Designated Driver

by Brad Rose

She was not thinking about him - absolutely was not. Instead, she was drinking salt-rimmed Margaritas in the sporadic shade provided by a few straggly pepper trees on L.A.’s oldest street, and thinking about Los Angeles — its brilliant, smoggy history — how Olvera street had originally been named "Wine St." Why, she wondered, as she sat at the small table for two in the noontime swelter, was Los Angles called "the city of Angels?" As she studied the zig-zag pattern of the worn red bricks at her feet, she began to feel the creeping buzz of the Tequila. It seemed simultaneously to buoy and to bury her. Rising from the table, she wasn’t worried about driving home, not in the least, because one of the dead — his salt white bones, teeth gleaming in the merciless sunlight — had promised her he would serve as today’s designated driver.

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