“We don’t even know that it needs one,” she said.
“True,” Joe said. “Not until they run the codes. We could try having them flush the fluids, see if that helps. When was the last time you had them checked? Your fluids?”
“I don’t know. How would I know that?”
“You don’t keep a record in your owner’s manual?”
“Does anybody really do that? Anybody but the seriously anally retentive?”
He smiled a little. “I do.”
“Annnddd . . . my point’s made. Bet Alec doesn’t.”
“Well, no, but I have a Mercedes mechanic making some pretty good boat payments on my dime,” Alec said. “I let him keep a record.”
“Sure you do. You’ve got people for that.”
Joe focused on the matter at hand. “We’ll take it to a shop.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket, did a quick search. “Another hour, looks like. Should be all right that far on the freeway, keep the speed even. No hard braking if you can help it, no hard accelerating, keep it in the same gear. We’ll get the codes run, get the fluid changed, see where we are.”
They’d made it to San Francisco a bit later than they’d intended, but they’d made it. And after that, Alyssa really started getting bossed around, because Rae came over to help with the move-in.
Well, “help” might be the wrong word. She actually just plain took over. Starting with going out to buy new shelf paper to line Alyssa’s dresser drawers, and moving on to unpacking all her boxes.
“I can do it tomorrow,” Alyssa had said in a futile bid for independence. “If you’ll just help me get the sheets on the bed and my bathroom stuff unpacked, I’ve got plenty of time for the rest. I don’t start work for another week.”
“You don’t want to spend days stumbling over boxes,” Rae said. “We’ll do it now. It’s just one room.” She looked around the large but otherwise completely unimpressive bedroom, the off-white walls with a scuff here and there, the uninspiring gray carpeting, clearly chosen to hide wear but losing the battle, the stiff, ugly beige drapes across an aluminum-framed window with a view of the apartment house across the street. “It’ll look a lot better when we have it all set up,” she said, which made Alec, humping two boxes of books through the door, give a dubious snort. “We’ll get you unpacked, and the guys can take the empty boxes back with the truck, get them out of here. And I’ll bet Joe can hang those for you, too,” she added as he came in with an armload of framed pictures, the only ones Alyssa had kept, wrapped in a moving blanket, and set them on the bare mattress.
“Joe doesn’t have to hang my pictures,” Alyssa tried to protest, but it was like arguing with the tide.
“Sure I do,” Joe said. “If Rae says I have to.” He bowed his head in mock servitude. “Just have to go home and grab my tools.”
“Need any help?” Alyssa’s new roommate Sherry had come to lean against the doorway, which made the room seriously crowded. A curly-haired, petite brunette, Sherry had a personality that belied her small stature, and Alyssa had known almost as soon as Sherry had opened the door to her on the fourth day of her so-far-disastrous housing hunt that they were Meant to Be. Although the way Sherry was looking at Joe right now was giving her some second thoughts.
“Want a ride?” Sherry asked Joe. “I’m free.”
“Sure,” he said, and Alyssa scowled. “Soon as we finish unloading.”
“What’s this?” Rae asked, holding up a threadbare item from the box she was emptying into Alyssa’s second dresser drawer. “You can’t mean to keep it. It’s a rag.”
Alyssa whipped it out of her hand, stuffed it in the drawer. “Just something I like.”
She dared a quick look at Joe’s face, saw him looking back. If Joe ever looked startled, he was looking startled now, and she knew he’d recognized it, even with the white lettering peeled away in spots. Eielson AFB. The shirt she’d worn until she’d worn holes in it. The shirt she had never been able to throw away, because it would have felt like throwing away Joe.
“Maybe you wouldn’t mind looking at the dripping faucet in my bathtub, too,” Sherry suggested to Joe, oblivious to the moment. “If you’re handy, and if it wouldn’t be too much trouble. I’d really appreciate it. I’ve told the management company twice, but they don’t seem too eager to hop on it. And it’s so annoying when you’re lying there in the tub, you know?” She gave him a smile that had Alyssa seriously reconsidering her housing decision. “Listening to that drip-drip-drip, just when you’re getting all warm and relaxed.”
