The next day he was busy when I arrived so I had to sit beside a customer in the row of connected chairs while he rented a car to a woman my age. I tried to figure out from her back if she was flirting with him. It made me crazy, other people around him; he gave himself so freely to these customers. In some alternate dimension I engaged with other people, too. And I had stature! Sometimes people wanted my autograph! But I couldn’t even hold that idea in my mind for one second before it was overwhelmed by a new and much more profound thought: Who cares. None of that had any impact on what was going on in this Hertz on the Arcadia/Monrovia border. I looked at the ceiling, took smooth breaths, and pulled my shoulders back. The gray-haired woman sitting next to me chuckled a little and said something under her breath that weirdly sounded like “You’re admiring him” but obviously wasn’t that.