you stop. Doesn’t matter who they are. Doesn’t matter what they think of you. You stop, because someday that’s going to be you out there, and you’ll want somebody to do the same.
So I stopped.
That stretch of Route 9 is bad road to break down on. No streetlights. Fields on both sides going black into nothing. The kind of dark where your headlight only reaches so far and everything past it could be anything.
The girl was shaking. I figured it was the cold at first. It was maybe forty degrees out and she had nothing on but a thin gray hoodie and jeans worn through at the knee.
“You got a spare?” I asked her.
She nodded. Pointed at the trunk without really looking at it. “In there. I think.”
“You think?”
“It’s not my car,” she said. “It’s my boyfriend’s.”
Something in the way she said
