The Woman in the Red Convertible

There are few things more humiliating than standing beside a beautiful automobile that has abruptly decided it would rather become sculpture, particularly when the automobile in question is a red 1965 convertible that you have spent considerably more money maintaining than you have ever admitted to your accountant, and particularly when you are wearing cream trousers, a silk blouse, a pair of Italian heels wholly unsuited to gravel, and the expression of a woman who has spent twenty-five years believing money and competent planning can prevent exactly this sort of inconvenience. The car had belonged to me for six years. The divorce had lasted fourteen months. I sometimes thought I loved the car more. That sounds crueler than it is. Michael and I had married at twenty-seven because we were beautiful, ambitious, impatient, and stupid enough to believe compatibility could be constructed the way I constructed buildings: good foundations, attractive materials, reliable financing, enough optimism to convince investors that the end result would resemble the rendering. Twenty years later we had three successful development companies between us, no children, separate bedrooms, and enough accumulated resentment to furnish a hotel. The divorce was not dramatic. Nothing was thrown. No one slept with the tennis instructor. We simply stopped being married several years before the paperwork caught up. The red convertible, on the other hand, had never disappointed me. Until that Friday afternoon. I was driving north after inspecting a property outside the city, the top down because the weather had turned unexpectedly beautiful, the radio playing something old enough that I knew every word, when the engine made a noise I had never heard before. A cough. Then another. Then something considerably more expensive sounding. “Don’t,” I said to the dashboard. The engine ignored me. The car lost power. By considerable good fortune, or what I later came to regard as suspiciously well-organized fate, a rural gas station appeared perhaps two hundred yards ahead. I coasted into it. The engine died beside pump three. I turned the key. Nothing. Again. Nothing except a low, miserable clicking sound. I sat very still behind the wheel. “No.” The car remained unmoved by my authority. I tried once more. “Absolutely not.” Click. I lowered my forehead onto the steering wheel. The gas station attendant was approximately nineteen and regarded my engine with the grave concentration of a young man hoping adulthood might arrive by staring into machinery. He asked whether I had roadside assistance. I did. The estimated arrival time was ninety minutes. Of course it was. I called my usual garage. Voicemail. I called my assistant. She offered to send a car. “I’m not abandoning the convertible.” “It is a car, Diane.” “That is exactly the kind of thing someone without a 1965 convertible would say.” She sighed in the familiar manner of a woman who had worked for me eleven years and survived both my marriage and my divorce. “I’ll keep my phone on.” “Thank you.” I hung up. Then I heard the diesel engine. An old blue tow truck turned into the station, not the polished corporate roadside-assistance vehicle I had been expecting but something that looked as if it had personally survived three presidential administrations. There was lettering on the door: GABRIELA’S VINTAGE AUTO RESTORATION — REPAIR — RECOVERY The truck pulled around my convertible. The driver’s door opened. And a woman climbed out. She was younger than I expected, somewhere in her early thirties, compact and athletic, with warm brown skin, dark curly hair pulled into a loose ponytail, grease already marking one forearm, and navy-blue mechanic’s coveralls unzipped just far enough at the collar to reveal a faded gray T-shirt underneath. She looked first at the car. Then at me. Then back at the car. Her face was extraordinary. Not conventionally polished, not carefully arranged, but alive in every direction, dark eyes sharp with intelligence and amusement, strong brows, a mouth that seemed already on the verge of saying something I might object to. She walked around the convertible slowly. “Yours?” “Yes.” “What happened?” “It stopped.” She looked at me. I looked at her. “That,” she said, “is usually why people call tow trucks.” “I assumed you wanted the sequence of events.” “I