Red Light

A sun-bleached old Camry idled in front of them, bearing a bumper sticker that read:

IF YOU’RE CLOSE ENOUGH TO READ THIS, I’M CLOSE

ENOUGH TO SLAM ON MY BRAKES AND SUE YOU

Steve thought that was dumb. At any rate, it didn’t make sense when the car bearing that message was stopped at a red light, and the reader also stopped behind it. He voiced this observation.

A pondering “hrrmm” came from Jill, indicating that she’d attended to his comment enough to know the appropriate response, but not enough to really process it. Steve didn’t mind; he often made inane comments to his wife when she was half-listening, and took her disregard as license to make more of them.

“Always wanted to try that,” he mused, hands draped through the wheel and fingers drumming on the steering column.

“Try what?” Jill asked.

“Slamming on my brakes when some asshole is tailgating me.”

“Sounds like a good way to get killed.”

“Well, not on the freeway,” Steve admitted. “But in town? If I’m going down Grand and some hulked-out pickup is crawling up my butt? Be so satisfying to collect insurance from one of those guys.”

“Mmm. Fair,” Jill agreed. “But I wouldn’t warn him with a bumper sticker.”

Steve laughed. “Also fair.”

The day was muggy and bright; it was February, but in San Diego. Steve looked down at his phone to see a report of 78 degrees. His back was damp. His back was always damp, and his forehead prickled with sweat. They had only left the house a few minutes ago, so the AC hadn’t yet hit its stride despite blasting full-bore.

He leaned forward, wincing as he felt his shirt unstick from the upholstery behind him, and irritably recalled that the Forester may or may not be running around with a coolant leak. He prayed that the AC could overcome such a hurdle.

“Swear to God, I will never understand how the lights in this town think.”

“That’s because they don’t think, champ,” Jill pointed out with an implicit wink.

“Fine. I will never understand the civil engineers who think for them,” Steve corrected. Jill “hmmm”ed again, back to thumbing through an article on her phone. Probably more research on the mask mandates or vaccines, Steve mused.

His wife tended to get lost in her phone when something was eating at her – not in pursuit of distraction, but just the opposite. Jill would try to drill to the bottom of a problem by reading anything and everything she could find about it. Steve felt this was often more confusing than enlightening for her, but had learned to accept it as part of the process. She could never be at peace with a decision if she didn’t feel she had done her homework on it, and the big one at the moment was whether to get the damn jab.

The green arrow for the left-turn lane next to them switched to yellow, and a low-slung Civic shot up into the turn at the last second, its glasspack muffler gurgling. The arrow turned red as several other vehicles swerved into the lane and dutifully coasted to a stop.

Steve craned his neck to try and see the light on the right side of the intersection. Still green. He squinted at it, willing it to turn yellow. It didn’t. A souped-up something revved its engine irritably ahead.

“How bad is it to be late to a free class?” he mused.

“Looks like we’ll find out,” Jill shrugged. “Probably not great, if they’re only going to let a dozen or so people into the room.”

“Well, that wouldn’t really be Krutzfeldt’s style from what I understand. Or whatever his name is.”

It was 5:23 on a Thursday afternoon. The couple were on their way to a seminar about “returns risk in your retirement portfolio” or something of the kind, recommended to them by a friend who was a client of the financial advisor offering it – Krutzfeldt, Kristofferson, some old-money European name like that with too many syllables. Neither Steve nor Jill knew the first thing about investing, really. They just looked for the big bold-type number at the bottom of every month’s Fidelity statement, and had been pleasantly surprised to see sizable upticks in the last few. Apparently the markets were going gangbusters and now was the time to learn how to exploit them.

5:24 – Steve cursed under his breath when he saw the minute tick over on the dashboard clock.

“Ok, now I’m really starting to wonder if this light is broken,” Steve griped.

“No, I think it’s just SoCal,” Jill deadpanned in response.

Steve groaned theatrically and put a hand over his eyes. The descending sun was starting to glare off a monolithic glass building on the other side of the intersection.

