Never Too Old 2...

[BossySon21]

Never Too Old 2…


By the time Keith I got back in the house, horrified at what I’d seen, my husband Keith was already out of the shower and looked as if he were in about the same general state I had been thirty minutes earlier, i.e. he wasn’t dead, but he sort of wishes he was. I still felt a long way short of ‘good’, but what I’d seen outside had gone a long way toward giving me a better sense of proportion about the whole thing. I mean I still felt horrible with my hangover, but compared to what I was afraid might have happened, the hangover was pretty trivial!

Keith looked more-or-less as if his thoughts were paralleling mine when I dragged my dear hubby outside and showed him the damage to our car and our garage door. Under other circumstances the look on his face when he saw the damage might have been funny, his jaw dropped, his eyes got wide, and he just stared as if our damaged car was some alien artifact he’d just discovered at a UFO landing site.

“Do you remember what happened?” I asked nervously. “Cause I sure don’t!”

“Uh…no,” he admitted. “I’m kinda foggy on everything last night after…well, at least after that fourth glass. I sort of remember singing the song last night, but after that it’s all…fuzzy. To tell you the truth, I don’t even remember getting in the car in the first place!”

“Me either,” I admitted. “Damn, what were we thinking, I can’t believe we got that drunk! How do you think that happened?!”

“No idea,” my nervous spouse admitted. “I mean if we don’t remember it could be anywhere, or anything! But surely there ought to be some clue! I mean, if we had an accident, somebody ought to have called the cops, so it can’t have been that bad or we’d have woken up in jail downtown!”

It was a measure of how upset I was that morning that I grabbed at that one straw of comfort like a drowning woman grasping a bit of floating debris, things were far enough gone that I was grateful not to have woken up in the frickin’ local jail! But I figured Keith was right, if we’d been in a car crash surely the cops would have been involved, wouldn’t they? Unless…the phrase ‘hit and run driver’ suddenly crossed my increasingly-scared mind, and I felt my stomach drop with a nausea that had nothing to do with how much booze I’d knocked back the night before!

We looked around for other signs of damage, and sure enough, we found some: we found tire tracks of our car where we’d come home the night before through my roses! The passenger side tire had clearly come through my rose garden beside the driveway, the marks were visible in the soft soil (it had been raining lately). One more testament to just how drunk we were!

I telephoned our hosts from the night before, they were hung over too, but now as bad as we were, and they confirmed that we’d insisted on going home in our own car, and told us about their offer to use cabs that they said we’d refused, we’d been sure we were OK. I couldn’t have said, the night before was blank after midnight!

We were torn, we didn’t know what to do! Keith turned on the local news, but there was nothing about anybody looking for any hit-and-run drivers, to our relief. We weren’t sure if we should try to turn this in to our insurance or just what, we just didn’t know what to do. We were still in that frame of mind when we went to bed that evening, and I can tell you that I had a hard time getting to sleep and I had some nasty dreams about us being arrested, about finding out we’d killed someone in our drunken stupidity, about a lot of things, I woke up not much better rested than I went to bed, and I’m sure Keith was no better off!

The next day brought us some answers, and they were both better and worse than we were afraid they’d be. We were home that day, we’d taken the week off work for the holiday, and we were still kinda scared to go anywhere. That’s why we were home that morning when we heard a car pull up to our house, and when I looked out I blinked in surprise, because it was a car I recognized as belong to Amy Graves!

Amy was my college-student daughter of my best friend and business partner, Melissa Graves, as I mentioned earlier. She looked a lot like a younger version of her attractive mother, never more so as she got out of her blue Chevy. She was dressed in sneakers, jeans, and a sweater, her long blonde hair down her back, and she looked angry. It was then that I noticed that the passenger-side door of her Chevy had a huge dent in it…and there was some red paint in it.

Oh my dear Heaven! I remember thinking, as I suddenly suspected I knew who’s car we’d collided with! Surely not!

The doorbell rang, loud and repeatedly, and when we answered the door, the blonde girl came stomping in, and said, “Did you think you two could get away with this?!”

“Get away with what?” my spouse asked in confusion, still not aware of what I’d seen. “What are you talking about, Amy?”

“You know damned well what I’m talking about!” the blonde almost shrieked! “On New Year’s Eve, I was driving home on Route Seven, stopped at the red light where it meets the highway, and came racing up, side-swiped me trying to pass me on the passenger side, and drove off as if you hadn’t even noticed! Did you think I wouldn’t recognize your blasted car?!”

“Oh no,” Keith said with a groan. “Oh please no…”

It turned out that Amy had not immediately called the police to report us because she was pushing the edges of the law herself that night, though with far better reason. When she had calmed down enough to communicate with us coherently, we learned that she had been out there giving a ride to a friend of hers who was still underage for drinking (21 in our state). Unlike us, she had had sense enough to call a friend for a ride, and that was why Amy had been ferrying three drunk college girls home.

Of course, technically they weren’t supposed to even be drunk at their age, none of the three were of drinking age yet, and so Amy had not felt free to report what had happened to the law…and too, Keith and I were friends of her mother. When we explained that we’d been so drunk that we didn’t even remember what had happened, it set off her temper again! It seemed she had just about managed to get her Chevy paid for, and now it was going to need an expensive body repair.

“We’ll pay for it, I promise,” Keith assured her.

“Oh yes, you certainly will!” Amy snapped. “Every penny of it! But that’s not enough, I’m so mad at you two right now that for 2 cents I’d sic the cops on you, friends of my Mom or not! Maybe I’d be getting my friends in trouble, but maybe they ought to get in trouble, it might keep them from doing stuff like this when they get to be your age! I mean damn it but you two are supposed to be grown ups! This is the kind of crap I’d expect from a high schooler, a really irresponsible high schooler!”

Now, we really didn’t want the cops involved! Keith and I both felt horrible about what had happened, incredibly guilty, and Amy rubbed salt in it by reminding us that she’d lost her own father over just that sort of stupidity a few years before! We’d been fantastically lucky, we could have gotten ourselves or someone else killed, and Amy made sure to point that out! My conscience was eating me alive, and I know Keith was feeling similarly.

It took us a while to talk Amy out of calling the cops, but eventually, she agreed that it would be best to leave them out of it. My husband knew some people who would do the body work to fix our cars for cash, no complaints or reports, and that would spare all our insurance. But we were asking Amy to do something a little bit unethical and illegal by covering for us, and she had her price! She wanted some personal payback, and the alternative was her calling the cops and some public humiliation.

“You two have behaved like children, so I intend to treat you as such! The price of my going along with this is that you pay all the bills, every penny, for all the repairs, and I am also going to turn you both over my knee and spank your butts! It’s your choice, and I really don’t care which one you choose!”

To Be Continued in part 3