The Car Keys in the Parking Lot

“I gave Britt the Equinox,” Greg said. “You can take Dad’s truck.”

He said it to his coffee cup. He was sitting at our kitchen table with his boots still on, and he did not look up at me when he said it.

I was standing by the back door with my overnight bag still on my shoulder. I had just finished a three-day live-in shift with a client, and I had not even gotten my coat unzipped.

“You what?” I said.

“Her car’s done,” he said. “Head gasket. The shop wants thirty-four hundred to fix a car that isn’t worth fifteen. She’s got to be at the plant at five in the morning, Sheila. What was I supposed to do?”

I looked out the window over the sink. The yard light was on, and I could see the spot by the garage where I had parked for eight winters. It was empty. The extension cord for the block heater lay coiled in the snow.

That was my spot. That was my car.

My name is Sheila Moe. I was fifty that winter, and I had been a home health aide for nineteen years. I live in a town of about four thousand people in central Wisconsin, the kind of place where the grain elevator is the tallest thing for miles.

Greg and I had been married four years. He was fifty-four, a big quiet man who worked maintenance at the feed mill and could fix nearly anything with a motor in it.

His daughter, Brittany, was twenty-three. My son, Jake, was twenty. Neither of them had exactly asked for the other, and the four of us had never quite figured out how to be a family.

On Sunday, Greg had driven me out to the Lindquist farm in his pickup. Mrs. Lindquist was ninety-one, and her daughter had flown to Phoenix for a funeral, so I was staying three days and nights with her.

The plan had been simple. My Equinox needed brakes. Greg had the pads and rotors sitting on his workbench, and he said he would do the job in the garage on Monday while I was gone. He picked me up Tuesday evening.

He was quiet on the drive home. I thought he was tired. I talked about Mrs. Lindquist and her cat and the soup I had made her, and he said “huh” and “that’s good” and kept his eyes on the road.

Now I knew why.

“You gave her my car,” I said.

“Our car,” he said. Then he heard himself, and his ears went red. “I know. I know it’s yours. But we’re married. I figured it all comes out in the wash.”

It did not all come out in the wash. Not that car.

I bought that silver Equinox in the spring of 2018. It was two years old, with thirty-one thousand miles on it, and it cost me nineteen thousand four hundred dollars. I financed it for forty-eight months at the credit union.

I was a single mother then. Jake was twelve. Every one of those payments came out of overtime: weekend shifts, holiday shifts, the overnight cases nobody else wanted. Four hundred and thirty-one dollars a month for four years.