“WAIT” a robotic voice intoned faintly from outside. Steve took his hand down again and peered ahead; a hunchbacked old man stood at the corner to the right, poking the crossing button insistently while an automated voicebox reminded him to be patient. The red hand on the far side of the crossing glowed at him, stern and implacable.

“WAIT…”

Steve looked at the clock again. 5:25.

“WAIT… WAIT…”

“I think we’ve been sitting here for three whole minutes,” Steve muttered. He felt tightness in his chest, an irrational anxiety at remaining motionless for so long.

“At least,” Jill replied. She looked up from her phone, and Steve was gratified to see a prickle of irritation in her face as well. So he wasn’t just being a crotchety old man. Thus affirmed, he ground the steering wheel cover around in his hands.

They were idling on Mission Avenue, a sizable suburban arterial that, at this spot, had the misfortune to intersect with Valley Parkway – a retail hellscape swirling traffic through a tangle with I-15 barely a quarter mile away. The couple were accustomed to long waits here, but this was exceptional. The Forester had at least a half-dozen cars ahead of it in the queue; observing this when they arrived, Steve had concluded that the light must have already been red for some time and they wouldn’t have long to wait.

Clearly, his masculine intuition for logistics had been far off the mark, and this rankled him further. He glared into the rearview mirror to see a thick, dense stripe of vehicles spreading uninterrupted until the road banked out of sight a hundred yards or so behind them. No telling how much farther the jam continued past that point. Steve snorted with equal parts derision and appreciation – at least he wasn’t one of those poor bastards.

“What’s that?” Jill replied to this outer expression of his inner monologue. She had given up on her phone and now looked anxiously for other diversion.

“Oh, nothing.” He waved vaguely at the mirror and then over his shoulder. “Just the crowd back there.”

Jill craned her neck to look and then faced forward again with a heavy sigh. “Christ.”

Steve crinkled an eyebrow; she didn’t normally share his petty driving frustrations to this extent. Her gaze out the windshield was steady and vacant, reinforcing the impression that something was on her mind.

“Everything ok?” he probed.

Her eyes widened with the momentary surprise of someone caught in a reverie.

“Oh. Yeah, yeah,” she demurred, lifting one foot onto the seat and propping an elbow against her raised knee. The pose made her look like a college girl on a long-weekend road trip, and seeing it eased the tension in Steve’s chest slightly. People often commented on Jill’s youthful air and that made him feel lucky.

“I mean, I think we’re probably going to miss this thing,” she admitted after a pause. She was nibbling on her thumbnail now; another youthful gesture, but one that turned the long-weekend road trip into something more like a trip to the dentist. Or the hospital.

“Probably,” Steve agreed darkly, and something re-tightened inside him. He tried to resist. “But so what? I’m the one dragging you to it anyway, right?”

She frowned in disagreement. “Huh-uh. I wasn’t interested at first, sure. But the more I think about it… I dunno.” She trailed off briefly. “We’ve been worried about the savings for years, and even if things are looking up for now, who knows how long that’ll last? I keep hearing all this stuff about a ‘Great Reset,’ and I don’t know how much of it is true, but if any of it is true then we’d better try and get ahead of it, right?”

She glanced at Steve, thumbnail between her teeth again, and now she looked more like a nervous teenager. He felt somewhat ashamed and relieved at the same time: ashamed that he hadn’t detected all these thoughts in her head, relieved that she was now bringing them to him. Jill was many things – intelligent, anxious, unusually driven for a retired homemaker – but forthcoming was not often one of them.

“Well,” he began to reply, then found himself distracted. The right-turn lane a little ways ahead of them was completely at capacity, and it occurred to Steve that he hadn’t seen any cars move out of it for as long as they’d been sitting. That seemed odd but he could not identify why.

“I dunno;” he said at last, “I kinda thought that ‘Great Reset’ stuff was just another conspiracy theory. You know, like 5G turning the frogs gay, or whatever the hell it is they’re saying on Tucker Carlson these days.”

Jill chortled and Steve grinned back, grateful that this particular inane comment had found its mark.

“It could be,” she allowed, gazing forward again. Then she looked down at her right hand, where a colorful twist of thread wound around the third finger. “But in any case, there’s also DeeDee. I just don’t think she’ll ever be able to move out.”

