ROADSIDE STAND

Why you left me poking around at the roadside vegetable stand, while you slipped back into the car and drove to Lord knows where, I have no idea.  But as I was looking for stuff for a salad for dinner to make later at your mom’s,  a small tingle crept across the back of my neck, causing me to shiver.
     Looking up, I saw the space in the gravel parking lot where your father’s Impala had been only moments before.  Seeing that and what I took to be just a speck of brown dust kicked up from the turning of your wheels made me squeeze the two hot house tomatoes I had in my hand, nearly turning them into ketchup with my bare hands.
      Now I would have to find out how to get back home.
      Who could I approach?  At the edge of the stand, an elderly couple fiddled with a giant orange squash.  Closer, a young woman in a blue warm-up suit wearing white earbuds was fingering some cucumbers.  I couldn’t be certain, but it was my guess that the man running the cash register didn’t speak much English.  I didn't feel like telling complete strangers that you had ditched me on the side of the road.  I may have sacrificed my self-respect with you, but that doesn't mean I had to give it up for everyone I came across.  Reflexively, my palms hit my pants pocket, serving only to remind me that I’d left my cell phone in the car.
      You bastard.
      I set the tomatoes down as a phantom cell phone vibration made my thigh tingle.
      I made my way out from under the wooden roof. The whoosh of an F150 doing at least 80 on that dusty two-lane road brought me back to my senses.
      I know you too well by now to think you’re heartless.
      It must be something else.
      I started walking; I figured I could make our apartment in a couple hours, which was just enough time to pack before dusk.  DFP

STICK

      My parents owned a 1970 Chevy Nova and when they handed it down to me not too long after my sixteenth birthday, they had it painted it black with a red racing strip.  It was as close to be “cool,” as I would ever come.  The catch, as it turned out, was that I was going to have to learn to drive a manual transmission.  Learning to drive a stick was easier than I thought, but that doesn’t mean things went perfectly.
One day I remember heading to school, motoring up the long hill on the way to another mind-numbing day of eleventh grade, when I had to come to a full stop at the red light at the top.  Even though I knew what to do with a manual transmission, hills were a problem.  On even a slight grade, taking your foot off the gas pedal could mean rolling into the car behind, but letting the clutch out too fast meant you could stall.
I always dreaded stopping at this particular light because of how steep the hill was and sometimes even blew through the yellow just so I wouldn’t risk being stuck there on the red.  So there I was: stuck in this ugly metaphor for my adolescence when I noticed that, beside me, Nancy Bucaro had just rolled up in her family’s VW Microbus.
My “problem” just graduated to a moral dilemma.
Questions began coursing through my brain.
Pop the clutch and risk stalling?
Take my foot off the brake and accordion the hood of the car behind me?
Actually, those weren’t the questions at all.  At that point, embarrassing myself in front of Nancy was a foregone conclusion, so the only question left at that point, really, was in what WAY did I want to embarrass myself?
It was no longer an issue of probability, but execution.
While I was pondered just sitting there with the engine idling until graduation day, the light turned green.
Instinctively, I yanked my left foot off the clutch and my right foot crushed the accelerator.
The air filled with the squeal of peeling rubber, and that decade-old Nova flew off the line like a black bullet.
That was nearly forty years ago, but I still figure that if you have to embarrass yourself in front of a girl, peeling out’s the way to go.  DFP