A bazillion thanks to thatsbogus, as good of an editor as he is a writer.
This is the second Convertible story, written as a standalone - the first story is recapped in the intro, but I encourage you to read the first one anyway.
++++++++++++++++++++++
My name is Jacob Leopold. I'm 32, and live in Menlo Park, California. I'm a Penn State grad with a Master's Degree in Materials Engineering, and I work for QuoVadis, one of the world's largest multi-disciplinary engineering and scientific consulting firms. To put it in layman's terms, when something big goes wrong involving a billion dollar project - a bridge collapses, a building with state-of-the-art fire safety systems goes up in flames, a dam bursts, a chemical plant blows up - the billion dollar companies behind these projects call QuoVadis. A team of scientific experts is assembled, and we fly out to the scene and gather data to determine exactly what happened and why, and if necessary, help defend the clients in court.
My twin brother Joel lives about 23 miles away in the upscale Willow Glen district of San Jose, and is a mechanic/co-owner of a luxury car reseller in nearby Sunnyvale, California. He and I like to say that when our mother's egg split, I got the brains, he got the brawn. I'm smart at figuring out things like how metal support structures fail, but I can't do something simple as change a car's oil to save my life. When it comes to internal-combustion engines, however, whether it's a lawnmower motor or a Rolls Royce engine, Joel can make those damn things sing like angels. Our mother used to swear Joel came out of the womb with a wrench in his hand, and I came out with a slide rule.
I'm still single, while my brother is happily married to his second wife, Charlotte. Even though she's 48, 16 years older than Joel, she's one of these tiny women who's hot as fuck! They have an 8-month old daughter, my niece Gabriela, and another on the way, believe it or not. Joel tells me - confidentially and brother-to-brother, of course - that Charlotte is so good in bed they fuck almost every single night, even when she's pregnant! If you ever saw Charlotte, you'd totally believe it.
Now here's where it gets crazy: Charlotte - his wife - used to be his mother-in-law! This sounds nuts, I know, but his first wife Arianna - a real beauty to behold, but an absolute bitch on wheels, believe me - leaves my brother after 6 months of marriage, shacks up with her boss in New York and divorces Joel!
A month or so later, Arianna calls Joel from out of the blue and asks him to drive her mother all the way up to St. Helena and drop her off at a resort for a 'girl's weekend'. This is a fucking two-and-a-half-hour trip, IF traffic is light, which it never is! Keep in mind also that the whole time he and Arianna were married, Charlotte was a total cold bitch to him; this woman could make a fucking polar bear shiver, I swear!
Being the soft touch that he is, Joel agrees because he stupidly hopes it might help convince Arianna to take him back. Anyone who knows her would predict that was never going to happen, but between us two brothers, Joel was always the starry-eyed optimist. (If it was me instead of my brother, when Arianna asked I would have emphatically stated "AWWWW, HELL NAW!", right before I told her to fuck off and never call again.)
And so, sap that he is, Joel drives Charlotte up to St. Helena in his classic British sports car, and wouldn't you know it, she and Joel talk and really get to know each other. She reveals she's very lonely, and how her cheating husband Rob won't bang her but has zero problems banging his 20-something side piece.
Charlotte confesses to my brother that she's always thought he was a sweet guy (he really is, trust me!); all this time she wasn't upset because she didn't like Joel, but because she knew her selfish brat daughter Arianna was going to break Joel's heart. (Ohhhh, yeah, give that lady a prize, she called it.)
By the time they get to St. Helena, Joel and Charlotte are falling for each other. Hard. Instead of merely dropping her off, he stays with her and they screw like bunnies; next thing you know, Charlotte divorces her cheating husband and tells her daughter to fuck off, she and Joel move in together, she gets pregnant, and I get invited to be Joel's best man at a City Hall wedding.
After Joel knocks up Charlotte, a two-seater doesn't make sense anymore, so he buys a Volvo 850 T5 turbocharged station wagon capable of 150mph a station and gives the sports car to me, his workaholic engineer brother, who gets excited about bridges collapsing but doesn't give a rat's ass about auto maintenance.
++++++++++
The car is a restored British racing green 1955 Triumph TR2 convertible; Joel used to brag to me (and anyone else who'd listen) that a similar model had raced at Le Mans. The first time I got in it, I was not impressed. It's a for-real sports car, not some junky Honda Civic with a spoiler bolted on; this meant comfort was not a consideration. Steering wheel, stick shift, hand brake, speedometer, tachometer, fuel gauge, oil pressure gauge, temperature gauge, battery gauge, starter knob, choke, buttons for the wipers, that was about it. No A/C, no satellite radio, no seat heaters, and no windows, just side curtains for inclement weather. For longer road trips Joel had installed an AM/FM radio hidden in the glovebox, but aside from that it was fairly spartan.
When I drove it, however, my views on the TR2 changed entirely. Simply stated, the car's a fucking blast! It was hardly the fastest car on the road (the four-cylinder engine gave it a top speed of 105 mph), but it was quick! It accelerated like a bat out of hell, it cornered like a demon, the full-throated rumble of the exhaust damn near made me deaf, but people sure knew I was coming. Not to mention it was a head-turner; every time I took it out for the day, people on the street would make offers to buy it.
The only downside? With me being on the road 95% of the time, I didn't have much time to drive it, much less anyone in my life to fill that passenger seat. Most of the time it sat parked in my garage, while I used my 2002 Toyota Corolla as a daily driver. Since I travelled so often, Joel would go take the TR2 out for a spin once every two weeks. He would frequently lecture me, "You want to treat a classic car like you treat your dick, bro: keep your fluids topped off and use it as often as you can. It's not good for your dick OR a classic car to sit unused." (Full disclosure: the last real date I had was taking a woman friend to a national football playoff in late 2018, not exactly high up there in the 'romantic' date category. The last kiss I had was with some woman who flirted with me at a bar while I was on an assignment in Great Falls, Montana. It was very nice kiss, but I never got her name or number; turned out she was just trying to make her boyfriend jealous.)
++++++++++
My life took an interesting turn recently when my employer, QuoVadis, got a call from a construction company in New Jersey. The wall of a high school gymnasium they were building had collapsed, and a team of us were assembled to fly there and determine why. To save the client money we were booked into an inexpensive hotel (The Ramble Inn, get it?) near the site, guessing we'd be staying about two weeks, to determine what went wrong. That first week, the eleven other QuoVadis team members and I would arrive at the site around 7am to take samples and measurements, then go back to the hotel mid-afternoon, sequestered in a hotel conference room to compile the day's data; it would then be sent back to headquarters in California for more detailed analysis. I was typically finished and back in my room by 4pm, where I'd order room service and watch pay-per-view movies until I fell asleep.
That first Friday, about an hour before we arrived on site a second wall of the gymnasium construction collapsed, and the team spent 3 hours scrambling the new rubble for additional samples. As a result, it was nearly 7:30pm when I left the conference room. As I crossed the empty lobby, I stopped dead in my tracks; there was a too-familiar face behind the front desk. It was Arianna, my brother's ex-wife.
She was still tall and slim with blue eyes, although her long raven-black hair was now styled in a pixie cut. Despite wearing the mandatory 'white-shirt-with-nerdy-red-vest' hotel uniform, there was no hiding those 32D breasts underneath. Joel told me they were implants, but although they were fake, they did look good. Her face, however, looked older than her 28 years. There were more lines and wrinkles in it than when I'd seen her last.
She looked up and saw me, and her reaction was pretty much the same as mine, stunned disbelief. I walked over to the front desk, and said "Arianna, is that really you?"