do.” I told her. She opened the hood. I stepped closer. She leaned over the engine. I watched her hands move among hoses and cables with rapid familiarity. Then she went very still. “Oh, wow.” I disliked that immediately. “What?” She reached farther inside. “Who services this car?” “An extremely reputable specialist.” She straightened and looked at me. “Your extremely reputable specialist should be arrested for crimes against machinery.” I stared. “I beg your pardon?” “I’m serious.” “I have used the same garage for five years.” “That explains a lot.” My irritation arrived instantly. “I assure you, they know what they’re doing.” She gave me a look of such open skepticism that I actually felt offended on behalf of mechanics who were not there to defend themselves. “Lady—” “Diane.” “All right, Diane. Somebody installed the wrong fuel-line clamp, one of these hoses is about fifteen years past retirement, your ignition wiring looks like it was repaired during a thunderstorm, and—” She leaned inside again. “Yep.” “What now?” “There’s electrical tape where there should absolutely not be electrical tape.” “My mechanic specializes in vintage European and American automobiles.” “So did Frankenstein.” I stared at her. She stared back. Then, against every intention I had, I laughed. Not politely. Not because I wanted to ease the conversation. I actually laughed. The effect on her was immediate. Her own expression cracked into a grin so broad and unexpectedly warm that I felt something inside me shift before I had time to object. “There,” she said. “That’s better.” “What is?” “You looked like you were deciding whether to have me killed.” “I was evaluating options.” “I could tell.” She wiped one hand on a cloth tucked into her pocket and held it out. “Gabriela Torres.” I looked at the grease on her fingers. Then at my hand. Then back at her. “Oh, come on,” she said. “I wiped it.” I took her hand. Warm. Firm. And for reasons entirely unrelated to automotive repair, I became suddenly conscious of the fact that she was looking directly into my eyes. “Diane Mercer.” Her eyebrows rose slightly. “Mercer Development?” “Yes.” “Huh.” “What does ‘huh’ mean?” “Nothing.” “It clearly means something.” “It means your shoes suddenly make sense.” I looked down at my heels. “What’s wrong with my shoes?” “Nothing. They’re beautiful.” The compliment came so casually that I was not prepared for it. She released my hand. Then added, “They’re also standing in gasoline-station gravel.” I looked down again. One heel had already sunk slightly. “Wonderful.” Gabriela laughed. And that was the first moment I understood I might be in considerably more trouble than my car. Gabriela spent another ten minutes under the hood before announcing that she could probably get the engine to turn over but would not let me drive it. “Let me?” She slowly looked up. “Yes.” “I own the car.” “And I own the tow truck.” “That does not create jurisdiction.” “It does when your fuel line is one pothole away from redecorating the engine compartment.” “I have somewhere to be.” “Do you want to arrive alive?” “That feels melodramatic.” “I work on old cars. Melodrama is part of the service.” I folded my arms. She folded hers. I had negotiated contracts worth tens of millions of dollars against men who considered compromise a moral weakness. Gabriela Torres did not appear impressed. “How long?” I asked finally. “If it’s what I think, three hours.” “Three hours?” “Maybe four.” “No.” She nodded toward the convertible. “Tell her.” I looked at the car. Then back at Gabriela. “You talk about cars as if they’re people.” “Most of them listen better.” “That must make dating complicated.” Her eyes flicked toward mine. Only for a second. But it was enough. “Sometimes,” she said. Then she turned away and began lowering the tow platform. I stood there watching her and realized, belatedly, that I had just tried to determine whether this woman dated women. Interesting. Very interesting. I had been divorced for eight months. Before Michael there had been two women, one in college and one during graduate school, both relationships sufficiently real that the way I had erased them from my later biography now embarrassed me. During the marriage there had been no affairs, male or female, but there had also been no reason to believe that the part of me that noticed women had disappeared simply because