The tight feeling in Steve’s chest gave way to a splash of sadness, and he too turned his gaze ahead, at nothing in particular.

“Yeah… probably.” He sighed through his nose.

The light sat right in the center of his field of vision, still red and imperious. Anger swam up again and Steve turned his eyes to the clock.

5:29.

“Oh mother of –” he exclaimed, almost shouting.

Jill swiveled to him in alarm. “Honey what?!”

“Just – lookit – ” Steve made a chopping motion toward the clock, suddenly and completely apoplectic. There was no way they were getting to this seminar, and part of him was now wondering if they’d ever get away from this damn intersection at all.

“Oh my God,” Jill said. “This is… wow. This is really bad.”

Steve pulled up his phone with one hand and clumsily jabbed at it with his thumb.

“Have you ever seen a light this long?” Jill asked, squinting down the street in disbelief.

“No,” Steve growled and raised the phone to his ear. “I’m calling the police.”

The ringer went off twice and then a middle-aged woman answered. “911, where’s your emergency?”

“Hi, I’m at the intersection of Mission and Valley Parkway,” Steve began, then came up short. It occurred to him that this wasn’t exactly an emergency… perhaps he should have called someone else instead of wasting the dispatch’s time? But he’d be damned if he was going to waste his own time digging around for whoever’s number at the department of engineering –

The dispatch sighed wearily. “The light?” she asked.

“Uh… yeah,” Steve replied.

“Mmhmm. We’ve got someone on the way,” she said.

“Great, thank you,” Steve said and hung up immediately, his rage fizzling down to embarrassment. How were blue-collar females so adept at making you feel stupid? That particular tone of curt boredom, perhaps.

“Do they already know about it?” Jill asked.

“Apparently,” he grunted. “So now I guess… we wait.”

Jill slumped back in her seat. “Keep waiting, you mean.”

An indistinct haze of minutes went by and then Steve was startled by a figure swaggering past his window. A black kid, built like a tree, sporting shoulder-length dreadlocks and a pink shirt that almost glowed against his dark skin. He glanced back and forth while striding down the narrow aisle between vehicles, as if crossing the street. Despite the uncertainty of his head, his body moved with obvious purpose.

Watching him, Steve saw another figure bob up on the far side of the left turn lane – a middle-aged woman with cropped, dirty blonde hair. She had the quintessential look of what their son Ryan called a “Karen.” She, like the dreadlock guy, headed up toward the intersection.

Jill followed his gaze out the window. “Guess we’re not the only ones wondering what’s going on,” she remarked.

“Yup.” Emboldened at the sight, Steve undid his seatbelt and threw the door open. “I’m gonna check it out.”

“I’ll come with you,” Jill said, undoing her seatbelt too.

Steve froze. “Well, wait – someone’s gotta stay with the car.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Really? Who’s going to steal it right now?”

She was right about that, Steve realized, but he wasn’t willing to admit to being irrational just yet. There had to be some other cause for his unease at leaving the Forester unattended.

“Sure, but… what if the light changes while we’re up there?”

“Then we’ll run back. The folks behind us can wait an extra thirty seconds.”

“You sure about that?” Steve pressed back reflexively, then thought of a reason for doing so. “What if we don’t make it through while it’s green, and then we’re stuck again after it switches back? They’ll probably want someone to blame.”

That gave her pause, but only briefly. “Honey, I’m sorry but you’re being paranoid,” she said, tossing her hands up in exasperation.

“I don’t think I’m being paranoid,” he growled, then checked himself. If this turned into a fight, it would be his fault, and that wasn’t worth it. “But I don’t want you stuck here by yourself either. So, if you wanna go…” He opened his hands in a so-be-it gesture.

“Thank you,” she replied with more than a touch of sarcasm, and got out of the car.

As they headed for the intersection, Steve looked back and saw a couple other figures also weaving through the barricade of stopped vehicles. He passed one, then three, then five cars, ears prickling when he realized all of them were silent.

