I used to work at Mona Lisa’s Discount Tires, this warehouse on the edge of the city where every wall had a different Mona Lisa painted on it: Mona Lisa in a fedora, Mona Lisa with a black eye, Mona Lisa double-parked out front, frowning at a parking ticket. My boss Tony would look at them and say, “She’s mysterious, like me, don’t you think?” and I would ask him “Like what?” and he would turn to me and say, “Like a flat tire at three a.m., what do you think?” I got hired ‘cause I could speak just enough Spanish to take calls from certain customers, though mostly what I did was roll bald tires out of the bay and stack them in the yard behind the building where the grass was dead and the ground was soft and the rats got so brave by spring you could see them blinking in the daylight. Tony said every tire had a story and sometimes he’d tell them to me, holding a coffee mug that read WORLD’S OKAYEST BOSS, like, “This one came off a guy’s pickup after he hit a mailbox doing eighty, swore it wasn’t his fault, swore on his mother’s grave, paid in cash and left Mona Lisa a rose on the counter.” The job was easy until it wasn’t. One morning the city came to fine us for “unauthorized art installations” and Tony disappeared to the break room, only reappearing after they left, his face streaked with black paint and his nose powdered with coke or sugar from his donut, muttering, “Let ‘em try to erase her.” On my last day, I clocked out and stood in the parking lot a long time, staring at all those faces watching me go, every Mona Lisa smiling like she knew a secret about the world and was daring me to guess what it was.