we girls have to stick together
the appointment went…ok. my doctor is confident that she’d removed all the abnormal cells. i will have to go in for a bunch of follow up appointment over the next year so she basically told me that i should go to see someone in seattle. i felt like i went in there to dump my doctor but she beat me to it. damn it.
on the way from the ferry terminal to my doctor’s office i was pulled over by a state patrol officer. the cop had been following me very closely for a while so i just knew i was going to be pulled over. i wasn’t speeding or anything, but i knew why she was so interested.
this is where i have to admit something embarrassing: up until today i hadn’t switched out my old license plates to my new ones with the new tags. i’d fully meant to put the new plates on, and even in the midst of a rainy early morning rush i was out there with a philips screwdriver…but i’d run into a snag. two of the screws holding on my plates weren’t drilled for a screwdriver and would have to be removed with a wrench.
so i put it off, because i didn’t know where my wrench went. my “her tools” pink plastic tool case disappeared during one of my moves. so instead i propped my license plate up in my rear window and vowed to seek out a wrench as soon as possible.
that was a while ago. think months.
the officer came up to the window and smiled at me. not with a fake, “i’ve got your ass” smile…but a nice friendly smile. she told me she’d pulled me over because i had two license plates. i stammered out something about the screws and the wrench so she went around my car to look. then she took my driver’s license and went back to her car.
to my surprise she came back with a screwdriver and a wrench and proceeded to help me replace my plates.
“they didn’t make it easy did they,” she said. “well we girls have to stick together.” that was it. we had some friendly small talk, i felt like a big moron, and she drove off.
i don’t know why, but i felt incredibly guilty. i kept asking myself, why she was so nice to me? i must have looked like a nice, helpless, sweet girl to her but she was helping me because i am lazy and can’t go find a wrench. i couldn’t figure out why she didn’t just lecture me and tell me wrenches were not her problem. did she see the fish outline on my car and think she was helping a fellow churchgoer? i wanted to tell her it’s from a life i lived years ago. i wanted to tell her my “brake light out” had come on and i’d been aware of it for over a week now and hadn’t done anything. even though it doesn’t really seem to be out, (my dashboard lies to me sometimes). i was ready to make her my state patrol confessional.
but i didn’t. i smiled and i was the nice, helpless, sweet girl who didn’t have a wrench. and i spent the remainder of the drive to my appointment trying to figure out why she was so nice to me when i obviously didn’t deserve it. but i realized that it didn’t matter what made her act (good mood; officer sworn to serve and protect; generous lady)…she had told me why:
“we girls have to stick together.”
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