Too Late but Never Mind

by Margaret E. Wells

When Lizzie Marsh gets in her car to drop her kids off at school, she’s already given up on finding matching socks for the four-year-old, and her older daughter has run back inside once to grab the field trip form she forgot, and there is almost certainly something sitting on the kitchen counter that was supposed to be in the car, but it’s too late now. When she drops her daughter off at the school’s back gate, there is just time for her to make it to class before the final bell if she really hustles, but Lizzie doesn’t have time to stay and see if she makes it so she just breathes out a quick Hail Mary and tosses it her daughter’s way as she pulls back out into the street.

It drives her crazy that there are at least 10 masks scattered across the backseat of the car and not one of them is the right size for her four-year-old son, so that she has to put the one from yesterday on his little face, smeared inside with spaghetti sauce and snot, and hope neither he nor his preschool teachers notice or complain.

On her lunch break she’s roped into a meeting with her ex for an interminable half hour, and what she feels is not the sensation of a jellyfish stranded by the tide, not the flapping hop of a captive swan whose wings are clipped, not the spreading rot eating a Halloween pumpkin from the inside out, but something slower and more pathetic: A protozoa swimming, its mass of microscopic hairs rowing frantically. A daddy-long-legs with its legs pulled off by feckless children. She remembers discovering the joy of sleeping naked and then losing it again. She remembers when she was the subject of every picture in his camera (before he slept with other people). Naïve girl so long ago.

Now when she types her last name at the end of the zillionth email of the day she thinks that she has no time—no time to get the car oil changed, no time to grade the stack of student papers before the end of the week, no time to shave her legs because who is looking anyway, no time to shop for groceries so better order delivery again, no time for any of the self-care regimens websites are always pushing on her, and—my God, she’s already late for pickup! And Lizzie Marsh knows that somewhere there are people who set timers and check every item off their lists and are always 10 minutes early and they would never, ever, ever run so close to the line on every damn thing and Lizzie knows this without even hoping, without even dreaming, without even aspiring, really, to be something so other than herself and so close to the divine.

All week Lizzie holds out hope for Sunday, because Sunday is her ex’s day with the kids, and Sunday, after drop-off at 8 am—or a little later than 8 am, let’s be realistic and say by 8:15—she has the whole glorious day in front of her to do any damn thing she pleases. Lizzie has not had this kind of freedom since her first job out of college, before marriage and before kids. In the first months after getting divorced, Lizzie slept every Sunday, gorging on hours of sleep like a bear sinking into hibernation, like a frog letting its blood freeze over for the snowy season, maybe even like someone giving in to hypothermia. She ran no errands, carried out no self improvement, read no books, watched no shows, went nowhere, accomplished nothing—just existed like a limpet on a rock, recovering from the battery of the tide.

Still, the unanimous opinion of the internet and all her friends and acquaintances and even the people at work when she finally let it be known that she had gotten a divorce is that when you are all alone again after splitting up with your partner of 23 years you need to get on out there and meet new people rather than lying in bed all day like a sloth. Even though everyone loves sloths, even though Costa Rica does a booming eco-tourism trade centered on sloths, even though sloths really have something going for them, Lizzie thinks, in their steady refusal of ant-like dedication to industriousness. Still, when the RSVP notice for an alumni hike on Sunday pops up in her inbox on Friday, and her old roommate Amanda sends her a text saying she and her husband Greg are going, Lizzie recklessly clicks “Yes!”

With Sunday drop-off achieved at 8:11 am, Lizzie Marsh has just enough time to drive back to her apartment, toss a peanut butter sandwich and some carrots into a backpack, grab a water bottle, and hustle back to the car with a prayer of making it to the 9 am hike before it begins. But now that she is in the car and committed, Lizzie finds herself with second thoughts. She considers calling Amanda to cancel, but Lizzie knows that phone reception is spotty out at the nature reserves that the alumni group favors and that Amanda will have gotten there early to greet people, because Amanda is the kind of person who is on the alumni board. Lizzie knows, too, that Amanda is on a mission to get her out and about, and Amanda on a mission is like a pack of sea lions when they decide to take over a dock, crashing through every fence that is supposed to keep them out with their four-hundred pound bodies. So she keeps driving.

The traffic gods are not kind and it’s already 9:05 when Lizzie turns into the main parking lot to find there are no spaces left, though Amanda’s on-time car is neatly parked near a cluster of hikers gathered at the trailhead. When Amanda waves enthusiastically and tells her there is a second parking lot just down the road, Lizzie wishes she were home in bed where her covers are ocean blue and the sun would just be starting to creep across the bamboo floors and she could be sinking into sleep. As she pulls back out into the road, Lizzie is hoping for no parking and an excuse to go home. Rounding a curve, the secondary lot comes into view on the left, and she presses the brake and flicks on the blinker, her eyes already picking out an open space. So she is committing to this hike after all, steering wheel turning under her fingers, already calculating how many minutes it will take to walk over to the main lot, and wondering whether the hike will have started without her, when she catches from the corner of her left eye a blur next to the driver’s side window and hears a sickening crunch. Lizzie hits the brake hard and jerks right, away from the blur and the sound, the car stopping just over the line between road and parking lot.

There is a man on the ground next to a red and silver motorcycle and for a second Lizzie’s heart stops because she knows, she knows she has made a terrible mistake in life and while she can’t decide whether the mistake was marrying the wrong person or not knowing how to keep her ex faithful to her or whether the mistake was marrying at all or something else she knows there was a mistake and somehow she is someone who, when left to her own devices, her own opinions and decisions, is a blight upon the world and the best thing, the only thing, the safest thing is to stay hunkered down in bed with the covers over her head and only do the things that need to be done. What was she thinking, going on a hike?

Another group of hikers is loosening from their tight knot and Lizzie is opening the car door and the man is getting up—oh, thank God!—and Lizzie’s heart starts up again, racing now, because even as she feels relief she wonders, ashamed to be wondering, what exactly is the state of her car insurance? In Lizzie’s fantasies she is someone who keeps an excel spreadsheet of her expenses and has a file cabinet with all of her passwords and account numbers carefully organized and she can recall with perfect clarity the details of her car insurance. Instead, she is pulling out her phone with shaking fingers and logging into the Geico app and praying for signal so that she can download the insurance card she never got around to printing out.

And even as all of this is happening, Lizzie half out of the car and the app finally done loading, the man is standing up. And he is alive and his bike even starts, and for a moment it is like grace. Then she swings from elation to a sense that, once again, she has been undeservedly spared the consequences of all of her bad choices, lined up like a set of bowling pins, for the world to come knock down. She exchanges insurance information with the man and after about 20 minutes he rides off.

Things she forgot and her friends berate her for later: to get his insurance information and to get his license plate number, so that when her insurance determines she is not at fault (but she knows, deep down, that if she hadn’t been late for the hike, and hurrying, she would have seen him coming up on the left and braked in time) she can’t get hold of his insurance and, though she is not legally liable for damage to him or his bike, neither does she ever see a penny from his insurance to fix the dent in her own car. This, Lizzie thinks as she explains the dent to Annabelle, her daughter who is oh-so-sharp, is only justice, and she leaves it unfixed as a reminder to herself of all her luck and all her many sins.


* * * * *

Margaret E. Wells is an emerging fiction writer who lives in Pacifica, California, and loves the ocean and the redwoods. She is originally from the Northeast and currently works in education. Her stories are inspired by the wonders of the everyday and the magic of ordinary people.