'Wrong,' he croaked, and the word was almost lost in the slick, mysterious sound of the falling sleet.
He stood on the walk, looking at his stalled car, marvellously resurrected time traveller from the era of Buddy Holly and Khrushchev and Laika the Space Dog, and suddenly he hated it. It had done something to him, he wasn't sure what. Something.
The dash lights, blurred into football-shaped red eyes by the moisture on the window, seemed to mock him and reproach him at the same time.
He opened the driver's side door, slipped behind the wheel, and pulled the door shut again. He closed his eyes. Peace flowed over him and things seemed to come back together. He had lied to her, yes, but it was a little lie. A mostly unimportant lie. No - a completely unimportant lie.
He reached out without opening his eyes and touched the leather rectangle the keys were attached to - old and scuffed, the initials R.D.L. burned into it. He had seen no need to get a new keyring, or a piece of leather with his own initials on it.
But there was something peculiar about the leather tab the keys were attached to, wasn't there? Yes. Quite peculiar indeed.
When he had counted out the cash on LeBay's kitchen table and LeBay had skittered the keys across the red-and-white-checked oilcloth to him, the rectangle of leather had been scuffed and nicked and darkened by age, the initials almost obliterated by time and the constant friction of rubbing against the change in the old man's pocket and the material of the pocket itself.
Now the initials stood out fresh and clear again. They had been renewed.
But, like the lie, that was really unimportant. Sitting inside the metal shell of Christine's body, he felt very strongly that that was true.
He knew it. Quite unimportant, all of it.
He turned the key. The starter whined, but for a long time the engine wouldn't catch. Wet wires. Of course that was what it was.
'Please,' he whispered. 'It's all right, don't worry, everything is the same.'
The engine fired, missed. The starter whined on and on. Sleet ticked coldly on the glass. It was safe in here; it was dry and warm. If the engine would start.
'Come on,' Arnie whispered. 'Come on, Christine. Come on, hon.'
The engine fired again, caught. The dash lights flickered and went out. The IGN light pulsed weakly again as the motor stuttered, then went out for good as the beat of the engine smoothed out into a clean hum.
The heater blew warm air gently around his legs, negating the winter chill outside.
It seemed to him that there were things Leigh could not understand, things she could never understand. Because she hadn't been around. The pimples. The cries of Hey Pizza-Face! The wanting to speak, the wanting to reach out to other people, and the inability. The impotence. It seemed to him that she couldn't understand the simple fact that, had it not been for Christine, he never would have had the courage to call her on the phone even if she had gone around with I WANT TO DATE ARNIE CUNNINGHAM tattooed on her forehead. She couldn't understand that he sometimes felt thirty years older than his age - no! more like fifty! and not a boy at all but some terribly hurt veteran back from an undeclared war.
He caressed the steering wheel. The green cats' eyes of the dash instruments glowed back at him comfortingly.
'Okay,' he said. Almost sighed.
He dropped the gearshift into big D and flicked on the radio. Dee Dee Sharp singing 'Mashed Potato Time'; mystic nonsense on the radio waves coming out of the dark.
He pulled out, planning to head for the airport, where he would park his car and catch the bus that ran back to town on the hour. And he did that, but not in time to take the 11:00 p.m. bus as he had intended. He took the midnight bus instead, and it was not until he was in bed that night recalling Leigh's warm kisses instead of the way Christine wouldn't fire up, that it occurred to him that somewhere that evening, after leaving the Cabot house and before arriving at the airport, he had lost an hour. It was so obvious that he felt like a man who has turned the house upside down looking for a vital bit of correspondence, only to discover that he has been holding it in his other hand all along. Obvious .