“I should be able to fix that for you,” Joe said, and he looked, Alyssa thought irritably, like he was all set to help Sherry relax, too. He wasn’t offering to help her relax. He was just nagging her about her car, exactly like Alec.
“Next weekend, Liss,” Alec had said when they’d gone out for well-deserved pizza and beer after the move, including Sherry, because Alyssa hadn’t exactly been able to get out of inviting her, “I’m taking you to buy a new car. I’d do it this week, but I’ve got too much going on. And if you can’t afford it,” he went on over her protest, “I’ll buy it. You heard what the man said. A new transmission, or a new car. And that car isn’t worth putting a new transmission into, would you say, Joe?”
“No,” Joe said. “You need a new car.”
“All right,” Alyssa agreed, her heart sinking at the thought of the hit to her already-stretched budget. “But I’ll buy my own car, thank you very much.”
“Call it a Christmas present,” Alec coaxed. “From Desiree and me.”
“Wow,” Sherry said. “Want to buy me a new car too?”
Alyssa ignored her. “No. Thank you, I guess, but no. You’re bad enough now, Alec. If you buy my new car, you’ll think you can tell me how to drive it. You’ll be asking me if I got the oil changed. You already ask me if I’ve had the oil changed. But if you buy my car, you’ll think you have the right to ask, and what’s worse, I’ll feel like you have the right to ask. Forget that. If I wanted a guy to boss me around, I’d get married.”
“Ha,” Alec said. “Trust me, that’s not what happens when you get married.”
“She’s right,” Rae said. “It’s better for her to buy her own car. As long as you’re not destitute, it’s better to be independent. But somebody should go with you, Alyssa. Car shopping works a whole lot better with two people. Not Alec, because he’s not a good enough negotiator. You’re not,” she went on as he opened his mouth to object. “You either get impatient and pay the money, or you get impatient and fire the person, or you walk out. I should go.”
“Or me,” Joe put in.
“Hmm.” Rae eyed him speculatively. “Yeah. Even better. Because I am a good negotiator, but you know cars, and the car-dealership business has to be the last bastion of 1950s-style male chauvinism in America. I could probably get the same deal you could, but it would take me a whole lot longer.”
“I’ll bet you are pretty handy to have along,” Sherry said to Joe. “I’ll bet they take one look at you and drop the price.”
“Joe doesn’t want to take me car shopping,” Alyssa said, having some more second thoughts about her choice of roommates. The apartment was cheap, but the price was looking way too high. She’d always known Joe dated other women, and it had always hurt. She didn’t need it shoved in her face. “He already spent his whole weekend moving me. He’s supposed to spend next weekend used-car shopping with me? Maybe Joe’s got a life.”
“You got a life, Joe?” Alec asked him.
“Nope.”
So here they were, one week later, at their fourth dealership of the day, having just done their third walk-out, and Alyssa was getting more than grouchy.
“Is this about which car?” she asked Joe, wrapping her arms around herself for warmth. “I could have told you which one I wanted without coming all the way out here. The dark-blue one.”
“We can get a better deal on the other one,” he said. “Only got ten thousand more miles on the cl
ock, a year older, and it’s sat on the lot for three months, which means they want to get rid of it that much more.”
“It’s beige,” she complained. “Inside and outside.”
“I think if you look at the sheet,” he said, a smile threatening, “you’ll find that it’s gold, with cloth upholstery in—” He looked down at the printed list of specifications he held in his hand. “Winter wheat.”
“Winter wheat my—foot. I know beige when I see it. And I am not driving a beige car. I’m not poor enough yet to have to drive a beige car.”
“All right. But I’m warning you, we’ll be walking out another time.”
And they did, but Joe ended up with a deal that the salesman complained his manager had barely approved.
“Good thing Ford’s paying you to keep the doors open, then,” Joe said calmly, which made the salesman’s relentless good humor slip for a moment. And then Joe negotiated her trade-in, and refused to allow the finance guy to even go into his spiel for undercoating and “stain protection,” which Alyssa appreciated even more, because she was hungry and tired and ready to be done.
