T WAS AT that very same moment that the electricity
sputtered and blinked and disappeared altogether, abandoning the broken city,
and leaving Warren in the dark. He was shaken and very concerned about Howard,
his cat, who, when the house started to move, bolted straight up from his comfy
snooze and flew like a fiery streak out the kitchen door into the living room
and off to parts unknown.
But Warren quickly forgot about his cat when he
looked out the window and saw his car—an aging Chrysler LeBaron with a rusted
fender and a missing side mirror—teeter on its jack, fall off and begin to roll
down the steep street in front of his house. The driverless car was not rolling
fast at first, certainly not as fast as Warren was running after he blasted out
the front door of his house, and sprinted down the street after it like a
cheetah or a gazelle or an ostrich. Granted, ostriches look funny when they
run, but they’re plenty fast.
All of it was pointless because, once he caught up
with the car, he didn’t have his car keys, so he couldn’t open the door to get
inside and stop it. Nor was he strong enough to stop the car’s growing momentum
as it continued to roll down the street. All he really managed to do was look
silly as he pushed and pulled, grunted and strained, like he was giving birth
to a fatheaded baby. The car ignored him and rolled smack into the side of a
warehouse at the bottom of the hill.
That’s how he met Lily. She lived in the warehouse.
The warehouse’s large steel door slid open with a
metallic screech as Lily stepped out to see what had smashed into her
warehouse. Warren noticed right away how pretty she was, and not just because
her cheeks were flushed red with anger. She looked about 30, had a small
upturned nose and piercing steel blue eyes that he guessed could be very bright
and kind, when she wasn’t so angry. Her reddish brown hair was swept back into
a tight ponytail that made her look a little like a schoolgirl. Of course, she
sure didn’t sound like a schoolgirl when she looked at Warren’s Chrysler and
saw the dent it had made in the side of her warehouse. She turned back to him
and accused him of a number of things, but mostly of driving like a lunatic.
“Well?” she finally asked.
He realized then that he’d only been watching her
talk, and now she was expecting him to answer. “Uh, I wasn’t actually driving
the car. It fell off a jack and rolled here.”
“Then why didn’t you make sure it wouldn’t fall
off the jack?”
She was starting to sound unreasonable—despite how
pretty she was—and Warren was himself beginning to get angry. “Gee, I’m sorry,”
he said, “but I didn’t know there’d be an earthquake today.” The last was said
with a good dose of sarcasm.
“Uh-huh. So, I guess an earthquake in San Francis-co
is a great big surpriseto you.” She too, apparently, was plenty
capable of sarcasm.
“Look, I’ll take care of it,” he told her.
“You’d better.”
“I will!”
She stood with her hands on her hips, sizing him
up. “Fine,” she said finally. “But I don’t like you.”
“You don’t know me,” he answered. “If you knew me,
you’d like me.”
She looked him over another moment. “No, I don’t
think so.” When they went inside to exchange phone numbers
and insurance information, Warren saw that she was an artist and that she’d
been working on a great many paintings and sculptures. Everything, however, was
very much in disarray because of the earthquake. Many of the paintings had
fallen off their easels, and a number of sculptures had toppled over. Some were
broken. Though it was very much a mess, he could see that she was very
talented.
One of the oil paintings lying on the floor was
beautiful in its sweeping blend of cheerful yellows and deep blues, yet it
seemed to tell of sadness in the dirt-smudged face of a little girl standing
beside a military tank. Another painting showed a man and a woman holding each
other while a giant wood screw passed into the woman’s back and jutted out of
the man’s back. Near a sidewall there was a sculpture of a limousine parked on
top of some farm workers.
Judging from her work, she was not happy about war
or hungry children or poverty or greed. When he asked her about a couple of the
paintings, it was pretty clear that she felt strongly about them and that her
paintings and sculptures brought her great satisfaction and pride. Which left
Warren feeling envious and a little sad because he no longer felt that way
about his own work.
“What do you teach?” Lily asked him after they had
exchanged information and she’d finally stopped being so angry and, of course,
after he complimented her artwork.
“Social studies. Sixth grade.”
“Oh. That’s interesting,” she said, trying to
sound polite, because she remembered how very uninteresting it was when she was
in school.
“But I really don’t know how much longer I’ll be a
teacher,” Warren found himself saying, despite his never having said so before.
He said it, he realized later, because he was trying to impress her, because he
didn’t want her to think he was just another ordinary typical boring
schoolteacher—which is what he was beginning to suspect he was.
He
also realized that he liked her.
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Chapter Three