Reaching the crosswalk, he noticed the old man still at the corner, and that damnable robotic voice again -

“WAIT… WAIT… WAIT…”

“A regular fustercluck,” he muttered to Jill. They drew up next to Dreadlocks Guy and Karen, who both wore the same expression of intent confusion.

“You ever seen a light take this long?” Steve asked Dreadlocks.

“Hell naw.”

“The lights themselves should go down before the timers do,” Karen remarked.

“These things on timers, or sensors?” Dreadlocks asked.

“Timers. Least during the day,” Karen replied. “That’s why they take so damn long at rush hour. But you come down here after 10 PM or so, when there’s less traffic, then they’ll open up for ya.” She raised her purse and began digging through it.

“Hey!” a hoarse male voice called from behind them. Jake turned to see a tall, trim fiftysomething approaching, dressed in impeccable business casual and brow furrowed.

“Anyone know what’s going on? I got kids to pick up.”

“Same,” Karen said, eyebrows arched in resigned exasperation.

“Have we tried calling the cops? This is a goddamn disaster.”

“Yep,” Jill replied. “Someone else must’ve too; they already know about it.”

More drivers were abandoning their cars and arriving at the crosswalk. Business Dad stood with arms crossed, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “For God’s sake, why don’t we just start running the light when there’s a gap?”

Dreadlocks smirked humorlessly. “You see any gaps, bro?”

Business Dad cast him a dark look but said nothing, pursing his lips. Looking up Valley Parkway and then down, Steve was inclined to agree with Dreadlocks. Traffic charged past in both directions, with no apparent breaks as far as he could see either upstream or downstream. Now that he actually looked at it, the uniformity was bizarre.

“Well,” he offered, “I guess we just wait for the cops then?”

“Guess so,” Karen agreed, lighting the cigarette she had produced from her purse.

Business Dad groaned and shook his head. “Absolute bullshit.” He whipped out his phone, scrubbed through it for a moment and held it up to his ear.

“Marcy? Hi, this is Tom Ruvalcaba. Are Stella and Damien still there? …Okay. Sorry for the holdup; I’m stuck in the weirdest traffic jam –” He moseyed off in no particular direction as he spoke.

A couple others gave up and headed back to their cars, but more came to take their place. By now, something like twenty people had joined the bewildered clutter by the crosswalk. Its subdued, anxious thrum reminded Steve of a recent unsavory news clip – parents gathered around a police cordon outside a high school, Indiana or someplace, where yet another youthful gunman prowled the halls out of their sight.

He shook his head in an attempt to dislodge the thought. This wasn’t that.

“You ok?” Jill inquired.

“Yeah, yeah,” he replied. “Just, uh… catastrophizing.” The word came out unexpectedly.

She smiled tightly and took his elbow. “Well, don’t. Kristofferson or whatever his name is probably wouldn’t have been much help anyway.”

Steve nodded. “Guess we have bigger problems than our ‘return risk’ at the moment.”

“Yeah,” Jill sighed. She gazed back into the endless stream of crossing traffic, then peered beyond it.

“Huh,” she said after a moment, pointing. “Wonder if they know anything.”

Steve followed her gesture and noticed – though they’d been right there the whole time – a line of tense and angry faces across the street, mirroring their group at the opposite crosswalk. He clucked his tongue in sympathy.

“Even if they did, how could we ask them?”

Jill shrugged. “See anyone you know? Anyone you could call or text?”

He scanned the group as best he could, but it was dicey without his glasses. “Nope.”

“If anyone has cardboard and a marker, we could make signs,” a man next to them suggested, his tone mostly-but-not-entirely joking.

“Mmm. Or maybe semaphore,” Karen said.

“Oh-oh.” Dreadlocks pointed toward a twirl of red and blue lights that had just appeared in the parking lot across the street. Steve once again found himself puzzled by the sight of something that should have been normal. A cop car, in that parking lot…

“Oh good,” Business Dad scoffed, back from his fretful little stroll. “The cavalry has arrived.”

Karen took a last drag on her cigarette and flicked it pointedly at a semi roaring past. A little blue hatchback hummed along behind it, following so tight and straight that it might as well have been getting towed.

Something clicked into place and Steve momentarily understood what was needling him.

