by Matt McGee
“C’mon,” Jamie said with a wave toward the driveway. “We’re going to the carwash!”
It wasn’t exactly Robin’s idea of courting, but any kind of motion suited him fine. By the time he reached for the door handle on her gunmetal gray Kia she’d already double-beeped the amber side-marker lights via remote.
He plopped into the leather driver’s seat usually fitted to her. A motor slid him back. She slipped the key in the ignition, like the helpful girlfriend he thinks she might someday be, then she leaned back and put on her seatbelt.
“You sure about this?” he asked.
“Hell yes. After all that time in the house? You drive, I?ll DJ.”
He rolled his eyes and started the car.
Her tastes are deceivingly Top 40. After three months together daily he knows she isn’t the punk her dark lipstick and dyed hair would lead people to believe. Even a tattered Sub-Humans t-shirt doesn’t fool him: he’s caught her sitting out front of the family’s house, pot smoke billowing against the Kia’s sealed windows, belting
out Bon Jovi’s Dead or Alive from the top of resin-shellacked lungs.
She poked her right pointer finger into the presets and found 104.7FM. Not too bad, he thought, cranked the wheel and spun the car backwards into the street. Old school hip hop. Me Myself and I was halfway through the first chorus. He threw the Kia in drive and launched toward the red light on the corner.
“I talked to my Mom today,” she said.
His job was to listen. There is no advice a 42 year-old stoner will listen to when their mother has been hospitalized for weeks. A good boyfriend just goes to the dispensary and helps her cope, and h has.
“Was she able to talk back?”
“She said ‘I want a sandwich!'”
“So get her a sandwich.”
“I can’t go in because of the virus. Even family’s not allowed.”
“Have one of the orderlies bring her a BLT.”
“She still has a feeding tube in, bruh.”
“Knowing your Mom she’ll find away.”
The light turned green. He rolled into the intersection then made a left. In a couple miles they’d beat the Shell station, the one with the carwash.
“Don’t you ever use turn signals?”
“When someone’s around. But in that case back there it was just…”
He waited for the chorus.
“… MeMyself and I…”
“Well me myself and I were there too, and I don’t wanna get hit. It was probably my store of good karma that spared us.”
“Or my superior driving skill.”
The sarcastic cough from her lungs was part raspberry. He reached for his mask.
“Watch the spittle. I don’t want your disease.”
“I’m not sick bruh, you’re the one who’s out seven nights a week.”
True, though he’d been careful. One of his precautions was to not tell the other members of her family, who’d all been quarantined since March, each nursing a pre-existing condition that kept them company.
His food delivery gig had come a few months before the virus had been verified an actual pandemic. Hewasn’t making a ton of money. The job paid a different kind of dividend.
Some of us don’t sit still very well, he’d say.
He’d seen friends quarantined and knew he couldn’t do it. He’s heard the same news as everyone else: the death counts, the constant Covid-19 updates. The restrictions, the warnings, the amateur epidemiologists competing in the brilliant
meme decathlon.
They’re all home, he knew, suffering.
“So what else did your Mom say?”
“Besides ‘I want a sandwich,’ she said ‘home.’ Over and over again. She just wants to come home.”
“She’s not gonna check herself out or something, is she?”
“They wouldn’t let her. Would they? She’s been too sick. She’s still hooked up to a buttload of machines for God’s sake.”
He stopped at the intersection, across from the Shell station. On the right of the mini-mart was a fully-automated carwash. He turned on his turn signal.
She didn’t notice.
“I just wanna be sure,” he said, “that an Uber isn’t going to pull up tomorrow and she’s gonna be out there yelling ‘let me out of this thing!'”
“She wouldn’t do that. They wouldn’t let her, right? I mean, I can’t imagine they’d let her. Seriously though bruh, the thing that just kills me is knowing I can’t go help.”
“How would you help?”
“I’d start by bringing her a fucking sandwich.”
He started rocking his head side to side; Tone Loc’s Funk Cold Medina had come on. The light at theintersection turned green. He rolled the Kia forward gently.
He slammed on the brakes. Jamie threw a bracing hand against the dashboard and was about to curse when she saw a grey Honda Accord speed through the intersection where they would’ve been.
“Motherf – … what thehell, dude!”
Robin watched the Accord disappear in his rearview mirror. A ride share sticker shone in itsback window.
“Another ten feet and we’d have been sharing a room with your Mom.”
“Not how I want to get there.” She turned and cursed at the long-gone Honda. Seeing it was safe, he rolled through a yellow arrow, bounced into the parking lot of the Shell and stopped at the front doors. She grabbed her purse.
“Be right back. You want anything?”
“Vitamin Water.”
“Acai?”
“How’d you know?”
“It’s what you always get.”
“Geez, next thing you know people will think we’re boyfriend-girlfriend.”
“My Dad already does.” She slammed the door, went into the gas station and pulled open a cooler door.
He let that soak in. They hadn’t been dating, just hovering around each other. She spent her days stuck in the house with two brothers and a father she liked well enough. He often thought she’d just rolled him into the brother category, like a spare in case of a blowout. While she was tending them, he’d spend fourteen hour days using aFord Focus to make sure the city was fed. The job was a wellspring of stories, and he was sure this was the basis of their attraction.
She liked him for what he was still ableto do.
I need 2 SAB she’d text, and twenty minutes later they’d be sitting on a curb four doors away, looking up into the stars.
