Driving in Neutral

by Sandra Antonelli

  “My once in a lifetime day. Oh! The dressmaker had a fishtail on my dress at my fitting yesterday. A fishtail! I looked like fuckin’ Morticia Addams!”

  “It wasn’t a fishtail; it was an unfinished hemline she pinned up. That’s the nature of a fitting.”

  Ella slid deeper into a Georgia peach accent. “She bettah be done by next Wednesday. If the dress turns out, you watch, Judge Foxcroft will ruin everythin’ by grantin’ a continuance on this case. And if that doesn’t happen, what do you bet on mah big day Suzanne will be chewing a slab of gum and Mimi will jingle like a cat wearing a bell. Ah know Sooze’s only human, but please, gum at a weddin’? Really. Ah’m not expecting perfection—”

  “Oh, yes you are,” Olivia snorted. “This entire event has to go off without a hitch or you will never give Craig a day of peace for the rest of your married life.”

  Ella’s hazel eyes grew large and very round. “Are you saying I’m…I’m…a Bridezilla?”

  “Bridezilla? No, no. Not even close. You’re more of an Austrian Nazi SS captain. ‘Finucci, I vant ziz cake viz vhite fondant and you vill make it! And you bridesmaids vill vear zese shoes or be branded traitors!’ More like that.”

  “I thought you liked the shoes!”

  “They’re pretty, but they hurt my feet.” Olivia shrugged. “Really, don’t worry about any of those other things,” she said. “You’ll finish the case. I’ll ask Sooze not to chew gum and make sure Mimi’s jingle bells don’t disrupt the entrance music. Those are tiny insignificant things. The day will fall into place. You will look gorgeous on your big day. Trust me.”

  “I do trust you. I trust you implicitly. I just don’t trust anyone else! All I can think about is my grandmother telling me red nail polish is for whores!”

  “Will you stop worrying about the little things because that’s all they are: little things. Everything will come together and nobody but you will notice if it doesn’t. Everyone will be too busy looking at how beautiful you are. The day will turn out exactly like those pictures we cut out and glued in the scrapbook we made.”

  Ella giggled. “I still can’t believe you kept that thing.”

  “Even at thirteen, I guess I knew it would come in handy.”

  “I’m just relieved to know you didn’t keep that World’s Greatest Singer plaque we had made in sixth grade for Shaun Cassidy, too.” Ella cringed in mock revulsion and then her expression took on a gray shade of panic. “Oh, God, am I doing the right thing? I’m too old for this now. I’m middle aged. I’m a freakin’ middle-aged bride! Who am I trying to fool with the white? What if all this drives my fine Irish boy to the drink? I know I can be over the top sometimes. I love him so much, but what if I ruin everything? What if I’m doing this wrong? What if this whole thing explodes in my face?”

  Olivia shook her head. “Ella, you are such a part of Craig’s blood, he’d be anemic without you.”

  Ella’s panic was replaced by a sudden, silly grin. “I love you too. Look what I found,” she said as she stretched across to hand over the magazine.

  Olivia opened it up to the marked page. It was a collage of celebrity photos from some benefit. It was an old magazine. To the left of a picture of actress Ashley Judd and her husband, Indy Racing champion Dairo Franchetti, was Karl Abenteuer with the model Alyssa Chaplin. Ella had drawn a WWI spiked helmet, glasses, and a long, walrus-style moustache on Karl.

  “Nice,” Olivia nodded, “but Karl could never grow facial hair like that.”

  “Has he put on weight? He has, hasn’t he? He looks puffy.”

  “The man hasn’t changed an ounce. He’s still a blue eyed, blond—”

  “Gestapo agent.”

  “No, I mean Karl looks exactly the same as he did the last time I saw him. The eyes, the hair.”

  “Speaking of hair, what did you think of Pete’s dreads?”

  “I didn’t recognize him at first, but the style suits him. Your brother looks really good.”

  Ella fanned herself. “Oooh lovers. I didn’t know you still had a crush on him after all these years. Did he give you a great office? He said he would. You make sure he gives you an office and not some cubicle next to one of those mega-nerds he likes to hire. I talked to him about an hour ago and told him the same thing.”