I stopped speaking about it. I had simply become very good at behaving as if attraction were irrelevant. Gabriela bent to hook the car. I watched her. Apparently the strategy had expired. The ride to her garage took fifteen minutes. My convertible rode behind us while I sat in the passenger seat of the tow truck trying not to notice how Gabriela’s hands moved on the enormous steering wheel. The cab smelled faintly of coffee, motor oil, and something citrusy. An old radio played salsa quietly beneath the engine noise. “So,” Gabriela said, “real-estate developer.” “Yes.” “Hotels?” “Some. Residential mostly. Mixed-use properties.” “You build expensive things.” “I build good things.” She glanced over. “I like that answer.” “And you repair expensive things.” “I repair old things. Sometimes they’re expensive.” “Mine certainly is.” “That’s because someone saw you coming.” I laughed. “You are extremely insulting for someone seeking repeat business.” “I’m not seeking repeat business. I fix things correctly.” I turned toward her. “That’s confidence.” “No,” she said. “Confidence is when you hope you’re right. I know.” I should have found that arrogance intolerable. Instead I found it attractive. Inconveniently attractive. Gabriela’s Vintage Auto occupied a low brick building on the edge of a very small town that appeared to contain one diner, two churches, a hardware store, and precisely the number of traffic lights required to make city people reconsider their assumptions about civilization. The garage itself was another matter. I loved it immediately. Not because it was elegant. It was not. It was crowded, warm, imperfect, alive. There were vintage signs on the walls, shelves of labeled parts, old metal cabinets, photographs of restored automobiles pinned beside invoices, three dismantled radios on a workbench, and a large red Coca-Cola clock that claimed the year was perpetually 1958. A cream-colored Thunderbird occupied one bay. An old Porsche sat beneath a cover. Somewhere a radio played a bolero through a speaker that crackled whenever the singer reached a high note. “This is yours?” I asked. Gabriela climbed down from the truck. “For six years.” “You own the building?” “Rent.” There was something in the way she said it. “Expensive?” “Everything’s expensive.” She began unloading my car. I watched. “You’re struggling.” She stopped. Looked at me. “With the rent?” “You’re very direct.” “It saves time.” “Yes,” she said finally. “I’m struggling.” I glanced around the garage again. “It’s a good business.” “You’ve been here forty-three seconds.” “I know businesses.” “You know real estate.” “I know when someone cares about what they’ve built.” That silenced her. For the first time since we met, Gabriela seemed unsure what to say. Then she looked away and began working the tow controls again. “Coffee machine’s inside,” she said. “Bathroom behind the office. There’s a waiting chair if you don’t mind sitting underneath a calendar from 1997.” “I can manage.” “I can call you a ride.” “No.” She looked back. “No?” “I’ll wait.” “For four hours?” “I want to see what you find.” Gabriela smiled slowly. “Sure.” “What?” “Nothing.” “That expression means something.” “It means you want to watch me work.” I felt the heat arrive in my face before I could stop it. “I want to understand what happened to my car.” “Of course.” I removed my coat. Gabriela’s eyes flicked over my cream silk blouse, tailored trousers, and heels. Then she looked deliberately away. That pleased me far more than it should have. The first hour passed with me attempting to work from my phone while repeatedly failing because Gabriela kept doing interesting things. She removed parts. Tested wiring. Swore softly in Spanish. Played an old Celia Cruz song louder when it came on the radio. At one point she disappeared almost entirely beneath the dashboard, leaving only her legs visible outside the passenger door. “You know,” I said from the waiting chair, “most businesses provide magazines.” Her voice came muffled from inside the car. “I have a 2004 issue of Popular Mechanics .” “How current.” “Tom Cruise was still young.” “That doesn’t narrow it sufficiently.” She laughed. A moment later she emerged, hair slightly more disordered and a black streak of grease across one cheek. I stared. “What?” “You have something on your face.” She wiped the wrong side. “Still there.” Again. Wrong