A Perfect Life nd Other Stories (14 page)

“I’m trying!” Emily kept typing and glancing at their position
readout, struggling to anticipate. “You won’t have much time.”

The image flickered again. Tate saw the bridge of a ship, and the
back of a man’s head came into view. He turned and just as she saw Ul lock eyes
on her and surprise cross his features, she pulled the trigger. The laser’s
flash blinded her, then the image flickered out, and she burned a hole in the
wall. She quickly released the trigger before the laser pierced the hull. Tate
let out a breath then sat back in her seat, still holding the gun.

“Did you get him?” Emily asked.

Tate nodded. “I think so.” She looked at Emily and grinned. “Nice
work, Captain. If your theory holds, we just ended a war.”

Emily wiped tears from her cheeks. “I should throw you in the brig
for disobeying orders, you know.”

Tate shrugged. “I know.”

Ul’s ship filled the front window. There was nothing more to do. A
blip on the long-range sensors caught Tate’s attention. Pirate ship. Too late.
She dropped the gun and reached for Emily, holding her tight, with only her own
body left to protect her.

“I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve you,” Emily said.

Tate kissed Emily’s neck, savoring one last taste of her. “You
love me,” she whispered.

At the moment of impact, while there was still air to transmit
sound waves, Tate heard the hull crumple. She felt a warm squeeze as she lost
sight of Emily amid a blinding flash, a thunderous roar, and the sensation of
her body disintegrating.

Auto Repair

THEY MET AT the 30,000-mile major service. As Natalie parked her
car in front of Jackie’s Auto Repair, she let out a cautious breath.
Should
I take a chance?

Her last service, an oil change at the dealership where she’d
bought the car, had ended up costing twice the advertised price. “That’s just
for the oil,” the man wearing a shirt and tie behind the counter had explained,
pointing out the fine print on the coupon she’d handed him. “There’s also labor
and disposal fees.”

That, on top of the job taking two hours, convinced Natalie to
take her coworker’s advice and try a local mechanic near the office.

“Be right with you,” a woman called from the service bay in answer
to Natalie’s hello.
Right, Jackie is a woman
. She thought that was cool
and very progressive. She probably wouldn’t mention it to her dad, though.

The smell of oil and grease reminded her of watching her dad work
on his Chevys when she was a kid. When she’d bought her first car, a used Dodge
Colt, he showed her how to change the oil, check the spark plugs, replace the
air filter. The easy stuff. And she’d done it herself for many years, but as
she’d grown older and moved to an apartment with no off-street parking, she’d
gotten lazy and left it to others.

Natalie glanced around the small office. The couch looked clean
and relatively new, but a box of grimy parts sat on the coffee table. A ficus
by the window dropped yellow leaves on the floor. On the wall behind the desk
hung three small watercolor paintings of what could be either dunes or a naked
woman’s body. It was hard to tell from a distance. She doubted they were nudes,
but not entirely.

“You must be Natalie.”

Natalie spun around, surprised both by the fact that the woman
before her knew who she was and a bit embarrassed to think she’d been spotted
staring at the paintings. “Yes.” She cleared her throat. “You must be Jackie?”

“The one and only. Have a seat.” She motioned to a chair facing
the desk.

A range of impressions ricocheted through
Natalie’s imagination. What had she expected? Fonzie with breasts? Rosie the
Riveter? Jackie seemed slight for a mechanic. Don’t they have to lift engines
and tires? Her short hair seemed more practical than radical. She could have
been any androgynous woman in T-shirt, jeans, and work boots.

Jackie reached into a drawer and pulled out a form. “So, tell me
about your car. What year is it? How many miles? Anything I need to know.”

“It’s a Corolla, nineteen ninety-nine. Just over thirty thousand
miles. That’s why I’m here, for the scheduled service.”

Jackie wrote down the details. “So roughly ten thousand miles a
year. Is that mostly city or highway driving?”

“City, I guess. I commute to work about fifteen miles a day. I
work out on Main Street. But I take a few trips a year that are highway
driving.”

“Oil changes every four thousand?”

“Well . . . more like two or three times a year.” It was like
admitting to her dentist how seldom she flossed. She braced herself, but Jackie
didn’t scold her, though her father occasionally did.

“Manual or automatic.”