  “You talked to Pete?” Olivia waited for Ella to smile slyly and start laughing, but she was looking at the two different colors of nail polish she had painted on each hand.

  “Mm-hm. He said you were pretty cool.”

  “Did he say anything…else?”

  “He mentioned you got caught in the rain this morning and probably ruined your dress. Please. Tell me again Pete’s stupid work isn’t going to get in the way of planning my wedding. Oh my God, oh my God. How can you stand me? What is wrong with me?” Ella fidgeted in her seat and fluffed the cape. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Look, I’m relaxed. Okay? I’m breathing in and out, see?” She inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly, four times. “I know you know,” she said in a serene tone, “Craig’s my fantasy man these days, but now that you’ve finally met Emerson, didn’t you think he was worthy of a smutty thought or two?” Ella gave her a sideways look.

  Olivia decided to be diplomatic. “I’ll say he was an interesting idiot.” Who kisses like an Olympic champion.

  “Interesting? Honey, you must have missed it. That man is ice cream and a day at the beach all rolled into one. He’ll eke his way into your subconscious. You mark my words. You could have gone out with him last Christmas, but no, no blind dates for you because you met Das Über-jerk on a blind date!”

  “I didn’t meet Karl on a blind date. Glenn introduced us in a pit at the Monaco Grand Prix.”

  “Whatever.” Ella waved and rolled her eyes. “You must have missed it completely.”

  “Oh, no, I got it all right. Believe me, I got the full Emerson Maxwell treatment. Look, Ella. Things didn’t go so—”

  “Excuse me, ladies.” Javiera poked in between them to unfold a piece of foil to check Ella’s color. Satisfied, the hairdresser turned the chair and went to work removing the aluminum from Ella’s hair.

  Ella held up her hands, letting the nail color gleam for a moment in the overhead lights before she dropped them in her lap with a huff. “I know you know you’re doing me the favor by working at E&P. It saves Pete from ripping his dreads out over some deadline. He’ll actually be at a family function for once. I won’t have to worry about him disappearing with that stupid cell phone at the wedding. Ah swear if he brings that damn phone to the weddin’ Ah will have him neutered!”

  The threat of fraternal castration, even if it wasn’t serious, was all it took. She’d started to tell Ella, before the hairdresser interrupted, about walking away from the job with Pete. Now it seemed she had to march back, gulp down her pride, ignore the unwanted attention. She had to go back and do the work for Pete’s sake because if she didn’t, and anything went wrong, Ella-the-tightly-packed-ball-of-explosives would race to E&P and detonate in her brother’s office with squares of foil in her hair.

  The Oak Street Diner was an old, family-owned place with fifties-style padded booths, homemade pies, and blue-plate specials like meatloaf. It was typical for them to hang out there for a few hours on a Friday night, but tonight, Ella had raced off. One short phone call from Craig and she’d gobbled half a tuna melt and fries, tossed her new rose-gold highlights, and announced she had to fax opposing counsel important case documents. She’d left the diner with a napkin still tucked into the front of her blouse.

  Olivia figured she’d raced off to meet her blue-eyed fiancé for a bit of pre-marital nookie. Nookie was high on Ella’s list of things to do before the wedding. Nookie was always high on Ella’s to-do list.

  The waitress brought her coffee and Olivia sat by herself in a cozy red booth. She’d considered going to a movie, but she wasn’t in the mood to sit in a theater alone. She could’ve gone home rather than ordering the lemon meringue pie the waitress had just set on the table, bu
t there wasn’t anything waiting for her at home besides a very comfortable bed.

  After she’d left Germany, it hadn’t taken her long to find an apartment in a six-flat. It was a nice location, a tree-lined street that skirted the edge of a country club, but it was empty. Her household goods hadn’t completed the trans-Atlantic sea journey yet and besides suitcases and a few boxes she’d kept stored at her brother’s place, the double-sized sleigh bed for her single life was the only stick of furniture she had.

