Free While She Was Out by Ed Bryant Page A

back something great from the mall,” he said. His only other response was to heighten the crowd noise from Upper Zambosomewhere-or-other.
    Sleety snow was falling, the accumulation beginning to freeze on the streets. Della was glad she had the Subaru. So far this winter, she hadn’t needed to use the four-wheel drive, but tonight the reality of having it reassured her.
    Southeast Plaza was a mess. This close to Christmas, the normally spacious parking lots were jammed. Della took a chance and circled the row of spaces nearest to the mall entrances. If she were lucky, she’d be able to react instantly to someone’s backup lights and snaffle a parking place within five seconds of its being vacated. That didn’t happen. She cruised the second row, the third. Then- There! She reacted without thinking, seeing the vacant spot just beyond a metallic blue van. She swung the Subaru to the left.
    And stamped down hard on the brake.
    Some moron had parked an enormous barge of an ancient Plymouth so that it overlapped two diagonal spaces.
    The Subaru slid to a stop with its nose about half an inch from the Plymouth’s dinosaurian bumper. In the midst of her shock and sudden anger, Della saw the chrome was pocked with rust. The Subaru’s headlights reflected back at her.
    She said something unpleasant, the kind of language she usually only thought in dark silence. Then she backed her car out of the truncated space and resumed the search for parking. What Della eventually found was a free space on the extreme perimeter of the lot. She resigned herself to trudging a quarter mile through the slush. She hadn’t worn boots. The icy water crept into her flats, soaked her toes.
    â€œShit,” she said. “Shit shit shit.”
    Her shortest-distance-between-two-points course took her past the Plymouth hogging the two parking spots. Della stopped a moment, contemplating the darkened behemoth. It was a dirty gold with the remnants of a vinyl roof peeling away like the flaking of a scabrous scalp. In the glare of the mercury vapor lamp, she could see that the rocker panels were riddled with rust holes. Odd. So much corrosion didn’t happen in the dry Colorado air. She glanced curiously the rear license plate. It was obscured with dirty snow.
    She stared at the huge old car and realized she was getting angry. Not just irritated. Real, honest-to-god, hardcore pissed off. What kind of imbeciles would take up two parking spaces on a rotten night just two weeks before Christmas?
    Ones that drove a vintage, not-terribly-kept-up Plymouth, obviously.
    Without even thinking about what she was doing, Della took out the spiral notebook from her handbag. She flipped to the blank page past tomorrow’s grocery list and uncapped the fine-tip marker (it was supposed to write across anything-in this snow, it had
better)
and scrawled a message:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
DEAR JERK, IT’S GREAT YOU COULD USE UP TWO PARKING SPACES ON A NIGHT LIKE THIS, EVER HEAR OF THE JOY OF SHARING?
    She paused, considering; then appended:

    Â Â Â Â Â Â 
– A CONCERNED FRIEND
    Della folded the paper as many tunes as she could, to protect it from the wet, then slipped it under the driver’s-side wiper blade.
    It wouldn’t do any good-she was sure this was the sort of driver who ordinarily would have parked illegally in the handicapped zone-but it made her feel better. Della walked on to the mall entrance and realized she was smiling.
    She bought some rolls of foil wrapping paper for the adult gifts- assuming she actually gave Kenneth anything she’d bought for him-and an ample supply of Strawberry Shortcake pattern for the twins’ presents. Della decided to splurge-she realized she was getting tired-and selected a package of pre-tied ribbon bows rather than simply taking a roll. She also bought a package of tampons.
    Della wandered the mall for a little while, checking out the shoe