He's shorter than everyone else in the room, and with a hunched back, he seems even tinier. But he's used to that. He has worked as the service manager here at the the New Haven Toyota dealership for over twenty years, just when Toyota started importing cars into this region. He was small back then, too. Having both parents immigrated from a poor background in Italy didn't help with his height. But he never let it bother him too much. In fact, often people respected him for what seemed a humble man, and he is humble, to his coworkers, subordinates, and of course, the customers.
But twenty years, and his whole forty-five years here in this outskirt of a small town in a small state. His wrinkles around his eyes, even when he's not smiling, hold testimony to his life as a father and a faithful husband. His pain born all these years can be seen in those lines, growing up in a touch neighborhood and in a household full of siblings but rarely parents who had to work, the growing pains as a teenager, during which his height attracted the most oppressive insults, and looking for a job and holding on to one as a high school graduate. All this, and more, especially when he found out her wife had been cheating on him, an incident he had kept his mouth shut about. She loved him through and through, and that was all he had asked from her as a partner in his life. She knew that he knew, but when it was over, it just felt like a bad wind that almost but didn't blow down the house.
He welcomes a customer, who, like nearly all of them, is taller than him. He is used to angling his neck a little to look up to the eyes of his customers. He smiles a little. Today is just a little. Today is different. Not really sure why. Perhaps because tomorrow there will be a major storm coming and he will still have to show up to work, to man the service department, in case any customer would show up. If any of his subordinates came late or call in sick, he wouldn't give them a hard time. In the past five years as the manager, he never was taken as a pushover.
But he wonders when that day would come. He takes the ticket from the customer, on which where were codes that the service person who took the car scribbled down. "You are all set, Mr. Rozowski," he said politely to the big Polish-American. He pronounced his name flawlessly, having lived among Polish Americans most of his life. The customer smiles and asks how long it would take. "Forty-five minutes," he said, still not really looking at the man, and looking very busy and preoccupied with his thoughts. It won't really take that long for an oil change, but he preferred to surprise the customer positively than disappoint him.
Maybe it's because he hasn't had his lunch yet. It's 2:30 and he's stomach has either forgotten to growl or that he had not noticed this time. He was very busy today. But with something else. A woman in her early thirties had walked in for an expensive maintenance job on her Prius. She was very friendly, but more than that, she had that bright shiny light in her eyes that grabbed his attention right away, the kind of light that you wonder why the whole world didn't just stop to feast on those eyes. She, too, had wrinkles around her eyes, though just a few. Unlike him, she was quite tall, taller than the average woman around here, and she didn't dress like them. He wondered if she was from New York, but didn't dare to ask. However, it was she who started the chitchat. She asked how business was going, since Toyota was being hammered in the news by its recalls of millions of vehicles around the world, including the Prius. But her Prius was not the year that is under inspection. But there started the little chitchat. He didn't want to chitchat, not really, not in the work environment, but more importantly, not as a short man. This kind of women didn't talk to him, really. They would smile at him, be respectful, but never talk to him. But her face was genuine, sincere, and she spoke to him frankly about the current crisis.
It was 12:30. She was a little early for her appointment.
Suddenly, he found himself propelled to respond to her. There was someone in the vast desert of his soul rising from the sands and drew up schemes to get her to talk more. He approved the maintenance on the screen so that the guys could start working on it, but then, instead of having her sit at the waiting room in front of a big TV with "Judge Judy" showing, he started telling her what they were going to do with her car, in detail. And the more he spoke, the brighter her eyes became, as if she was really interested.
She was. She must have been.
Then he started to show her through huge glass windows what the mechanics were doing with people's cars.
Suddenly, he felt self-conscious. Except for that period in junior high and the beginning of high school, he never really felt "short." He didn't dare to look at her. And he was also ashamed. He thought about his two sons and his adorable daughter. He thought about his wife he loved immensely regardless of what she had done or how fat and sloth she had become in front of the TV. But then he smelled the woman's scent.
Woman?
He knew her name. He typed it in the computer when they started this chitchat. It was "Melina". Such a beautiful name. Would it be shameful to say that it was the most beautiful name he could remember?
His wife's name is Jane.
He could smell Melina's perfume. Is she married? There was no ring.
Why does it matter?
He grew quiet. But she didn't let the awkward moment settle in. She asked about how he got into this business.
That was when he realized how lonely he had been. He couldn't remember the last time any woman asked him, and no man could be expected to ask this unless they wanted to do business with him, and he had never encountered such man. What did he do all this time? He still had most of his hair, and only a little was graying. But that was Mother Nature's business. He had lived here all his life, worked in this office nearly half his life time, and never had anyone until that moment asked about this work of his that occupied this huge chunk of his adult life. The last time he felt so lonely was when this rather unattractive girl he asked for the prom rejected him and only hours later accepted the invitation from a friend of a friend of his. That was more than twenty years ago.
Was he lucky that he only got to feel loneliness once every twenty years or was he just so lonely that he didn't even know he's walking in it until someone pointed him the light of attentiveness.
The chitchat went on for a little more, making him feel even more disoriented in his life. He wasn't sure if he smiled at her by the time the job was done, during whose whole time they were talking. Were his coworkers watching? His shame dawned on him again, but more painful was that she had to go. She gave him a smile he felt was the most beautiful in the world, in his life. But when she disappeared behind the entrance door, his heart sank to the lowest point since that day when that unattractive girl chose someone else.
Mr. Rozowski goes into the room with Judge Judy's voice criticizing some idiot who obviously couldn't defend himself. The short manager has a moment to himself, in front of the computer, whose screen no longer shows "Melina."
