Clutch

Fifteen, maybe twenty raindrops on the windshield and she's reaching over here to turn the wipers on. I can still see fine but the wipers shudder across the glass and leave a wide, gritty smear. I have to use the wiper fluid. "Just smears it," I tell her.

"What?" she says. She's on my cellphone.

"I said it just smears it."

"Hold on," she says to the phone. "Hold on," she says to me. "What?" she says to the phone.

The light turns green. I give it too much gas and when her coffee spills in her lap I blame it on the clutch.

"Who was that?" I ask when she's through on the phone.

"Rod," she says. She looks out the window at the clock outside the bank: 7:14 p.m. and just above freezing. "We're late."

I say something stupendously lame about Alice and the Mad Hatter being disappointed. She's not listening. I try again. "Of course, Wednesday night Bingo ain't no tea party." Nothing. "And the V.F.W. hall's a hell of a lot weirder than Wonderland."

She's silent. I fiddle with the heater. It really is weirder than Wonderland, though, because we're both twenty-two and she's attractive and short-skirted and we're playing board games with a hundred geriatric lechers and their jittery, puckered wives. But we're broke, and sometimes we win, and for us that's reason enough.

I look over at her. She's still looking out the window.

"What'd you say?" she says. She looks at me.

"Nothing," I mutter. It's raining hard now and I turn on the wipers. "I was just saying how Bingo's weirder than Wonderland."

"Oh, were you?" She turns back to the window.

"So who's Rod?" I am superior to anyone named Rod. "Buddy in porn?"

"Bartender at work." She's rubbing at the scuff-marks on her black leather boots, the knee-high ones she can't get off unless we brace ourselves against each other and pull.

I can't stop making stupid jokes. "Well, if Rod has trouble reaching the, ah, the expensive liquor on the high shelf-"

"The top-shelf liquors," she says. She's a waitress so she knows.

"Right, well, if he can't reach, I get a lot of e-mail from people who can help him out if, ah, Rod needs an extra couple of inches." I immediately feel stupid.

"That's funny." It looks for a second like she's smiling at the joke but she's checking her lipstick in the mirror on the visor. It wasn't funny. I pretend it was and laugh so she knows I made it for me, not her.

She says something but her mouth is still twisted in a lipstick-checking contortion.

"What?"

"I said you crack yourself up. You find a job today?" She smacks her lips and flips up the visor. "ŚCause you still owe me half the rent. Did you even look? I can't wear the pants around here forever."

"No," I say, "but you sure can wear that skirt. Goddamn." I run a red light and her nails leave marks on my hand when she moves it back to the gearshift. I check the rearview for cops and slow to the speed limit, and the whole time she's looking at me like I shit my pants.

"What?" I say. "Jesus. Sorry." I'm not; I want her to be.

"You're like that pervert at the V.F.W. You're just like him. That old guy."

"That narrows it down," I say, but I know who she's talking about.

"Fuckhead, I mean the one that groped me."

And I guess it took her saying it, but suddenly I really am sorry, because her voice gets soft and scratchy and the last two words are whispered. I saw her running toward the door that night, and without knowing what had happened I chased her out into the freezing wind and saw her slip and fall in her boots and her skirt on the ice and frozen gravel in the parking lot, and helping her up I dropped the keys and kicked them under the car. She stood on scraped and naked legs and cried in short harsh breaths while I crawled under the car on my belly, fumbling for the keys, and just when my hand closed around them she finally screamed, for the first time and just once but with everything, and my head snapped up and hit the oilpan and the world flashed bright and went black. She had to drag me out and drive me home, and on the way she told me what happened but my head hurt so much I didn't care until much, much later.

And she still wears that skirt because she won't let some pervert change the way she dresses at Bingo. I am proud of her for that. Neither of us is proud of me.

I brake very easily at the next light so she won't spill her coffee. "Hey," I say. "I'm sorry." I reach over to squeeze her knee but she moves my hand back to the gearshift. She's gentle this time but it hurts a lot more. So much for that. The light turns green and when her coffee spills in her lap I blame it on the clutch.

- Ty Williams