Free Past Due by William Lashner

hippies, and it is that very clash that gives the street its frisson. Two very different generations cruising the same strip, eyeing each other warily with the future at stake. And then he sees her again.
    “She walked right by me.” In her tight blouse, her pleated skirt, her long slim legs, a shimmering vision in white. “And I smelled her.” The cleanliness of her silky hair, the soft floral scent that stings him with its subtlety and sends him careening after her like a bee chasing a buttercup. “Christ, I can still smell her.”
    He follows her, gains on her. He is a big man, my father, his body strengthened by his bout in the army, his skin dark from his work outside cutting suburban lawns for Aaronson. And he knows all the right lines, if he learned anything in the damn army it was the lines, the lines to give to the German girls hanging outside the base, the lines to lay on the neighborhood girls with their hair teased high. He has his lines ready, but when he finally reaches her, when she finally turns around as if to find the address she had passed, when finally he is there, with her, on the street, face-to-face, the lines all skitter and fly away, a frightened flock of birds.
    He says something clever, like Hi. She looks through him, as he was certain she would, but then, she looks at him, directly, and he feels it, like he is back in the ring, boxing for the base team and getting a shot in the gut.
    What’s your name? he manages to say.
    None of your business, she says, but then a sly smile. What’s yours?
    Jesse, he says.
    Okay, Jesse. I guess I’ll be seeing you, Jesse.
    Where? he says.
    Wherever.
    When I see you, what will I call you?
    Whatever you want.
    She nods at him and then walks past him and he watches her, watches her walk away, watches her stop, turn around, come back toward him, smile.
    What do you want to call me? she says.
    I don’t know, he says, flustered. Angel Face or something.
    Oh, Jesse, she says, you can do better than that.
    How about just Angel?
    She sticks her chin out for a moment as she considers it, sticks her chin out and then a smile breaks through. Okay, she says. I’ll be seeing you, Jesse.
    I’ll be seeing you…Angel, he says back to her. And as she walks away, her pleated skirt swaying with each step, he repeats the name to himself, again and again.
    The next time he sees her she is not a pedestrian on the street, she is instead sitting once again in the long burgundy car, sitting up front, her back straight, her eyes forward. He shouts to her, but she doesn’t respond, doesn’t move a muscle, as if she hadn’t heard. Then he notices the old man in the backseat of the car, his great swath of white hair, his long pale face, his black eyes turned toward my father with a strange intensity as the car slides by and my father chases after it calling out, Angel, Angel, Angel.
     
    I couldn’t sleep that night, there was something about my father’s story that rattled in my brain. Maybe it was the image of him, strutting down South Street, young and arrogant, full of life, still in the great human pursuit of something special around which to shape his life, something which he, sadly, never found. Or maybe it was the sight of him calling out after a woman, calling out like a lovesick puppy. Some people you can’t ever imagine other than as they are now, and my father, old and bitter, with a life restricted by his own failings, was just such a person. I couldn’t reconcile the man I had known my entire life with the young and questing hero of his story. But whatever my father was or had been, he was not prone to flights of fancy. So I had to wonder what could have changed him so irrevocably. And the only answer I could come up with was the answer he had apparently come up with too: the girl in the pleatedskirt, his Angel. Or maybe it was the sinister chap staring out at him from the back of the long burgundy car.
    I climbed out of bed, went to my desk drawer, took out the