When Ben was on the day shift, he sometimes entertained Grace at supper with an amusing incident or two of his work. Sometimes his stories were pure fiction and she suspected as much, but what difference did it make? They were things that ought to have happened even if they hadn’t.
On this occasion he was wild to talk about the girl from Rye, but he had learned that his wife did not care much for anecdotes concerning pretty women. So he recounted one-sided arguments with bungling drivers of his own sex which had very little foundation in fact.
“There was a fella coming south in a 1922 Buick and the light changed and when it was time to go again, he thought he was starting in second, and it was reverse instead, and he backed into a big Pierce from Greenwich. He didn’t do no damage to the Pierce and only bent himself a little. But they’d have held up the parade ten minutes talking it over if I hadn’t bore down.
“I got the Buick fella over to the curb and I said to him, ‘What’s the matter? Are you homesick?’ So he said what did I mean, homesick, and I said, ‘Well, you was so anxious to get back to wherever you come from that you couldn’t even wait to turn around.’
“Then he tried to explain what was the matter, just like I didn’t know. He said this was his first trip in a Buick and he was used to a regular gear shift.
“I said, ‘That’s fine, but this ain’t no training-camp. The place to practice driving is four blocks farther down, at Forty-second. You’ll find more automobiles there and twicet as many pedestrians and policemen, and besides, they’ve got streetcars and a tower to back into.’
“I said, ‘You won’t never learn nothing in a desert like this.’ You ought to heard the people laugh.”
“I can imagine!” said Grace.
“Then there was a Jordan, an old guy with a gray beard. He was going to park right in front of Kaskel’s. He said he wouldn’t be more than half an hour. I said, ‘Oh, that’s too bad! I wished you could spend the weekend.’ I said, ‘If you’d let us knew you was coming, we’d have arranged some parties for you.’ So he said, ‘I’ve got a notion to report you for being too fresh.’
“So I said, ‘If you do that, I’ll have you arrested for driving without your parents’ consent.’ You ought to have heard them laugh. I said, ‘Roll, Jordan, roll!’ You ought to have heard them.”
“I’ll bet!” said Grace.
Ben fell into a long, unaccustomed silence.
“What are you thinking about?”
It came out against his better judgment. “There was a gal in a blue Cadillac.”
“Oh! There was! What about her?”
“Nothing. Only she acted like it was her Avenue and I give her hell.”
“What did you say to her?”
“I forget.”
“Was she pretty?”
“I didn’t notice. I was sore.”
“You!”
“She all but knocked me for a corpse.”
“And you probably just smiled at her.”
“No. She done the smiling. She smiled—” He broke off and rose from the table. “Come on, babe. Let’s go to the Franklin. Joe Frisco’s there. And a Chaplin picture.”
Ben saw nothing of the blue Cadillac or its mistress the rest of that week, but in all his polemics he was rehearsing lines aimed to strengthen her belief in his “cuteness.” When she suddenly appeared, however, late on the following Tuesday afternoon, he was too excited to do anything but stare, and he would have lost an opportunity of hearing her enchanting voice if she hadn’t taken the initiative. Northbound, she stopped at the curb a few feet above his corner and beckoned to him.
“It’s after four,” she said. “Can’t I drive you home?”
What a break! It was his week on the late shift.
“I just come to work. I won’t be off till midnight.”
“You’re mean! You didn’t tell me you were going to change.”
“I change every week. Last week, eight to four; this week, four to twelve.”
“And next week eight to four?”
“Yes’m.”
“Well, I’ll just have to wait.”
He couldn’t say a word.
“Next Monday?”
He made an effort. “If you live.”
She smiled that smile. “I’ll live,” she said. “There’s an incentive.”
She was on her way and Ben returned to his station, dizzy.
“Incentive, incentive, incentive,” he repeated to himself, memorizing it, but when he got home at half past one, he couldn’t find it in Grace’s abridged Webster; he thought it was spelled with an s.
The longest week in history ended. A little before noon on Monday the Cadillac whizzed past him going south and he caught the word “later.” At quitting time, while Tim Martin was still in the midst of his first new one about two or more Heebs, Ben was all at once aware that she had stopped right beside him, was blocking the traffic, waiting for him.
Then he was in her car, constricting his huge bulk to fit it and laughing like a child at Tim’s indelicate ejaculation of surprise.
“What are you laughing at?”
“Nothing. I just feel good.”
“Are you glad to be through?”
“Yes. Today.”
“Not always?”
“I don’t generally care much.”
“I don’t believe you do. I believe you enjoy your job. And I don’t see how you can because it seems to me such a hard job. I’m going to make you tell me all about it as soon as we get out of this jam.”
A red light stopped them at Fifty-first Street and she turned and looked at him amusedly.
“It’s a good thing the top is down,” she said. “You’d have been hideously uncomfortable in one more fold.”
“When I get a car of my own,” said Ben, “it’ll have to be a Mack, and even then I’ll have to hire a man to drive it.”
“Why a man?”
“Men ain’t all crazy.”
“Honestly, I’m not crazy. Have I come near hitting anything?”
“You’ve just missed everything. You drive too fast and you take too many chances.
