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The downpour begins near midnight, during dessert. Weighty, swollen raindrops pound against the Manhattan restaurant windows while cabs clamor and rush through the city the way all New Yorkers clamor and rush to speak at the same time.
The diners are out-of-town family members who have traveled to this city for wedding festivities. Now the storm has yanked the bridal couple from their guests to change their plans for tomorrow's outdoor wedding.
After coffee, grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles, and two sets of divorced parents duck from the tiny twenty-six-seat restaurant into the deluge to snatch taxis to their Brooklyn hotel. The sight of the street flooded with cabs brings relief to the exhausted guests. If they were city dwellers, they would know cabbies drive passengers from Brooklyn to Manhattan, but not from Manhattan to Brooklyn.
Three of the guests, a young man in a suit and two middle-aged women in party dresses form a team in pursuit of a taxi. Occupied or not and blind to the hailers' plight, cabs speed past the waving arms and pained faces of the trio. After an hour's attempt to flag down a cab, the two women retreat to shiver together against the wall under the narrow restaurant awning with other stranded party companions.
The young man in his rain-soaked suit now hunches alone, determined to procure a taxi for his mother and his Aunt Lana, the groom's mother. Dozens of empty taxis screech away from the young man, leaving him behind with muddied cuffs and curt refusals to drive to the family's hotel in Brooklyn.
An elderly couple, the groom's grandparents, also stands in the shelter of the restaurant awning. The old gentleman is distinguished looking, tall and trim, with a full head of thick white hair. A life-long pose as a courteous person has evolved into a convincing one. Earlier, before dinner, he had labored to retrieve a penny stuck to the sidewalk. Fingering the coin in his pocket makes him appear admirably relaxed rather than unnerved by the late night rain. When he gets to the hotel, he will add the penny to his round leather pouch of loose change. His companion of twenty-eight years stands beside him in bright pink, his twin in agreeable appearances.
Finally, after dozens of rejections, the young man succeeds in his search for an available cab. Standing at the open car door, he signals to his mother and Aunt Lana across the street. As he drops into his seat, the opposite door of the taxi opens. Instead of his mother and aunt, the elderly couple - his step-grandfather, Bill, and girlfriend, Joan - slips into the seat without a word to the young man. He and his mother had spent the evening avoiding their company, but there the two sit, in their taxi, uninvited.
The intruders close the taxi door and settle in without a word. They neither address the cab driver nor acknowledge Paul, whom they have crowded against his door. Their expectant demeanor implies that the driver has pulled up just for them and knows their every wish.
The urge to eject them into the flooding streets thunders through the young man's chest, but the occasion of his cousin's wedding calls for decency, not justice. Paul bites his tongue. Confrontation would give the man permission to rain indignation upon his Aunt Lana. "I've never been so insulted in all my life," he would begin. His huff and puff would continue until he boarded his return flight on Sunday after the wedding. Pouring endless supplies of venom into the ears of his two daughters peps him up. Being insulted is so invigorating that he has invented myriad ways to achieve it.
Paul has only just absorbed the shock of the couple's unwelcome intrusion when the front passenger door opens, and his mother jumps in. Her sleepy, half-closed eyes pop wide at the sight of the opportunists in the back seat who have stranded her sister behind in the drenching rain. The late hour and unavailability of cabs will soon force Lana and her exhausted guests to call a limo service.
Paul cannot predict his mother's response to the couple's audacity. He loathes the two intruders as much as his mother does and tenses in case he might need to defend her.
The Indian taxi driver turns toward Paul's mother with insistent, rapidly spoken sentences. Paul and his mother switch their attention from disgust with the trespassers to the task of untying the cabby's knot of accented words.
"Where you go?" the cab driver asks Anne.
"Holiday Inn. The 600 block of Union Street, Brooklyn."
"Where you go? What address?"
"I told you - the 600 block."
"What address? You have tell me address."
In frustration Paul's mother opens the window and shouts to his aunt for the exact address.
"That twenty five miles. Very far! You too essited. I can't drive you too
essited. Calm down."
"No, no. The hotel is only 4.7 miles from here."
"How you know?"
"MapQuest."
At every intersection the driver throws questions into his phone and waits for directions from the other end; he is the one who needs calming. His talk speeds nonstop. Passengers are simply bodies in space, bodies with money for fares and ears for listening to his machine-gun chatter. He informs Paul's mother that he has lived in the United States for eight years and visited Chicago for eight days.