place. “Here.” Before thinking better of it, I stepped toward her. I lifted my thumb. Stopped. We were suddenly very close. Close enough for me to see the tiny gold flecks in her brown eyes. Close enough to smell soap beneath the garage. Close enough to understand that touching her face would change the nature of the afternoon. Gabriela did not move away. Neither did I. “May I?” I asked. Her voice was quieter now. “Sure.” I wiped the grease from her cheek with my thumb. The contact lasted perhaps two seconds. It felt like considerably more. Gabriela looked at me. I looked at her. Then an old air compressor kicked on somewhere behind us with an explosive metallic rattle and I jumped. She burst out laughing. I stepped back. “Oh, that’s hilarious.” “It startled me.” “You nearly climbed into the toolbox.” “I did not.” “You absolutely did.” I returned to my chair with whatever dignity remained. Gabriela continued smiling for the next ten minutes. After that, conversation became easier. Too easy. She told me she was thirty-two, Colombian-American, born in Florida after her parents emigrated from Medellín, and had learned engines from her father because he had wanted a son and eventually decided a daughter with better mechanical instincts was an acceptable substitute. “He sounds charming.” “He is. In an emotionally prehistoric way.” “And the garage?” “His dream first.” “Then yours?” “Eventually.” She loosened a bolt. “He died seven years ago.” “I’m sorry.” She nodded. “Heart attack.” She said it without theatrical sadness, which made it feel more intimate somehow. “I opened this place a year later.” “For him?” “At first.” “And now?” Gabriela looked around. “For me.” I understood that answer immediately. Perhaps too well. The divorce had taught me how many things I had once chosen for other people and later kept because somewhere along the way they had become mine. She asked about Michael. Not by name. Only, “You said recently divorced.” “Yes.” “Bad?” “No.” “That can be worse.” I stared at her. “You’re surprisingly perceptive for someone who insulted my mechanic within thirty seconds of meeting me.” “I contain multitudes.” I laughed. “Twenty years,” I said. “Married?” “Yes.” “Kids?” “No.” “Regrets?” I considered it. “About not having children? No.” “About him?” Another pause. “No.” Gabriela nodded. “Good.” I looked at her. “Why good?” She was bent over the engine again. Without looking at me, she said, “Makes what I’m thinking less complicated.” Everything in the garage seemed suddenly much quieter. Even the radio. “What are you thinking?” Now she looked up. Dark eyes. That dangerous mouth. “You’re the direct one.” “Usually.” “Not asking.” “I just did.” Gabriela smiled. Then deliberately returned her attention to the engine. “Your car needs a new ignition lead.” Coward. I liked her immensely. By the third hour, I had abandoned work altogether. Gabriela gave me coffee in a mug advertising a transmission company that had apparently gone out of business in 1989. I removed my heels. That was her fault. “You’ll break your neck,” she said after watching me step around an oil pan. “These shoes cost eight hundred dollars.” “That doesn’t make them OSHA compliant.” “They are perfectly comfortable.” “You’ve been shifting from foot to foot for an hour.” “I have not.” Gabriela stared. I sighed. Five minutes later I was sitting on an old stool in stocking feet with my heels neatly beside me. Gabriela looked unbearably pleased. “Not one word.” “I didn’t say anything.” “Your face is saying several things.” “My face is bilingual.” I laughed so hard I nearly spilled the coffee. She leaned against the workbench opposite me. The late-afternoon sun had started slanting through the high garage windows, catching floating dust and turning everything briefly golden. “Why red?” she asked. “The car?” “Yes.” “Because my husband hated red.” Gabriela’s eyebrows shot up. I laughed. “I bought it three months before I asked for the divorce.” “Diane.” “I didn’t realize the symbolism until later.” “That is spectacular.” “It was not intentional.” “You bought a bright red convertible your husband hated and then left him.” “When you say it like that—” “There is no other way to say it.” I shook my head. She smiled. Then her expression softened. “You happy?” The question landed more gently than I expected. “Now?” “Yes.” I looked around the garage. At my