As the police did what they had to do, I sat on a grassy knoll near the sidewalk with my head in my hands, wishing I had stayed to eat steak. I heard a woman’s voice say to me: “Is that Laura and Bob’s car?” I looked up at her. “Do you know them?” I said, standing up. Maybe you could break the news to them I wanted to add. The woman was a neighbor, out for a walk. “I don’t know how I’m going to tell them,” I said. “This has never happened to me before.”
“Oh, honey,” the woman drawled, “don’t worry about them. Last year at their Christmas party I spilled red wine all over Laura’s new carpet and they were just fine about it.” I stared at the woman. The words are you fucking kidding me marched through my head again. “I wish all I had done was spill wine on their carpet,” I said. “I think this is a lot worse.” I paused after putting emphasis on the word “this” and pointed at the wreckage. The entire windshield of the car had blown out and was now scattered across the intersection. Flares were lit. Cars had stopped. People were staring.
A tow truck arrived and dragged away the car, its front wheel bent and dangling. The errant wheel of a shopping cart was more functional than this thing. “Where are they taking it?” I asked the officer who had been questioning me, but if he answered I hadn’t been paying attention. My mind was consumed with the thought of how I was going to break the news to Laura and Bob and, more worrisome, how they’d react.
“I don’t know how to tell you this,” I said, having gotten Bob on the phone at the restaurant. After the police had dropped me off at the house, I went straight up to the room, sat on the hardwood floor with my back against the four-poster bed and picked up the phone. “And I’m so sorry that I have to tell you this,” I continued, “but I had an accident.” The line was silent a moment. “Okay,” Bob said. And then he asked me if I was hurt. I told him I was fine and back at the house. “Well,” he said matter-of-factly, “that’s the important thing. I’m gonna go finish my steak now and then we’ll be home in a couple hours.” I hung up, not sure what that meant. Home in a couple hours...to kill you? To impale you on that four poster bed and bury you in the backyard?
Thirty minutes later an Australian couple staying at the bed and breakfast arrived at the house and came upstairs to find me. They had been eating at the steak house, too, and had heard about the accident. Concerned, they built a fire in my room’s fireplace and sat with me until we heard the door open downstairs. Bob and Laura had returned.
“Is the car totaled?” Bob said. He was a tall man, large but not fat, a man who had clearly been enjoying red meat for many years, and he was standing close to me, looking down at my pale, white face. I briefly considered asking how exactly he defined “totaled,” as my “totaled” might be his “dented,” and why make things sound worse than they needed to be? But I knew there was only one answer. Be direct, I thought, if only to get through the conversation as quickly as possible. “Yes,” I said, then braced myself. One corner of Bob’s mouth went down while the other went up, and he gave his head a brisk nod. “Good,” he said. “Now I can get a Mercedes.”
Laura had been setting her things down, and she now turned her attention to me. “Look at you, you’re shaking,” she said. What did he just say? I thought, but Laura was moving me into another room. The bar. “Let’s get you a drink.” I hadn’t yet seen this part of the house. For a bed and breakfast, it was exceedingly large, with twelve fireplaces and multiple sitting rooms. “She puts a Christmas tree in every one of them,” Bob had told me the night before as we sat in a Ralph Lauren-inspired den done in pine green and plaids, watching a baseball game. “And they all have a different theme,” he added, shaking his head, clearly thinking it was lunacy but loving her for it anyway. I had seen what Laura could do with some fake fruit on a Thursday afternoon so I had no doubt so she went all out come Christmastime.
The Australians joined us in the barroom as Bob opened a bottle of red wine and handed me the first glass. My hand was in no condition to hold anything steady, but spill away, I thought, recalling the neighbor on the street. The bar itself was a huge, freestanding piece, “solid cherry,” Bob said, handmade with pillars and a canopy. It was like something you’d find in the Frontgate catalog. Frontgate, if you’re unfamiliar, sells things for the kind of people who need a fourteen-foot-long pole with a claw at the end of it to change a light bulb on their ceiling. Four leather-clad stools were lined up in front of the bar while the rest of the room was furnished with club chairs and a brown, leather sectional. Behind the couch was a long wall with a hand-painted mural, commissioned by Laura, that she was now considering having repainted. “I don’t like the way he did this part over here,” she said, gesturing at a small detail in the lower left corner that looked perfectly fine to me.
We sat and talked like that for the rest of the night, casually, as if nothing had happened, and every now and then someone would notice that I was still shaking and ask how I was feeling. I took this as an opportunity to apologize, every time. “This has never happened to me before,” I’d say. “I’ve never even scratched a car.” And every time Laura and Bob would listen and shrug and drink their wine and then change the subject. I tried to act normal, tried calming down, but I was still in shock, mostly from wondering why the hell these people didn’t care about their car.
When it came time to turn in for the night, I got my answer. I offered a final apology to Laura as Bob had stepped out of the room. “Laura,” I said, “again, I am so sorry.” She immediately cut me off. “Listen,” she said firmly, her hand raised. “I don’t want to hear another word about it. Bob hated that car, he’s hated that car since the day he brought it home, and he’s glad it’s gone. We’re just glad you’re okay.” Seems I had done them a favor. And in return they had done one for me.
When the phone rang, it was the director, calling to make our plans for the next day. I told him what had happened and, more surprisingly, what the reaction had been. “They’ve been really very nice,” I said. “They really don’t seem to care.” Red wine on their carpet. Their Lexus. “If we happen to burn the house down,” I said, “I’m sure they wouldn’t mind.”
I often think about Laura and Bob, those Republicans from Kingsport, Tennessee. They no longer run that bed and breakfast. I imagine they’re retired now, listening to Dolly Parton, eating steak and drinking wine, driving around in a Mercedes without a care in the world.
