Boom Town By Laura J. Oliver

The other night, I was working at the kitchen table, waiting for the sushi rice timer, when Leah-dog started barking as if the neighborhood fox had breached the fence or a delivery driver had approached the porch.

Most likely a package from Amazon, I thought. Leah was in the living room overlooking the street, and she hates Amazon trucks. She tells me this frequently, only it comes out, “Treat, squirrel, play, walk.” 

The barking went on a lot longer than it takes to drop a package by the stone planter, however, so I put down my wine, and walked into the living room to peek out the window. In front of the house, a middle-aged woman dressed like a real estate agent was photographing my car with her iPhone.

I knew instantly, I’d been hit.

 Again. 

The only questions were: how bad was the damage, how long would I be without my car, and how much was my deductible? I opened the front door, cringing as I approached the street side of my car.

I expect to like everyone, and I am habitually polite, but I didn’t stop myself from audibly groaning when I saw what she’d done. 

In broad daylight, she had managed to take out two panels and the side view mirror of my VW Jetta, backing out of the driveway across the road where her company had just listed a multi-multi-million-dollar house. One of us was going to be impacted by this a lot more than the other. 

Not the one getting that commission.

The last time this happened was in the dead of night, and I was asleep, alone, when the sound of metal crashing into metal awoke me with a boom. Scared and sick with the knowledge that something really bad had just happened, I threw on a robe and ran out onto the darkened street. My Honda Civic, which had been parked where my VW is parked today (the only place I can park since I have no driveway), had been shoved bizarrely broadside into the road where it would have been blocking traffic had it not been 1 a.m. and the bars closed.

By the light of a streetlamp down the block, I could see that the entire back and side of the car were crumpled, and chunks of metal, glass, and plastic littered the pavement. 

Not a single light came on in any of the neighboring houses in response to the crash. Just me, standing barefoot in the wreckage of my car—wishing someone would save me. Mr. Oliver was in New Zealand at that time, 12,000 miles from home. I did the math—“Count 8 hours backward and make it tomorrow,” to see if it was a reasonable time to call the southern hemisphere. My crisp autumn night was his balmy spring afternoon.  

I was going to have to handle this myself, but something violent and shockingly unexpected had happened, and I needed someone to be in it with me. Aren’t you braver, more competent, and calmer when there is someone with you to search the basement for the dead mouse? To go with you to hear your lab results?

Satellites orbiting overhead beamed my call across midwestern plains and rocky mountains, stormy seas and starry skies to the deck of an America’s Cup yacht in the middle of the Hauraki Gulf. 

Sorry. Call the police, he said. 

Two uniformed officers, a man and a woman, arrived a few minutes later. No need for sirens, but the guns on their hips added to the surreal nature of the scene. They shook their heads, called a tow truck, and left as I picked up the pieces of my car so no one would have to drive through the debris in the morning. I briefly wondered who normally does that? Picks up the wreckage? And the answer seemed to be “You pick up your own broken pieces in this life. Put your shoes on. Do your job.”

The next day, the officer who had taken the report called. “We got him,” he said. “He blew out his tires when he hit you and drove away on his rims.” The cop laughed. “The gouge in the pavement led us straight from your house to his.”

“Like breadcrumbs,” I said. 

He laughed again. “He was hiding behind the living room curtain when we pulled up.”

My car was totaled. I was told to go to the impound lot where it had been towed to retrieve anything of value. I found the car on the other side of a chain-link fence. Suddenly, it felt foreign, alien. Abandoned amidst a sea of other wounded vehicles, it had become something different and no longer mine. It’s not like someone shot your horse, I thought. Get over it. But I actually grieved a little. I seem to become unreasonably attached to things. 

Sure. 

We’re talking about cars.

I pulled out sunglasses, a cellphone cord, an umbrella, and a couple of receipts. 

Life can get turned on end while you’re deep in your dreams or waiting for the rice to boil. And there are risks we have to take when we don’t have off-street parking, and otherwise. But the intimacy of disaster, and the exhilaration of joy are just better if someone else holds them, too.

Everything that happens to me becomes a story for you.