  While she had mapped out a new life for herself, she hadn’t exactly pictured sleeping alone at this age, yet she was actually comfortable with that fact. This was her me time, her time to focus on what she wanted, and what she wanted was a home and privacy. Only thing was, while the apartment was private, it didn’t feel like home. It felt…temporary. It was pretty with its high windows and gleaming birch floors. The place was light and airy, which would have been great if Olivia were into entertaining. A social butterfly would have invited her neighbors over for a gourmet dinner served picnic-style on bare floors. A social butterfly would have had a cocktail party. A social butterfly would have started a trivia night or Tuesday night book club. Except Olivia wasn’t the convivial butterfly type and she had yet to meet any of her neighbors, other than Mr. Peck, a frail-looking elderly widower who scowled at her without ever introducing himself.

  The real estate agent who’d found her the apartment had said the others in the building were professional couples in their late twenties. Olivia suspected they’d avoided introducing themselves because she was a single, middle-aged woman. To them, she was the middle-aged female counterpart to Mr. Peck.

  Mr. Peck and I could start our own little club.

  Olivia laughed at herself. Slender Mr. Peck, with his gnarled, arthritic hands, and trim white David Niven moustache was a very unlikely candidate for neighborly camaraderie.

  She glanced down at the newspaper beside her plate and smashed gooey yellow and crisp-baked egg white into her fork. The Chicago Tribune was spread out on the tabletop. She started reading an article about the crumbling façade of the Michigan Avenue YMCA, but her mind wandered onto other events, like why had she kissed a panicking claustrophobic man instead of slapping him.

  Slapping Maxwell would have shocked him into breathing, only, as she’d thought at the time, he could have hit her back. Oh, who was she trying to kid here? She kissed him for another reason. There was fear in those amazingly deep green eyes and seeing that did something to her, something powerful, something sexual. Olivia liked knowing she had managed to get a physical rise out of a man. Dripping like a half-drowned cat—or rat—she’d still, somehow, been attractive enough to generate a response. It was quite a boost to a sexual ego that had been beaten down by Karl’s infidelity. Her sexual self-esteem sure had come roaring back to life. How she’d reacted when Maxwell started kissing her back was rather ridiculous, but it had felt so good to sit in his lap and feel how hard he was. She’d known the natural desire for intimacy would return post Karl, just like it had after moody Adam left, but really, did it have to be a man like Maxwell who tripped the switch?

  It was possible, but just barely, that this stemmed from an unconscious worry about fading looks, or a fear that the lines near her mouth and eyes weren’t character or laugh ones, but wrinkles. The thing was, she had never worried about aging. It was bullshit that reaching a certain age meant you were instantly all washed up in life. The decree that demanded you were supposed to look and act and feel a certain way because you were chronologically forty, or fifty, or sixty was bullshit too. Those twenty-somethings in her apartment building would figure out eventually that it was all in how you felt, and Olivia felt good. She looked better in her forties than she had in her twenties, she had more confidence, had more experience, which of course didn’t mean she had more wisdom because she still made plenty of mistakes. Case in point Karl. Then again, perhaps, on a subconscious level, since she was sitting here thinking about age and wrinkles, and her abysmal record with men, and the fact her husband had fucked around on her with a younger woman, she was concerned.

  Maybe she did buy into the advertising, and “Hollywood normal” and the double standard of aging that prized older men and devalued older women.

  Uh-huh. She jettisoned that theory as bullshit.

  Her rational side knew that worrying about the route nature took was pointless. This was about history. Worrying about things that had already happened in life was as useless as thinking you could change the past—although the idea of time travel to make some alterations did have a certain appeal.

  Given the opportunity, what would she change? She was who she was because of the good and bad experiences she’d had in life. She’d earned her laugh lines, her scars, and she wore them well. She’d chosen the path, the direction she wanted to take, but unlike driving, where you put your foot down on the accelerator to make time, there was no way to make up for the lost time in life, which to her was the most attractive aspect of time travel. Getting back the time she gave to Karl and Adam, the time she wasted on them, would have been nice.

  Characters in time machine stories were always trying to fix bad marriages, muck with history to wipe out present-day mistakes, or bring back dead lovers. Peggy Sue, Marty McFly and the old Christopher Reeve Superman all played with time to fix something significant in their relationships. Olivia wasn’t interested in altering relationship history. There was no point to that. No, it was the other sort of lost time she’d fix, the meaningless time no one gave any thought to like washing the dishes, changing the sheets, and watching TV; the sort of time that had no impact on anyone’s life.