"Where you from?" he asks.
"Chicago. Where have you been in Chicago?"
"Indian restaurant row."
"You mean Devon Street? Yes, I know it well. Excellent Indian restaurants."
"You like Indian food? I don't believe."
"Oh, yes, but I don't like the very hot dishes."
Anne surprises herself with amusement over the situation. She is stuck with a hyper taxi driver who consumes her attention and concern. She isn't sure how to read him. Is he a nut? Is he dangerous? Can she keep him 'calm down?' His behavior, though, might simply be his way of protecting himself from late night trouble makers. You never know, he may be telling himself, you gotta talk loud, sound tough, be ready to kick 'em out. Behind her, next to Paul, sit the only people in the world she despises: her step-father and his girlfriend. Four point seven miles in New York City ticks like fifteen point seven in Chicago.
The old man is present for the wedding because Lana, his daughter, insisted that he come. He dislikes New York. He dislikes inconvenience. He dislikes New York prices. And the parade of people disgust him. They are reminders that the world has fallen apart since his generation. But then again, wedding celebrations are opportunities for free meals.
Joan is in the blank-faced stage of Alzheimer's. She formerly suffered from logorrhea, an emotional disorder characterized by tedious babble, and everyone in her presence suffered as well. With Joan at Bill's side, no one noticed that he had nothing to say, while everyone noticed that she said too much. Alzheimer's had, to everyone's relief, silenced her at last. The two, now a quiet couple, are silent as mice burgling cheese in a kitchen.
Finally, the hotel appears through the windshield. Anne's watch reads 2:30 a.m. She switches her thoughts from the taxi driver to Bill and Joan, fantasizing retaliation for her step-father's aggravating intrusion. She would like to jump out and strand him with the taxi fare, as he has stranded her outside the family since her mother died twenty-eight years ago. An instant and a sigh later, she knows her satisfying plan would fail because cab-jumping would strand the cabby instead, without a decent tip. Anne knows her step-father's miserly math well.
Besides, Anne respects, or perhaps she idealizes, weddings. She is convinced her nephew and his bride deserve to be honored with their guests' sincere participation in their celebration of union and love. Until the family occasion is over, another time for confrontation will have to do. Anne tries to figure out a way both to pay the cabby and escape the couple's presence.
Earlier that summer the house over which Anne's step-father once presided, the house in which Anne grew up with her two half-sisters, had to be readied for the market. Even three decades after the death of Anne's mother, the house held much that had been promised to Anne and her half-sisters. The three grown siblings set aside four days in June to sort and reminisce. This step-father did not want his step-daughter in the house. He phoned to make sure she knew.
"I would like to say this: I didn't invite you to come to the house. You are not welcome. And I advise you not to show up, because you will not be admitted to my house. So please do not make any attempts to come here. There's nothing here that belongs to you, so just remember not to make this trip, OK? Bye."
The memory of his words adds to Anne's dread of the minutes and space between the taxi and her hotel. Trapped between her responsibility to the cab driver and her step-father's opportunism, she gives up. She will have to stick around to make sure the driver receives a just fare.
The taxi turns into the circle drive of their hotel. Rising suddenly from silence in the backseat, the unexpected voice of Paul alleviates Anne's feeling of entrapment. Paul has turned to face his grandfather and speaks forcefully. Rather than addressing the man as "Granddad," he calls him by his first name.
"Got any money, Bill? Got the money you owe for the ride?" The meter showed $18. Paul speaks with the confidence of a man, rather than the deference of a grandson. Anne realizes that Paul has stopped counting him as a grandfather.
"Uh, well," Bill says, as if surprised that money is involved in his taxi ride. He rocks over to one side the way a man does to pull his wallet from a pocket. "Uh, I can't get my wallet out."
"That's okay, we have time." Paul has opened his door to step out and stand up. The old man hands his grandson a $10 bill.
"You need more money, Paul? Need more for a tip?" He has already returned his wallet to his pocket. Slow getting it out, fast putting it away.
"Don't bother, Bill. I'll take care of it." Paul hands the driver his fare and a 40% tip. Unlike the dozens of indifferent taxi drivers, this man stopped for them. And Anne and Paul are grateful.