“Automatic. I wanted—” Natalie started to
explain how her girlfriend, Sara, didn’t drive a stick, so she’d bought an
automatic, though she’d have preferred manual. It wasn’t that she was afraid to
come out, and Jackie could be a lesbian for all she knew. Censoring her life
had become a habit.

“Security system?”

“A kill switch, no alarm.”

“AC?”

“Yes.”

Jackie ticked off check boxes down the form. “Factory installed?”

“Yes.” That was another concession. Her dad was in his nineties
and didn’t handle the heat well. He didn’t ride with her often, but enough to
make that an expense worth paying.

“Original tires?”

“No. I had a blowout driving over train tracks last year.”

Jackie gave her a commiserating smile. “Don’t you hate that? Which
tire?”

“Front passenger.”

Jackie wrote that down. She certainly was thorough. Natalie
considered joking about how her doctor didn’t ask so many questions but decided
she didn’t know Jackie well enough to get that personal. Besides, if this
didn’t work out, she’d never see her again.

Jackie explained the work she’d be doing—spark plugs, air filter,
oil and filter, ATF—

“ATF?”

“Sorry, automatic transmission fluid. I’ll also change the
antifreeze and clean and adjust your brakes.” She wrote the list down on
another form while she talked. She stopped and looked at Natalie. “The car is
new enough that I don’t expect to find any surprises. And you don’t look like
the type who’d abuse a car.”

Natalie bristled at that comment but let it go.
How does she
know I don’t race up at New Hampshire Speedway on weekends?

“It’ll probably be about two hundred dollars,” Jackie continued.
“If that’s okay, sign here and I’ll get started.”

Natalie thought she’d heard wrong. That was
less than the dealer had charged her for the 15,000-mile service that didn’t do
half that stuff. She didn’t want to look too eager so kept a poker face while
she looked over the list and signed her name.

“And a phone number I can reach you at.” Jackie pointed to the
place on the form for that.

Natalie sat in awe of her concise efficiency. So far so good.
Still, she worried. “This won’t violate the warranty, will it?”

Jackie leaned back and smiled. “You’re not cheating on the
dealership. The warranty is with Toyota, not them. As long as the service is
done and documented, and I always use manufacturer’s parts, your warranty is
intact.”

Natalie liked Jackie’s no-nonsense attitude. “You do come highly
recommended.”

“So how come it took you thirty thousand miles
to find me?” Jackie’s wink suggested she was teasing. “That’s good to hear. I
do my best. I’ll always give you a fair price and an honest answer.”

“That sounds like a good slogan.”

“Maybe I should stencil it on my door.”

When Natalie picked up the car later, she was floored by the bill.
It was exactly what Jackie had told her. From then on, Natalie relied on Jackie
to fix her Corolla.

AT 43,318 MILES, the battery gave out. Natalie didn’t blame it. A
lot had happened in those miles to grind her down as well.

“I’m not in love with you anymore,” Sara, the non-stick driver,
had said over breakfast a week earlier.

“Just like that? Bang, you’re done?”

“Of course not. It didn’t happen all at once.” Like that was
supposed to make Natalie feel better. “It, I don’t know, dwindled. We’ve grown
apart. Isn’t that what couples usually say?”

“You say. Not me. I haven’t grown apart.”

But of course she had. While Sara cleared her dishes and made her
lunch, Natalie sat fuming, wondering. She remembered the excitement she’d felt
when the state court had ruled that same-sex couples could get married. And the
gnashing anxiety that followed. Would Sara expect her to propose? Why hadn’t
that been her first thought? They laughed about it that evening. How neither
was ready. Six years together didn’t mean forever had to loom.

A week later, she sat in her boss’s office, listening to him drone
on about budget cuts and the recession taking its toll, wondering if it meant
no raise.

Then, “I’m going to have to let you go,” he said, without so much
as a pause to take a breath or change his position, leaning back in his chair
with arms folded across his chest.

Inexplicably, her first thought was that she wouldn’t be able to
argue for keeping the large apartment she rented with Sara. She couldn’t afford
it alone. His chair creaked in agreement.

In the parking lot at the job she no longer had, Natalie sat in
her Corolla in the rain, turning the key futilely, the starter whining ever
more slowly till it only clicked. She didn’t know how long she’d sat there,
hand on the key, no longer trying, when Richard, from IT, tapped on her window.