And at the end of it, she had a new car, and it wasn’t even beige.
Not a Date
“I’ve got a new car,” Alyssa said, standing next to the dark-blue compact, reaching a hand out to stroke the hood as if she couldn’t help herself. She laughed, and the happiness in it rang out loud and clear. “I honestly wasn’t sure it was going to happen. You had me convinced we were walking out without it.”
“It was always going to happen.” He had to smile back, she was so excited over this boring little sedan. Well, it was a major improvement, although if he’d had his way, he’d have put her into something a whole lot better. Well, if he’d had his way, he’d have put her into his own car, and he’d have kept her there.
He’d showed up as agreed at ten that morning to take her car shopping, had rung the bell down at the street, waited a while, then rung it again. At last, he heard her voice on the intercom. “Joe?”
He spoke into the brass-plated grille. “Yeah.”
“Shoot,” he heard. “Come up. Sorry.” The door buzzed, and he shoved it open, climbed the three flights to her place, already resigned to a wait.
It wasn’t Alyssa who opened the apartment door. It was a guy. A barefoot guy, tall and thin and with serious bedhead, wearing skinny hipster jeans and a slim-cut black button-down shirt. A guy who’d got out of bed not very long ago, wearing the clothes from the night before.
“Hey,” he said. “Come on in.”
Alyssa came out of her bedroom looking flustered and . . . strange. “Sorry,” she said. “I haven’t got in the bathroom yet. I need a minute.”
Joe looked between her and the guy. He had no right to be jealous, and he knew it. He knew it. Her sex life was no business of his. But he wanted to shove the guy right out the door and keep on shoving. At a minimum. He pushed his hands into his jacket pockets and reminded himself to breathe.
The bathroom door opened on a cloud of steam and Sherry came out, tightening the sash on a very thin blue bathrobe.
“Oh. Joe,” she said, faltering to a stop. “I didn’t know you’d be here today.”
“Hi,” he said, carefully not checking out the bathrobe.
Sherry recovered her balance pretty fast. “Bathroom’s all yours,” she told Alyssa, then looked at her more closely and laughed. “Great hat.”
Alyssa stared at her blankly for a moment, then put her hand to her head. Her mouth opened and shut again, and she snatched the thing off her head, went to her bedroom door and chucked the hat inside.
“Five minutes,” she told Joe, ducking into the bathroom and shutting the door behind her.
“Oh, did you meet Jonathan?” Sherry asked Joe. “Joe, Jonathan. Jonathan, Joe. Want some coffee?” she asked the guy—Jonathan.
“Yeah,” he said. “Or we could go out to breakfast, if you want.”
She perked up. “Breakfast would be good. I’ll get changed.”
Ah. Sherry’s . . . guest. Joe felt the tension leaving his body like air from a balloon.
Jonathan flopped onto the couch and picked up a magazine from the coffee table. “Could be a while,” he told Joe. “In my experience.”
Joe was pretty sure he was right, so he took a seat in an armchair. It wasn’t too long, though, before Alyssa was back out of the bathroom door again, and he rose to his feet.
“Ready,” she said. “I just have to get my boots.”
“And a coat,” Joe said. “It’s cold out there.”
She came out of her room a minute later carrying a pair of low red boots with pointed toes and Western tooling, perched on the arm of the chair Joe had just vacated to pull them on and zip them up. She was wearing a dusty red quilted coat that hung open over a ribbed dark-blue sweater that matched her eyes and clung to her figure fairly convincingly. And a skirt, a flimsy little gray thing that didn’t come close to reaching her knees, and swooped up at the sides quite a few inches too, which hiked up a whole lot more during the boot-fastening exercise.
“Ah . . .” Joe said, “do you think a skirt is right? I mean, you might want to look more serious.”
She looked at him in surprise. “I’m wearing tights,” she pointed out. “Almost like pants.”
No. A short skirt and sexy little boots weren’t like pants. He didn’t know what tights had to do with it.
“Besides,” she said, “aren’t most car salesmen guys?”
