Bobby Chandler chuckled to himself as he drove down the street. He didn't mind it much that his mother and his grandmother were conspiring against him. If things went right, he would have one more woman to help keep him satisfied. He thought it to be a bit ridiculous, though. Hence, his "conditions." He never once thought they would be so willingly agreed to. "Kinda like leading sheep to the slaughter," he said aloud.
Barely six blocks away from his house and he entered a newly formed subdivision. Very few houses existed in the place where the campus of his old high school had once stood. It had been razed within weeks of the new high school being built on the outskirts of town. Most of the foundations had been laid, on top of which houses, in varying stages of completion, stood like skeletons, waiting to be finished. It was there that he saw Mrs. Brubaker's minivan sitting next to the curb with the hood up. Mrs. Brubaker stood next to the driver's side door, waving frantically.
"My lucky day," Bobby thought as he stopped next to the van and rolled the window down.
"Thank God you came along," she said breathlessly.
"What's wrong, Mrs. Brubaker?" Bobby asked.
"I don't know," she said as she leaned part way through the open space in the passenger side door. "It started making this clunking sound and then it just quit running. Now, I can't get it started."
"Sorta 'gave up the ghost', eh?" he said, laughing inwardly at his own joke.
Mrs. Brubaker saw no humor in her situation, but didn't tell him so. She just smiled disdainfully and said, "What am I going to do? I need to get groceries and get home as quickly as I can."
"You also need a tow truck," Bobby told her. "Tell you what. You climb on in and I'll take you shopping. You can use your cell phone to call get a bl-tow job."
"I can't," she told him.
"What do you mean?" Bobby asked. "You can't ride with me or you can't make the call?"
"Oh, no," Mrs. Brubaker told him as she opened the door and climbed in. "I can't make the phone call because I left my cell phone at home. May I use yours?"
"Left mine at home, also," he said. "We'll call one when we get to the store." For the first time since he'd known the Brubaker family, he saw Becky's mother in a different light.
Of average height and a little more than average weight, Mrs. Brubaker was a bit nondescript. Yet, her naturally curly blonde hair would have made her stand out in a crowd. It hung to just below her shoulders.
"I love the way the sun reflects off your hair," Bobby commented. "You must have just shampooed it."
"Really?" she questioned as she twisted her neck slightly, causing her hair to undulate along her shoulders and back.
"That's more than my Herman would say," she said, her voice brimming with cynicism. "Ever."
Bobby saw his opening and he took it. "Your husband has to be an idiot not to notice true beauty like yours."
"You're so sweet," she told him. For a second or two, Bobby thought, Mrs. Brubaker's visage had changed to that of a real human being, almost belying the fact that she was the hoity-toity, nose-up-in-the-air bitch that most everyone he knew thought her to be.
"You sure didn't feel that way when you caught me walking Becky home from school that day," he said to himself. He bit his lip to keep from putting a voice to his thoughts. Instead, he just laughed lightly and told her. "I've always thought you were one of the sexiest women on the block."
Mrs. Brubaker caught her breath and stiffened temporarily. "How dare him use such a word to describe me," she thought. She opened her mouth to severely chastise him, but, for some reason she couldn't. In spite of what she thought about Bobby Chandler, she found herself warming up to the idea that he wasn't such a bad kid after all. Instead, she ran the fingers of her left hand through her hair, smiled again and said in a soft voice, "Thank you for your opinion. But, flattery will get you nowhere with me."
Bobby pulled into a parking space in front of the grocery store, shut the engine off, turned in his seat and looked her in the eye. "Sure, Mrs. Brubaker, it is a bit of flattery that I'm using on you today but, I promise you that every word of what I said is the truth. If I were your husband, you'd be getting compliments like that every day of the week. You have no idea. . ."
Mrs. Brubaker reached for the door handle. "You're going to make an old lady blush," she said as she quickly exited the vehicle and ran toward the store.
About an hour later, Bobby spied Mrs. Brubaker exiting the store with a shopping cart full of groceries. He opened the car's trunk and began to transfer the groceries. When he finished doing that he moved quickly to the passenger side door, opened it and waited for her to get in.
Mrs. Brubaker tried to pull the seatbelt around her, but it was stuck. She looked at Bobby with demanding eyes. "Fix it, please," she said coldly and matter-of-factly.
"Yes ma'am," Bobby replied. "It gets stuck like that once in a while." He tugged on the belt several times before it became unstuck. Instead of giving her control of the seatbelt, he decided to fasten it himself.
As he reached around her, his forearm brushed against her breasts. She glared at him for a moment and then looked away. He closed the door quickly, hoping she wouldn't notice how excited he'd become because of that one unintentional touch.
Bobby needn't have worried so much. As he was rounding the car, getting in and fastening his own seatbelt, Mrs. Brubaker was asking herself why such a simple touch of her breasts from someone she despised so would cause her nipples to harden like they had.
She would have understood and would have welcomed the touch if it had been her husband doing the touching. She laughed to herself. "Fat chance of that happening. He hasn't touched me sexually in well over a year."
A tiny tear formed in her left eye. "He's sure enough touching that harlot, Marla Jackson, every chance he gets." The tears became bigger and soon they were in both eyes, clouding her vision.
Bobby glanced in her direction in time to see a tear fall from her chin onto her blouse. "You okay, Mrs. Brubaker? He asked.
She stared straight ahead, her expression almost void of emotion. "Sure," she said with a touch of sadness. "Why wouldn't I be?"
Bobby said nothing else to his neighbor the rest of the way to her house. "Aw, hell!" he exclaimed as he pulled into her driveway.
Lost in a sea of self-misery, Mrs. Brubaker was startled by bobby's sudden outburst. "What's wrong?" she asked.
"We forgot to call a tow truck."
"I did that while I was in the store," Mrs. Brubaker said rather condescendingly. "If you had paid attention, you would have noticed that my van was not where I left it."
Bobby breathed a sigh of relief. "Oh, good," he said. Once in the driveway, he turned the engine off, got out and scurried around to open the door for Mrs. Brubaker. He helped her out of the car and then opened the trunk. Thankful that the store still used plastic bags, Bobby managed to carry all her groceries in the house in one trip.
