The Rideshare Driver Drove Me Home Four Nights in a Row novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Night One
On the first night of four, a driver hands a crying woman a napkin and takes the long way; at her door she tells him to drive around the block.
The app said, "Your driver Mateo is 2 minutes away."
I was standing under the awning of the restaurant, reading my ex-husband's text for the third time.
It was five minutes to one on a Monday morning, and it was raining for the first time that fall.
Since the end of summer I had walked the mile home, or taken a lift from whoever on the line was headed my way.
Tonight I had a bag of knives on my shoulder and a cold coming down in sheets.
I had opened the ride app because it was the only one on my phone.
It was the account my ex-husband had never taken off.
His text had come in seconds after I tapped the button.
"Saw you ordered a car. Good. It's too late for you to be walking around alone, Paulina. Text me when you're in. Don't make a thing of it."
He had left me in March.
He had taken the Subaru, the good pans and the date of the appointment with the lawyer.
He still thought he got a say in when I came home.
I read it again.
I had spent nine years in that kitchen, and I had run it through two owners and a health inspector's worst week.
I could not make my thumb answer him.
Behind me the back door banged, and two of my line cooks and the dishwasher came out into the rain, pulling up their hoods.
"Chef," one of the cooks said. "You want a ride? Our car's around the corner."
"I've got one coming," I said.
"You okay?"
"I'm fine."
I held the phone against my chest so he couldn't see the screen, and he nodded and ran for the corner with the others.
A gray Camry pulled up at the curb.
It stopped so smoothly that the puddle barely rocked.
The driver got out in the rain and came around the hood.
I stood there with my mouth a little open, because nobody had ever done that for me.
He was young.
He had short dark hair, a small scar on his chin, and a gray sweatshirt soaked dark at the shoulders.
He opened the back door and held it.
"Evening, ma'am."
The curb was slick, and my bag swung, and I put my hand out without looking.
It landed on his forearm.
It was warm through the wet sleeve, and hard, the arm of someone who lifted things for a living.
I held on.
I held on one beat longer than the curb required, and he stood still and let me.
Then I got in the back seat and he shut the door.
The car smelled like cold air and coffee.
A rosary hung from the mirror, and a phone mount on the dash showed the map with my street already on it.
He got in and checked the mirror, and then he drove.
He didn't ask me to confirm the address.
He didn't say anything else at all.
We turned off Broadway onto Louisiana, and the wipers went back and forth, and my phone lit again in my lap.
"Paulina? I'm waiting."
I looked at it, and something in my face gave out.
I cried the way I had not cried at the lawyer's, or in March, or in the empty house.
It was quiet and ugly, and I put my hand over my mouth to keep it in.
I thought he hadn't heard.
Then his arm came back between the seats with a napkin in his hand.
It was a fast-food napkin, folded in four, from the console.
He didn't turn his head.
"Thank you," I said, and my voice cracked.
He nodded.
I wiped my face and saw that he had turned the wrong way at Evans.
He was taking the long way, around Washington Park, with the wipers slow and the heater going and the streetlights sliding across the roof.
He was driving under the limit.
In the mirror his eyes found mine, dark and steady, and then went back to the road.
He wasn't studying me.
He was checking that I was still there.
I had been looked at in my own kitchen for nine years, by cooks and owners and a husband.
It had always been to see what I was doing wrong.
This was the first time in seven months that anyone had looked to see if I was all right.
It embarrassed me how much I liked it.
I leaned my head against the cold window and let the park go past in the dark.
By the time he turned onto my block I had stopped crying, and I wished I hadn't.
The duplex came up on the left, with my half of it dark and the porch bulb out.
He pulled to the curb and put the car in park.
"Here you go," he said.
His voice was lower than I had expected, and there was a little Pueblo in it, in the way he said go.
I didn't reach for the door.
The rain drummed on the roof, and the phone in my lap lit again.
I turned it face down on the seat.
The engine ran, and his hands stayed on the wheel at ten and two.
He waited.
He could have said it was time, or reminded me about the fare, or asked if I was all right.
He did none of those things.
I didn't want to get out.
I didn't want to go into a house where the only thing waiting was a text.
"Drive around the block," I said.
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