“Yeah,” Jonathan said. He’d looked up from his magazine to check her out, Joe saw, some of his tension returning despite his best efforts. “They’re guys.”
“And guys like skirts better, right?”
Joe didn’t know about other guys, but he knew he did. And Jonathan apparently did too, because he was nodding agreement.
“Then,” she said. “I’ll distract them, get them off-balance, and you can look all serious and scary, Joe, and intimidate them. Don’t you think?”
“Could work,” he said. “Though if you really want to distract them, you should put the bear hat back on.”
She burst out laughing, and Jonathan joined in. “Yeah, that was a surprise,” he agreed.
“You weren’t supposed to see that,” Alyssa complained. “It’s cold in my room. There’s no heat in there. I was waiting for the bathroom, to do my hair and makeup, but Sherry was in there, so I was keeping warm, and I . . . I forgot.”
“Never mind,” Joe said. “I might need to see it again, though. The ears were pretty special. Where’d you get that?”
“Gabe. He gave it to me for my birthday. He thought it was funny. I found it when I unpacked, and like I said,” she shrugged, smiling again, “it’s cold in my room. Anyway, you ready to go?”
“Yeah. Good to meet you,” Joe told Jonathan. He got a raised hand in return and was thankfully able to leave the guy behind.
“Sounds like the first thing is breakfast,” he said when they were descending the flights of dingy stairs. “Because I have a feeling you didn’t manage that this morning either.”
“I overslept,” she admitted. “Well, sort of. I haven’t had a roommate for a while, and I forgot how . . . awkward it could get at times. They didn’t have the door shut, so it seemed like a good idea to wait, but it was kind of a long wait, and then I fell asleep.”
“Sherry’s got a boyfriend, huh? I wouldn’t have guessed that.”
She shot him a quick look as he held the front door for her. “Ha. I bet you wouldn’t have. And I didn’t even tell her how rich you are. She figured that one out later, all by herself, with a little online research. If she’d known you were coming over today, believe me, she would have made sure she didn’t have company.”
Was she jealous, or was that just wishful thinking on his part? “You’re saying I’ve got a shot there?” he asked, following her to the little yellow compact and holding the door for her once she’d unlocked it.
“You know you do.” She scowled
at him, then tossed her head so her shiny dark hair bounced before climbing in, and if a person could be said to flounce getting into a car, she flounced. “But she’s not your type.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he mused before he slammed her door shut. He walked around the car and squeezed himself in on his side feeling a whole lot better than he had been a few minutes earlier. “I have a weakness for sassy girls with smart mouths.”
“Only because you probably think they need a big strong man to straighten them out,” she muttered.
“Mmm,” he agreed. “That’s about it.”
No, that was exactly it. Because he wanted to do everything wonderful there was to do with Alec’s little sister, and everything nasty there was to do, too. Absolutely everything. There was nothing he hadn’t thought of, nothing so dirty that he hadn’t done it to her, again and again, in his wild, undisciplined, out-of-control mind. He just hoped she didn’t know. Sometimes, when she looked at him, he thought she did. And that thought made him sweat at night as much as the rest of his thoughts did. Well, almost as much.
But he hadn’t done any of it. Of course he hadn’t done any of it. He’d taken her car shopping. And afterwards, out for a hamburger, because that was what she’d wanted.
“You sure?” he’d asked when they were making plans over the hood of her new car in the dealership’s lot. “I know I don’t seem like a very classy guy.” He ran a hand over his stubbled cheek, cast a glance down at his leather jacket and jeans. “But I could go home and change. And I do occasionally eat piled-up food.”
“Piled-up food?”
“You know.” He measured serving portions with his hands. “Three sprigs of asparagus on a big white plate, covered up with a tiny piece of meat, a leaf of some bitter thing you wouldn’t even eat in a salad on top of that. And then. . . figs, or organ meat, some lumpy thing, and a sauce with a French name, poured around into patterns that some guy thought looked interesting. Piled-up food. Date food.”
She laughed. “I know exactly what you mean. You know what my best date is?”
Asking for Trouble (The Kincaids) Page 7
