A Long Drive

After he retired, he continued to leave the house every morning at 8am and every evening at 5pm, promptly, in order to hit rush hour traffic. Though he never admitted aloud to anyone, the commute, while circular and meaningless, gave him a sense that he still mattered. On schedule, he would lace his shoes, don his jacket, kiss his wife goodbye, and leave the house, returning an hour or so later, with news that “Traffic was awful,” or, “Not bad today,” or, “If you’re going out later, stay away from pioneer square, it’s a nightmare.” At first his wife was offended, thinking after all these years of complaining about meetings and boardrooms, he’d rather be sitting in them than with her, and her jealously (maybe, she thought it was jealously) caused her to bring up the matter with their family physician who immediately told her not to worry; the drives gave her husband something to do and, besides, his blood pressure had always been chronically low, getting cut off once in a while by a distracted motorist on her way to an offramp may be a good thing. And so his wife listened, and so she never objected and kissed her husband goodbye and, an hour later, asked him how the commute was as she made him coffee and brought his favorite mug to him in the living room, where he sat, watching the clock for the next eight hours, before getting up and doing the drive in another direction, which, if we’re being fair, is more or less exactly what he’d done at the office each day for the previous forty-seven years, with one very important singular exception, which is also the reason this story is a story at all: unlike those decades filing papers and moving numbers and making small jokes in small meetings, one day, a Friday with unusually heavy slowdown due to a four car crash on I-95, the needless, existentially palliative commute gave him the opportunity to be part of his very first international drug deal …