She’d spark a bowl of the dispensary’s finest as he’d sip another acai Vitamin Water and catch his breath, an athlete in the heat of battle.
The passenger door popped open. She dropped back in her seat and handed him a frosty plastic bottle of red liquid and a carwash receipt. He memorized the six-digit code on sight; he’d often wondered if this was a sign of a photographic
memory. He rolled theKia around the back of the station to the mouth of the carwash and cracked his drink open. While he typed the code into the kiosk, When a Man Loves a Woman came on the radio. She gently lowered the volume. He rolled into the carwash.
“If we were dating,” he said, “this would be a great makeout spot.”
She pulled her mask up and used two fingers to make the sign of the cross. He rolled his eyes.
“You can’t social distance in a carwash.”
She lowered the mask. The light of the carwash turned red; he put the car in park and shut the engine off. Pressurized spray hit the Kia’s paintjob. Rubber brushes the size of steamrollers began to spin, ready to work.
“So,” she said louder, “of all thethings you see out there, what’s the scariest?”
“The homeless guy in the middle of the road wearing nothing but a shopping cart.”
“WHAT.”
She made him tell the story. After all, she loved LivePD. When it was over and the cops had taken the poor guy away she said “OK, so really, what’s the actual scariest thing you’ve seen out there.”
The car rocked with the force of spinning brushes.
“I go to alot of apartment complexes. These people, they’re working from home. Doing Zoom meetings. They never go out. They order breakfast, lunch and dinner from the app. And when I roll into their complex, every once in awhile, there’ll be this car. Nice. Newer. Parked in its usual spot. And it’s just coated in dust. Like it’s been there for months.”
She nodded.
“Sometimes there’s cat prints in the dust. And I realize how long these people have been home.”
“You could probably have a nice little side-gig doing mobile mechanics when they all come out. Do jumpstarts. Recharge the batteries. Replace them if needed. Maybe change their oil while they’re still in lock-down.”
He nodded.
“Think about it,” she added.
“I’ve always been a fair mechanic. And I’m real good with horses.”
“Well, I don’t know about thehorsepart but —”
The brushes slowed and a giant vacuum sounded. He restarted the Kia and edged it forward. A giant blow-dryer would whoosh away the remnants.
“So seriously,” shesaid, “what’s the scariest thing you’ve seen during quarantine?”
“That’s it,” he said. “There is nothing scarier to me than sitting still. Even that carwash was a test of my patience.”
She reached in the glove compartment for her lighter. The pipe was already in her hand. He wondered where it’d come from, and was happy she’d waited until they were out of the carwash to spark it up and take a hit.
“So,” she said, breath held, “you’re saying the scariest thing to you is the threat of sitting still?”
Big exhale.
“Those dust-covered cars are like ghosts. Those people had normal lives. Went to concerts and hit Vegas with their friends. All that normal stuff. Now it’s like they’ve been dead for months and someone forgot to repo their car.”
“You’re a bit of a drama queen.”
“Said the drama queen. No, but I am melancholy. What do you want? I’m Irish. I’m gonna see things through melancholy colored glasses.”
He rolled the Kia into the sunlight. They stopped at a pump island and he grabbed a few paper towels to dry the remaining spots on the glass. He was wiping the back window when the strawberry blonde appeared.
She wore snug green denim shorts. She shoved a pump nozzle into her VW’s gas tank and turned Robin’s way. She smiled first. He smiled back and waved a damp brown paper towel. She looked slowly away, her smile reflecting the sunlight, never fading.
The Kia bounced a little. Jamie was rocking out to Madonna’s Like A Virgin. Robin crumpled the towel into a ball, shot it into a trashcan and got back behind the wheel.
He didn’t look back at Pump Nine.
“Looks good,” he said.
“Doesn’t look like a ghost car anyway.” She lowered the volume then pressed a button that tilted the sunroof open. She aimed her smoke up, a long exhale. “You got your tablet?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Turn on the app.”
“Which app?”
“The one you work for. Let’s go do some deliveries.”
He understood. Her house still wasn’t far enough away.
He spun the wheel and pointed the Kia toward the freeway. The VW and the strawberry blonde had disappeared.
“How areyou feeling about icecream?”
“It’s still my kryptonite.”
“There’s this place in Agoura Hills I’ve been doing deliveries out of,” he said, “called Sage. It’s new. Farm-to-table kinda stuff.”
“So?”
“So they havean ice cream bar.”
“There’s a Baskin Robbins right up the street.”
“Yeah, but I’m buying. And I want to give them my money, so —”
“So?”
“So they have hempseed-based ice cream.”
She smiled. “You know you don’t get high from that stuff, right?”
“Yeah. But it still makes me sound cooler than I actually am.”
She patted his arm. “Your secret’s safe with me.”
As they climbed the on ramp a different DJ, one with a classic voice came on the radio and cued The Platters Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. He didn’t see the VW anywhere, and soon, he forgot about it altogether. They merged onto a freeway that at this time of the afternoon would usually be locked bumper-to-bumper. The faster the car went, the lower she sank into her seat. She closed the sunroof. She played with a vent. Then she crossed her hands on her lap, stared at the open road, the scenery speeding by, and for the first time in weeks, a slight smile crossed her lips.
“This is all I need,” she said.
And he knew just what she meant.
Matt McGee writes short fiction in the Los Angeles area. In 2020 his stories have appeared in Barrelhouse, Gnashing Teeth and Celestial Press. When not typing he drives around in rented cars and plays goalie in local hockey leagues.
