After he’d wedged himself in the car and started driving—directly into the sun, that was—he was reminded that he had a splitting headache, and after a day of trying to sober up, he was ravenously hungry. In fact, he was surfing his phone for any nearby McDonald’s as traffic crawled along, which resulted in him taking a wrong turn.
When Joe looked up, he realized he had just entered the river of vehicles moving at a snail’s pace into the terminal. “Ah hell,” he muttered, then pounded the steering wheel a few times to let off some frustration.
Traffic into the terminal was barely moving as people drove in to pick up stranded passengers. Joe’s fingers drummed impatiently on the steering wheel. He tried to find a radio station, but everyone was talking about the blizzard and the impending strike. He switched that off, then turned his head slightly to shove fingers through his hair. That’s when he caught sight of pink in his peripheral vision. He sat up; he could see her on the sidewalk, taking up an entire bench with her pink raft and luggage. Kate herself was sitting with her knees together, her elbows braced against them, her head in her hands, her blonde hair spilling around her shoulders.
“Good luck,” he sighed as he inched by. But as he neared the split in the road—right would take him to freedom, away from the terminal, while left would circle back around—he inexplicably went left.
“What are you doing?” he shouted at himself. Yes, okay, he’d taken pity on her. For one thing, she was pretty with those eyes and that hair. He had a thing for silky hair. And in spite of the fact that she had no spatial awareness when it came to shared armrests, she seemed nice. After all, she’d given him a bag of peanuts. Last, he had to acknowledge that she was severely handicapped with that pink thing. The least he could do was give her a ride to Houston.
“Consider it your good deed of the day,” he muttered to himself as he maneuvered into the lane to pick up passengers. “If you do this good deed, you won’t feel too bad when you grab the last seat on some flight to Seattle.”
It took another ten minutes to reach the curb. She was now sitting up, her shapely legs, encased in boots and tights, sprawled before her, her head back on the bench and her eyes closed. Joe rolled down the window. “Hey, Kate!” he called out the window.
She sat up with a start and looked wildly about.
Joe honked his horn. “Kate! Over here!”
She realized where he was and stood up, squinting at him warily. “Joe?”
“I’m going to Houston. Want to come?”
Now she looked completely suspicious, as if she thought it was some sort of joke, as if someone was going to leap out from behind a bush and announce that she’d been punked. So much for good intentions, Joe thought.
“I just thought I’d offer. But you don’t have to go—”
“No!” Kate did a funny little hop. “I mean yes! Yesssss!”
Now Joe was the one who was startled. She was suddenly dragging her things toward the car. He hopped out and hurried around to help her. “Here,” she said, shoving her suitcase at him.
That thing was heavy—what was she carrying, a bunch of bricks? “What is in here?” he asked, lugging it along to the car.
“Shoes,” she said breathlessly. “And books.”
Joe threw it into the trunk and closed it. Kate was trying to get the pink thing in the backseat. He walked around, intending to help her. “Let me help you.”
“Got it!” she said quickly. “It can’t get wrinkled.” She bent into his car, squirming around as she tried to fit the thing in perfectly.
But the only thing Joe could see was her derriere. He didn’t mean to look, but come on, how could her help it? He was a guy, and that was a nice derriere. When she’d finally situated the pink raft as she wanted, she backed out, turned around, and looked up at him, pushing her hair back from her face. There was a slender moment when her gaze flicked over his face, and then her eyes narrowed slightly.
She knew he’d been looking.
“What’s in there, anyway?” he asked.
“In there? In there is the ugliest, most hideous, god-awful poufy piece of peach taffeta in the history of mankind. But I have to wear it or my cousin will die. And I’m not kidding.”
Joe smiled. “Okay, then. Let’s get out of here, huh?”
“Please,” she said primly, and slid very gracefully into the passenger seat of that stupidly small car, and stuffed her shoulder bag in at her feet.
Joe walked around and wedged himself in again, then eased in front of another car.
“I thought we could grab something to eat on the way out,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.”
“Oh, me too!” she said, sinking back into the passenger seat. “I tried to get some yogurt at the food court, but there is nothing left. Nothing! It’s like zombies went through and ate everything.”
“Zombies don’t eat,” he said absently as he pulled into traffic.
She looked at him as if she thought he was crazy. “What do you mean, they don’t eat?”
“Zombies are dead,” he said. “They don’t eat. Haven’t you ever seen a zombie movie?”
“No.”
“No?” Joe had never known a single person who hadn’t seen a zombie movie, with the exception of his mother. It was practically a requirement for his generation, which he assumed Kate was part of. “You have to see a zombie movie. Just one. You can’t go an entire lifetime without it,” he said as they began to inch out of the terminal.
She laughed. “I’ve made it twenty-eight years without seeing one.”
Yeah, well, he would keep his opinions about that to himself. “So how are you at navigating?” he asked, and thrust the one-page map the rental counter had given him in her direction.
She snatched it out of his hand and peered closely. “I happen to be pretty fantastic at navigating. Where are we?”
He pointed to the terminal and the highway they’d be entering. Which they did, about fifteen minutes later, and began to zip along at a top speed of sixty-five miles an hour.
They hadn’t gone far when Joe spied the Golden Arches. He veered off the highway and turned into McDonald’s.
Kate looked up. Her mouth dropped open. “Wait—you’re not going here, are you?”
“Yep,” he said, and pulled into a parking spot. “I’m hungry, remember?”
“But not McDonald’s!”
“What’s wrong with Mickey D’s?” Joe asked as he unbuckled his seat belt. He knew full well what was wrong with it—he’d had enough girlfriends to know that the nutritional values of the food were not in the acceptable range for sleek New York women.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No.”
She gasped. “Calories! Fat!”
He was too hungry to debate it. “You don’t look like you have to worry about that,” he said gruffly. “And besides, we don’t have time for a fine dining experience, remember? So—are you hungry?”
Kate shifted forward and squinted out the front windshield at the restaurant. “Starving,” she muttered, and unbuckled her seat belt.
A few minutes later, they were in the car again. Kate, Joe noticed, was wolfing down the burger she’d disdained. She happened to come up for breath and noticed his look of amusement. “Don’t judge me,” she warned him, and punctuated that with a big bite of burger.
Joe laughed. He liked a woman who could eat. “Bon appétit,” he said as he started the car up and backed out of the parking space.
Kate had polished off the burger and the fries she’d bought by the time they neared downtown Dallas and a dizzying display of highways in the sky, looping up and over each other. Just as they began to enter that mess, her phone rang.