W Is for Wasted

count. What car wash? What money? I listened to the message a second time and comprehension dawned. The guy at the car wash . . . oh,
that
guy. Drew was the one who’d admired my Boss 429 a lifetime ago. When I’d offered to sell the car for the five grand I paid, he expressed interest, but I hadn’t taken him seriously. I still hoped to get rid of the car, but not just now. In order to off-load the Mustang, I’d have to line up another vehicle, which might take weeks. You don’t just run out and buy the first car that catches your fancy. That’s how I’d acquired the Mustang and look what a dumb move that was.
    I tried Drew’s number, which was busy. I left the scratch pad in plain sight to remind myself to try him again.
    I peered out of the window. William still sat in the sun, his head back, his eyes closed, this time with Ed on his lap. The cat stood and stared into William’s face intently, perhaps mistaking him for dead. I was praying nobody else would die or I’d have three funerals on my hands. To appease my jangled sensibilities, I made myself another hot hard-boiled-egg sandwich with a line of mayonnaise so thick it looked like a slice of cheese. The copious amounts of salt I shook onto the mayonnaise glistened like artificial snow. I knew if I’d gone to Rosie’s right then, I’d have ordered a glass of wine just to settle my nerves. As often as I thought of Dace, I kept forgetting he was dead. Not only dead, but related to me and I was charged with his care. In the “olden” days when I longed for family—which I’d now thoroughly repented—I always pictured living persons instead of the other kind. Now I had some of each.
    I finished lunch and put a call through to the service station to inquire about my tire. The attendant seemed surprised to hear from me and it was clear he’d forgotten. Happily, the mechanic in the service bay had taken care of it. I drove the four blocks and read a comic book while the newly repaired tire was swapped out for the spare. While the mechanic was at it, he insisted on rotating and balancing the tires, a process I had little patience with but endured nonetheless.
    When I got home, I scurried through the backyard like a thief, unlocking my door in haste. It would only be a matter of time before Anna came knocking on my door, trying to con me out of who knows what.
    I settled on the sofa with a book, pausing to peek out the window now and then to see if William was still there. For a while he remained, making notes on the back of an envelope. The afternoon stretched on. When I found myself sliding down on the sofa, I pulled a quilt over me for warmth. For unpaid time off, due to lack of work, this was close to perfect. All the comforts of home and it wasn’t costing me a cent. Next thing I knew, I’d drifted off to sleep.
    Of course I didn’t hear from Dietz. I couldn’t believe he was so clueless when it came to his son. I’ve never even had a kid and I still had a better sense of what was going on. It was natural for Nick to be territorial. Not that there was any reason to be alarmed. Dietz and I were not an item. In the ebb and flow of our relationship, the tide was usually going out. I’d thought of Dietz as a gadabout, a freewheeling soul whose ties were few and whose life was his own. But nobody with kids can evade the commitment indefinitely. Dietz had lived as though he had no one to answer to. Naomi had stepped into the breach for him and filled the parenting role. Now that she was gone, he was “it.” Apparently, he hadn’t twigged to the fact that Nick and Graham would be looking to him for guidance, companionship, and spare cash. For the first time in all the years I’d known him—five by my count—I saw Dietz as a man with baggage. In the singles world, “baggage” is a dirty word, denoting ex-wives, double mortgages, spousal support, writs, liens, offspring of all ages, split-vacation time, alternating holidays, family-counseling sessions, attorneys’ fees, PTA conferences, private schools, college tuition, accusations, court appearances, and vicious spats on every conceivable subject, including any new relationship the offending parent was engaged in that the other parent objected to.
    In my brief fling with Jonah Robb I’d had a taste of this. I was relegated to the wings, a peripheral character in the play that he and his wife/ex-wife had produced, cast, and starred in from seventh grade until the present. I’d bowed out