He shakes his head. “I told you before: call me Danny, Lou. We’re neighbors.”

“Thank you, Danny,” I say.

He smiles at me, gives a quick nod, and unlocks the doors of his car. His car is very clean inside, like mine but without the fleece on the seat. He turns on his sound system; it is loud and bumpy and makes my insides quiver. I do not like it, but I like not having to walk to the transit station.

The station and the shuttle are both crowded and noisy. It is hard to stay calm and focus enough to read the signs that tell me what ticket to buy and at which gate to stand in line.

It feels very strange to see the campus from the transit station and not the drive and parking lot. Instead of showing my ID tag to the guard at the car entrance, I show it to a guard at the station exit. Most people on this shift are already at work; the guard glares at me before he jerks his head telling me to go through. Wide sidewalks edged with flower beds lead to the administration building. The flowers are orange and yellow with puffy-looking blossoms; the color seems to shimmer in the sunlight. At the administration building, I have to show my ID to another guard.

“Why didn’t you park where you’re supposed to?” he asks. He sounds angry.

“Someone slashed my tires,” I say.

“Bummer,” he says. His face sags; his eyes go back to his desk. I think maybe he is disappointed that he has nothing to be angry about.

“What is the shortest way from here to Building Twenty-one?” I ask.

“Through this building, angle right around the end of Fifteen, then past the fountain with the naked woman on a horse. You can see your parking lot from there.” He does not even look up.

I go through Administration, with its ugly green marble floor and its unpleasantly strong lemon smell, and out again into the bright sun. It is already much hotter than it was earlier. Sunlight glares off the walks. Here there are no flower beds; grass comes right up to the pavement.

I am sweating by the time I get to our building and put my ID in the door lock. I can smell myself. It is not a good smell. Inside the building, it is cool and dim and I can relax. The soft color of the walls, the steady glow of old-fashioned lighting, the nonscent of the cool air — all this soothes me. I go directly to my office and turn the AC fan up to high.

My office machine is on, as usual, with a blinking message icon. I turn on one of the whirlies, and my music — Bach, an orchestral version of “Sheep May Safely Graze” — before bringing up the message:

Call as soon as you arrive. [Signed] Mr. Crenshaw, Extension 2313.

I reach for the office phone, but it buzzes before I can pick it up.

“I told you to call as soon as you got to the office,” Mr. Crenshaw’s voice says.

“I just got here,” I say.

“You checked through the main gate twenty minutes ago,” he says. He sounds very angry. “It shouldn’t take even you twenty minutes to walk that far.”

I should say I am sorry, but I am not sorry. I do not know how long it took me to walk from the gate, and I do not know how fast I could have walked if I had tried to walk faster. It was too hot to hurry. I do not know how much more I could do than what I have done. I feel my neck getting tight and hot.

“I did not stop,” I say.

“And what’s this about a flat tire? Can’t you change a tire? You’re over two hours late.”

“Four tires,” I say. “Someone slashed all four tires.”

“Four! I suppose you reported it to the police,” he says.

“Yes,” I say.

“You could have waited until after work,” he says. “Or called from work.”

“The policeman was there,” I say.

“There? Someone saw your car being vandalized?”

“No—” Against the impatience and anger in his voice I am struggling to interpret his words; they sound farther and farther away, less like meaningful speech. It is hard to think what the right answer is. “The policeman who lives with — in my apartment house. He saw the flat tires. He called in the other policeman. He told me what to do.”

“He should have told you to go to work,” Crenshaw says. “There was no reason for you to hang around. You’ll have to make the time up, you know.”

“I know.” I wonder if he has to make the time up when something delays him. I wonder if he has ever had a flat tire, or four flat tires, on the way to work.

“Be sure you don’t put it down as overtime,” he says, and clicks off. He did not say he was sorry I had four flat tires. That is the conventional thing to say, “too bad” or “how awful,” but although he is normal, he did not say either of those things. Maybe he is not sorry; maybe he has no sympathy to express. I had to learn to say conventional things even when I did not feel them, because that is part of fitting in and learning to get along. Has anyone ever asked Mr. Crenshaw to fit in, to get along?

It would be my lunch hour, though I am behind, needing to make up time. I feel hollow inside; I start for the office kitchenette and realize that I do not have anything for lunch. I must have left it on the counter when I went back to my apartment to file the insurance claim. There is nothing in the refrigerator box with my initials on it. I had emptied it the day before.

We have no food vending machine in our building. Nobody would eat the food and it spoiled, so they took the machine away. The company has a dining hall across the campus, and there is a vending machine in the next building over. The food in those machines is awful. If it is a sandwich, all the parts of the sandwich are mushed together and slimy with mayonnaise or salad dressing. Green stuff, red stuff, meat chopped up with other flavors. Even if I take one apart and scrape the bread clean of mayonnaise, the smell and taste linger and are on whatever meat it is. The sweet things — the doughnuts and rolls — are sticky, leaving disgusting smears on the plastic containers when you take them out. My stomach twists, imagining this.

I would drive out and buy something, even though we don’t usually leave at lunch, but my car is still at the apartment, forlorn on its flat tires. I do not want to walk across the campus and eat in that big, noisy room with people I do not know, people who think of us as weird and dangerous. I do not know if the food there would be any better.

“Forget your lunch?” Eric asks. I jump. I have not talked to any of the others yet.

“Someone cut the tires on my car,” I say. “I was late. Mr. Crenshaw is angry with me. I left my lunch at home by accident. My car is at home.”

“You are hungry?”

“Yes. I do not want to go to the dining hall.”

“Chuy is going to run errands at lunch,” Eric says.

“Chuy does not like anyone to ride with him,” Linda says.

“I can talk to Chuy,” I say.

Chuy agrees to pick up some lunch for me. He is not going to a grocery store, so I will have to eat something he can pick up easily. He comes back with apples and a sausage in a bun. I like apples but not sausage. I do not like the little mixed-up bits in it. It is not as bad as some things, though, and I am hungry, so I eat it and do not think about it much.

It is 4:16 when I remember that I have not called anyone to replace the tires on my car. I call up the local directory listings and print the list of numbers. The on-line listings show the locations, so I begin with the ones closest to my apartment. When I contact them, one after another tells me it is too late to do anything today.

“Quickest thing to do,” one of them says, “is buy four mounted tires and put them on yourself, one at a time.” It would cost a lot of money to buy four tires and wheels, and I do not know how I would get them home. I do not want to ask Chuy for another favor so soon.

It is like those puzzle problems with a man, a hen, a cat, and a bag of feed on one side of a river and a boat that will hold only two, which he must use to transfer them all to the other side, without leaving alone the cat and the hen or the hen and the bag of feed. I have four slashed tires and one spare tire. If I put on the spare tire and roll the tire from that wheel to the tire store, they can put on a new tire and I can roll it back, put it on, then take the next slashed tire. Three of those, and I will have four whole tires on the car and can drive the car, with the last bad tire, to the store.