Sarkassian looked slightly embarrassed. “Well, William was an unusual man, given to somewhat romantic gestures and ideas.”
“The garage is full of chocolate?” Nina was totally down for that. “Champagne?”
“No.”
“Roses?”
“No.”
Nina had a sudden insane surge of hope. “Kittens?” She did realize that wouldn’t work; she just always hoped for kittens.
The lawyer coughed. “No. The garage contains a 1982 Pontiac Trans Am.”
Nina stared at him blankly, then a fact popped into her head. “Wait, like from Knight Rider?”
“Exactly like. A black Pontiac Firebird Trans Am.”
“He left me K.I.T.T.?” Nina immediately flashed back to many happy evenings lying on the floor in front of the TV, listening to Louise murmuring about David Hasselhoff’s leather pants. “Did he think I was a lone crusader in a dangerous world?”
“Good Lord.” Lydia’s tone was incredulous. “He left you a car?”
“You can have it if you want. I don’t want it.” Nina really didn’t. She didn’t care about cars; she barely drove. The movie with the head in a jar was The Silence of the Lambs, by the way; it had come back to her.
Lydia shook her head. She was clearly bothered. “An intelligent car is so much more fun than money.”
Nina looked at her. “It’s not really an intelligent car. It’s just a car.” She turned to Sarkassian. “Unless it comes with an actual com-link wristwatch thingy, in which case I am totally keeping it.”
“I know that,” said Lydia, her voice scornful. “But he only left the rest of us money.”
There was a pause.
“Maybe he thought you only cared about his money,” said Eliza, quietly.
“Well, he would have been wrong. But seeing as he never asked me anything at all about my life, how would he know?” Lydia looked around. “None of you ever ask me anything.”
After another awkward silence, Sarkassian coughed and said, “Well, whether Nina takes the car or not, the will makes it quite clear that she has to go drive it at least once before she chooses to sell it or give it away.”
Nina frowned at him. “What kind of legal provision is that? What is this, Brewster’s Millions?”
Clearly, the lawyer had never enjoyed that brand of Hollywood madcap legal comedy, because he looked at her with a tiny wrinkle between his eyebrows. “I don’t know what that means. I have the keys here. Please be nice to the mechanic who’s been taking excellent care of it for the last twenty years. When I told him about the will, he hoped you would be impossible to find.” He slid the keys across the table, and Nina suddenly had a terrible thought.
“I can’t drive stick.”
He raised his eyebrows, smoothing out that pesky wrinkle. “Well, here’s your chance to learn.”
As Nina sat in the Lyft heading back home, she checked her phone. Nothing. Impulsively, she sent Tom a text.
“Hi there, I just inherited a car.”
No response. Maybe he was working.
“It’s a 1982 Pontiac Firebird. Like K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider.”
Still nothing. Maybe he was busy.
“It doesn’t have William Daniels’s voice, though, so, you know . . .”
Silence. Maybe he was with someone else.
She looked out of the window, noticing all the couples walking along, holding hands, smiling at each other, or even simply sitting across from each other looking at their phones. She’d always loved the feeling of being separate, of being alone while everyone else clumped together like mold on the inside rim of an old coffee cup. But now she felt lonely.
She leaned forward. “Hey, can I change our destination?”
The driver met her eyes in the mirror. “Sure, but you have to do it in the app.”
“I can’t tell you? You know, verbally?”
He shook his head. “Well, sure, you can tell me, verbally, or in sign language, or on a piece of parchment carried by a pigeon, but for me to alter my course, you also have to change it in the app.” He shrugged, his eyes back on the road. “Despite the fact we’re a scant two feet apart, our relationship requires the intermediation of a computer system housed in a server farm neither of us will ever see. Thus technology further separates us, eroding our trust in one another and leading our species down a path to a future where we only know one another on a screen and can only talk to one another in characters, and where ideas are owned by companies run by algorithms.”
Nina gazed at the back of his head for a moment.
“So . . . on the app then?”
“Yup.”
Twenty-six
In which Nina meets a legendary
Pokémon in human form.
The garage on Cahuenga was part of a larger mechanic’s business, with classic car restoration clearly a specialty. There were several old cars parked outside, including a Mercedes, which was the only hood ornament Nina recognized. She was pretty impressed she even remembered they were called hood ornaments, honestly. Cars all looked more or less the same to her, though she sorted them into broad categories like “fancy” and “regular” or “in her way” or “going too fast in a residential neighborhood.” They all looked the same from the driver’s seat, she reasoned, unless you care about how the people outside the car are looking at you.
The mechanic was an older guy, maybe in his late fifties. Nina couldn’t tell; he was covered in a patina of wrinkles and oil that blurred the edges. She’d tracked him down in his “office,” which appeared to be the car mechanic’s version of the back room at Knight’s. Where they had piles of books, this guy had piles of manuals and little bits and pieces of machines that Nina didn’t recognize. She had introduced herself, and the temperature had gotten noticeably chillier. She felt bad for the topless garage mechanic—well, she was holding a wrench—on the calendar behind him.
“Oh, you’re the new owner?” He looked her over and clearly wasn’t happy. “Do you drive a lot?”
“Hardly ever.”
“Do you know cars?”
“I know they have wheels.”
“Do you understand the inherent beauty of a well-machined engine, the throaty purr of a finely tuned timing?”
Nina frowned at him. “I understand that throaty purr is a cliché, but other than that, no. Look, Mr. . . .”
“Moltres.”
She looked at him. “Moltres?”
“Yes. Moltres. M-o-l-t-r-e-s.”
“Did you know your name is also the name of a legendary Pokémon?” As was so often the case, Nina immediately regretted saying this. Either he already knew, in which case, duh, or he would have no idea what she was talking about and would consider her possibly dangerous. There should be some kind of twelve-step program for people like her, she thought; Non Sequitur’s Anonymous. Then she wondered if maybe that was actually what NSA stood for; they didn’t care about national security at all. Then she realized it hadn’t, strictly speaking, been a non sequitur, it had just been a stupid question, and that her twelve-step program would more appropriately be named Stupid People Anonymous and that it would be a pretty big group and have the acronym SPA. Then she realized Moltres was still talking to her.