With No Warning (Romance/Inspirational)(Complete)

CHAPTER 4: No Appreciation For Depreciation

CHAPTER 4: No Appreciation For Depreciation

Replacing her office phone into it’s cradle, Dakota did a quick twist of glee in her fancy chair. The late afternoon sun slanted through the slits of the blinds on her office window, and she focused happily on the rectangular patterns of light on the dark carpet, while lost in her exhilarated thoughts.

       Finally, she would be able to buy a new car to replace the one she had almost arrived in on the day of the storm, the one that was now in a salvage yard somewhere in the area. It stood to reason that she did not have the best car insurance in the world, because it had taken a month of plaguing phone calls, voice mail messages, and letter writing to at last get these beneficial results.

       When buying the car, she had shopped around for the automobile insurance, thriftily choosing the company offering the lowest monthly premiums, and this had obviously been a mistake the minute an actual catastrophe had happened. The initial pay off for total damages that she had been quoted by the field agent had been enough to pay off the loan on the car, but not enough to put the deposit she had placed on the car only a few months before back into her bank account and onto another car.

    “Depreciation.” He had explained to her solemnly, over the phone, like the news was as devastating to him as it was to her.

       “Where does depreciation enter into it?!” Dakota had passionately argued. “It’s not going to be resold, it is wrapped around a sign pole for pete sake!”

     With that unbidden image, tears had sprung hotly to her eyes at the sudden unexpected remembrance of the sheer terror during that five minutes. Now there was the added frustration that as if what she had been through wasn’t enough, now circumstances was going to cheat her out of the several hundred supplemental dollars she needed to put down on another car.

       “Perhaps when you are calmer–“ The agent began in a placating tone, but she interrupted his words straightway.

       Aggravated, agitated, and frustrated, she was quickly and unwillingly succumbing to a hysterical state of mind, and although she didn’t mean to, she began to yell. “I am not going to be calmer! I didn’t drive it into that pole, I parked it perfectly in front of a store, and when I came out, AFTER the entire store had blown away around me, my car WAS the new store sign!” These words ended on a shriek. To her dismay, she had cried then, and after she had regained control, let out a weary sniffling sigh. “At least I wasn’t in the car.”

       That’s what many nights in a row of little, or no sleep did to a person’s emotional stability. Anger and tears came easily. In this case, maybe it had helped. It had certainly won the sympathy of the agent working her claim. The end had turned out okay. She was getting a fair amount, less a small deductible.

       The weekend was quickly coming on, and she meant to spend it car shopping. Bumming rides from Kelli or Lora had grown old fast for her, even though they always generously carried her where she needed to go, and were seemingly glad to do it.

       Springing up from her chair, she hastily gathered the papers she needed to grade, pocketed them in a manilla folder, and stuffed them into her leather tote. It was a beautiful Indian summer afternoon, and she was done with classes for the day.

       The tiny hall outside her office dumped into the main student hall one way, and into a private entrance and exit the other way. As she passed the other staff offices on her way to the private exit, she checked to see if Kelli or Lora were out of class yet, but their office doors were both completely closed, and without slowing her steps, a quick peek through the narrow window that hugged each door, showed only empty rooms.