There was no visible entrance to the lot on Mission, so presumably the cop must have entered on the Valley Parkway side. But that felt wrong. A bit of subconscious spatial awareness recalled that a turning vehicle will always slow down, and reasoned that the patrol car should therefore have caused a gap in the traffic streaming down Valley Parkway when it entered the lot. But no such gap had appeared – Steve knew that, somehow. The flow of vehicles was so dense and consistent, and had been for so long, that any break in it would be conspicuous.

This chain of reasoning whirred through Steve’s head before he could fully observe it, and within seconds was gone again, leaving behind only a vague sense of distaste toward the passing cars. They felt less like separate objects and more like a continuous river of noisy metal. The whole thing wasn’t just frustrating – it was unnatural. Eerie, even.

While Steve was lost in thought, the cop had made his way to the opposite corner of the intersection and donned a fluorescent safety vest. A stack of traffic cones sat next to him and he gazed up the street, apparently with the intent to start placing a cordon once the opportunity presented itself.

“Oh my God,” Business Dad moaned. “Classic. He’s just standing there.”

“I mean, what’s he supposed to do?” Jill demanded, and Steve felt a little flicker of pride.

“What do you mean, what’s he supposed to do?” Business Dad shot back. “He’s a cop for Christ’s sake.” The sensation in Steve’s chest flared into aggression, but he held his tongue. Jill had little patience for white-knight bravado on the rare occasions when he tried it.

“Dude,” Dreadlocks said in a weary, almost pleading tone. “Quitcherbitchin.”

Business Dad swiveled on his heel to face the kid, eyes wide, practically baring his teeth. “Excuse me?”

Dreadlocks leaned backward slightly, eyebrows raised, his thoughts telegraphed for an instant: I shouldn’t have said that. But he made a fast recovery, squaring his shoulders and meeting the other man’s glare.

“I said,” he enunciated, “Quit. Your. Bitching. Please.”

Business Dad lunged and the whole group flinched in response. But he stopped short of actually striking Dreadlocks, instead leaning in close with his lips sucked against his teeth.

“Well then maybe you can explain to my daughter why she has to spend the night with her stepfather instead of at home, you dumb fuck.”

Steve had stepped protectively in front of Jill at the beginning of this exchange, and drew himself taller and closer to her now. She made no complaint – everyone was at spring-loaded attention, wondering if the whole weird episode was about to tip into something nastier.

Dreadlocks looked away for a second, then sighed through his nose. “Sorry man. Just… want us to be proactive, you know?”

Business Dad backed off a little, but continued to stare daggers at the kid. “I’d think you of all people would know better than to count on cops,” he sneered.

“Hey, he apologized, ok?” The newcomer who had suggested cardboard signs stepped between them, one hand held out pacifically. He was chubby, dressed in blue coveralls that looked a bit comical, but with a sturdy frame that could surely hold its own in a fight.

Business Dad stepped away. “Right,” he growled. Everyone watched as he strode back to a handsome Rav4 sitting three deep in the queue and climbed into it. A collective breath went out of the gathering when he shut the door.

Someone pointed out that the cop had abandoned the corner, taking the cones with him. Steve decided he’d seen enough and turned to Jill.

“Hon, you wanna try calling Sasha and see if she can come give you a ride back home?”

She pursed her lips. “Well, I’d like to make it for at least some of the seminar.”

Steve blinked. He’d almost completely forgotten about that; and come to think of it, rolling in late would be better than nothing. Still, he got more uneasy the longer this thing dragged out.

“I’m worried about DeeDee,” he finally said.

“What do you mean?” Jill frowned. “She’s ok by herself for an hour or so, otherwise we wouldn’t have gone in the first place.”

“Yeah, but…” He trailed off, confused and frustrated. “I dunno. I’d just feel better if I knew you were home safe.”

“Ah. I see,” she replied, and looked back out at the teeming street in front of them.

That was exactly the kind of reaction Steve had meant to avoid, and he prickled with irritation. Why did he have to have a reason for everything? Why did she always feel this need to prove herself? Couldn’t a man look after his family anymore without getting written off as some arrogant, misogynistic –

“I’ll give Sasha a try,” she said abruptly. “But I think she might have a church thing tonight, and I don’t really want to go calling everyone and their dog when we might be on our way again in five minutes.”

