Page 496 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
all-time high, I took a deep breath, checked and reassured the kids, and went back into traffic, this time, lesson learned, to wave down a tow truck driver whom I, despite the pressure of the circumstances, would not be stupid enough to prepay. (Anyway, there was just so much money left in my wallet.) Permit me, possibly for the first time, to truncate: After I don’t know how much time had elapsed, highwayman number two came “riding—Riding—riding . . .” up, but, to my relief, he was not Alfred Noyes’s highwayman of yore, and he stopped with the best of intentions. Miracle of miracles! Not only did he tow us (without pre- payment) to a garage in the Bronx, but also he knew that the garage would have a mechanic who might (and did!) fix the car—on a Saturday night! Not only was the car fixed on the spot; it was fixed to the extent that I could drive the kids to Farragut Road.
This was great, but it did result in the ultimate indignity. For rea- sons that I don’t recall, I arrived at the house knowing that I could not drive the car back to Manhattan. Worse, I arrived after the time at which the last train had departed for Grand Central. Accordingly, I was left at Phyllis’s sufferance to sleep in Peter’s trundle bed in a room festooned with Mets regalia, thirty feet from what had been my bedroom in a house in which I had lived for a decade and a half—a house in which I was now an undesirable trespasser.
• 478 •