“Hil, I know you’re upset, but I think it would do you some good to just take a deep breath and calm down for a second --”

It wasn’t bad advice. No, it was terrible advice. She didn’t need Sam telling her how to breathe or when to be angry. She had managed well enough on both fronts since birth without his counsel.

“Calm down? Look at my van, Sam! What the hell happened? And my name is Hillary, you bow-legged, high school educated, lunchmeat eating idiot.”

Despite appearances to the contrary, Hillary’s outburst wasn’t meant for Sam. After all, he couldn’t have been responsible for the smashed windshield, punctured tires, and wrecked hood before them. Sam had become the target of her ire by way of his unsolicited therapy, but the true source of her anger, the real person she wanted to hear answers from was the man who had rescued them from the Swan Song and now stood with them in its shabby parking lot, a maroon-colored 1999 Saturn SW1 the only other thing keeping them company.

“I hate to say it, but I thought you would be, I don’t know, a little more appreciative. On account of me risking my life for you two.”

He had the long, lean body of a swimmer and the exaggeratedly relaxed drawl of a surfer; as if the only thing to perturb him was a wave too gnarly. He wore his dark hair in a bun atop his head and, in the brief interlude between the diner and van, had managed to slip on a pair of oversized aviator sunglasses. It was as if he were auditioning to be cool but knew he wasn’t right for the part.

“Appreciative? Look at my van! Look! Last time I saw it there wasn’t a thing wrong with it!”

Sam cleared his throat.

“I wouldn’t say nothing was wrong. With that knocking, something was definitely awry with one of the accelerator pumps. Couldn’t manage to get her up to speed without a PLOCK PLOCK PLOCK sound.”

Never before had she been more glad to be divorced from the man.

“Sam, does this look like something caused by an accelerator pump?”

“Uh, well…,” he squirmed.

“Does it Sam?”

He conceded that what they were looking at wasn't typical of an accelerator pump, knocking noise or not.

“I don’t even know what an accelerator pump is, but unless ours was some kind of mutant accelerator pump that decided to get revenge on us for driving too much in the summer heat, I don’t think it was the accelerator pump. I think it had something to do with this guy. Whoever he is.”

Sam had to hand it to her. It probably wasn’t the pump.

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“Let’s back up. Whatever happened to your van, I had nothing to do with it. It was like this when I got here to, as I said before, save both of you at risk to my own health and well-being. I do have suspicions about who might have done it, though. And my name, since I think we skipped that part of the introduction process, is Dat Vinh Halliburton.”

Never one to forget the folly of the last thing out of his mouth, Sam spoke up again.

“Vin Halliburton? Is that Dutch?”

Dat Vinh struggled to understand if he was being made the butt of a joke. Little did he know that Sam was neither witty nor erudite enough to craft that kind of joke that quickly.

“No, it’s Dat Vinh, and then Halliburton. Like the company. All of us take as our surname the name of one of the oppressors. I know a Total. And Sanofi. Meta. Sberbank.”

“Total?” Sam questioned. “Like the cereal?”

“No, Total like the oil company. You don’t read much, do you?”

Hillary’s eyes rolled and her chest heaved with a weary sigh.

“Sam, that’s enough... Dat Vinh, Who is this ‘us’ you’re talking about? And who do you suspect did this,” she pointed dejectedly at the van, “ -- and why? Why my van?”

“I don’t think the van’s your biggest concern --”

“You don’t? Well, Dat Vinh, you don’t know what it took to get that van and you don’t know what it means now that I’ve lost it.”

“I don’t even know how she got it, and I’ve been living out of it for weeks.”

The back and forth. The heat. Dat Vinh had thought this would be easier. His directive had been clear. Find Sam & Hillary -- preferably before the opposition did. Extricate them from whatever situation they’d gotten caught up in. Return with them as unharmed as the situation would permit.

If anything, he thought the hard part would be the extraction but all that had required was a good hard shove. He hadn’t expected getting out of the parking lot to be the challenge.

“All I’m saying is that, compared to the very real danger posed by the people who are after you, I think you may be placing a little more weight than you ought to on the van and a little less importance on staying alive.”

Hillary ground to a halt. There were plenty of causes; diagnosing the source of this malaise would have been no easier than getting the nectar back out of honey. It wasn’t just the heat or the wear in her bones. Not just the aches that come with being tired from well over a year of different kinds of sadness. That all added up, certainly. Most of all, though, it was the wild swings in emotion that were getting to her. Fear and anger followed by elation tinged with sorrow.

The state of her van. This meant it was over, didn’t it? What else could it mean? She had survived but the van hadn’t. She didn’t have the money to fix it. Nor did she have the time. Or the emotional wherewithal.

“My severance.”

Sam arched a dirty eyebrow.

“Your what?”

“My severance. I paid for the van with my severance and what I had left in savings. All cash.”

Sam asked what she meant by severance. He had always made his living in an industry without such bourgeoise luxuries.

“They let me go. Alectronic let me go. Eighteen years, the only place I’ve worked since college, and they let me go.”

“Oh, I’m sorry Hil--”

She didn’t have the patience to correct him.

“It was part of a reorganization and they said I shouldn’t take it personally. And I shouldn’t. But how could I not? First you. Then my dad. And then my job. I’m running out of things I used to be able to define myself by.”

“You’re more than that job, Hillary. You know that.”

Technically, she was less than the job. A career? A livelihood? That was just another empty space in her life’s ledger. Another debt she couldn’t pay back.

She deflated with a hopeless shrug.

“I certainly thought I could try to be. It was a gamble. It was impulsive. It was the kind of thing I would have never done -- even thought about doing -- before. Truth be told, I had been drinking the night before. But the thought that it was a good idea didn’t go away even after I woke up in the morning. Not even after I got over the hangover. Not even after I pulled up at the dealership with a wad of cash in my purse.”

It was a way to cope; it was the wrong way to cope. The guilt came fast for Hillary and it lasted long, too. Longer, certainly, than any sense of relief or joy she felt at fulfilling this, the project she chose to inherit from her father. All she could do to fight the inescapable feeling that she was making a mistake was to push on. The more pig-headed the better. She had to drive Sam hard because the moment she slowed down or, heaven forbid, stopped, she knew she’d have to come to terms with the mistake that she’d made.