Lainey rubbed Waffle’s nose as she flicked her eyes to Elliot.
“I put literally nothing past you.”
Someone tapped at her windshield from the crosswalk.
She rolled down her window. “This isn’t how rideshares work, Larry. You request from the app,” she told the familiar nuisance who ran the local Vincent Groff tourism industry along with the high school spring musicale.
“You haven’t called back about the tours,” he barked through the window.
Elliot leaned over her from the passenger seat. “Sorry, Larry. We can’t have people bothering the guests. Maybe we can try it in the offseason.”
The light changed. Lainey pressed on the gas, and in a surprising turn of events, Larry, ever persistent, ran alongside.
“What are you doing?” Lainey yelled.
“I have reason to believe that June twenty-first is when the bridge connects,” he explained, lumbering beside her window with surprising speed. Damn, if that man wasn’t committed. “That’s when everyone wants to come! It’s not just architecture buffs. This eclipse-chaser group caught wind of it, and now I have at least two dozen people begging to stay overnight at the site.”
“Why would eclipse chasers care about a sunset?” Lainey asked.
Larry tilted his head to the side. “I may have slightly oversold the grandeur of the event.”
“We’re only permitted for four guests,” Elliot said, scrolling his phone. He was choosing the tactic of avoidance, a privileged position as the person not currently responsible for driving the car.
She waved at Larry apologetically, proceeding cautiously down the main drag, which was officially in busy season, withpedestrians ambling freely in front of traffic, crossing signals be damned. “Sorry, Lar.”
With a thud, his body slammed into the side of her car and his fingers gripped the driver’s-side window of her decidedlymovingvehicle.
She screamed. “Larry!”
“What the—?”
In spite of the man clinging to her car, Lainey was, for some unfathomable reason,still driving, albeit slowly. Elliot was holding Waffle by the collar as he barked at the man who was mounting their door with the intent to climb inside, legs akimbo, like a getaway in a cartoon bank robbery.
“I can’t take no for an answer,” he shouted, supporting himself against the window in his labored jog along the side of the car. “It’s fifteen thousand dollars!” the man panted out through heaving breaths. His legs beat at the pavement, desperate to keep up with her seven-miles-per-hour pace. His eyes bugged out, panic flickering with what she assumed were images of his life flashing before him. He was the personification of the dog who caught the car, right down to the English bulldog–like wheezing. “We’ll split it! I’ll take care of everything. You won’t even have to be there, just—”
Larry disappeared from the window.
“Oh my god, stop driving!” Elliot demanded, unbuckling his seat belt.
Lainey had to blink out of her daze before slamming on the brakes and throwing the car in park. “This was my first ‘hop-on,’ so forgive me if I didn’t immediately know how to handle a middle-aged man hitching a ride to my car like a human tractor trailer!”
“Okay, fair,” Elliot said, briefly acknowledging her while mid-tumble over the console to tend to the man slumped on the curb in front of Curly’s Motorcycles and Exotic Pets.
Elliot placed both of his arms under Larry’s and dragged him up, leaning his flank against the sign that readHog Parking Only. All Others Will Live to Regret It.
Lainey assessed Larry’s palazzo pants andGuys and Dollscast tee for damage. “You good, Lar? Did you hurt yourself?”
“You don’t need to put them up. They’ll bring tents. They just want to be there to celebrate the totality,” he implored, the rises and falls of chest finally beginning to slow. “Fifteen grand. We split it fifty-fifty. You want a bigger cut? Is that what this is about?”
“Oh, uh…” She kind of did. The first she’d heard of this money was ten seconds ago when she had a man clutching the side of her car like Tom Cruise in aMission: Impossiblemovie, but now that she had a second to picture her life with that kind of money in her bank account, she didn’t want to imagine it without it.
“It’s not about the money,” Elliot answered for both of them. Lainey turned to look at him, her mouth open.
Larry fluttered his eyelids in irritation. “Fine. Sixty-forty.”
Lainey did the quick mental math—nine thousand dollars. Larry was offering them nine thousand dollars. That kind of money would take care of Gran for the rest of the summer. Lainey wouldn’t have to spend every night of the busy season driving from vacation town to vacation town in search of enough riders to make ends meet. She could spend the summer with Elliot, watching old movies, gazing at the sun setting over the lake, falling asleep on his chest to the beating of his heart. Itwas a glimpse of the kind of summer she saw other people have. The kind where her December wasn’t determined by how many boat lifts she repaired or docks she stained from May through September. She could relax.
Elliot shook his head. “We could lose our rental permit. It’s not worth the risk.”
