Christmas Bliss by Mary Kay Andrews Page B

to be standing at a stove cooking something. I looked away, embarrassed to intrude on his privacy, but when I looked back, he gave me a jaunty salute with his spatula. So far, it was the friendliest encounter I’d had since landing at LaGuardia two hours earlier. I smiled and waved back.
    Suddenly, the driver floored the Buick’s accelerator, zipping in and out of lanes, alternately speeding and tailgating. I was desperately searching for my seat belt when the car hit a pothole so deep, it bounced me nearly off my seat.
    “Hey!” I said sharply, but the driver didn’t even turn around. Anyway, the search for a seat belt was fruitless, so I simply hung on to the cracked plastic seat back and prayed we’d reach our destination before I got jounced out of all my dental work.
    After we left the elevated highway we were on an ancient steel truss-work bridge which the signage declared to be the Williamsburg Bridge. This, I concluded, was definitely not the scenic route to Daniel’s apartment. Snowflakes swirled around in the air outside, and I longed for just a lungful of what I was sure was cold, clean air.
    We drove through dense, urban streets. No signs of Christmas here. Just more stunted trees, soot-blackened buildings crowded up against streets, and sidewalks heaped with bags of trash, which were now receiving a picturesque frosting of snow. I saw street signs, but of course, they meant nothing to me. My driver hunched over the steering wheel, muttering in a low voice and an unfamiliar language.
    “Excuse me,” I said brightly, thinking he was addressing me. It was then that I noticed he was wearing a headset, and actually talking into his phone.
    We’d been driving for at least thirty minutes, and I was becoming more and more uneasy with each block. Shouldn’t we be in Manhattan by now?
    “Excuse me,” I said loudly, but the driver had no reaction. I leaned forward and tapped him on the shoulder. “How much longer?” I said in a loud, distinct voice. Ridiculous! He was foreign, yes, but not deaf.
    “Yes,” he said, nodding, his eyes meeting mine in the rearview mirror. “Very soon. We arrive.”
    “How soon?” I asked. “I looked up the address last night. On the Internet it says it’s only twenty minutes from LaGuardia.”
    “Internet not know everything,” he said.
    Ten minutes later, he pulled the car onto a street lined with what looked to me like rows of abandoned storefronts. The shop windows were covered with steel pull-down grates, and the brick and concrete walls were riddled with spray-painted graffiti. I saw what looked like a large bundle of rags dumped up against a vacant storefront, and was horrified to realize, on closer examination, that the bundle was actually a man, sleeping on a pallet of flattened cardboard beer crates.
    The driver rolled slowly down the block, then pulled alongside the grimmest, most decrepit building I’d ever seen.
    “Here,” he said triumphantly. He turned to me. “We are here.”
    “Here?” I blinked. This looked nothing like the Greenwich Village I’d always pictured. I craned my neck to read the print on the nearest street sign, which read “Avenue C.”
    “This isn’t Stuyvesant Street,” I protested.
    “No. Is Avenue C. You say Avenue C. I take you here.”
    “I never said Avenue C. I don’t know where this is. I asked you to take me to the East Village.”
    “East Village?” He shrugged. “East Village is not here.”
    “I realize that. You’ve brought me to the wrong place.”
    “I take you where you say.” He picked up a pencil and a tiny spiral-bound notebook and began jotting figures. He frowned, erased, scribbled some more. Satisfied, he tore off the slip of paper and handed it to me.
    In large numbers, he’d written $130.
    “What’s this?”
    “Is fare. You pay.”
    “A hundred and thirty dollars? This can’t be right.”
    “Is right. I pay tolls, gas. You pay one hundred thirty now.”
    I was scared. But I was starting to