“Need a jump start?” he asked through the wet glass.

Natalie rolled down the window. “Please.”

She drove straight to Jackie’s. The beauty of being laid off in
the morning was that it left the rest of the day to herself.

She sipped dark coffee at a Middle Eastern bakery on Main Street
while Jackie installed a new battery, replaced the front brake pads, cleaned
and adjusted the rear brakes, and, for no extra charge, rotated the tires.
“It’ll be up on the lift anyway,” she’d said, which deflated Natalie’s notion
that she’d offered it out of chivalry.

“New battery to get you going where you want to go. New brakes so
you can stop going where you don’t want to go. What more could you ask for?”
Jackie said as she wrote up the bill.

If only it were that easy, Natalie wanted to say, but didn’t.
Jackie was a mechanic, not a therapist. She nodded and wrote out the check.

“You have a good day now,” Jackie said.

“You too.” Natalie didn’t add that this had been the best part of
it. That when her life had gone to shit on all fronts, Jackie was the one
bright spot. She almost asked her out for a beer, but knew she wouldn’t be able
to stand it if she was turned down, or worse, found out Jackie was as flawed as
everyone else in her life.

After spending the next three days online looking for jobs and
apartments, Natalie realized there was no point in finding a place until she
knew where she’d be working, so she decided to move back home with her dad. He
needed the help anyway, she rationalized.

Her parents had divorced when she was a teenager and she’d lived
with her mom through college, only seeing her dad on a calculated formula of
weekends and summer vacations. When her mom moved to Florida ten years ago,
leaving Natalie unmoored from family, she had reconnected with her dad. So it
wasn’t like she had an old room to move back into. She was thankful he had a
guest room and helped him move boxes and piles of clothes off the bed.

“You’ll find a better job,” he said.

“I know.”

“How’s the car running?”

“Fine.”

“For a Jap car.”

“Dad.”

“What?”

His speech had changed since he got dentures, but the content
hadn’t.

“If more people bought American cars, this country wouldn’t be in
such tough shape and you wouldn’t get laid off. That’s all I’m saying.”

“There’s a reason why people buy Japanese cars, Dad. The quality
is better.”

“And you have the unions to thank for that.”

Natalie shut up. No point in continuing that line of thought. She
didn’t win arguments against her father, no matter how wrong he was.

BY THE NEXT major service, at 48,799 miles, Natalie had a new job
and had moved in with her new girlfriend, Ginny. They were planning to get
married. Or rather Ginny was. Natalie couldn’t seem to wrap her mind around the
concept of a big wedding. She wasn’t out to her dad, so how could she get
married? Ginny said she understood her dilemma but persisted in pressuring
Natalie to settle on a date.

“We need to do it sooner rather than later,” Ginny argued in her
lawyer way. “If Governor Romney gets his way, we won’t be able to get married
at all.”

“Then let’s go to town hall and elope,” Natalie countered.

Ginny wouldn’t buy it. She had her heart set on all the trimmings.
So they were at a temporary impasse.

Natalie’s new job was no longer down the street from Jackie’s, so
taking her car for repairs meant driving forty minutes in rush-hour traffic,
leaving the car, then taking an hour on two buses to get to work. Her friends
ridiculed her for going so far for a repair, right after complaining about
their dealer breaking something just to overcharge them to fix it.

The ficus had rallied and its green leaves shone in the sun by the
window. While she wrote out a check for the serpentine belt, spark plugs, and
PCV, whatever that was, Jackie commented on her engagement ring, with its large
diamond that Natalie was having trouble getting used to.

“Welcome to the club,” Jackie said. She pulled a gold band out
from inside her shirt where it hung from a thin chain.

Natalie had not considered the notion that Jackie might have a
significant other, let alone be married.

“Why don’t you wear it?” she asked.

“Too dangerous,” Jackie said. “One spark from a battery cable and
my finger’d be toast.”

Natalie flinched. She knew the job had its hazards, but hadn’t
considered electrocution one of them.

“Maura and I got married as soon as it was legal,” Jackie said.
She outed herself like it was nothing.

Natalie tried to imagine their wedding. Did Jackie wear a tux? Did
their families approve? She didn’t ask those kinds of personal questions,
though. She didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize her relationship with the
best mechanic in the world as far as she was concerned.