Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by Z. Z. Packer Page A

ticket from the pad.
        
    S HE SPED out of the maze of streets. There was a green light and she whooshed through it faster than the reds. She could see the outlines of two boys walking across the street the way Baltimore kids walk, sauntering and primping and strolling all at once. They were the sort of kids who thought they had all the time in the world; time to play around, time to disobey, time to do whatever they wanted. They were the types of kids who seemed to love watching faces curse noiselessly on the other side of the windshield, their vengeance against the world. Lynnea knew they weren’t going to make it across at the speed she was driving. She would have to slow down. She pressed on the horn so hard it braced her in the seat. The horn bleated.
    “It’s a green light! Get out of the way!” She knew the kids could only see her yelling, that they heard none of the words. One short outline flashed her the finger like a hearty salute. The taller one saw that she was going too fast and tried to limp a bit quicker, but thefinger-flasher held on to him, as though to say, They gone stop. Make ’ em wait and get mad and shit.
    She had a chance to slow down, and she didn’t want to. She’d scare them, for once. Make them run. Her foot slammed the accelerator for what seemed like no time at all, but when she changed her mind, trying to brake, she knew it was too late, she couldn’t stop in time.
    Somehow she heard the strange hissing before she heard the brakes screech. She’d never associated hissing with car wrecks, at least not the ones she’d seen in movies, where metal crunched, tires squealed. On television, cars spun like compasses gone haywire, only to regain their sense of direction, speeding off to create other wrecks. She no longer saw the boys—the limper, the finger-flasher.
    She promised herself that if these boys lived, if they turned out all right, she’d visit Sheba at Our Lady of Peace; she wouldn’t just pretend to care but would actually do something about it.
    Just as she made this promise to herself, she heard the boys cursing and wailing somewhere near the front of the car’s grille. One boy howled, struggling to one foot, holding his knee, hopping around as though he were searching for someone in a crowd. The other one banged the passenger window with heavy thumps and curses. They were alive.
    Lynnea closed her eyes. Of course she knew leaving the accident scene would be the wrong thing to do, just as she knew she’d never see Sheba again, knew that her teaching days were over.
    She could still hear the boys, even as she reversed, even as she took off. Even as she imagined how ridiculous it would be to visit Sheba, to watch as the girl hitched up her scary fishnet stockings, her eyes narrowed and unforgiving, speaking up for every pissed-off kid in the world, “C’mon. Make me. ”

The Ant of the Self
    O PPORTUNITIES ,” my father says after I bail him out of jail. He’s banging words into the dash as if trying to get them through my thick skull, “You’ve got to invest your money if you want opportunities.” It’s October of ’95, and we’re driving around Louisville, Kentucky, in my mother’s car. Who knows why he came down here, forty miles south of where he lives, but I don’t ask questions that are sure to have too many answers. I just try to get my father, Ray Bivens Jr., back across the river to his place in Indiana. Once we’re on the Watterson Expressway, it seems as if we’re about to crash into the horizon. The sunset has ignited the bellies of clouds; the mirrored windows of downtown buildings distort the flame-colored city into a funhouse. I can already see that it’ll be one of those days when the sunset is extra-brilliant, though without staying power.
    My father just got a DUI—again—though that didn’t stop him from asking for the keys. When I didn’t give them up, he sighed and shook his head as though I withheld keys from him daily.