shoes. At the car. At Gabriela. “Strangely, yes.” Her eyes stayed on mine. “Good.” That word again. Good. I became aware that I had spent more time in this garage than I had spent with anyone socially in months. That I did not want to leave. That my car being repaired was beginning to feel less like good news. Gabriela pushed away from the bench. “Speaking of which…” “No.” She laughed. “You don’t even know what I was going to say.” “The car is ready.” “It is.” I felt genuine disappointment. “That’s unfortunate.” She stopped. “Unfortunate?” “For your repeat-business model.” “I told you I don’t have one.” She walked to the convertible and lowered the hood. “It runs beautifully.” “As it should.” “I replaced the bad wiring, fuel-line clamp, hose, and ignition lead. You should still take it easy for fifty miles.” “Anything else?” “Change mechanics.” “I believe you’ve mentioned that.” “I’m serious.” “So am I.” Gabriela looked at me. There it was again. That silence that was not silence at all. I slipped my heels back on. Stood. She handed me the keys. Our fingers touched. Neither of us withdrew quickly enough for it to remain accidental. I paid the invoice. It was shockingly reasonable. “You undercharged me.” “No.” “You did.” “I charged you what the work costs.” “You spent nearly four hours on it.” “Three hours and twenty-eight minutes.” “You counted?” “I invoice honestly.” “I own a development company, Gabriela. I understand labor.” “Congratulations.” “Let me pay you more.” “No.” “Why?” “Because you’ll come back.” The words came before either of us could pretend they meant only the car. I looked at her. She looked slightly surprised at herself. Then neither of us looked away. Outside, evening had begun settling over the little town. The diner across the road switched on its neon sign. I should have gotten into the convertible. I should have driven home. Instead I leaned one hip against the door. “Is there somewhere good to eat around here?” Gabriela’s expression changed almost imperceptibly. “Depends.” “On what?” “What you mean by good.” “I’ve been drinking vending-machine coffee for four hours. My standards have become flexible.” She wiped her hands on a shop towel. “There’s a diner two blocks down. Good burgers.” “I don't want a burger.” “Mexican place near the highway.” “Maybe.” “Little Colombian restaurant fifteen minutes away.” “That sounds promising.” She nodded. “Very good.” I waited. She waited. I realized she knew exactly what I was doing. That irritated me. And thrilled me. “Do they take reservations?” “No.” “Busy?” “Sometimes.” Another silence. Gabriela folded the towel slowly. Then she smiled. “Diane.” “Yes?” “Are you asking where you should eat…” She took one small step toward me. “…or whether I’ll eat with you?” There are moments when forty-eight years of practiced confidence abandon a woman completely. I looked at Gabriela Torres, standing there with grease beneath one fingernail and amusement dancing in her eyes, and for once I had absolutely no interest in pretending. “The second one.” Her smile widened. “Good.” “You say that a lot.” “Only when something is.” I glanced toward the clock. “Dinner?” “Give me ten minutes to close.” “I can wait.” “You’ve already waited four hours.” “Yes,” I said, smiling. “But now I know what I’m waiting for.” Gabriela locked the garage eleven minutes later. I know because I checked. She caught me. “Eleven.” “You said ten.” “I had to wash my hands.” “Poor time management.” “You want dinner or not?” I opened the passenger door of the convertible. She stared. “You’re letting me ride in it?” “You repaired it.” “That’s not the same as trusting me.” “No,” I said. “It isn’t.” Gabriela held my gaze for a moment. Then she walked around to the passenger side. I started the engine. It came alive instantly, smooth and deep and perfect. She listened with obvious satisfaction. “Beautiful,” she said. I looked at her rather than the dashboard. “Yes.” She noticed. And smiled. I pulled away from the garage with the top still down, evening air moving through our hair, Gabriela beside me directing me toward a little Colombian restaurant fifteen minutes away, and my red convertible—my wonderfully expensive, temperamental, newly repaired symbol of independence—carrying me toward the first date I had not planned in more than twenty years. For once, I was perfectly happy not knowing what came next.