October 2023

“You have a good job, right? Aren’t you like a crane operator or something?” Alex asked.

I told him I was—had been. A confused wrinkle caught his brow as he nodded to himself and laid out the papers for me to sign.

We sat at his desk, in the sales department of the dealership, near the tall windows that looked out at a parking lot full of brand new Subarus and the bustling afternoon traffic on highway 99. Alex had handled the original sale of my car over two years beforehand. He’d sat with me on the test drive when a hooker on the sidewalk lifted her shirt to reveal her massive breasts to the onslaught of traffic. Look, it’s a good omen! Alex had said with a laugh. Now, staring down college expenses and a lack of work, I couldn’t afford to keep the car.

“What are you going to school for?” Alex asked.

“English,” I said, feeling self-consciousness. “I like to ask questions and I’ve always loved to write, so I figured I’d study something that let me do that.”

“Oh, nice,” Alex said.

That was the usual reaction. Other times people acted like it was something monumental, like volunteering in a war zone—That’s so great that you’re pursuing your passion. It was a weird spot to be at thirty-three.

“You got a friend coming to pick you up?” Alex, asked.

I told him I planned to take the bus.

“Oh, I’ll give you a ride, that’s no problem. I’m almost out of here anyway,” he said, checking his watch.

It was just past three on a Friday.

Alex was a big dude, built like an offensive lineman who’s been out of the game for a while, with round features and black, short-cropped curly hair that descended down his face like wall-to-wall carpet. His eyes were brown and bulged above his cheekbones. He had a Jersey accent, vaguely Italian, but he told me he’d grown up in the suburbs of Seattle.

After I finished the paperwork and handed over the keys, we walked out into the brightly overcast afternoon and climbed in his sedan, a Subaru WRX, red, with the same body style I’d had back when I was twenty-five before I realized I wasn’t the kind of guy that drives a WRX.

“If you’re going to drive, it might as well be fun,” Alex said as we pulled onto Aurora heading south. “I only drive manual for that reason.”

He punched the gas, and we sped through a yellow light.

“What did you do before you became a car salesman?” I asked.

He told me he had been a truck driver for nine years after a failed attempt to become a lineman—one of those people who crawl up power poles to fix transformers when they blow.

“I got my CDL to attend the school because it was a requirement, then I figured out pretty quick that I hated heights. Pretty bad career if you hate heights,” Alex said with a self-conscious laugh.

As it turned out, he didn’t much like being a truck driver either.

“The roads got so busy, and I just kept thinking, man, all it would take is one idiot and I’ll get in an accident that will ruin me. In the truck? I’d probably be fine, but I’d have to live with whatever damage I caused someone else,” Alex explained. “I was too stubborn to quit, and my company wouldn’t listen when I told them I didn’t want to drive truck anymore—that I wanted to be transferred to another position. So, I just stayed home until they fired me,” Alex said with a chuckle. “Then, I rode unemployment for a while, being a general piece of shit, until the money ran out a couple years later. After that, I got a job at a storage facility in Interbay,” Alex told me.

His phone rang, the name on the screen was Mi Sueño.

“Let me take this real quick,” Alex said.

After he and his wife finished discussing dinner plans, Alex returned to his story.

“So, I’m working at the storage place and this guy walks in. I’m just helping him find his unit when he turns to me and asks, ‘You ever think about selling cars?’ Right out of the blue, he asks this,” Alex said, waving a hand. “I’d never considered selling cars—furthest thing from my mind—and I might not have thought much of it but, when we went to shake hands, I shit you not dude, there was like some kind of spark. Like it was the universe or something. So, I just ask him—asked Josh—if he knew of a place I could apply and he helped me get a job at a Ford dealership over there,” Alex said, pointing left toward Wedgewood as we drove south on 15^th Street. “And Josh quit like a week later,” Alex said with a laugh. “I was like, come on, dude! You’re the only one I know here and now you’re leaving. Josh told me, ‘I can’t stand these fucks any longer, but you? You’re going to be just fine.’ And he walked out the door.”

We took a left on 75^th street past the Roosevelt reservoir, the sun had escaped from behind the clouds and the maples along the road seemed oversaturated in their autumnal colors.

“Sure enough, I was fine. A couple years later, I got the hell out of there, too, and found my spot at Carter Subaru right after that,” Alex said with pride. “Years later, when I finally worked up the courage to ask Josh, on the risk of sounding like a real weirdo, I go, ‘Hey, remember that time we first met? Well, this is going to sound strange, but it was like I felt something when you shook my hand.’ And Josh just smiled and said he’d felt the same thing,” Alex said, shaking his head. “So it was nuts, right? Universe just works like that. Always leading you in the right direction.”

As we pulled to a stop outside my home, I thought about the fact that I hadn’t known any car salesman for as long as I’d known Alex, let alone bought and sold a car to the same guy.

I told him this.

“Yeah, man. Wild. Well, you know where to find me for your next car and always send your friends or family in my direction if they’re looking for a Subaru—I’ll take good care of them,” Alex told me as I got out of the car.

I told him I’d do my best.

As Alex drove away, I wondered if he was right, if Universe always led you in the right direction, but I also wondered how you could know for sure it was the Universe you were following.

Like the salesman, I’d felt sparks before. I had let them catch fire and watched as they burned brilliantly, changing my life in unanticipated, magnificent, and painful ways. But fire is unpredictable and sometimes it burned everything to ashes—even the things I tried to save.

How could you know you’re going in the right direction when everything is gray, and your sight is scorched by smoke?

How could you know there was a right direction?