Steve didn’t say anything at first, nonplussed, then just rubbed her back and shrugged.

“Murphy’s law,” he quipped. “If you call everyone and their dog, then the light’ll turn green.” She rolled her eyes indulgently and started scrolling for Sasha’s number.

He stared out at the passing cars again, until something tugged at the corner of his vision and he turned to find Karen looking at him. She averted her eyes quickly, but too late for either of them to pretend he hadn’t caught her. Not that Steve was above trying. He coughed and turned to Jill, about to feign conversation when he saw she had the phone up to her ear.

“Sorry,” Karen said.

“What’s that?” He turned to face her again, eyebrows raised as if he didn’t know what she was referring to.

“Didn’t mean to eavesdrop… I just heard you talking about ‘DeeDee.’ You guys have kids back at home?”

“Oh!” Steve nodded. “Yes. Well, one kid – DeeDee, yeah. Then we have a son who’s off at Cal State.”

“Ah ok. Bit of an age gap, then?”

“Sorry?”

“If one of ‘em’s at college and you’re worried about the other one being home alone, I mean. How old is DeeDee?”

“Oh. Well –” Steve crossed his arms and shifted, then decided it wasn’t worth mincing around. “She’s twenty-eight, actually. Car accident back when she was in college… hasn’t really been the same since.”

“Oh. I’m so sorry –”

“No no, don’t be,” Steve insisted. He loathed the polite fumbling that always came whenever he mentioned his daughter’s condition. “It’s not so bad. There are certain blessings that came out of it, you know?”

“Hmm. Like what?”

Steve found himself blindsided for the second time in as many minutes. Karen met his surprised glance with patient expectation, either oblivious to her own forwardness or unbothered by it. He fumbled for a response – his statement had been mostly a nicety, something that felt true in moments of peace and clarity but was otherwise just a rhetorical tactic to defuse strangers’ sympathies.

“Well, uh… It was hard to let her go, I guess, when she first moved out. Went to a school on the east coast, and we’d hardly ever hear from her. Now we don’t have to. Have that distance, I mean.”

“Sure, sure.” Karen nodded, her expression hard to decipher. It looked almost shrewd, like she realized that she’d stumbled upon some privileged information.

“Still,” she added after an uncomfortable pause, “must be hard to see your kid’s wings clipped like that. I know it is for me, anyway.”

“Why’s that?” Steve pressed. Two can play this game, he thought.

“My son,” she said. “Brilliant kid. I know that’s what a mom is supposed to say, but I think I’ve had enough people tell me the same thing. But his interests are very, um… specialized. Pretty sure he’s autistic.”

She was facing away from Steve now, back toward the traffic. She appeared focused on it, in fact, her head swiveling back and forth just a bit as if she were scrutinizing every vehicle that whipped by.

“Not that that matters without a formal diagnosis. Busted his ass applying for a bunch of fancy art conservatories – he draws faces all over everything, and swear to God they look like black-and-white photos. Even with just a ballpoint pen.

“But rejections, across the board. A single polite form letter from every damn place and that was it. Some of those places, I look at the student work they show off on their websites and I think, Jayson can blow that out of the water. So why couldn’t any of those admissions counselors be bothered to even give him a second look?”

She snorted and shook her head.

“Call me racist or whatever, but I think it’s because his last name is Wilhelm. No minority feather for those SJW pricks to put in their caps. Sorry,” she concluded, glancing back at Steve. “Don’t mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist.”

“No, that’s…” he faltered, embarrassed by the frankness of this huffy mother hen. “That’s really disappointing.”

“Disappointing for me, sure,” she replied crisply. “Heartbreaking for him. Now he’s just gaming whenever he isn’t at school; doesn’t talk at all. His grades are terrible, and I know there’s shitheads at that place beating up on him. But he’d sooner die than tell me about it.”

She was still monitoring the passing cars. Steve found himself doing the same for a moment, but couldn’t make out what it was about them that had so caught her attention.

