semi up ahead with its hazards flashing, which explained what happened to the car. But then the other thing I notice right away is that it had been a brand-spankin’ new vehicle—doesn’t even have plates yet, just the paper tags from the dealer—Wendell Imports.”
As Brawny spoke, Priscilla could see him fall into the same predictable pattern that had finally driven her over the edge. She cocked her beer and drank it a third of the way down in one swallow.
“And then I see an arm dangling out the smashed-in side in a way that weren’t natural.”
“Brawny—”
“I pull up in front of the white Jetta, and I see in the rearview what was left of the windshield—”
“Brawny, stop.”
“—dark stuff running down behind the deflated airbags, the whole thing is sprayed with blood—red everywhere.” Priscilla stood, her agitation making her heart pound. Brawny was visibly shaking now, his mouth quivering with emotion. “I’m not going to make a move till EMS gets there, but I can’t take my eyes off the mirror.”
“Okay, I get the picture. Now the best thing to do is put it out of your mind,” Priscilla said, her voice suddenly calm and instructive.
“But Sammy, I can’t. It took for-fuckin’-ever for the paramedics to show up, and I’m sittin’ there and I see something movin’. I get out—I had to—and I go to the not smashed-in side, and pressed up against the cracked window was this girl’s face. ‘Help me,’ she says. I can’t really hear her, ’cause now the sirens are wailing, but I can read her lips. I yank on the door as hard as I can, but the damn thing is sealed shut. I want to break away the glass and try to open it from the inside, but I was afraid of hurting her more. Hold on, I tell her—the ambulance is right here.”
“Brawny, don’t do this to yourself.”
“But then her eyes closed. I could feel in the pit of my stomach she was gone. I hung around praying to myself as they pried open the good side with the Jaws of Life. They peeled her out and, shit, the other one—what was left of him. It was a boy, the one who’d been driving. They were kids, Sammy—couldn’t be more than eighteen, the pair of them. Probably high school sweethearts out for a spin in his graduation present.” Brawny’s features crumbled with the onslaught of tears.
Priscilla sank resignedly down on the arm of the chair and let her hand rest tentatively on his back. Brawny covered his face and gave himself up to a full-fledged breakdown. Priscilla bit her lip, angry that she had allowed Brawny to suck her into his recurring melodramas, but still feeling too much compassion to tell him to hit the road.
If there was another woman in his life—and she had never known of a time when there wasn’t—then it should be his current babe’s responsibility to pick up the pieces of this shattered giant and put him back together. It was no longer her job. She’d been relieved of that duty when she gave up the relative pleasures of having him as the steady man in her life. She realized how ironic it was that she should think of the word ‘steady’ in association with this overly-susceptible hulk, a man who had the outwardly appearance of immense strength, yet was so vulnerable on the inside, he often felt other’s troubles more painfully than his own.
If Brawny hadn’t been in such a state, she would have laughed out loud. What was it about her that made her a magnet for the downtrodden, the morose and the cursed? Why had her life been filled with a non-stop parade of unfortunate souls who were doomed to a life of continual disappointments and calamities?
This was the same question she had posed to herself countless times, and she had long ago figured out the answer. It was her fate to have her life populated with habitual losers. And when she was up to admitting it, she acknowledged that being surrounded by Darwinian failures qualified her as a loser herself.
Priscilla patted Brawny on the