“What?”
With grating slowness: “My tire.”
I opened my mouth.Then I shut it again.I walked around to the passenger side, and sure enough, the back tire was flat.
“Why don’t you change it yourself?”I said.
“Because there are certain things that a person of refinement simply does not do,” Fox said.
“Because you don’t know how.”
Fox hissed at me.Then they snapped, “You don’t know how either.”
“No, but we’re pretty smart.I bet we could figure it out.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Fox said.“Get that hunk of a man you call a fiancé to come do it.”
“No way!”
“Why not?”
“Because—” The real answer was because Keme would inevitably find out and laugh at me.But I had the feeling it wouldn’t soundgreatif I said it out loud.Plus, I liked to call Bobby for favors when they benefitted me instead of Fox.“—we can do this.”
“Oh God,” Fox said and pinched the bridge of their nose.
“We can!We’re smart.”
“So you keep saying.”
“And we’re reasonably competent human beings.”
Fox scoffed.
“Well,” I said, “we’re functioning adults.”
“Do I spy the elastic waistband of Pokémon underwear?”Fox asked.
“Nope,” I said.“Catchimals.It’s a massive copyright infringement.”
“Why do you sound proud of that?”
“Come on,” I said.“We can do this.We can show all those high school bullies who made fun of us because one time in Driver’s Ed you were using the simulator and somehow you went off the road and into that crowd of anti-war protesters and it was, uh, graphic, and then the simulator started smoking, and Mr.Kennard had to send everyone out into the hall, and a couple of days later they replaced the simulator with a vending machine that only had healthy snacks.”
The wind moved through the branches of the trees.
“Uh,” I said, “that’s a hypothetical example.”
“What comet or meteor or life-ending asteroid were you born under?”Fox muttered.
“Fine,” I said.“I’ll do it myself.”
This turned out almost immediately to be false because first I needed Fox to show me where the van’s manual was (thank God it had somehow survived forty years in the glove box), and then, when I tried to get the spare off the back, Fox eventually got tired of hearing me say, “It won’t come off,” and got out of the van to point out that I was turning the, um, screws the wrong way.(Bolts!Are they called bolts instead of screws?)
But once Fox was out of the van, they got into the spirit of things.We blocked the front tires and found the jack, and after a couple of false starts, we raised the van until the rear tires cleared the ground.I got the flat off (full disclosure: Fox had to help me loosen the bolts, but after that I did it myself).Against all odds, the spare was actually still in decent condition, so we put it on, tightened down the bolts, and lowered the van.
(I’m ninety-nine percent sure they’re called bolts.)
Somehow in the process, I’d managed to blacken my hands, arms, and—according to my reflection in the window—face with tire grime.But I didn’t care; I was grinning.And to my surprise, Fox was grinning too.(They had somehow escaped all the grease and old oil and general muck.) They produced an old T-shirt from the back of the van, and I used it to wipe my hands.
