Out of the Blue by Sally Mandel

doubt. Or a nun. Probably a nun.
    “Are you sorry?” he asked. “Because I’m not.”
    “I’m a teacher, Joe. I spend my professional life trying to train kids to … to construct order out of a chaotic world so they can function safely. The unexpected. So that they’re prepared to handle …” This part I’d rehearsed, but it wasn’t going well.
    “You didn’t answer my question.”
    A horn blared nearby, one of those ear-splitting truck blasts. It was an exclamation point at the end of my answer. No, I’m not sorry!
    “I should be sorry,” I said, and laid a hand to my chest where the squatter from outer space was squirming to get out. “The thing is, I could do it right here,” I wailed. “I could throw you down on the backseat and jump you right here.”
    He laughed, but when he saw my distress he began kissing my fingers one by one. Suddenly I was disgusted with myself—for being craven, for hoping he’d explain the inexplicable, for trying to dump the responsibility on him. I didn’t know what it was I wanted from him anyhow. Absolution, maybe, but more likely exactly what I’d heard, that he wasn’t sorry.
    “Let’s just go,” I said, and leaned over to give him a kiss on the cheek. Then I snapped me and my alien into our seat belt and off we went. For no discernible reason, I suddenly felt great.
    I’ve noticed that people’s driving styles elucidate their character. I’ll never forget a death-defying trip with Grant Hurst to visit his mother in Connecticut. Grant is one of those drivers who strictly obeys the speed limit but insists on doing it in the left lane. Cars pile up behind him for miles as he coasts serenely along at sixty-five. I once suggested to him that perhaps he might switch lanes, but he just fixed me with his avian eyeballs and pronounced that he was observing the law and so should everyone else. Grant also tends to stray over the white lines when one engages him in conversation, so the wise thing is to keep quiet, close your eyes, and remember to take the bus next time.
    Joe, on the other hand, shifted expertly through four gears while negotiating the traffic hurtling up the FDR Drive. He was confident but courteous, occasionally waving other drivers ahead and never cutting anyone off. Here was a man who knew how to take charge yet whose ego would not prevent him from delegating. Portrait of a successful executive. Encouraged to surrender my natural proclivity for backseat driving, I leaned back and watched an airplane from LaGuardia rise into the west.
    “What’s your biggest regret?” I asked him.
    He smiled at me. “You want to tell me what prompted that?”
    It was the plane, but I didn’t want to say so. “You seem rueful sometimes and I can’t tell why.”
    “I’m not right now,” he said.
    “But you are ducking my question.”
    “Give me a minute.”
    I’d give him hours as long as I could just sit there and look at him. The dreariness of the Bronx landscape made his beauty all the more startling. Not that there was anything conventionally pretty about Joe, not with that beak and the sheared angularity of his face. But the warmth of his eyes took my breath away. They reminded me of the water I’d once seen on vacation in Florida, when I was little and my father was still around—a mixture of improbable aqua, the pale gold of the sand, and deeper blues and greens. The darker colors seemed to predominate when he was thoughtful, like now. His hands rested comfortably on the wheel. Hands that had moved across my body with such tenderness and skill.
    “I could have spent a year studying in Rome,” he said.
    It took me a second to haul myself up out of the pool. “During college?” I asked.
    He nodded. “My father has family in Tuscany. His mother was Italian. But I was worried about screwing up my grades.” His voice, ordinarily so guarded, was edgy.
    “Did you ever just go for a visit?” I asked. “To see your family.”
    “I was supposed to,