A magazine arced through the air and landed spine up on top of another.
“Sir, if you don’t like our reading material, feel free to watch television and leave it to the others,” the secretary admonished as she scooped up the sprawling periodicals.
On another day, he would have appreciated her choice of an outfit that struggled to cover her ample virtues. As it was, Oscar glared at her. She would not understand what it felt like to see your own vehicle, the one into which you’d put so much money and wax, mocked over and over by the snobbish authors of the editorials in all those shabby rags and therefore he could not enjoy anything about her. Somewhere in the shop, they labored to take out the faint scratches caused by the morning’s collision with that puny little foreign-made roller skate someone at the Court called a car. When the task was complete, his world would be righted again, even if his ungrateful wife never came back. She didn’t understand the Hummer either.
Oscar chewed at his fingernails and pushed back the image that blotted out his other thoughts. His memory of the blood and the glimpse of the other man’s agonized face would not stay safely stowed away in the corner of his mind, even considering the blinding rage that dredged up Sugar’s face and the desire to smash it in, the sickening fear that his boss would fire him for calling in sick, and the worry over the outcome at the body shop. The lady cop’s assurance that the other man was probably to blame because of the cell phone could not make him put the blood in its place.
“He’s nothing,” he muttered to himself. “A loser.” Those lines helped him regain his composure every time when Sugar tried her tears on him. He wrung his hands and confronted another image, the twisted frame of the car. “He deserved it.”
Television intruded. Some woman had lodged the channel on that bossy cow, Oprah. Who made her such an expert on everything? Maybe she was the one who gave Sugar all her ideas, egged her on to disobey him. He‘d always suspected as much, which is why he locked the television up while he was away from the house.
Oscar crossed his arms and looked away from the flapping mouth of Oprah Winfrey. Thankfully, the volume was very low. He could ignore her voice but he picked up the music of the ad that followed. He returned his gaze to the television and watched as a tidy, smartly dressed woman scrubbed a bathroom until the shine made little starbursts. That was that part Sugar needed to study. Perhaps if he made a DVD of all those vignettes strung together and made her watch…
Again, the blood crept across his thoughts. He scowled and crossed his arms, raising his eyes to the ceiling. It was all Sugar’s fault somehow. She was the one who should be bleeding.
