A Brush With Fear

A drunken driver clipped our car on Saturday night.
We were each taking a sleeping child out of a car seat when the head light beams swept around the corner of our quiet street.
When the lights kept coming with no sign of the car slowing down, I squished myself between the car door and the car just before the loud crack of metal on metal. My head bumped the frame, the door dug into my back, but I was fine. MeiMei was still sleeping peacefully in her seat, although already unbuckled. JieJie began to whimper, less from the impact than from the string of forbidden
words I hurled at the receding taillights.
Since then she has been afraid to let Mommy and Daddy get in the car without her, and when Dad wanted to clean his car, she begged to be allowed to help him. Her help was as a self-appointed sentry, calling out to him to be careful each time a car turned down the street.
The driver came back. He turned out to be an attorney, a neighbor we had not met before. He was quite affable, apologizing and offering to exchange information in the morning if we preferred. But the Mama Lion adrenalin was pumping. It was Daddy who had the presence of mind to notice the driver was drunk, and so I retreated to the house to call the police. The driver retreated to his house to park his car and returned with a big plastic goblet that appeared to contain wine. I found the glass later at my feet. The driver told the police he had gone home for a (very short) half hour before they arrived and had a couple of glasses of wine. When they shined a flashlight on him, they noted that his white shirt was spattered with red wine.
They conducted a road sobriety test quite loudly in the middle of the street, which brought the neighbors out. He failed in what surely must have been humiliation, unless perhaps he was so anesthetized he did not feel it.