A FEW DAYS before Christmas my car stalled out so I left Lena with the Lindas and got into the cab of a tow truck, where I sat beside a driver who pulled my car into the only car-repair place in town. Imagine my displeased surprise—although I shouldn’t have been surprised, since after all the town is small—when I was greeted by the beefy man from the diner.
He was the owner, apparently, since he wore a button-down collar shirt while the other, thinner man behind the counter wore polyester-mesh with the name of the franchise appliquéd. The beefy man—John—reclined with his arms crossed in a posture of managerial ease; I stood across the counter and smiled wanly. I felt the discomfort I always feel in car-repair places, the low-level dread of condescension followed by cost inflation, and wished to call upon my considerable expertise on the workings of internal combustion. Unfortunately I had none.
Waiting for the man to finish typing and Beefy John to finish watching him, I looked around at the walls, at ugly posters for automotive service packages, tires, motor oils.
One poster was markedly different: it was for something called American Family Radio. I peered closely at it, an airbrushed-looking photo of a plump, pink-faced man in headphones, shining smugly. Inscribed beneath his face and what I guessed was the name of his radio show were the smaller words The AFA Works to: (1) Restrain Evil by Exposing the Works of Darkness . . .
“Ma’am?” said Beefy John, finally.
I tore myself away from the fine print.
“Hey there, and how’s that pretty little girl of yours? What can we do you for today?”
“My car keeps stalling out,” I said. “A Honda. It’s a Civic hybrid—getting a little old, maybe. But it’s always been pretty reliable. I can leave it overnight.”
“A Honda, huh? Well sure, we can take a look at that rice burner for you,” said Beefy John, and his smile said he was bestowing a favor. “B.Q. here will help you with the paperwork.” He smiled again before he clapped the underling on the shoulder, tapped his forehead in my direction in a mock salute and disappeared into the back office.
“B.Q.?” I asked.
“ ’At’s me,” said the underling, typing.
“What does the Q stand for? If you don’t mind the question.”
“Quiet,” he said.
“Quiet?”
“Be Quiet. Always saying that to me when I was a kid.”
B.Q. looked up from the keyboard and grimaced. His teeth were a rotting brown from the gums up, old-bone yellow and tobacco brown.
Handing over my keys I realized Don wasn’t due to pick me up for almost half an hour; it was bitterly cold outside and I needed to be warm while I waited. But Beefy John in his satisfied recline, his crossed arms, the words that pretty little girl of yours, the jagged mossy teeth of B.Q.—they made me uncomfortable. The words land shark came to me as I signed the work order, B.Q. leaning forward unnecessarily from the other side of the counter, so close that I could smell the residue of cigarettes. B.Q. wasn’t a shark, surely, he seemed more ruined than fierce, but the teeth . . . I considered whether his meth use was current or past, whether teeth ravaged by meth could be reclaimed. Then I pivoted and walked out into the winter, pretending to have a goal.
Once I was on the sidewalk I slowed down and ambled, watching my breath fog and feeling the cold on my cheeks until I fetched up in front of the library and went in. I hadn’t had that goal in mind, of all the thousands of possibilities offered by libraries no single one presented itself to me, but there, right away, was the librarian I was attracted to. I had nothing to say as he looked up from the front desk, nothing at all. And yet I felt better already.
“Sorry, just coming in from the cold,” I blurted.
“What we’re here for,” he said.
I couldn’t think of any more small talk so I wandered along the shelves looking at titles, plucking out books at random. I seemed to be in a section either for children or for adults who were childlike: true-life accounts of balloonists, explorers. Pictures of famous caves. Prehistoric animals turned to fossil—trilobites that looked like beetles, ammonites that looked like snails. Real-life Monsters. Haunted Houses of New Orleans. The more I looked at the variety of subjects, the more hopeful I felt.