his voice I am struggling to interpret his words; they sound farther and farther away, less like meaningful speech. It is hard to think what the right answer is. “The policeman who lives with—in my apartment house. He saw the flat tires. He called in the other policeman. He told me what to do.”
“He should have told you to go to work,” Crenshaw says. “There was no reason for you to hang around. You’ll have to make the time up, you know.”
“I know.” I wonder if he has to make the time up when something delays him. I wonder if he has ever had a flat tire, or four flat tires, on the way to work.
“Be sure you don’t put it down as overtime,” he says, and clicks off. He did not say he was sorry I had four flat tires. That is the conventional thing to say, “too bad” or “how awful,” but although he is normal, he did not say either of those things. Maybe he is not sorry; maybe he has no sympathy to express. I had to learn to say conventional things even when I did not feel them, because that is part of fitting in and learning to get along . Has anyone ever asked Mr. Crenshaw to fit in, to get along?
It would be my lunch hour, though I am behind, needing to make up time. I feel hollow inside; I start for the office kitchenette and realize that I do not have anything for lunch. I must have left it on the counter when I went back to my apartment to file the insurance claim. There is nothing in the refrigerator box with my initials on it. I had emptied it the day before.
We have no food vending machine in our building. Nobody would eat the food and it spoiled, so they took the machine away. The company has a dining hall across the campus, and there is a vending machine in the next building over. The food in those machines is awful. If it is a sandwich, all the parts of the sandwich are mushed together and slimy with mayonnaise or salad dressing. Green stuff, red stuff, meat chopped up with other flavors. Even if I take one apart and scrape the bread clean of mayonnaise, the smell and taste linger and are on whatever meat it is. The sweet things—the doughnuts and rolls—are sticky, leaving disgusting smears on the plastic containers when you take them out. My stomach twists, imagining this.
I would drive out and buy something, even though we don’t usually leave at lunch, but my car is still at the apartment, forlorn on its flat tires. I do not want to walk across the campus and eat in that big, noisy room with people I do not know, people who think of us as weird and dangerous. I do not know if the food there would be any better.
“Forget your lunch?” Eric asks. I jump. I have not talked to any of the others yet.
“Someone cut the tires on my car,” I say. “I was late. Mr. Crenshaw is angry with me. I left my lunch at home by accident. My car is at home.”
“You are hungry?”
“Yes. I do not want to go to the dining hall.”
“Chuy is going to run errands at lunch,” Eric says.
“Chuy does not like anyone to ride with him,” Linda says.
“I can talk to Chuy,” I say.
Chuy agrees to pick up some lunch for me. He is not going to a grocery store, so I will have to eat something he can pick up easily. He comes back with apples and a sausage in a bun. I like apples but not sausage. I do not like the little mixed-up bits in it. It is not as bad as some things, though, and I am hungry, so I eat it and do not think about it much.
It is 4:16 when I remember that I have not called anyone to replace the tires on my car. I call up the local directory listings and print the list of numbers. The on-line listings show the locations, so I begin with the ones closest to my apartment. When I contact them, one after another tells me it is too late to do anything today.
“Quickest thing to do,” one of them says, “is buy four mounted tires and put them on yourself, one at a time.” It would cost a lot of money to buy four tires and wheels,