  “How come nobody ever wanted to find some way to zip in and collect all those mundane minutes and combine them into a day to make up for what you wasted?” she wondered out loud.

  “That pie looks good,” was the response she got.

  Musings about time machines made out of DeLoreans, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and Mr. Peabody’s WABAC Machine ceased abruptly. She glanced up from the pie-covered tines of her fork.

  Pete and Emerson Maxwell stood next to her booth.

  Chapter 4

  “Ella said you’d probably still be here.” Pete scratched his head. “But before you tell us to piss off, just give us a minute. Emerson’s got something to say. Don’t you, Em?” With a light punch to his friend’s shoulder, Pete moved away and headed for a seat at the counter.

  Clad in the baseball shirt and suit trousers from the morning, Emerson broke a piece of crust from her squashed slice of pie and dabbed it into the lemon filling before popping it into his mouth. “Tasty,” he said.

  “Yeah, and it only costs three-fifty. Need me to lend you some change so you can get your own?”

  Emerson licked yellow goo from the corner of his mouth. “Listen, Pete doesn’t normally yell. That’s more my thing. He’s the quiet brain that drives the company and I’m the whip-cracking taskmaster figurehead with the usually great clothes. Don’t make him yell at me again. It was scary. Not as scary as Ella, but still frightening. I told him I could apologize appropriately enough to have you stay on. So don’t make me look bad. He’s watching.” Emerson pointed to the long dining counter where his nervous-looking best friend sat on a chrome stool.

  Pete waved.

  Emerson went on. “Please stay. Please. I’m a smartass. I know that.”

  Olivia snorted.

  “Okay, I’m an ass.”

  She said nothing.

  “All right. I’m a dick. I behaved…abominably and put you in an awkward position. Please accept my apology, let me buy your pie and come to work for Pete and me, so his sister doesn’t hire a contract killer.”

  “You pay for my coffee too and I’ll call us square.”

  He shifted, careful to keep weight off his knee. “And the job?”

  She said nothing.

  Clearly she needed—or more accurately—wanted more groveling. Emerson thought he was wasting his time, but h
e tried to grovel sincerely. “Yes, I was an absolute asshole. I’ll buy your pie, your coffee, and your dinner. No, make that I’ll buy coffee and pie whenever you want coffee and pie. We need your help.”

  Again, she said nothing.

  “Look, if you’re worried, if you’re thinking, everyone knows the tale, no one has to know it was you. Wait. Let me rephrase that. No one will know it was you.”

  “Except those guys who saw me in the elevator with you. They’ll know.”

  “I’ll fire them.”

  She tried to hide her smile behind the swab of a paper napkin. “Uh-huh.”

  “Consider them canned. They’re out. Unemployed on the sidewalk. They’ll be bums within two weeks.”

  Olivia tossed the napkin on the table, raised her chin and inhaled. She chewed her bottom lip for a second before exhaling. Then she looked over at Pete and gestured for him to come to the table.

  When Pete slid next to her in the booth, he looked at Emerson expectantly. “You going to sit down so we can talk a little business?”

  Emerson didn’t like the distance between the seats and the table. Instead of slipping onto the bench across from them, he grabbed a chair from one of the square tables in the middle of the diner, and, limping, dragged it to the end of the table.

  Fifteen minutes later, Pete paid the bill and the trio made their way to Olivia’s car in the lot beside the diner.

  Pete whistled as his gaze wandered over the white body of the Aston Martin DB5 she’d stopped beside. “Is this what you’re racing around in these days, Liv?”

  “I’ve always had a thing for English sports cars. The V12 Zagato is really hot. I had the chance to drive that last year.”

  “Hey,” Emerson said, “is this the same car James Bond drove in Goldfinger and Skyfall?”

  “Not quite. His was gunmetal gray and had an ejector seat.”

  “I don’t know much about cars, but I know what I like and this,” Emerson’s eyes skimmed over Olivia and the car, “is a toy for a big boy. So what are you doing with it?”