“So he’s the one I’m worried about back at home,” Karen said after a pause. “For different reasons, I guess. Or maybe not.”

Steve shrugged, hoping this was an organic end to the conversation. “Maybe not, yeah.”

Karen hitched up her purse and fished through it again. “You smoke?” she offered.

“No. Thanks though,” he replied, relieved to see Jill sidling over. “Hey you,” he said as she drew up next to him.

“Hey yourself.” She sighed. “Sorry that took so long. Sasha wanted to know all about our little… anomaly. Asked me a bunch of questions and I said ‘I don’t know’ to all of them.”

“She able to come get you?”

“Yeah. Said to meet her in the Aldi parking lot in fifteen minutes.”

“Good.” He put an arm around her and squeezed. “Thank you. I know it’s hard for you to step away from the action.”

She leaned over and nuzzled the side of his neck. “If this counts as action, then we’re definitely getting old.”

Steve laughed, and they stood quietly for a minute or two. Snatches of conversation drifted around; whatever nascent tension crackling through the group before seemed to have dissipated. People had moved through their bafflement and frustration and were now settling into resigned boredom. Presently Steve became aware of a noise that, he now realized, had probably never gone away.

“WAIT… WAIT… WAIT…”

He peered over Jill’s head toward the corner, and saw that the robot was now speaking to no one.

It appeared the old man had given up. Steve searched through the retail parking lot next to the intersection but couldn’t find him, and felt a prickle of concern. He had an instinctive sympathy for the strange bedraggled characters that often appeared around the city – a profile that fit the old man. He hadn’t looked homeless, but the blank stoicism with which he’d stood at that corner for so long hinted at senility.

“Well I’ll be damned,” someone muttered from behind him. Steve glanced over his shoulder to find the chubby coveralls guy, squinting across the street. His mouth hung open slightly in frank bemusement. Catching Steve’s curious glance, he pointed.

“Grandpa made it over somehow.”

Steve looked and, for what seemed like the umpteenth time, felt the gears in his brain slip a bit. The old man was on the far side of the intersection, shuffling away from them down the sidewalk, apparently quite unscathed by the unceasing stampede he had just crossed.

All equally baffled, Steve and Jill and Coveralls spent the next few minutes canvassing the handful of people still milling outside of their cars. No one they spoke to had actually seen Grandpa perform his magic trick, but it aroused a great deal of interest as well as skepticism. The smattering of people gathered by the crosswalk turned back into a small crowd as others re-emerged from their vehicles, wondering what the fuss was about.

Any concerns Steve had about being overprotective of Jill were gone by the time Sasha arrived. The prospect of escape, obscure though it was, had caused the collective nervous energy to ramp back up, and he was grateful for their furtive trip into the Aldi parking lot.

“Now here’s the deal,” Jill stipulated before ducking into Sasha’s ugly Taurus. “If that damn light still hasn’t changed thirty minutes from now, you’re calling me and I’m coming to get you in DeeDee’s car. I’ll jump it if I have to. Leave the Subaru.”

Steve began to protest but she cut him off.

“Call the police if you want, make them keep an eye on it, I don’t care. But you can’t stay here all night. Okay?”

“Come on, hon… there’s a big difference between thirty minutes and all night.”

“Maybe so, but it’s long enough. Deal?”

Steve groaned. “Sixty minutes.”

“Forty-five.” She glared at him, a bit of mirth there but her intention clear.

“Fine,” he huffed. “Forty-five.”

“Good.” She kissed him and got into the passenger seat. “Either way, I’ll see you at home soon.”

As she and Sasha drove off, Steve thought again of that newsreel of the besieged high school. Nothing in particular had reminded him of it, except a sense of being at the rim of a disaster that hadn’t fully manifested yet. He stood in the parking lot by himself for several minutes, reluctant to return to the traffic jam.

It was past six o’clock now. The sun had long since gone behind the mountains, pulling some of the heat back with it. They had drawn up to the light over an hour ago; an otherwise unremarkable span of time, but it felt almost obscene. Jill’s hard bargain suddenly seemed quite reasonable after all.