Turning Around

Life's Carnival: Consecutive Substack Story 1193

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

The old lady ran like either an axe wielding maniac was chasing her or she was an axe wielding maniac with no axe.

Fast for a woman half her age.

Tony had ended his reverse and was putting his Mazda in drive when he realized the woman’s target was him.

He couldn’t understand what she was yelling about, but she was definitely yelling.

The absence of an axe was now a comfort.

He had pulled in a driveway to turn around.

Maybe she thought he was a delivery person who had left without delivering.

It was curiosity, not compassion that made him stop and roll down the window.

The only word he could make out was pinwheel.

It made no sense.

When she stopped running, five feet from his car,her words got quicker and less easy to understand than they already were.

Then one sentence crystallized in Tony’s ears.

The words ran along an old, crepey, flabby arm that pointed at the driveway.

“Arthur won me that pinwheel.”

Tony replied “Who is Arthur?” his mouth not yet closed when he realized it didn’t matter who Arthur was, not to him anyway.

He wanted to just drive away but the old lady’s lip was doing a thing. It changed from muscle to jello to a puddle with ripples in it.

The arm was still pointing.

Unable to look at the strange lower lip any more, Tony followed the arm to the end of the finger to a sun-faded metal pinwheel on its side with a tire track over it. His tire track.

“We were married in 1979,” the woman said, sort of answering Tony’s question he never should have asked.

“He won that pinwheel for me at the 1978 Livonia Spree.”

“I can-” Tony started, not knowing how he would finish the sentence, before the woman said: “Darts. Balloon darts. Darts and balloons. If Arthur would have hit one more balloon he would have won the Led Zeppelin mirror I wanted.”

And then the lower lip seemed to separate from her body and she let out a wail that seemed to hit Tony like a fish thrown across a market.

“You’re supposed to wheel into the driveway on the inside of the pinwheel so you don’t muss up the lawn,” the woman said, the word lawn turning into an undulating, multisyllabic decibel of misery.

Tony Sanfalco’s mind turned into a slide show.

Whose prized possession is a pinwheel?

What fucking luck do I have that I’m the first SOB to turn in that driveway and knock over that pinwheel?

Does that old broad sit there and watch the damn pinwheel out the window?

“You, you owe me…”

Tony reached for his wallet. He’d give the woman twenty bucks and have a weird story to tell at bowling.

“..an apology,” the woman said.

Tony’s arm pulled away from the side of his ass with the wallet.

He looked the lady in the eyes.

The slide show in Tony’s mind flipped to a different slide.

Where he had first instantly planned to offer a simple “I’m sorry, lady,” Tony said “I swear to Christ I got a Led Zeppelin mirror in my basement somewhere.”

The woman froze.

Her eyelids snapped up.

“Houses of the Holy?”

Tony bit his lip, thought about it.

“Physical Graffiti.”

The woman mumbled “Fuck you,” turned her back to Tony and walked to her driveway, where she pulled the pinwheel from the mud and held it to her chest.

***

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