cleolinda | It's okay to laugh. No, really

Okay, Sister Girl is home now, and I've gotten a bit more of the story:

Sister Girl is on her way back from a Panera catering delivery at the Sparks Building on Sixth Avenue; she has a green light and is proceeding forward as normal when suddenly Mr. Magoo just pulls across--either to or from 22nd Street, I forget which one. He does actually hit her driver's side door, and she doesn't see him coming at all, probably because she wasn't expecting someone to make a rogue left turn on a red light. She hits her head on the Leet Panera Skillz buttons, etc., as described previously. So she gets out, and she says she was determined not to cry, because she figured that if she started she'd never stop. The old man is apparently seventy-eight years old and on his way to the Kirkland Clinic because no one else can or will take him. I now know his real first name, and clearly, we're not going to use it here, but suffice it to say that it's as perfect an old man name as you've ever heard. So he starts trying to convince Sister Girl that they can just exchange insurance information and not get the police involved, because they might take his license away. My sister, who is sort of woozy from the HEAD TRAUMA, decides she's going to let Mom play bad cop, since the car's in Mom's name anyway. My mother is all of two blocks away, so she arrives and the old man gets to work trying to convince her, which--good luck with that, buddy. Eventually it comes out that he doesn't even have a license because, technically, it's expired, and then the words "Because if the police get involved, blame is going to get assigned. I mean, the damage is minimal--she can drive that car home" come out of his mouth. The old man turns around and kicks his Bumper of Destruction back into place. Mom looks back over at my sister's car and takes note of the engine hanging out.

My mother pulls out her work cell and says, "Hi, I'd like some officers down here."

(She does benefits for pretty much everyone at the university except the professors and researchers. Which doesn't sound like a lot of people, until you realize that she's got all the coaches, security guards, and campus police [in whose jurisdiction they were just barely still in at this time], among others. I should clarify--I wasn't making a lot of sense when I wrote the previous entry, but the "we found him in New Orleans" guy was one of the stories my mother would come home and tell. He has nothing to do with the accident today. The old man today, as you can see, stopped and did not have to be chased.)

So then they call Panera, so after about half an hour they've got my sister's boss and three cops (or five to six, depending on whose account you believe, my sister's or my mother's. Strangely, it's my mother who insists there were more cops. Apparently the university police are much like the Men in Black of old, in that they move in mysterious ways and numbers) down there, and the old man is pretty squarely outnumbered. As a side note, my mother said that she had a hard time being too angry with him, because she kept thinking of her own father--my sainted grandfather--who died about five years ago. He never hit any twenty-year-old delivery drivers while making illegal left turns, but he once told his doctor that he could drive himself to the hospital from the doctor's office just fine, and the doctor said, "No, you can't, because you're having a heart attack." Bless.

Anyway. I don't want to sound overly materialistic here, but once I had heard from my sister's own mouth that she wasn't bleeding, maimed or dead, I started worrying about the damage to the car. Apparently the driver's door was crushed in, the front left side of the car was no longer there, and you could not, in fact, drive that car home. Her shift starts at five am, so it's not like she's going to be able to get a ride from anyone, and she's been (legitimately) sick a good bit lately, so I was afraid that Panera wasn't going to be real happy about her needing more time off work, either. Well, her boss says not to worry--per company policy, probably because they have the delivery drivers use their own cars, it's now a worker's comp issue and Panera will pay for all car repairs and any medical bills. Praised be the Jesus, saith I.

So now it's on to the hospital. I don't know what happened back at the scene with the old man after that, but I'm sure I'll hear updates tomorrow. In the emergency room, my sister is attended by... the woman who broke up my parents' marriage. I'm telling you, people, I can't make this shit up. To say that my parents' divorce was "acrimonious" doesn't really cover it, although to say "it involved felony insurance fraud charges" comes a little closer. So: awkward. Dr. Homewrecker says, somewhat abashed, "If you'd rather me step down and have someone else look at [Sister Girl]...," and my mother just says, "Look, it doesn't matter. Go for it." I haven't seen my father in about eight years--since my parents broke up, basically--but my sister's had dinner over there with him and Dr. Homewrecker a few times, so she at least knows the woman.

Sister Girl gets settled into a hospital room for a four-hour stay. ("Shit," she says later, "it's not like we're paying for it.") She tells me over takeout tonight that she watched The Cosby Show and had a CAT scan, the latter administered by a technician named Rocky Brazil. If he doesn't moonlight as a boxer or a rock star, I say that's a perfectly awesome name going to waste. My sister is inexplicably disappointed that she gets discharged before she gets to eat hospital food for dinner, which was when I started to worry that she really had sustained brain damage, but apparently she got off light with simple "head trauma," which is double less ungood than a concussion. Dr. Homewrecker prescribed some painkillers for her, and now she's home. She gets at least one day off work, maybe two, and probably a rental car for when she does go back. Other than the fact that her head's probably going to hurt like a motherfuck tomorrow, I'm pretty sure she got through this with the luck of the angels.