite the frigid temperature, right now he didn’t seem in a hurry to leave either.

  “I guess I should give you your coat back,” she said.

  “Keep it until we go to dinner.” He looked at her fondly, and there was silence as their eyes met. It was a sweet moment between friends. Then he broke into a goofy grin. “Did you hear the one about the toothless termite who went into the bar?”

  Gina shook her head and laughed. “No, I haven’t heard that one, but I suppose I will.”

  “The termite said, 'Is the bar tender here?'”

  “Is the bartender here?” she repeated. “I don’t get it.”

  “Think about it a while.”

  They walked back to Kevin’s car to guide Burk back to Gina’s car, and once he was settled in, Kevin walked Gina around her car to the driver’s side.

  “Happy New Year, Burk. Drive safely, Gina,” said Kevin through the open window. He locked her door and waved good-bye.

  Gina rolled up her window against the cold and started up her car to head back to her little apartment on Lincoln Street. As she pulled away from the shoulder, it dawned on her that, for the first time, she had not noticed in particular what Kevin was wearing under his jacket other than shirt and pants. She thought on this and other aspects of her weird nonrelationship with Kevin all the way home, thanks to Burk, who had clammed up like a threatened mollusk ever since Kevin had showed up on Monterey Road. The moody silence was broken only once as they drove.

  “He’s following us, isn’t he?” said Burk.

  “Yes, he is.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Alioto’s Restaurant, Fisherman’s Wharf

  San Francisco

  “Do you think Patty Hearst is guilty?”

  While Gina waited for Kevin to answer, she made a tight knot in the thread she was using to sew a button that had fallen off her coat as she met him at her apartment door. Using her teeth she cut the remaining thread, jammed the needle into the spool, and stashed it in Kevin’s glove compartment.

  “She was certainly guilty of pointing that assault rifle at the bank tellers in the Sunset District. The bank camera filmed her holding the weapon. But determining her intent is another matter.”

  “Oh?”

  “A lot of people believe she was brainwashed. Others would like rich kids to pay for the perceived sins of their parents, guilty or not. But you never know what you’ll do to save your own keister after you’ve been kidnapped, threatened, starved, tied up in a closet, and sexually assaulted."

  “I suppose. I hadn’t looked at it that way,” said Gina.

  “In the military, soldiers as young as Patty headed for a war zone get E&E, evasion and escape training. Pilots get it too. In the Navy and Marines they call it SEER. Survival, evasion, escape, and resistance. It’s all kinds of sophisticated skills to prepare them for being taken prisoner, so that they don’t crack under abusive treatment, so they have half a chance to escape.”

  Gina nodded to show she was listening but her face was one big question. Kevin continued.

  “But Patty didn’t get any preparation for what she went through after those thugs dragged her from her apartment. She might have been drugged too. Who knows what frame of mind she was in when she walked into that Hibernia bank with those creeps who kidnapped her.”

  Gina thought about Kevin’s assessment of the Patty Hearst case while he turned his beetle onto U.S. 101, north toward San Francisco. They had half an hour to visit on their way to Alioto’s on the Wharf. Olivia Newton-John’s honeyed voice came on the radio singing, “Have You Ever Been Mellow.”

  “I’ve been following the case in the papers for weeks. She’s only a year older than I am,” said Gina. “I keep wondering what I would have done if I had been in her place and was forced to rob a bank.”

  “Fortunately for you, one of the few benefits of having no money is that you don’t have to worry about someone kidnapping you or your kids,” said Kevin. He took his eyes off the road for an instant to flash a smile. “No one really wanted Patty. It’s her grandfather’s millions they were after. Poor kid. She was just a means to an end.”

  “I never thought about the fact that guys in the military get special training in case they’re taken prisoner, I mean in relation to Patty’s case. And I never put the word ‘benefit’ in the same sentence as ‘no money’ either.”

  Kevin laughed, and Gina turned to look out the window again as the noisy VW rattled down 101. Such an ugly road. One gray business after another, all with their dreary, chain-link-fenced rear lots facing the highway, the view interrupted only occasionally by equally dreary, dated apartment houses.

  “The Patty Hearst case is interesting, but what really gets my wheels turning is the Martha Moxley murder,” said Kevin. "Those Skakel brothers keep changing their stories. They’re just digging deeper holes for themselves. One of them was involved in her death. I’m sure of it. And with the Kennedy connection, you know we’re going to hear more about this one. It’s not over yet.”

  “I agree,” said Gina. “Speaking of crime,” she turned from the window back to Kevin, “I’ve been meaning to tell you about something weird that happened to me recently. I chased a guy out of the women’s locker room at the university.”

  Kevin took his eyes off the highway to face her directly, eyes wide. “When? What happened?”

&
nbsp; “It was a few weeks ago. I was in the locker room in the afternoon for my daily laps in the pool. I was alone and …” She told him the entire story.

  “Did he hurt you?” Kevin seemed genuinely alarmed.

  “No.”

  “Did you report it?”

  “No. I wasn’t sure if he was really spying or if he was lost like he said. It was hard to tell. I hated to go to Security about him when I wasn’t sure myself.”

  “Gina,” said Kevin. His voice had an edge she had not heard before. He was upset. “Let’s look at this objectively, okay? Was he carrying a sports bag?”

  “No.”

  “Was he suited up to work out? In gym clothes? What was he wearing?”

  “He was wearing street clothes, like guys wear to class. Pants and shirt.”

  “What do you see when you first enter the women’s locker room? Anything there to make a casual observer know that they’re in the women’s locker room and not the men’s?”

  “Well, let me think. Women’s showers are to the left, but I suppose they look like men’s showers, too,” she said.

  “Probably. I wouldn’t know.” He winked at her, and she chuckled.

  “There are some women’s health posters near the door,” said Gina. “You know, like annual breast exams and stuff. And there’s a women’s hygiene machine to the right, too.”

  “And what does it say outside the door to the locker room?”

  Gina paused. “It says WOMEN.”

  “So do you really think he accidentally walked into the women’s locker room?”

  “Well …”

  “Why was he hiding behind a shower curtain, Gina? You were the only person in the locker room. He could have slipped out easily without you noticing once he realized his error, because the showers are near the entrance, as you said. So why hide?”

  “You’ve made your point,” she said. There was a long silence as she absorbed what he was trying to convey. She felt stupid for thinking anything other than that the man had been a Peeping Tom. “There is a positive side to this story, though."