Chapter 1

The phone's incessant ringing snapped me out of my reverie. Who could be calling this time of day? I looked at the clock as I picked up the phone, and swore under my breath as I realized I had once again lost track of the hour. Still, I wasn't expecting any calls.

"Hello, Dad. I hoped I might catch you at home."

"Jenna, honey, where else would I be?"

"Oh, I don't know, but it took you long enough to answer the phone. Are you sure you're all right?"

My daughter was both protective and nosey, just like her mom had been.

"I'm fine honey, never been better. Doc says I'm in better shape than most men half my age."

Of course I didn't tell her that as soon as he'd said that old Doc Rogers had laughed and given me a ten-minute lecture on what was wrong with most thirty-year-old males.

"Well, that's good. I worry about you all alone in that big house. The kids miss you. Shawn asks me 'Where's Granddad?' every day, as soon as he comes in the door after school."

"That's sweet. Tell him that I miss him, too. I sure enjoyed the three weeks I spent up there with all of you, and I thank you for having me."

"Yeah, Dad, but we'd love to have you all the time..."

"Now, honey, you know that Minnesota in winter is just a bit too cold for me. I've grown accustomed to these warm Florida winters, where snow is something you only see on TV and on Christmas cards. You guys should come down here, during Christmas."

This was a long running discourse. Jenna and my son Mark had been encouraging me to move in with one or the other or to split my time up between the two of them. This had started almost as soon as my wife of thirty-four years passed away, a bit over four years ago. I knew that they both understood that I had no intentions of giving up the home that I had worked so long and hard to pay off.

As we exchanged further pleasantries, I knew in the back of my mind that the real purpose of her call was to check up on me. I knew I could expect a similar call from Mark in a few days. I guessed there was nothing wrong with that. I loved my kids and grandkids as much as they loved me. Still, you can have too much of a good thing. We ended the call with promises to call each other soon.

I returned to my writing, but the distraction had been too much. The paragraph that I had been working on made no sense to me now. My muse must have taken the phone call as his signal to take a nap. Why not? It was almost as old as I was!

I thought about what else I wanted to accomplish. The grass was cut, the flowerbeds mulched, the pool cleaned, the oil was changed in the Mustang.

Not a bad day's work for a sixty-year-old man. Hell, I told Jenna the truth, more or less. I felt like a thirty year old. Better, in fact, because when I was thirty, I was trapped behind my desk. I had hired all of those things done. Avoiding boredom had me in the best shape of my life!

Still, it wasn't that I really lonely. I had my chat buddies online, as well as my friends, locally.

I wasn't exactly looking for romance, either. Hell, the number of amateurs on Craigslist, advertising sex for hire, almost made romance obsolete. Things were much simpler with them. I didn't need to know what to say or guess what a woman wanted ... as long as I had an extra hundred dollars, and a little patience, it was a done deal. Hell, a hundred was dirt cheap, when you considered that the cost of a real date was usually double that, and didn't come with any guarantees. Of course I had to be careful of STDs, but no more careful than I needed to be with some sweet thing from a bar or bingo parlor.

I didn't want to spend the morning day trading stocks, even though I thought of day trading as the equal of the best video game ever invented. My system seemed to work well, especially in the volatile market of the past couple of years.

It wasn't that I needed the money, though. Lately all of my gains had been socked away into my grandkids' college trust funds. Hell, those funds already had enough in them to allow them to get advanced degrees at the best universities in the country. I laughed as I thought of the surprise those trust funds would be, when the kids graduated high school. Of course to hear Mark and Jenna brag, I expected that all my grandkids would get scholarships when they graduated, anyway.

Well, musing about the future wasn't getting anything accomplished. As I glanced outside, through the large picture window that faced my swimming pool, I noticed that it was a beautiful warm fall day. It was more like summer, actually.

Smiling, I decided to drive to the beach. That was the great thing about retirement. I could do anything I wanted, on the spur of the moment, without answering to anyone. I knew that school was in session, but I was still fairly certain that the beach would be covered with an excess of beautiful but barely covered young women.

I filled a small cooler with soft drinks, quickly changed into my bathing suit, added a 'cool' beach shirt and ball cap, grabbed the SPF 50 sunscreen and car keys, and headed out the door.

