Okay, so I’m an idiot.
 
The Acura went into a ditch because I was trying to do too many things at once. Radiohead’s “The Bends” was playing, loud, while I was driving home, too fast, since I was late as usual. Left hand on the wheel, while with my right hand I was thumbing my BlackBerry for e-mails, hoping I’d finally nailed a deal with a huge new customer. Most of the e-mails were blowback from the departure of our divisional vice president, Crawford, who’d just jumped ship to Sony. Then my cell phone rang. I dropped the BlackBerry on the car seat and grabbed the cell.
 
I knew from the ring that it was my wife, Kate, so I didn’t bother to turn down the music—I figured she was just calling to find out when I’d be home from work so she could get dinner ready. She’d been on a tofu kick the last few months—tofu and brown rice and kale, stuff like that. It had to be really good for you, since it tasted so bad. But I’d never tell her so.
 
That wasn’t why she was calling, though. I could tell right away from Kate’s voice that she’d been crying, and even before she said anything I knew why.
 
“DiMarco called,” she said. DiMarco was our doctor at Boston IVF who’d been trying to get Kate pregnant for the last two years or so. I didn’t have high hopes, plus I didn’t personally know anyone who’d ever made a baby in a test tube, so I was dubious about the whole process. I figured high tech should be for flat-screen plasma monitors, not making babies. Even so, it felt like I’d been punched in the stomach.
 
But the worst thing was what it would do to Kate. She was crazy enough these days from the hormone injections. This would send her over the edge.
 
“I’m really sorry,” I said.
 
“They’re not going to let us keep trying forever, you know,” she said. “All they care about is their numbers, and we’re bringing them down.”
 
“Katie, it’s only our third try with the IVF stuff. It’s like a ten percent chance or something per cycle anyway, right? We’ll keep at it, babe. That’s all.”
 
“The point is, what are we going to do if this doesn’t work?” Kate’s voice got all high and choked, made my heart squeeze. “Go to California, do the donor egg thing? I can’t go through that. Adopt? Jason, I can barely hear you.”
 
Adoption was fine with me. Or not. But I’m not totally clueless, so instead I focused on turning down the music. There’s some little button on the steering wheel that I’ve never figured out how to use, so with the thumb of my driving hand I started pushing buttons, but instead the volume increased until Radiohead was blaring.
 
“Kate,” I said, but just then I realized that the car had veered onto the shoulder and then off the road. I dropped the phone, grabbed the wheel with both hands, cut it hard, but too late.
 
There was a loud ka-chunk. I spun the steering wheel, slammed on the brakes.
 
A sickening metallic crunch. I was jolted forward, thrown against the wheel, then backwards. Suddenly the car was canting all the way down to one side. The engine was racing, the wheels spinning in midair.
 
I knew right away I wasn’t hurt seriously, but I might have bruised a couple of ribs slightly. It’s funny: I immediately started thinking of those old black-and-white driver-ed shock movies they used to show in the fifties and sixties with lurid titles like The Last Prom and Mechanized Death, from the days when all cops had crew cuts and wore huge-brimmed Canadian Mountie hats. A guy in my college frat had a videotape of these educational snuff flicks. Watching them could scare the bejeezus out of you. I couldn’t believe anyone learning to drive back then could see The Last Prom and still be willing to get behind the wheel.
 
I turned the key, shut off the music, and sat there for a couple of seconds in silence before I picked the cell phone off the floor of the car to call Triple A.
 
But the line was still open, and I could hear Kate screaming.
 
“Hey,” I said.
 
“Jason, are you all right?” She was freaking out. “What happened?”
 
“I’m fine, babe.”
 
“Jason, my God, did you get in an accident?”
 
“Don’t worry about it, sweetheart. I’m totally—I’m fine. Everything’s cool. Don’t worry about it.”
 
 
Forty-five minutes later a tow truck pulled up, a bright red truck, m.e. walsh tow painted on the side panel. The driver walked over to me, holding a metal clipboard. He was a tall, broad-shouldered guy with a scruffy goatee, wearing a bandana on his head knotted at the back and long gray-flecked brown hair in a kind of mullet. He was wearing a black leather Harley-Davidson jacket.
 
“Well, that sucks,” the dude said.
 
“Thanks for coming,” I said.
 
“No worries,” Harley said. “Let me guess. You were talking on your cell phone.”
 
I blinked, hesitated for a microsecond before I said sheepishly, “Yeah.”
 
“Damn things are a menace.”
 
“Yeah, totally,” I said. Like I could survive without my cell phone. But he didn’t exactly seem to be a cell phone kind of guy. He drove a tow truck and a motorcycle. Probably had a CB radio in there along with his Red Man chewing tobacco and Allman Brothers CDs. And a roll of toilet paper in the glove compartment. Kind of guy who mows his lawn and finds a car. Who thinks the last four words of the national anthem are “Gentlemen, start your engines.”
 
“You okay?” he said.
 
“Yeah, I’m good.”
 
He backed the truck around to my car, lowered the bed, hooked the winch up to the Acura. He switched on the electric pulley thing and started hauling my car out of the ditch. Fortunately, we were on a fairly deserted stretch of road—I always take this shortcut from the office in Framingham to the Mass Pike—so there weren’t too many cars whizzing by. I noticed the truck had a yellow “Support Our Troops” ribbon sticker on one side and one of those black-and-white POW/MIA stickers on the windshield. I made a mental note to myself not to criticize the war in Iraq unless I wanted to get my larynx crushed by the guy’s bare hands.
 
“Climb in,” he said.
 
The cab of the truck smelled like stale cigar smoke and gasoline. A Special Forces decal on the dashboard. I was starting to get real warm and fuzzy feelings about the war.
 
“You got a body shop you like?” he said. I could barely hear him over the hydraulic whine of the truck bed mechanism.
 
I had a serious gearhead friend who’d know, but I couldn’t tell a carburetor from a caribou. “I don’t get into accidents too often,” I said.
 
“Well, you don’t look like the kinda guy gets under the hood and changes the oil himself,” Harley said....