The Cheater in the Breakdown Lane

Somebody had feelings

My AI approximation of the car. I’ve not tried to recreate the driver and his friend.

Somebody loved that sports car enough to buy it, and somebody hated its driver enough to spray-paint CHEATER down the side in letters two feet tall. It was broken down, pulled up on the shoulder under a bridge. The driver and a friend leaned on the hood. They were both talking into cellphones, looking hapless and helpless.

This past Sunday, I was driving home from a weekend away, locked in stop-and-go traffic, and I did not pass this situation so much as inch alongside it for ten unbroken minutes. So I had time to study and consider. Some essential part of me pulled over to examine the vehicle and its occupants, because I had feelings. And they weren’t sympathetic.

I gave the guy leaning on the hood a girlfriend. I gave him an affair that was stupid and recent, a lie with a bad cover story. I gave her the discovery: a text, probably. I gave her the drive to the hardware store, the can of spray-paint, the very specific satisfaction of choosing the word. She had the concision of a poet as she marked that car.

Carrie Underwood popped into my head. The woman in “Before He Cheats” takes a Louisville Slugger to both headlights and keys her name into his leather seats, and someone that committed does not stop at the cosmetics of the car. In the song, she slashes holes in all four tires. But I think this woman paired the explicit graffiti with a subtle act of sabotage that manifested at a deliciously inconvenient moment on the highway, later. Well played.

I don’t know the man on the hood, or his friend, and for all I know they are exemplary human beings having a bad Sunday. But I've been cheated on, and people I love have been cheated on, and so the part of me that might have offered him a jump start instead sat in traffic and counted his troubles like rosary beads. Bad things come in threes. His were the betrayal, the marked car, and the breakdown.

Maybe he can move on. I hope she does. I did. Eventually, I got home.