Still, as the cruiser looped through the turns and climbed back up out of the Noyo Valley, she began to rethink her position, until degree by degree she felt the indignation cooling in her. This was going to cost her. Fines, towing and Christ knew what else. They’d make her renew that sticker, and there’d be paperwork, a layout of cash she really didn’t have and every sort of hassle the authorities (authorities, what a joke) could devise. By the time they arrived at the police station and they’d photographed and fingerprinted her, given her her one phone call — to Christabel, who else? — and escorted her to an empty cell and locked her in, she was contrite. Or no: chastened was a better word. And enlightened. Enlightened too. These people didn’t recognize her status, didn’t know a damned thing about the Uniform Commercial Code or her rights under it, and they didn’t care either. They had all the power, all the muscle, and she was nothing, reduced to this, to groveling and ass-kissing and giving lip service to the System, as if she was grateful they’d assaulted her and taken away her rights and her property. All right. If that was how they wanted it, fine. She sat in that cell and kept her mouth firmly shut and fed her hate and resentment till Christabel showed up an hour later with the bail money and she was out.
“I told you,” Christabel said, once they’d slammed into her pickup in the lot out back of the station. “You may have your theories or beliefs or whatever, but these people? They don’t care. They’re on another planet — this planet, planet earth.” She gave her a look, all eye shadow and glistening black mascara. “And you — you’re in outer space. I mean it, Sara. I really do.”
Christabel was two years older than she was, also divorced, also childless. She’d kept her figure and had men sniffing after her seven days a week, but she was done with men, or that’s what she said, anyway — at least till the next one came along. She was Sara’s best friend and here she was proving it all over again, taking time out from her work as a teacher’s aide at the elementary school to be there for her, but she was wrong on this, dead wrong.
“It’s not theory,” she said. “It’s law. Natural law.”
“There you go — I mean, don’t you ever learn?” They were heading out of the parking lot now, the police lot, and the idiot dinger started in because she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt. “And buckle your belt, will you?”
Contrite? Who was contrite? Not her. “No,” she said. “No way.”
That was when Christabel hit the brake so hard she nearly went through the window. “I swear I’m not going another inch until you buckle up — and not just because of what happened here and not for safety’s sake either, but because I can’t stand that fucking noise one more second!”
“You don’t have to shout,” she said. “I mean, there’s nothing wrong with my hearing.” Still she didn’t touch the belt. It was as if her hands were paralyzed.
The noise kept up, ding-ding-ding, a beat, then ding-ding-ding and ding-ding-ding.
“Sara, I’m warning you, I mean it, I do—”
She let her gaze roll on out over the scene. She was calm now, utterly calm. Traffic flicked by on the street. Ding-ding-ding. Ding-ding-ding. A girl who honestly couldn’t have been more than sixteen went by pushing one of those double baby strollers as if there was nothing wrong with that, as if that was the way people were supposed to live. She looked over her shoulder and saw that there was a car in the lot behind them, a face trapped in the blaze of the windshield, some other soul trying to get out of this purgatory and back to real life, but nobody was going anywhere unless something changed right here and now. Christabel was glaring at her, actually glaring.
In the next moment, and she hardly knew what she was doing, she flipped the handle and pushed the door open wide, and then she was out on the sidewalk, her feet moving and the door gaping behind her, hurrying down the street as fast as her boots would take her, thinking, The bank, the bank before it closes. And Christabel? Christabel was just an afterthought because she wasn’t going to sit there arguing. She had to get to the bank because she knew she was going to have to suck everything out of her savings and put it into a cashier’s check if she was going to get the car out of hock. That was the first priority, the car, because without it she was stuck. Once she had it back, the minute they handed her the keys, she’d head straight to the animal shelter, because when she thought about how scared and hurt and confused that dog must have been, it just made her heart seize. He’d never been separated from her since she’d got him as a pup, never, not for a single day, and what had he done? Just defend her, that was all. And now he was locked up in a concrete pen with a bunch of strays and pit bulls and god knew what else. She didn’t care what anybody said, and they could go ahead and crucify her, but that was as wrong as wrong got.
6
BUT THEN THEY WOULDN’T let her car go until she went down to the DMV and had it properly registered (their words, not hers), yet in order to do that she had to show title to the car, which was at home in the lower drawer of her filing cabinet, which in turn meant calling Christabel and eating crow (I’m sorry, I was upset, I don’t know what came over me) so she could get a ride back up to Willits and then down again to the DMV, which was closed when she got there, of course, as was the animal shelter, and that was hard, the hardest thing about this whole sorry affair. She could see through the glass of the door into the deserted lobby and hear the dogs barking in back, could hear Kutya, and there was nothing she could do about it. She must have banged on that door for ten minutes but nobody came, and the noise she made, the noise of her frustration and anger, meted out with the underside of her coiled fist, just made the dogs bark all the louder.
Behind her, in the lot, Christabel sat in the truck with the engine running. “They’re closed!” she shouted, hanging half out the window. “Can’t you see that? They’re closed!”
She almost broke down then, so frustrated her eyes clouded over till she could barely see, but she didn’t break down and she didn’t give up either. Instead she worked her way around back, looking for a way in, a gate with a padlock somebody had forgotten to secure, a chainlink fence she could scale, and all the while the dogs barked and howled and whimpered from deep inside. She circled the place twice — there was a rear door, locked, and from the feel of it, bolted too — then made her way back across the lot to Christabel.
“Well?” Christabel demanded. “Did I tell you? They’re closed. Shut down.” She held up her phone. “Hours, ten to five, Tuesday through Saturday.”