Ten for Ten

Comfortably Numb

The driver’s seat was a little piece of heaven. 

Her father mimed rolling down the window.  When she did, he dropped a key ring with an electronic fob for the garage into her lap.  “So you can get back in,” he smiled wistfully.  “I also a spare set made.  Those are in the secret jar.”  Antonia’s throat tightened with nostalgia.  By the set of his shoulders, she knew he was thinking of Danielle, who’d instituted the tradition of the secret cookie jar. 

“Thank you.”  There was more to be said, but for now it was enough.  He nodded and made a shooing motion.

“Go raise a ruckus somewhere.  But be safe, eh?”

Easing the car out of the garage, Antonia realized she had nowhere to go.  Well, maybe she’d drive over to the lake.  If she was fast and careful, she’d make it before the sun set.  And wouldn’t that a be a sight.

Her car needed a name.  Mulling over the possible choices left her, in retrospect, too distracted to drive.  No wonder it had taken her three tries before she finally got her license.  Sometimes the thoughts in her head edged out the world around her.  “You need to sustain your concentration young lady, or you will kill someone.  This is two tons of metal you are moving around,” the first instructor that failed her said.  It was a good piece of advice, she knew, but harder to put into practice than it seemed.

To be fair, it was not quite dusk when she took the turnoff to the lake.  The clouds gave the sky a lovely orange-purple glow.  She was stuck between Dee, in honor of Danielle, and Ralph.  What she was not doing, and should have been, was paying enough attention to the road. 

“Are you trying to run me over?!”  Dean Ardsley practically dove out of the way of her car.  Her heart raced.  Someone with slower reflexes – an old man, a young child – would have been hit. 

Antonia’s hands shook on the steering wheel.  Despite telling herself to get out of the car and see if he was ok, she couldn’t make herself do it.  Fear caught her squarely in the gut.  Had she seen him subconsciously and kept driving?  Was she that upset with him? 

Knocking on her window, Dean asked, “Antonia?”  When she didn’t answer he pulled opened the driver’s side door.  Something in her expression must have worried him, because the anger fled his face, replaced by concern.  “Are you hurt?”  His hands roamed over her lightly, checking for injuries.  “Sweetheart, please get out of the car.  Talk to me.  Are you ok?”

Antonia burst into tears.  She couldn’t say why.  Relief, maybe, that she hadn’t killed anyone.  Hurt, sorrow at how things ended between her and Dean.  Anger that this had come to pass.  There was so much to choose from. 

Frustrations acknowledged and long buried welled out of her.  Figures that today of all days and Dean of all people would be the one to see her break.  But that thought wasn’t enough to stop the hysteria. 

Only when she realized that she was crying into his shoulder, that Dean had slid into the passenger seat and put her on his lap did she stop.  “I’m sorry,” she sniffled, not willing to meet his eyes. 

“Me too,” he whispered into her hair.  And so they sat there for a bit, in the kind of comfortable silence that characterized the early days of their relationship.  She had missed him tremendously.