My 'old car' was a 1968 cherry red Mustang convertible. I had lovingly restored the car, but had added some improvements to the original factory specs. The convertible top was now motorized, and would open and close without the trouble of the original. I had replaced the original eight-track tape player with a state of the art DVD/MP3 player. I'd also had the original 289 CID V-8 completely reworked by a friend who owned a garage that specialized in high performance cars. He'd tuned the exhaust system, too.

The car (which I kept buffed to a high gloss) never failed to grab everyone's attention, wherever I parked it. Occasionally a classic Mustang purist would wince, and tell me I had ruined a fine car with 'those mods'. I would answer that I hadn't rebuilt the car for show. I had rebuilt it to drive. Before I'd started work on the Mustang, I went to a lot of vintage car shows. I saw a lot of restored Mustangs rolled off of trailers at the shows, which were pushed into place without ever having the engine started. That wasn't what I wanted at all.

It was a beautiful day for a drive to the beach. I headed off down a back road, rather than the much quicker interstate, in order to enjoy the power and handling of my car. The curves and absence of traffic and law enforcement on the back roads allowed me to exercise my right foot. I could concentrate on the road, rather than the rear view mirror. Several times I left the smell of burning rubber wafting up from the pavement as I peeled away from the various intersections.

I was only a few miles from the beach when all at once, what had been a clear road quickly became congested. As I moved along at a snail's pace, I soon saw the apparent reason for slowdown. There was an older sedan, which was apparently broken down. It was sitting along the side of the road with the hood raised.

I cursed as I realized the stupid driver hadn't taken the time to properly move the car from the road, which left about half the right lane blocked. That choked off passage at that point, as the road at that spot took a sharp dogleg turn, obscuring vision of oncoming traffic.

Being a nosey old cuss, I pulled safely off the road behind the sedan, rather than pass as everyone else had done. I set my emergency flashers blinking before getting out. I was curious to meet someone who was stupid enough to leave his car in the road as a target for every other nut on the road. I shook my head as I wondered what would have happened if the breakdown had occurred on the other side of the blind curve ahead.

Before I even got to where I could see the driver, I heard the sharp rapping of metal on metal. As I walked around the sedan I saw the butt and legs of the driver kicking in the air as the rapping continued. Then I heard a decidedly female voice launch into a steam of invectives that began with 'God damned, fucking old piece of shit' ... and ended with a screaming... 'Motherfucker!' I winced, as I knew I never wanted to be on the receiving end of that woman's wrath.

I was looking at her high heels kicking in the air, and was about to turn around and sneak back out of there, when I heard the wrench she was using as a hammer clank as it dropped through the engine compartment. It was at that moment that the previously mentioned 'motherfucker' screamed forth from her lungs.

Almost as soon as that happened, she pushed back off the fender. She pushed a little too hard, and ended up going over backwards onto the ground.

Before I could move or say a word she turned to me and screamed, "What the fuck are you looking at?"

I was wondering that to myself. Luckily I didn't say that as I took off my ball cap and scratched my head.

I know it sounded idiotic to her, because it sounded stupid to me after the words came out, but I asked, "Somethin' wrong with your car?"

I think she looked around for something to throw at me before she screeched, "Arrrrhh," and almost jumped to her feet.

I say 'almost' because she stumbled when the three-inch heel on one of her shoes caught in the dirt and broke. That must have been the proverbial 'straw that broke the camel's back'. She limped to the door of her car, opened it, and sat down on the seat. The ends of the obviously too long coveralls covered her feet, which were hanging out the door. Raising her foot to her lap, she peeled back the leg of the coverall. She pulled the broken shoe off, and threw it at me! Then she began to cry.

She cried for only a few moments, however, then gave me a withering glare. Having identified the enemy, she wiped her face with the back of the coverall sleeve.

Then she surprised me by plagiarizing a line from an old Robert Heinlein novel, asking, "Were you born stupid, or did you have to study to get that way?"

I considered the source of that line, and the eventual connection between those two characters, and I began laughing. At first she glared at me and then she gradually added to my laughter.

At first I wasn't sure whether her laughter was at me, or with me, as she pointed at me and began taking off her other shoe. When I winced, and shielded my face, she laughed even louder. At that point I rejoined her laughter and she tossed the shoe in the back seat of her car.

Even with her makeup smeared across her face, I could tell that she was a beautiful woman. I couldn't help looking her up and down, and admiring the calf that was exposed where she had pulled up the coverall. She was blonde with a complexion that let me know right off the bat that her hair color didn't come from a bottle. Her face was pixyish with a few freckles from the sun that had been lightly covered by the smeared makeup.